It’s been a good ride. I did a lot of freelancing over the past several years, learned a lot, met a lot of great people, and had a lot of fun. But a new chapter has come. If anyone wants to pick up any of my WordPress plugins and update them, feel free to fork them.

To all my fellow WordPressers: keep on keepin’ on. The future only looks brighter.

-John

Entering Code Into the Comments

People like to share code in comments. But, come on, it NEVER works! So I’ve made it easy to share code. Simply click on the “Entering Code?” link when commenting, and a popup will let you enter your code in, submit it to PasteBin, and automatically put the link into the comments. No more messy code not playing nice any more!

New Page For My Projects

All of my project pages have been redesigned. What do you think? Are they easy enough to use? I’ve done this in preparation of sharing additional info about a special project I’ve been working on for some time.

Finally

So, what do you think? A good change? I’d like to especially thank The Webcrafters, a fantastic duo who came up with this design for me. I’ve used them for other projects and am always pleased with their high quality, reasonably priced work.

In the next few days I’ll be publishing a post detailing how I accomplished a lot of the things with the redesign (PasteBin API, custom post types, and more!). Thanks everyone!

What is MammothApps? From the about page:

“MammothApps is a WordPress development studio owned and operated by John Kolbert. Based out of Minneapolis, MN, MammothApps’ typical clients are looking for medium to large scale custom plugins or websites that require advanced functionality (such as e-commerce, or social networking). However, MammothApps offers a wide range of WordPress-related services.”

Why, you may ask?

Put simply: growth. I’ve been blessed to be much busier then I expected with client projects. So much so, in fact, that I haven’t updated this website in four entire months. With MammothApps, I’m branching out. I’m officially declaring: I mean business. I’ve networked with several other talented developers who will be providing support and skills on larger scale projects overseen by MammothApps. We’ll be focusing primarily on larger scale (maybe even, mammoth?), custom plugins and applications, all built on WordPress. All of my WordPress-related developing will occur through the MammothApps studio.

JohnKolbert.com will become entirely my personal blog. All references to my former freelance consulting services have been removed or redirected to the MammothApps homepage.

I’ll hope you join me over at MammothApps. In addition to client work, we’ll be publishing a series of  advanced WordPress tutorials, called MammothTips each month, as well as releasing some pretty awesome WordPress based web applications (details forthcoming).

Here’s a few highlights of the changes I’ve made.

Display My Services

The largest change is that the homepage now displays services I offer prominently and de-emphasizes the blog somewhat. This change is to allow me to focus more on client work and to have potential clients recognize the services I offer.

Portfolio

I’ve finally added a decent portfolio. Right now the portfolio is displaying ten recent projects I’ve worked on, minus the non-disclosures (obviously).

Dedicated Donation Page

I’ve also added a dedicated donation page to allow people who have enjoyed my plugins and/or services to donate anytime they like. The form processing is handled through PayPal.

Updated Plugin Pages

I’ve also updated the plugin pages for plugins I’ve released. They use the same graphic as the donation page with a different text overlay.

Feedback

Remember to leave any feedback in the comments or feel free to email me with any you have.

What’s Smart Ads, you ask? Smart Ads is an intelligent advertising plugin for WordPress. It lets you insert ads based on category, wordcount, member status, post age, and more.

Well I’m happy to say that in just over a year, Smart Ads has been downloaded over 10,000 from WordPress.org! It’s quite a milestone for Smart Ads and myself personally, as it is my most popular plugin. I told my wife today and her response was “Why didn’t you just charge $1 for it!” You can tell she has more business sense then I do!

If you’d like to give Smart Ads a try, check out it’s homepage. It’s fully compatible with WordPress 2.8 and absolutely free.

What is Absolute Privacy, you ask? It is a WordPress plugin which turns your blog into the ultimate private blog.

• Force registrants to enter first and last name
• Allow registrants to choose their own passwords
• Moderate users: new registrants cannot login until approved
• Get emailed every time an approval is waiting (with a link for quick approval)
• Lock out all non-logged in views from your website (configurable)
• Perfect for family blogs, personal sites, and private communities!

To download or read more, please visit the Absolute Privacy homepage.

See, last night I had the support team over at AnHosting change some settings on my server. Little did I know that the changes would remove the custom Mx record I set for the domain which allows me to use Google Apps to host my emails. So anyone who has tried to email me today most likely got it sent right back. My apologies!

So what is the moral of this story? Follow me on Twitter! Then you can message me to get hold of me or find out what’s going on. I’ve since fixed the error and should be back to receiving emails now. Thanks for your patience!

Why the changes? I’ve come to a few realizations over the past several months that have made me re-evaluate my goals and focus for both my blogging and my freelance work. Here’s some realizations and what they mean for my other projects:

Freelance Work

Update 5/23/2010: Checkout MammothApps for my freelance work.

My new focus is going to be mainly on freelance WordPress development. Freelancing helps me pay for dental school while doing what I love. I’m going to detail and feature all (when allowed) projects here, regardless of how big or small they are. I hope a major part of my blogging will be detailing what I’m working on, how I accomplished it, and what the results were. Because I am in dental school, however, I will be taking a limited number of projects each month. I’m going to focus mainly on custom plugin development but will also do theme modifications, installations, and HTML to WordPress conversions. Unfortunately my time won’t allow for full theme development projects as of writing this. Feel free to check out my current rates and request a no-obligation estimate for your project.

Simply-Basic

Update 5/6/2009: Simply-Basic is no longer online

After much thought and consideration I’ve decided to stop updating Simply-Basic. This will allow me more time to focus on freelance work without feeling guilty for not updating another site. Simply-Basic was my first home and the start to my blogging online. It’s where I created many close relationships, honed my skills as a WordPress developer, and really started as a freelancer. Unfortunately, I made many mistakes on Simply-Basic. But I feel I’ve learned a lot from them. Here’s a few mistakes I’ve made and what I’ve learned from them.

• Frequent design and layout changes (some of them looked really bad). It’s very disorienting to readers to have the layout of the blog change every few weeks. My problem is I love to tinker with code and change things up. I got a few complaints and questions on why it kept changing. What did I learn? Find a theme. Keep it simple. Leave it alone. One of my favorite phrases: “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” Lesson learned.
• Infrequent posts. Time is often hard to come by. I kept telling myself I’d update 3-4 times per week. The problem is life gets in the way. When blogging is a hobby it’s often the first thing to get bumped when life gets busy. What did I learn? Set a realistic schedule and inform your readers. If your schedule is to post once per week, tell people that this is a once per week blog. After you come back from a hiatus, just post. Don’t post about why you didn’t post.
• Undelivered promises. Several times I would start a series and not finish it or announce a post was in the works and never get it published. What did I learn? Under promise and over deliver. Don’t announce something unless it’s done, or just publish it with out a pre-announcement.

I’ll leave Simply-Basic online (it only costs $20 a year for the domain) and all the current content there. I will not, however, be transferring old posts over here.

WordPress Plugins

I’ve released a number of WordPress plugins on both Simply-Basic (no longer active). In the coming weeks they will be migrated over here. I’m going to go through each plugin one by one and update them to WordPress 2.7. After the update is complete their new home will be found here. All future WordPress releases will be done via this blog.

Techlyzer

A month or so ago I decided I wanted to start creating tutorials in the form of in-depth screen casts. For this project I created Techlyzer to release them all. Unfortunetly, spreading myself thinner was not the answer to my blogging problems. So just as fast as it was created, I’ve ended my Techlyzer experiment. I still hope to create and release screencasts, but they will be done so here on a sporadic basis. I will still publish some PhotoShop tutorials by my good friend Chelsea Stark as well.

What Does It All Mean?

I’ve narrowed my focus, honed my skills, and am ready for a new chapter in my online life. I’m quite excited about what 2009 will bring. Rather then feeling the pressure to publish several short articles a week, I can spend more time detailing in-depth projects, working with clients, and writing long, detailed tutorials. If you’ve followed me this far, you’ll love what’s coming ahead. Here’s to a great new year!

-John