Here’s an example:

eSnipe finally gets the green bar!

Our website is highly dependent on PayPal and does many transactions every day. I suddenly realized that our users would probably feel better about plunking down their hard-earned cash if we added the EV SSL to our site. I figured the cool highlighted address gives customers an unconscious cue that the company isn’t fooling around with their money and data. Renewing an SSL certificate is a pain in the rear to begin with. I figured out now was the time to get the EV SSL feature since I had to duel with the red tape contingent anyway.

Getting an SSL certificate isn’t strictly a technical matter. You have to prove that:

• You own your own domain name
• Your servers have permanent address on the web (a “static IP”, not the less expensive dynamic IP that shouts out “rented server on the wrong side of the tracks” (or racks, or something))
• Your company has a physical location, or at least an address where lawsuits can be served on you
• Your company is listed with a major directory such as Dun & Bradstreet
• Your company has an accepted legal structure such as an S-Corporation, C-Corporation, or LLC, and is up-to-date on its filings

This is all common sense stuff, and so very 20th century. Because the truth is, my company is totally distributed. I work wherever I have a laptop, the main ops guy/programmer works in another state, and support people live in yet other states (sort of; I recently realized that one support person who’s been with us for years lives just an hour away in my home state, but you get the point)( I’m not a details guy), and I’ve never even met one of my most expensive lawyers, who’s across the country.

The certification people don’t want to hear that, and for good reason. At its root the concept of the SSL is that customers want to know that third parties have verified that you’re not likely to run off with their money, and that if you do, you’ll have left some sort of paper trail. The EV SSL certification is expensive by small business standards, though well within the IT budget of a major corporation. This fee is, let’s be honest, in large part to keep the riff-raff out. If your company can’t afford a few thousand for the certification, as the Wall Street Journal pointed out diplomatically a few years ago, it’s not stable enough to merit the very appearance of substance it is meant to convey.

We had to do a little… adapting to satisfy the certification team. They needed to see email addresses using our company’s domain. I conduct the vast majority of official business using my personal email account. So I had to start checking the official company email address more. Because we hold no debt and are not a public company, we had let our Dun & Bradstreet listing lapse a decade ago. Therefore they needed to contact James, one of our lawyers, to ensure we existed, had indeed been incorporated since 2001, and can be served during the business day for lawsuits (thanks, James, but I hope I don’t ever need you for that one). They called and emailed several employees during the business day to make sure said employees were on the job. (They asked for an HR department but, ah, I’m the HR department.) DigiCert, the company that issued the EV SSL certificate, was polite but insistent. It’s a thorough process.

What city is my company in? In Seattle, where management lives, California, where operations does its magic, or Arizona, where support is? Our customers don’t much care. In practice eSnipe is 100% virtual. I honestly don’t know what state my Quickbook Online business records are kept in; they’re stored in the cloud (backed up on a local drive, duh), maybe at Intuit’s offices in Northern California, maybe not, I don’t know.  Microsoft is technically a Delaware corporation; Microsoft Office is written mostly in Redmond but also in India. I doubt that matters to most Office users.

On the technical end of things, the operations staff had their hands full. Part of my application included asking them to generate a certificate request or “CSR”, which is a big huge number represented in encrypted form as shown below, sharply truncated.

-----BEGIN NEW CERTIFICATE REQUEST-----
MIIEXzCCA0cCAQAwfzELMAkGA
… blah blah blah
rZjVqR0VvD+DFv3RM6mCBy
VvJn7a4WWmjBHkFTI3TRRsYn2
ncNGPLGLP9+7sosafQbZfCcS+Q==
-----END NEW CERTIFICATE REQUEST-----

This number is created by taking identifying characteristics of the web server, the computer it’s running on, and a number of other factors that, while invisible to any of us viewing the CSR in its raw form, form a unique identifier. Among the data are our company’s name and city of origin, all baked into the CSR. This tripped me up last time we got the simpler, plain vanilla SSL certificate. I was living in Arizona, the company was based in Washington, the server that generated the CSR was in California, and I was thoroughly confused. Since I was in Arizona, that’s what went into the CSR, and the certificate was rejected. Someone at the certificate company looked us up in state records, found our Washington incorporation and busted us. That’s low tech, and it does the job just fine. I may have been in Phoenix, but my company was in Washington. They’re all about the due diligence, in case you wondered how seriously they take that green bar.

Does physical location matter in a global company, which we are, tiny though we may be? It still does. In this most modern of businesses, when it comes to handling your money, the universally accepted methods of determining who we are boil down to methods that would make perfect sense to the Hardy Boys.

P.S. They had to reissue the certificate this time, but for once it wasn’t me. After all that work someone on the other end spelled eSnipe’s state as Wahington, and I had to catch it. Puh-leeze, I’m supposed to be a high-level guy. Where are Frank and Joe when you need them?

This blog is written using WordPress, and WordPress reviews of version 3.0 are rare at the moment. I love it, and I think WordPress 3.0 is going to cost a lot of CMS software companies a lot of money.

Need a WordPress review in plain English now that version 3 is out? Wonder if it’s ready for prime time as a CMS? (If you don’t know what a CMS, no worries. ) We’ll touch on some of the hottest features without the opaque tech language favored by so many WordPress fans.

WP Template a Crazy Good Default Theme

The new default theme, Twenty 10, looks gorgeous out of the box. It’s reminiscent of the very popular Cutline theme but updated. This is the first default theme that will wow just about any potential WordPress user or prospective client right out of the box.

Instantly Change Header Image or Background Colors

Oddly, earlier versions of WordPress required a dip into the CSS editor to change the background color or the image used for the header. This was frightening to nontechnical users, easy to screw up with nothing more than a misplaced semicolon, and just plain tedious. While an increasing number of themes have started to include these features, WordPress 3 adds an image browser for the header and a color wheel to change the background color, making these changes a snap. And it even comes with a few background images out of the box.

Finally-An Intro Page Feature

One of the most common WordPress bugaboos has been the difficulty of creating a unique page that appears as the site’s “book cover”, something like the splash page used by many sites. It’s the most natural way to introduce the site to a new viewer, and has been the subject of many plugins. The process is now simplified to the point of choosing what WordPress calls your front page in the General > Reading settings.

Help Me!

Get context-sensitive help on any page from within the WordPress admin area by clicking the unobtrusive Help tab on the upper right of the admin pages. You get extensive help straight from the enormous WordPress Codex without having to search manually.

WordPress as a CMS 1: Put Blog Posts on a Static Page

A special new Posts Page means you can now treat the blog as just another drop-in module, at peer level with a static page.  This brings WordPress even further into the Content Management Systems (CMS ) mainstream, making it much easier to get past corporate gatekeepers who sometimes can’t get past WordPress’ reputation as “just a blog”. (A CMS is a way to create robust, easily maintained websites without requiring the user to master Web programming or even HTML. WordPress has been a true CMS for years, but many of those who control the corporate purse strings have resisted the rend.)

WordPress as a CMS 2: Custom Posts

Many, perhaps even most, sites use WordPress as something closer to a general-purpose website creation system because it’s so darn easy to use. That meant many WordPress admins found themselves using complicated, error-prone formatting customs to display different categories of information.

Enterprise-level CMS systems let you create special page types that are actually specialized database entry forms, so that they get displayed consistently and appropriately for each kind of information. Suppose, for example, you have a product review site that has fields for Product Name, Description, Category, and Rating. Blog posts only have Title, Content, and Category.

Custom Posts now let you create new post types with the additional fields, so each time a new product is entered there’s no danger of omitting a field or mis-formatting it by accident. In WordPress 3 exploiting these features requires additional plugins or themes, but the API support makes these plugins almost trivially easy. And in true WordPress form they add rich support for tags.

WordPress- Multiple Blogs Now a Snap with WP 3

There is an alternate universe of folks who need to manage many WordPress installations at once. Until now they were relegated to a WordPress underclass, using a somewhat-incompatible version called WordPress MU. That’s a thing of the past. WordPress MU has been superseded by WordPress 3.0, but you’ll only know about it if you tweak your wp-config.php. Adding multiple blog support means editing a single line. It could have been right out there in the Dashboard, so why not do it that way?

Because a novice user would be flummoxed by the confusing and occasionally dangerous options. By requiring that manual change the WordPress team cleverly hid the added complexity of multiple site management. They kept novices from falling down the rabbit hole.

WordPress CMS Controversy is History

WordPress CMS might be a better name for the new version. The “Is WordPress a CMS” controversy is over. WordPress 3.0 is a flat-out CMS killer. It will prove the downfall of many lucrative, overpriced enterprise software licenses. And for good reason. Features like multiple blog handling and custom posts move it into the big time.  ]]> http://easyonme.com/blog/easyonme/wordpress-3-0-review-goodbye-overpriced-corporate-software-hello-wordpress-cms/feed/ 1 http://easyonme.com/blog/easyonme/jonesing-for-peanut-butter-part-1/ http://easyonme.com/blog/easyonme/jonesing-for-peanut-butter-part-1/#comments Mon, 30 Nov 2009 06:53:36 +0000 Easy On Me http://easyonme.com/blog/?p=116 Continue reading →]]> Ten weeks ago I started a new eating plan. It immediately slammed me against a wall, vaporized every last ounce of my productivity, and crouched in the corner of my office laughing as it watched me beg for mercy. And that was only the first day.

Ten weeks ago I started a new eating plan. It immediately threw me against a wall, punched me in the gut, and crouched in the corner of my office laughing as I begged for mercy. And that was only the first day.

Because my reaction was so extreme I won’t name the diet just yet. A hint: it’s the only peer-reviewed eating plan known to prevent and reverse heart disease without surgery, and has been proven consistently to do so over the last 25 years or so. It requires eating only plant-based foods, and even those are restricted. It ruthlessly eliminates oils, salt, nuts, and nut butter. Obviously no milk, eggs, meat, cheeses. In other words, all the fun stuff is gone, other than whole-grain bread, walnuts on occasion, and trace amounts of fruit juice and sugar used to add flavor to recipes.

By the second day, I was fantasizing about peanut butter and my sense of smell went into overdrive. When my wife sauteed up some shrimp, the smell was so nauseating I had to leave the house. When my kids opened the wrappers to their Halloween candy, I had to leave the room. I became irritable and stayed that way for hours at a time. I was not good company.

I knew it would be difficult for me. I’m 150 pounds overweight, and you don’t get that way being a casual eater. I’ve dieted many times before. All my other diets were common sense versions of the just-eat-less-but-balanced school. The documentation that this is the best way to reverse heart disease, reduce cholesterol, and eliminate harmful plaque buildup is compelling. I always viewed it as a last resort, hoping to achieve those ends by less rigorous means. I haven’t been able to, and I’m too old to keep fooling myself. So hardcore vegan no-oil diet, here I came. The bargain I made for myself was that I would slough off any obligations other than family if it came down to that.

It did, with near-disastrous results. More tomorrow, but I’m bringing this into the conversation to explain my long absence from this blog, an absence I am not proud of. More next time.

Work isn’t a burden to me. I think work is a blessing, especially considering that I enjoy my job(s) so much. Besides eSnipe I am also working on a company that publishes ecourses. I am also learning about internet marketing so I can do a better job spreading the word about eSnipe, and I think affiliate marketing will be the best way to do it. During vacation I didn’t write much but I did study. I am investigating work at home possibilities for older people who are enthusiastic Web users but who find their age is a negative on the job market.

From the time I was young I was readying myself for economic doldrums like these (and worse). I have done a pretty good job of it. I studied the lives of other who had achieved economic security and wanted very much to follow in their footsteps. My parents came out of the Depression and I am naturally cautious, so I went entrepeneur fairly young, failed a lot, and finally found a position where I could be productive and earn a decent living.

Starting a traditional business has always been hard. I know, I’ve done a few. By the 80s and 90s it had become much worse in many places than it had ever been before, due to layers of red tape thoughtlessly wrapped around the wrists of entrepreneurs at every bureacratic level: city, county, state, federal. And whereas in 1935 you could at least start a hot dog cart business with relative ease by 1995 it was an ordeal, with health inspectors and zoning and permitting that made it impossible or nearly so.

But the Internet is still in its early stages. Starting a small business on the Web is roughly like putting a hot dog cart on a busy Manhattan street during the Depression. You can do it with a modest expenditure, but while times are bed there is still a tsunami of potential customers rushing by your business every hour of the day.

I am exploring these no-physical-inventory, low expenditure web startup possibilities and have been even as the blog has been languishing. I have alwyas been an expert on how to make money even in hard times, and my last big success (eSnipe) was a pioneering web business launched during the first bust of the Internet era.

Along with the Great eBay Seller’s Experiment I am working on those ideas too. I have found a world-class mentor  and will report back to you as I progress. Now more than ever we need to understand the possibilities allowed us on the Net, especially those of us who are old enough to suffer job discrimination and who want to explore work at home possibilities that take full advantage of a connected world. More coming on that.

Meanwhile, I’ve been getting some excellent feedback on the Seller’s Experiment and will post more about it ASAP.

• What’s changing at eSnipe
• What you don’t like about eSnipe and how you’d like us to improve it
• How to make a better living and think in new ways
• EasyOnMe’s solution to getting your business on the web fast and inexpensively without relying on a webmaster
• How to get great deals in the online auction world
• Just fun stuff

I’d love it if you’d post comments. They won’t get approved right away because this is a moderated blog, but that means you won’t have to wade through comment spam, either.

eBay sellers: care to guest blog?

eSnipe has a lot of users and gets an astonishing number of page views. If you have something interesting to say about the eBay world, even if it’s just about your own business, drop me a line via the Contact page.  I’d love to see some guest bloggers here. I don’t mind self-serving posts either as long as they benefit the reader too. We’ll include a link to your site if we publish your post.

Cheers,

Tom Campbell, CEO
eSnipe, Inc.