First, the Past

Seven years a go, Benjamin Young (President of BigBlueHat), started out to build a web design and development company that would make life easier for his clients and friends. The early years were focused on building simple sites for small companies on Open Source Content Management Systems (CMS’s) such as Mambo and Joomla!. As our client’s needs changed, so did we. The Open Source CMS’s of the day didn’t provide the flexibility that we all wanted and needed–and they all lacked the usability Benjamin cares so much about. So, we built BlueInk–our very own “over the top” CMS that lets editors view their sites while editing. You may have seen it, used it, or heard of it. If not, we’d love for you to check it out http://blueinkcms.com/ To date, we have now built over 100 sites on BlueInk! We’re pretty proud of the little guy…

Second, the Present

Open Source has played a huge roll in everything we’ve done for the past 7 years, but our contributions to Open Source were mostly small lines of code, the occasional documentation paragraph, and general promotion and support in various forums and mailing lists. A few months ago (does that count as present?), we made a decision we’d put off too long. We decided to jump into the Open Source world full tilt by building a rewrite of BlueInk as an Open Source project on a relatively new database called CouchDB. If you’re into this sort of thing (as we obviously are!), you can checkout the code at http://github.com/BigBlueHat/BlueInk

This was a huge decision for us! Building something as broad as a CMS is rewarding and challenging. Doing it with a world-wide community of like minded developers extends the reward (and the challenge) to an even greater level. Open Source is a strange and exciting world and we’re excited to now be more completely a part of it.

Third, the Future

These past seven years have shown us that “going it alone” ain’t all it’s cracked up to be. Open Sourcing BlueInk has introduced us to the power of community and the powerful other people can play in our business, products, and ideas.

Today, we’re announcing that BigBlueHat will be transforming into a new, stronger company! We are forming a partnership with a long term, local affiliate, Exact Solutions. This new partnership will be known as Exactly, Inc. and will combine the BigBlueHat ideas, products, and services with Exact Solutions’ fabulous and experienced support and management team.

In the short term, hosting and technical support will be improving (due to the additional hands on deck). We’ll also be releasing some long awaited BlueInk documentation. Beyond that we’ll be making new product announcements, upgrade opportunities, and hosting package improvements.

We’ll be making more detailed announcements over the coming weeks as we form the partnership and role out the new products and improved support.

Last, the Thanks

Each of you have played an important role in BigBlueHat’s growth over the years. Thank you for being a part of this business, choosing our products, and helping us grow through your feedback, ideas, and purchases. We look forward to many more years of service to you, our clients and friends.

On a related note, Benjamin Young, BigBlueHat’s founder, has recently accepted a full time position with CouchOne–the company started by the creator of CouchDB. The Open Sourcing of BlueInk created more opportunities than we’d first imagined! Benjamin will still be an active part of Exaclty, Inc. working primiarily in a consulting and planning role–think Steve Jobs or Bill Gates. He’ll still be very much around, but will primarily be in the background cooking up crazy new inventions and charting BlueInk’s continued growth.

If you’ve made it this far, you have our thanks. If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to write us. We’ll be sending out several more e-mails over the coming weeks to introduce you to the new team, services, and products.

Thank you again for all you’ve done with and for us over the years.

Your’s very truly,
BigBlueHat

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Co-Chairs: Mike Amundsen & Benjamin Young

REST Fest 2010 (Sep 17th & 18th)

REST Fest is a community unconference event focused on the REST architectural style and implementations. This year, REST Fest will encourage developers who have direct experience building RESTful applications for the World Wide Web to share their successes and their frustrations in an informal atmosphere. REST Fest will also maintain a “Hack Room” open throughout the two-day event where attendees can get together and work on any project they like. http://restfest.org

Call for Presenters

In the spirit of the “Unconference” model, all talks are automatically accepted as a “Lightning Talk” (Five Slides in Five Minutes). Presenters are encouraged to submit a title, short abstract (250 or less), and an indication of the “level” of the talk (beginner, intermediate, advanced). “How To…” talks are encouraged as well as “How Do I?” talks. A small number of talks will be chosen as “Selected Talks” with a format of 30+ minutes. Break out sessions will be added as desired by the attendees. http://restfest2010.eventbrite.com/

Workshop: Hypermedia Hacking with Mike Amundsen (Sep 17th)

In this one-day pre-event workshop, attendees will learn how to implement an alternative to one-off Web APIs using Hypermedia Engines. The all-day session includes a mix of presentation, discussion, and hands-on implementation. Attendees are encouraged to bring laptops and “code-along” with supplied examples throughout the day. http://www.restfest.org/schedule/workshop

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Typically, the cause of these errors has been the use of ?> followed by one or more whitespace characters. The extra whitespace was either added by the original author (and overlooked thanks to a low error_reporting level) or by a none-too-helpful FTP client.

After spending too long hunting down the whitespace (made necessary by the use of unnecessary code), I Twittered about the problem and a deluge of discussion followed.

Tradition and Convention vs. Need

According to the PHP manual on the topic of instruction separation, the use of ?> at the end of a file is completely optional. That said, the use of ?> has been standard fare for decades. At this point in history, most of us are so used to seing it dangling uselessly at the bottom of our code, that removing it feels painful or even dangerous.

Personally, I’d never thought to question it’s existence until I read the Doctrine ORM for PHP coding standards. Coding standards typically consist of a four spaces vs. tab debate, where one should put one’s curly braces, and class naming conventions. When I read Doctrine’s, I was surprised to find them start out with the requiring that ?> not be used at the end of files.

Since then, I’ve found other projects that require it be left off and, most recently, spent hours frustrated by the fact that someone before me didn’t leave it off.

Necessity, the Mother of Invention Convention

There seems to be growing movement among projects to drop the use of ?>. Most PHP coders, however, aren’t a part of those project. Many of us stumble across these things by accident, and overlook them as an oddity of a particular project (as I originally did with Doctrine) rather than a best practice for all PHP code. My hope is that my Twittering about it, this blog post, and subsequent debate/promotion/usage of the practice will save us all time down the road.

Discontinuing the use of ?> where it’s not needed is one way we can make the world a better place. No longer using PHP 3 and 4 and moving to PHP 5 would also help, but that’s another blog post.

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What’s needed is an ever increasing use and creation of open standards so we can all move up the innovation ladder or at least make that forward momentum generally available.

Perhaps the Cloud computing “movement” presents this opportunity in some ways. Tim Bray’s thought that PHP’s ubiquity may help this hope may point to a broader way forward–especially when it plays well with other languages via extensions and remote data stores like CouchDB and other web services.

BigBlueHat’s role in this will hopefully continue to increase. We’re doing things “here and there” at the moment as we continue to bootstrap our way to a successful CMS market share. In the future, though, we hope to give more, participate in more, and promote more of what we believe the web should be.

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If you’ve not yet tried BlueInk, we’d at least like to have you check it out at the BlueInk Demo Site.

Thanks in advance for whichever you have time to do.

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If you’d like to follow the fun, check out the BigBlueHat Twitter feed or search for the #works hashtag.

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Benjamin Young admittedly hates computers, but in 2002 he launched BigBlueHat, a web design and information management company.  Why?  Because he wants to provide people with solutions for the same problems that annoy him about computers.  This idea and BigBlueHat’s customer-centered mission to “make the web a better place” helped the firm to enjoy enough growth over the years that in 2006 Young decided to expand is own “freelance gig” by bringing on web developer Brad Garrett.  Together, they provide web design and development services, as well as content management and project management systems, all of which can be customized to fit their different customers’ needs.

Hoping to grow his company even more, Young enrolled in a FastTrac GrowthVenture class in Greenville facilitated by Kim Williams in the fall of 2007, an experience he would gladly repeat.  Looking back, Young said that his only regret is that he did not know about the program when he started the company.  He explained, “I gained insight into business management essentials I’d overlooked, shared experiences with other small business owners, and learned from leading local entrepreneurs. In many ways, it changed the course my business took.”  Find out more about the course BigBlueHat has taken and where it is going at www.bigbluehat.com.

I really did enjoy FastTrac, and would do it again. If you’re in South Carolina and are looking to start or grow your business, I recommend you check out the FastTrac programs. They’re worth every penny.

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Generally, it’s best to look at what other successful innovators are doing. Sometimes, though, it’s good to look at less successful ventures like The 50 Worst Cars of All Time.

Personal Top 5 favorites include:

• 1913 Scripps-Booth Bi-Autogo
• 1933 Fuller Dymaxion
• 1957 Waterman Aerobile
• 1958 Zunndapp Janus
• 1966 Peel Trident

Inspired yet? No, check out the Microcar Museum. Innovation is just around the bend…no doubt.

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Contact Information:
Benjamin Young
108 Poplar Dr.
Greer, SC 29651
Tel: 864.232.9553
Website: http://www.bigbluehat.com/

Greenville, SC —Today, BigBlueHat is announcing the immediate availability of version 2 of our BlueInk Content Management System (CMS).

BlueInk is BigBlueHat’s flagship product. BlueInk gives ordinary people hassle-free, in-browser control over their web site’s content. Through a simple, innovative interface the site owner can edit and organize text, photos, contact information, and other components—all while viewing the site.

During the creation of BlueInk version 2, BigBlueHat received valuable feedback from several upstate businesses, entrepreneurs, and web technologists. BigBlueHat continues to use feedback gleaned from current and potential customers as it makes pivotal decisions about the future of its product.

BlueInk is available via BigBlueHat’s website as new template-based site, a web site conversion, or through the purchase of BigBlueHat’s design files to code service. BlueInk is sold on a software-as-a-service, so web site owners enjoy free upgrades to the software.

BigBlueHat is a web-manufacturing company that creates custom web sites and web-based software for clients around the world. Its chief product is the BlueInk CMS, a proprietary content management system that accommodates both the designer and the end user with an easy-to-use interface.

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