Startup Customer Service

I upgraded this blog last week to WordPress 2.6. Prior to the upgrade I had been using a custom permalink structure. Upon upgrading from 2.5 to 2.6 the link structure would not display individual posts.

As I a result I changed my permalink structure to one of the defaults and my blog began displaying the posts correctly. Now I had changed my permalinks throughout the site.

I use Disqus the great full featured commenting system. Disqus essentially creates a forum area based on your post permalink for your comments. As I said I had just changed all my permalinks and my comments were now disconnected. My comments were effectively floating in the blogosphere.

I searched Google for a fix. I searched around on the Disqus site. David of the KnightKnetwork pointed me to this thread on the Disqus forums.

Apparently I was not the only one having this issue. In the thread Daniel Ha the founder of Disqus said,

“Please email help@disqus.com and we can, well, help. 🙂 “

I immediately sent an email as prescribed. My email basically said I upgraded WordPress and changed my permalink structure, Help! I sent the email at mid morning.

I received a reply at in the early afternoon from Jason Yan of Disqus. It said,

“Hi Franklin,
I’ve merged all your threads so they point to the new links.
Thanks,
Jason”

This was outstanding customer service. A while ago Marc Andreessen wrote several posts about startups. Startups are interesting entities. Building business processes from the ground up seems to be very challenging but very rewarding for the startup entrepreneur. Infrastructure needs to be built from the ground up. Customer service could be easily overlooked or handled very poorly.

I try many Web 2.0 Alphas and Betas and it seems the successful ones pay attention to the details. It is rare to find a good software product with poor customer service. Customer service is important to the end user.

I want to thank Jason Yan and the Disqus team for their prompt service.

I believe Disqus will be successful not only because of their great product but their great customer service as well.

In the world we know as Web 2.0 who is good at customer service? Who isn’t?

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Excuses, WordPress, & Blogging

For the past 6-8 weeks I have been tech blogging. Well at least a little. I have managed to post sporadically with a quest to post regularly. Sporadically is probably the best I can do for now. I tried blogging before and had given up on it. But this time I think it has stuck. I will maintain this blog and try to post daily but at least once a week.

As a new blogger I have been working to spruce up the site. I have been researching many WordPress themes, many sidebar widgets, and lots of tweaks for the blog. Several months ago I added the Disqus plugin for threaded commenting. Disqus is great! If you do not use it for your WordPress blog you should really give it a try. Installation is easy and it works great. One of my favorite features is the commenting by email reply .

During the past week I have been looking at WordPress themes and wordpress theme development. The main process in a wordpress theme that displays your posts is called “The Loop.” The loop looks like this:

<?php if (have_posts()) : ?>

<?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>

//Code here would display and format the post.

<?php endwhile; ?>

All wordpress themes have the_loop but some have more than one. Some premium themes and magazine style themes may also display post excerpts in a sidebar or else where on the page. They have multiple loops. The following is a list of links that I have viewed as I was researching multiple wordpress loops.

I looked at ways to enhance my theme with category pages. I wanted a specific verbiage at the top of each category page. Here are some relevant links:

As I stated I have been looking at many different wordpress themes. It is good to choose a theme and stick with it. Here are couple places to take a look at themes:

I decided on Cutline by Chris Pearson for now. It is a 3 column theme. But I intend to tweak it further by changing the theme’s pages, categories, sidebars, and general setup.

Here a couple more general WordPress links:

One more thing. So you want to play with new themes, or just tweaking your site. One thing you can try is installing WordPress locally. So you do not have a Linux machine? No problem, XAMPP to the rescue.

XAMPP is a free, cross-platform web server, consisting mainly of the Apache HTTP Server, MySQL database, and interpreters for scripts written in the PHP and Perl programming languages.

XAMPP lite contians just what you need. XAMPP is zipped and requires no install. There is even a portable apps version of XAMPP. XAMPP contains everything needed to run WordPress. Check out the following link:

This link gives you step by step instructions to get your local WordPress install up and running.

I like this blogging thing no more excuses but to post.