The most onerous provisions in these acts concern takedown orders. Under SOPA and PIPA, entire sites — and indeed, entire chunks of the internet — can be blacked out based on a complaint by pretty much anyone. The bills bypass due process by requiring hosting and internet service providers to cut off access to the site in question. Defendant sites can protest the complaint, but must do so by mail before five days is up. Hosting providers and ISP must act, by law, five days after the complaint is filed.

Complaints can be as simple as “this image was posted on this site without permission” or “this sentence was plagiarized from my site.” SOPA and PIPA take the current enforcement model (provided by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, or DMCA) and turn it on its head: While DMCA notices require sites hosting stolen content to take that content down, it does not punish the site if the site acts quickly enough. SOPA and PIPA, however, take an enforcement-first approach — tell network providers to shut the site off, and hold the complainant harmless (even if the complaint was wrongly filed with harmful intent).

What does this mean for companies like Honest Code? As we mentioned, about two thirds of our business comes from building WordPress sites for individuals, organizations and business across the country. WordPress is designed to facilitate free and open communication — through blog posts, comments, trackbacks, and other ways to make it easy to post and share news and information. Putting the heavy legal responsibility to vet every word and image posted to a site is enough to cause these organizations and individuals to reconsider their participation on the Internet. “If I post this image, and our site gets taken down, was it worth it?” I’d reckon the answer will often be no.

That conceivably means that two thirds of our business could evaporate overnight.

Moreover, Honest Code operates a site called peg.gd, where people from all over the world create simple, single-serving web pages for whatever they need. If laws like SOPA and PIPA become law, I will likely shut peg.gd down. I’m just starting a family: I can’t risk having my websites taken offline because of what an anonymous someone posts on what happens to be my server.

We sent letters by mail to our house representative, Congressman Brian Bilbray, and our senators Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein. We received no reply. I asked Congressman Bilbray again via Twitter, and again was met with silence.

Congressman Bilbray, Senator Boxer, and Senator Feinstein, combined, have received almost $1.5 million in industry contributions that are undoubtedly being used as leverage to persuade them to vote in support of SOPA and PIPA.

If you haven’t already, and you’re able, please send your representatives and senators in congress a message. Let them know that while they might be concerned about thousands of jobs in the entertainment industry — an industry that is spending the millions of dollars pushing this legislation through — millions of jobs are at risk because of what these bills will do to fundamentally change the Internet. Please tell them that the Internet needs to remain free and open, and future legislation shouldn’t be used to censor anyone’s website.

More information:

• Find out where your members of congress stand
• A good summary of what’s wrong with SOPA
• Stop American Censorship
• Google: End Piracy, Not Liberty
• More opponents of SOPA and PIPA
• Fight for the Future’s SOPA Strike

Looking back

2011, in every measurable way, was a banner year for Honest Code. True, it was only our second year in business, but compared to all the years I’ve been freelancing, 2011 was indeed exceptional. In revenue terms, it was my second best year ever. My best year, 2008, saw over 60 percent of my revenue come from one place: the U.S. Department of the Navy. This year, my largest client accounted for just 23 percent of my income. More customers and more work made 2011 certainly busier, if not more successful.

Even though I had a larger diversity of clients, nearly two-thirds of the work I did last year was related to WordPress development — design, themes, plugins, widgets, and conversion routines from other content management systems. Years before, I would go through a little song and dance to convince customers that WordPress is a good option for them; Today, customers come to me with WordPress already in mind.

2011 brought us some great projects. Late in the year, The Skateboard Mag, launched its brand-new, WordPress-based website greeting 10,000 visitors per day. Honest Code built a custom WordPress theme and imported their existing content from their less-performant, home-grown CMS. We also launched a brand new identity and website for Great Ecology, with the help of our friends at Traina Design.

Honest Code was privileged to build some new websites for our valued agency clients as well. Traina Design, The Starmack Group, Ten Stories, and Lift all launched or updated their sites last year.

Where we are

This year, probably the biggest event for me personally is that my fiancée Michelle and I are getting married in March.

What does this mean for Honest Code customers? The past three months have been very intense with work. I’ve made it my New Year’s resolution to focus more on the wedding (and take on less new business) for the first three months of the year. After the wedding (and maybe a trip in April) I’ll start ramping back up for the rest of the year.

Where we’re going

I’m very much looking forward to the coming year. I’m starting a new technical illustration project for an Orange County-based sensor products manufacturer that will be a welcome change to my web development routine.

That isn’t to say I’m entirely shifting gears, of course. In 2012, I’ll be working with Creativity Included to build and market a commercial image carousel plugin for WordPress.

I’m also cautiously optimistic about some speaking opportunities coming up this year. I’m working on talks about WordPress theme development — and development in general — for designers that may be more comfortable with print than web design.

Starting in the second quarter, Honest Code will also be proud to accept credit card payments online using Stripe. I’m solidifying our security and banking infrastructure now, and will be thrilled to provide this convenience for our large and small customers alike.

Thanking you

Of course, I want 2012 to be my customers’ best year, too. Anything Honest Code can do to make your business healthier, stronger, and more agile makes us feel good too.

Thanks so much for taking an interest in Honest Code in 2011, and also for your continued custom in 2012.

Cheers!

I was looking at blogging and found some real interesting reads. Can you share your experience on blogging and how we can implement this from our WEB site?  I want to link our website to Facebook, LinkedIn, [and use] social media to draw more traffic.  In general, we need to drive SEO.  Can we re-sync on the objectives and see if we are still on plan?

What the client is talking about here is Content Strategy. Content Strategy (the proper noun) is a relatively new field, and it requires a certain amount of work to create and maintain a successful content strategy. In its most basic form, a website content strategy (the improper noun) describes:

• what content is appropriate for posting on the website
• where that content should live (that is: based on what the page is about, where best does it fit?)
• who is responsible for creating and maintaining that content
• when (or how often) it should be published
• what process is followed to approve content for the website (will they need the approval of editors, proofreaders, or maybe even the CEO?)

These are not questions we can answer for them, but we can at least direct their thinking. The client should consider their audience first: What answers would they like to see for each of the questions above? Do their readers have time for a blog post every day (or every week)? Do their readers appreciate a direct, casual approach, or are they more formal and corporate?

SEO and social media are a part of that strategy, but they shouldn’t be the focus of the strategy. Good, relevant, engaging content drives far more traffic — and customers — than social media gimmicks and SEO black magic.

Creating a content strategy is only the first step. Implementing that content strategy is frequently more difficult, because it requires everyone in the client’s organization to cooperate. Signs of a broken content strategy are missed deadlines, spelling errors, and an increased number of customer support requests. A good content strategy has room to grow in order to address all those issues.

The bottom line is this: The client gets out what they put in. If they want to devote time and resources to building a successful content strategy to drive traffic to their site, it will pay off for them.

There are no shortcuts. There is only a lot of work.

For the sake of argument, let’s set aside the obvious jokes and the Sisyphean task of competing against Google, and just look at what they have to date.

CNN says they’ve been working for two years on this project. What do they have to show for it? A signup form. Hey, that’s OK — a lot of startups begin with a signup form.

But wait — for a search engine? In the early days of the web, I don’t recall Yahoo! or Lycos ever signing people up before offering search. Google didn’t either. Cuil (that’s right, it doesn’t exist anymore), such as it was, didn’t pre-register. And if they’re pre-registering people in the state of California, they should have a privacy policy, right? It’s the law! Nope, sorry. No privacy policy.

A simple whois lookup shows that wiredoo.com is registered — and hosted — with GoDaddy. Competing with Google almost automatically excludes GoDaddy from your hosting options. If I were in Hammer’s place, I’d start to see some red flags.

Looking at this as an investor and consumer, if there’s no privacy policy, and they’re collecting names and emails, what possible function could this “search engine” have other than to collect, aggregate, and sell your personal information to third parties? That is, of course, the popular thing to do these days. I won’t begrudge them that, but two years to develop a signup form that very well may unlawful, on a platform that couldn’t withstand their launch day, for the purpose of turning their users into a rich vein of data to mine?

I couldn’t touch that.

The app is a little over a year old, and since I haven’t really done a whole lot of iOS programming in the meantime, my skills are rusty as all getout. Add to that a new IDE, new requirements for iOS 5, and the fact that the app is in desperate need of a facelift. There’s no way I’m going to be able to promise a timetable for fixing all the issues I know need to be fixed.

I do apologize to all of peggd’s fans, and I hope to be able to start on a new version soon. In the meantime, the web app works great! Give it a try.

Thanks again!

And when I say “met,” I mean that I, along with about 5,000 other people, were in the same (large) room as him. At one point, I passed within about 20 feet of him, surrounded by media shouting questions at him. That was about as close as I dared get.

He was tall — about six feet, as I recall — and the memory I have is with him walking slowly, casually, hands behind his back. The media people were very squirmy, with photographers crouching to get a good shot. It was like Pigpen’s cloud constantly swirling around this guy.

From the stories we’ve all read over the years, he was a guy that was hard to work for. A tyrant, some say, exacting discipline and perfection from his company. In exchange, they developed — and we, today, enjoy — some of the most amazing physical objects ever created.

We can carry around with us computers — computers several times more powerful than those that took men to the moon — in our pockets. We can create and share information and distribute it nearly instantaneously to every corner of the Earth. A lot of people made this happen — most of whom weren’t Steve Jobs. But part of a networked world means that everyone who wants to participate in the network has to have a device that works with it.

Steve Jobs made those devices indispensable. Either through his flawless presentation technique or his amazing ability to refine products to be effortless to use, he sold devices that let everyone from infants to grandparents to those with cognitive disabilities exist on the same plane. The network’s power is in its ability to connect people; Steve Jobs’ talent was successfully convincing people to join the network.

In his often-shared 2005 commencement speech at Stanford University, he said, “your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”

We’ll miss you, Steve. Thank you.

Your patience is appreciated.

Update: Power was restored for us at 1:25 this morning, however the grid remains fragile, according to San Diego Gas & Electric. Honest Code will be making every attempt to conserve power throughout the day.

This magic is the product and service of Dinner Studio, a unique, local business that delivers inexpensive, fresh (or frozen, your choice) meals right to your door, ready to cook for dinner tonight. TV dinners in plastic trays these are not — homemade, family-friendly recipes from Gloria Otten, once a well-known executive chef, fill out a long menu that changes every month.

The Beginning

Dinner Studio started in 2003, riding the wave of “learn to cook” kitchens: We give you a shopping list, you bring the ingredients to suit your taste, and you come to our professional kitchen where we help you make enough meals for a week. Dinner Studio had three kitchens throughout San Diego county where people could come, cook, eat, and learn.

Josh Otten, Gloria’s stepson, and manager of Dinner Studio’s business-end, admitted that this was a tough start for the company. Costs for three locations were draining away what little profit the company generated, in what was already a low-margin business.

“We had a few things that we, ourselves, prepared in the kitchens, and people began coming in asking just to buy that,” instead of making their own meals, Josh said.

Josh soon realized they were in the wrong business.

Gloria and Josh shut down all but one kitchen in central San Diego, and took a hard look at the business. People wanted prepared meals. They didn’t want to cook. They wanted good food — not fast food — delivered right to their door.

Plus, customers wanted to order online. Their old website, mostly a brochure for the old business, wasn’t up to the task.

“What we used to do in person — taking payment, answering questions,” Gloria said, “was so time consuming that customer service was really all we had time for. When we did have time to work on our old website, we would have to relay the information to our webmaster and hope he could find the time to put it up for us. Frankly, the time we lost with our old system leaves that entire experience as something of a blur.”

The New Website

In 2009, Honest Code designed, built, and launched a two-part website for Dinner Studio — the first part was a WordPress-driven front-end where Josh could make changes to any part of the site he wanted. The second part was a PHP and MySQL back end — developed along with High Class Software — to handle payment, coupons, discounts, delivery, and pickup.

With the new website, Gloria said, “it was almost like starting a new business.”

“The ability to take payment over the internet has been huge for us, as has the ability to post pictures, videos, redeem coupons, and change content … all within minutes. Plus, it can all be done by us! Your work makes us look great!”

For Dinner Studio, information is power, too. “The ability to utilize the data collected by our website in real time (and again, without waiting on a third party) has also been huge,” Gloria said.

“It has allowed us to make smarter, quicker decisions that affect how we market and where we do business. What used to take two people all day to accomplish can easily be done by one now — and in less than half the time.”

Users appreciate the ease-of-use, too. “It’s so easy to use,” one customer said. “Especially for someone like me, who’s not too computer-savvy.”

Looking Ahead

Honest Code still maintains and updates the site today, recently improving coupon handling, and adding meal options as well.

Perhaps most importantly, their new website has allowed Dinner Studio to grow. The last few years haven’t exactly been kind to small businesses like Gloria and Josh’s. “With the economy the way it is, it was easy to miss the good things going on last year,” Gloria said.

“The numbers tell us we grew by 7.5%, but the other benefits of this website go way beyond sales.” Compared to the possibility of not being in business at all, she says she much prefers the modest growth.

“If I had to pick the one best asset of this website it would have to be the time it saves us,” she says. “The ability to aggressively work on fine-tuning our business instead of just barely surviving has meant the difference between modest growth in a recession and not surviving the recession.”

“It has also allowed us the time to resume some sort of life outside of our business, which for me has really been one of the greatest gifts.”

I’ve just started using Instapaper, too, and I know I’m late to that party. Michelle’s iPad is frequently on the couch, and having Instapaper articles just handy to read there is nice.

So I had my peanut butter, and I had my chocolate, but I had no good way to combine the two. I asked Dave Pell if he was going to start accepting Instapaper email addresses in Delivereads, and I got no reply.

So, I built Paperboy. Paperboy goes and fetches the headlines on the Delivereads home page, and saves them to your reading list if you provide your Instapaper username and password.

It does this all through Instapaper’s JSON interface, and none of the usernames and passwords are ever stored. It works great on your iPad, too.

It’s a slightly manual process, since Delivereads is updated sort of irregularly (though usually on the same day of the week). I figure it’s easier to go and load it up yourself whenever you feel like something new to read.

If you like it, great! We hope you do. If you’re Dave Pell and you think I’m stealing from you, then I’m terribly sorry, and please email me.

Try Paperboy.