Your system will fail

Two jobs ago (a lifetime it seems!) I worked with this great programmer who came from a job with the military. The Air Force to be exact. His job was to maintain a system that managed inventory for parts for aircraft. Seems like a simple system, but when he got into the depth of the inventory it blew my mind. They tracked everything down to each nut, each bolt, exactly where each part was on the aircraft, it was amazing the detail they had to keep track of.

The main reason for all this detail was the massive amount of redundancy in the construction. Basically if you’re flying into enemy territory and start taking fire you don’t want a bullet or shell to hit the wire that links the joystick to the wings. Or any wire for that matter (turns out they’re all pretty important) . So you put the wire in a place that has the lowest percentage of being hit.

But there’s still a chance (even small) it could get disabled. And when millions of dollars of aircraft and at least one human life are at stake, you want to get as close to 0% as possible. So you add in another wire that does the same job in a different place. Just in case.

But there’s still a chance right? So you add another wire in another spot.

The end of the story is, there are several redundant wires, nuts, bolts, hardware, software, everything. All in different spots. All to back up the other. All to make sure that if one fails the plane doesn’t fall out of the sky.

And why not? If one little wire is the difference between life and death, and there’s room and time and money to put it in, why not?

Luckily Twitter does not work for the military

A less dire example (and the point of this rant) is Twitter. For me the twitter service is sketchy at best. I set it up to get the tweets from the people I want to hear the most directly on my phone. The rest I monitor through the web or rss.

It rarely works 100%.

Case in point, this morning I got an email from twitter about a direct message from someone I follow. It was about some potential work. Even though I have my account set up to send his tweets to my phone I never got the message that way. I went to my feed online (and rss) but since it was a direct message I didn’t see the notification there. Luckily I’m a big fan of redundancy so I have direct messages sent to my email. Crisis averted. And luckily so because the work that came from it looks to be a good gig, and has tons of upside for a future working relationship.

The question is, does your web site or application have that redundancy? If someone is trying to contact you, do you have fail safes in case one way doesn’t work? Will it lose you money if it fails? Do you give your users the opportunity to be paranoid, sometimes justly?

If not, maybe now is a good time to check out your processes and add in that extra wire.

Theme Options

The latest project launch has been another quality WP site with a cool new feature I learned just for the occasion.

Theme Options

Yeah it’s been around for a bit, and it’s probably just a baby step to writing full blown plugins, but I’m excited.

Mainly it gives me a way to extend a theme outside of the page/post level of things and get specific functionality available in the admin. My first foray on my latest project (from the killer design by Winters Interactive) is on the new incarnation of the  Ask a Bachelor site. In the header is a teaser for a question and answer article. Since this teaser didn’t necessarily coincide with a new blog post it needed to be somewhat removed from the post interface in the admin.

Enter theme options.

Theme options gave me a way to set up a new form that housed the data to be displayed in the header. It removed it from the post itself so gave the admin a little more control over what was displayed and how it was linked. Basically a form that had the three fields of the title, question, and link. All managed through the admin panel in WP. Pretty cool!

I found the handy how-to at NomeTech.com and can’t wait to work it in on more projects and expand the functionality a little bit as well.

WordPress Checklist

Just rolled across this Theme Development Checklist. Looks to be extremely useful.

Just off the top it looks like a great check list to roll through to make sure all the files are there to handle the different ways a site will be displayed. From readying it for plugins and widgets to just basics like comments and gravatars.

Oh and this is probably a good resource for you designers out there to make sure your vision is ready for the dynamic world of the web ;)

WordPress continues to rock my face off

I can honestly admit that I’m late to a lot of parties when it comes to web development. I definitely keep my ears open for new and exciting stuff, but rarely jump on board until I can see that whatever it is is here to stay and worth the time investment on my part.

WordPress was one of those. When I first jumped on the bandwagon I felt like I was forcing a square peg when I used it as a back end CMS for a site that didn’t even have a blog. But now, wow, now WordPress doesn’t even blink at the stuff I try to do with it. It’s almost a challenge to find something that it can’t do. And on top of that, I keep finding new and better ways to do the stuff I already know it can do.

So I’m never bored using it, which is great. But then I got wind of WordPress MU. Multi-user WordPress! Sure it’s been around and available for a bit, hey I said I’m usually late to the party, but man how powerful. MU takes regular old WP to the next level and lets you host as many sites/blogs as you want under one WPMU installation. Think about that. It looks to be the perfect solution for franchise brands that need a little more control over their franchisee Web sites, but still want to let them manage it themselves. Schools that could use separate sites for separate groups or activities. The list goes on and on.

And the best part is development time hardly goes up at all. It’s like tripling the value without even touching the cost!

So even though I’m late to this party, I’m happy to be showing up while the keg is still full.

First!

Welcome to Papercanopy.com. The site is still in its startup phase, but look to see all my ramblings on web development, WordPress (MU) and recent wins in the web development world.