In what is sure to be a memorable way to end the year off with a bang, Fused Network has stepped up to the plate once more, coming in as both reindeer and elves. In fact, Fused Network clients have contributed to roughly 80% of the fundraising! And why not?! After continued successes and an ever-growing client base, giving back to those in need does wonders for the morale. It is absolutely imperative we do more than our best to keep this cycle going – we receive, we give back, and the act of receiving comes back in the form of good vibes. Lather, rinse, repeat – with emphasis on repeat.

The Fused Network team will be hitting the Mod Club dance floors on the 16th in support of a most wonderful cause. Surface level engagements aside, it all boils down to the roots of this event; HoHoTO is about community, camaraderie, and generosity of spirit, all of which should be exercised daily. In a blog post aptly titled Blessed, David writes:

“We will go home feeling incredible knowing we, among many others, have helped foster such widespread generosity. As those feelings of elation start to settle, however, we must never forget that the needs of those who are less fortunate than us have no end. A daily effort on our parts must be observed to ensure that they too, get their daily bread.

When the music stops, the giving shouldn’t.”

Heartily noted – mind, body, soul. In a culture so very defined by excess, no one should have to wander the streets hungry.

- – -

The Toronto Daily Bread Food Bank is the largest provider of emergency food relief in the Greater Toronta Area. There are several ways to donate to the Daily Bread; visit their donations page for more information. For HoHoTO event details and statistics, click here.

- – -

If you find yourself in the city, come on out to the most happening Christmas party to ever hit Toronto! HoHoTO is the ultimate mixer; techies, creatives and good, fun-loving people gathering together for a wonderful cause… What could be better?! E-mail me directly at isshamarie[at]fusednetwork[dot]com for a chance at acquiring tickets.

Their warmth struck me first, and I was immediately drawn to Diane and Shona’s energy. They welcomed me with the widest of smiles and the firmest of handshakes, their warm reception a striking (and most refreshing) contrast to yet another cold and rainy Vancouver afternoon. Formalities naturally evolved into friendly banter back and forth. They are such a delight to speak with from the very beginning.

Diane and Shona’s enthusiasm, passion, and infectious energy are a testament to the working environment behind the doors of Fresh Choice Kitchens. Its humble beginnings stem from the concept of community kitchens, combining the simple pleasures of communal gatherings with wholesome and nutritious food. The frequency of communal, sit-down dinners have significantly decreased with the onslaught of technology, the exponential growth of social networking systems, the odd working hours, and the many other innumerable factors that have infiltrated and therefore defined the “norm” of the 21st century. Good, nutritious, healthful meals are catalysts to long-lasting community ties. The sautéing, the chopping, and the overall process behind food preparation – these activities become vehicles for conversation, for banter, for witty repartee, for emotional unloading. What better way to return to the good old days of communal dinners than to partake in community kitchens?

In 1996, the Vancouver Community Kitchen Project was launched, catching the attention and support of Vancouver Coastal Health, BC Gas (now Terasen Gas), and the Greater Vancouver Food Bank Society. By 1998, 25 community kitchens have been organized, self-directed and fully operational with help from the various workshops and [kitchen] equipment drives organized by those involved in the Vancouver Community Kitchen Project. The focus of the project eventually shifted to providing a resource centre for small groups and communities interested in starting various CKs all across Vancouver and eventually, the entire province. The Vancouver Community Kitchen Project changed their name to Fresh Choice Kitchens in 2008 to reflect this evolution. Diane Collis, Fresh Choice Kitchens manager, helps organize seasonal workshops, Level I courses on Food Safe, and equipment drives to help jumpstart any group looking into developing a CK program in their community. Shona Lam’s organizational and newfound social networking skills have helped brought awareness of this long-standing concept to the online demographic. The people at Kontent Creative, for instance, have worked closely with Fresh Choice Kitchens and the Greater Vancouver Food Bank Society to raise funds for these projects through Innovation Camps. The amalgamation of the social media realm and this highly-evolved CK project made for a natural, super-charged pairing, one that will most certainly bloom with time, dedication, and perseverance.

The emphasis, really, is on the most basic of human needs. We need to be sated both physically and mentally. We need food to survive. Camaraderie and human companionship, abstract and intangible concepts, is food for our souls. Combine healthful, seasonal, nutritious (yet affordable!) food with human interaction and you have before you the recipe for success. Diane and Shona, in their warm reception, allowed me to glimpse but a minute fraction of what goes behind these open doors. I can hardly wait to participate in the cooking session that is to occur on the 10th of December. This post is merely a prelude to the fun that awaits my person over the next few weeks.

-

For an in-depth article on the concept behind Community Kitchens, Diane Collis, manager of Fresh Choice Kitchens, has written a wonderful article for SPARC BC here.

For more information on Fresh Choice Kitchens, visit CommunityKitchens.ca

Fresh Choice Kitchens has also released a cookbook titled Many Hands, available in all Vancouver Capers Community Markets, or online. You can find more information on this wonderful cookbook here. The cookbook places emphasis on cooking as a community; the recipes in this book are tailored to accommodate communal cooking sessions and feeding large groups of people!

For information on how to donate to this wonderful project, click here.

Those who know me know that while I do possess in me some knowledge regarding the tech scene, I am not exactly an avid partaker. In short, events such as Barcamp Vancouver are simply not my cup of tea. After having attended this one, however, I might just participate in similar events that allow both tech-industry enthusiasts and creatives to get together and mingle. I had my doubts about this one, particularly during the mixer the night before the main event; everyone seemed to know each other, I had absolutely no idea how to represent the company I work for, I was lacking networking accoutrements such as the all-important business card, and it was way too dark and too loud to really hold conversations with anyone. I could not stay for too long because of this, so I left promptly after a good two hours of roaming around the venue trying to figure out what manner I should approach people. That night was a disaster – for me anyway (nevermind the fact that bars are not exactly my scene either).

The main event was as nerve-wracking as the night before, initially, that is. Fused Network has sponsored the event by paying for lunch, and having had my share of troubles getting to the venue in the first place (via public transportation and cab service), I was extremely lucky to have made it in time to represent Fused Network during the roll call for sponsors. Then came the sessions. Those who wanted to lead sessions were asked to line up, give a 30-second introduction about the talks they want to lead, and were subsequently assigned a time-slot and a room to hold their sessions in. I happily snapped some candids by the time this was taking place:

As I surveyed the board I was quite taken by a few topics of discussion that piqued and highlighted my interests. The sessions I attended in that roster were all related to photography, in one form or another. I took part in the morning photowalk around Discovery Parks’ vicinity, where I happily basked in my element. Quite a few photographers showed up for this session, all twenty of us (give or take), armed with everything from compact cameras to phone cameras to some of the best digital SLRs on the market. It was definitely a great start to my Barcamp experience.

(Tangent: I would have happily crawled through one gaping hole on that chain-link fence leading to the parked trains, but I was honestly not dressed to do some trespassing. Imagine heading back inside with a disheveled business-casual suit and mud sticking to my heels! Now that I think about it, I probably should have done it anyway – it would have made for a more dynamic set of photos. Oh well!)

The post-processing session that followed the photowalk took place right after lunch. I enjoyed that immensely. In this session, two popular post-processing applications were highlighted – Aperture (for Macs) and Adobe Lightroom (for both Macs and PCs). While Photoshop will always be my go-to program for post-processing, it was nice to be able to look at the demos on Aperture and Lightroom. We had very open discussions on post-processing techniques, as well as a little presentation on black and white film developing, led by Michael (@thedarkerside). His talk definitely rekindled my love for film, and it was also during his talk that I found myself piping in with questions and comments in regards to my experience with the medium (given my all-nighters playing around with printing in the darkroom at the University of Toronto!).

Perhaps the most relevant and informative session I attended at BCV09 is ‘Freelance is NOT free work’. An open forum led by academic, Dr. Raul Pacheco Vega, the group discussed well-known qualms that come with doing jobs for non-profit organizations, friends, families, and close associates, for pay that is almost always less than the amount of work you end up doing for them. As a freelance graphic designer put it [in regards to working for non-profit organizations you heartily support], “I do not want to have to burn bridges with the community just because I feel I should get paid fairly for the amount of work I do.”

With the exponential growth of new media and various social networking realms, it is easy to get caught up in doing jobs for free, most especially if it promises “exposure” for the freelancer in question. The fact of the matter is, the freelancer treats these clients very much like he or she would treat an actual paying client; this also means dealing with set deadlines. Where does one draw the line between doing things for exposure and doing things for pay, especially for someone who wants to develop a steady clientele over time?

The perception of opportunity is the Venus flytrap of the freelancer’s world. I myself, have been victim to this several times over the course of my year since having graduated from university. Below are three major points I picked up from the session:

• Outline times. You must provide your prospective client with information on the amount of time it would normally take to complete the allotted task. Decide on reasonable and fair payment based on the hours spent for the job. Outline terms of the job at hand on paper, if needed; this makes things official.
• Your skill is a business. In no way should you, as a freelancer, devalue your work by doing something for “cheap” when you yourself believe in your talents. When dealing with non-profit organizations or friends who cannot pay you much for your services, make certain both parties benefit from your work. Ask them to write testimonials you can put on to your site as a means for you to advertise your talent and reliability to future clients who will come your way. Also, if the opportunity for paid gigs ever comes across your friends or these non-profit organizations, make sure to have them direct these gigs over to you. These deals work purely in a symbiotic manner, so if you do not take that initiative to promote yourself in that way, it will become extremely difficult to establish your clientele over time.
• Change impressions! If companies see that you have done most of your work for free, this devalues your skill. This, of course, is common sense to all freelancers. If this is in fact, your case, showcase these jobs in such a way as to highlight the skills used behind the end product. These “free jobs” then give off the impression of paid work. Utilize those client testimonials in conjunction with your portfolio.

You can view more of my photographs from the event here and here.

To sum it all up, I learned lots and met amazing creatives in the process. And of course, it always feels fantastic to be able to participate in my element, photography.

Thanks for the opportunity Fused Network!

What made this particularly interesting is that the email address NextTree spammed one of my clients through was my own, completely unrelated to this particular site entirely & never having been associated with it. The greeting read ‘Dear David’, as though it were addressed to me but it referenced another website and client in the subject line entirely. Completely baffled by this, I immediately set out to figure out how NextTree would have confused myself and one of my clients. I dug through older whois records, left no stone unturned on google and still came up with not a single link associating my own completely unassociated email address with this particular client.

With still no luck in figuring out where they obtained the contact, I’m left wondering if Jason Matheston is possibly using old Netfirms whois database data to do the web web design related spamming. I did happen to take a few moments to call Jason but beyond stating that he couldn’t disclose where he obtained the contact details, he didn’t have much else to say. I suppose what’s truly disheartening about it all is how someone with previous experience at companies like Netfirms (as large as they are) and even including a positions titled ‘Marketing Director’ and ‘Marketing Manager’ really need to sink as low as spamming my clients. Boo, can’t you guys come up with something better?

Here’s a copy of the email that I received below, along with Jason Matheson’s contact details, he seems to be a massive fan of unsolicited email so I’m sure he wouldn’t mind receiving some from you, all of your friends and that persistent Nigerian prince who wants to adopt you as his red-headed stepchild.

Dear David,

Have you ever wondered why some websites perform better than others? (Spamvertising, maybe? Or Ci4l1s!)
Some websites were designed by NextTree!

NextTree is a full-service web development company with a passion for spamming, creating highly usable, results driven websites. We’ll make your business look better and perform better than the competition. We’ll make your business shine.

Visit http://www.nexttree.ca/website/ to discover how we can help you launch a brand new website or put a fresh face on an old one. (Lipstick on a pig?) NextTree can you give your website a professional edge!

Sincerely,

The NextTree Web Design Team spammers.
($10 discount off your next design if you can guess which cereal box we got our website out of!)

http://www.nexttree.ca/website/

–
NextTree is a registered trademark of NextTree Inc.
2-112 Petra Way Whitby ON Canada.
We are 100% Canadian eh?!

Luckily they’re 100% Canadian, since spamming is illegal in the United States & CANSPAM is a $50,000 fine per unsolicited message. Luckily, our server infrastructure also resides in Chicago.

A few of Jason’s email addresses, say hi:
mathesonj@mtonic.net
jmatheson@room100.net
jasonmatheson@HOME.COM

Luckily we’re 100% bootstrapped and flush with investments from people who actually matter to us: Our clients.

The past

During the past few years we’ve rather quickly scaled the wall in the web hosting world. By any comparison we’re still extremely small in the hosting ecosystem but we’re continuing to grow despite the often quoted concerns of a recession: What recession? Luckily we’ve had an exceptional group of people who we’ve worked with (again, our clientbase is fantastic) on a daily basis that have touted the Fused ‘horn’ despite some of our shortcomings: At points I’m sure they’ve had more faith than myself!

If we really considered all of the speedbumps we’ve endured this would be referred to as ‘offroading to success’ instead of the road to success. Nonetheless with perseverance and our noses to the grindstone we’ve successfully kept things in working order & for the most part flawless.

I was about to write that our past would be considered easier in comparison to what we’re up against as far as planning & development go and then I recalled the days when I ate with cardboard cutlery and ’soup’ and ’soup’ were the two choices to decide between for lunch & dinner. Okay, so the past was rather arduous if anything but the days ahead will be short of easy.

The present

We’re currently spending every waking moment on the hiring process. I recently made the move out to Vancouver largely to take advantage of the bigger ‘geek’ crowd and open-source friendly ecosystem out here. If the size of the ‘vanlug’ crowd is any reflection of the teeming applicant pool, we’ll do swell. I’m currently parsing through over 250+ applications for a recent support & system administrator position at Fused Network. Now’s the time for us to invest in infrastructure, backend and begin really working on client acquisition once we’ve filled up some more positions. At this point I’ve held off on advertising to allow us to continue to offer the same level of service without overloading our existing team.

Although it’s not the sole issue we face, finding applicants who fit the description of the type of people we want working at Fused Network is difficult. There’s a very rare breed of people that we’re willing to hire and sifting through the hundreds of resumes is probably the most difficult task I’ve ever been delegated. I’ve spent years building up this clientbase and even though I can be my own worst enemy at times, there’s a level of service I want to retain on a permanent basis. Luckily (if it can be defined as that) there’s a lot of highly qualified people out there looking for work and we’ve just got to find them.

The future

We’ll be opening a bunch of new points of ‘presence’ in the future that you can look forward to wielding, alongside a small content delivery network we’re slowly building. In 4th quarter 2009 we hope to open up additional infrastructure in Vancouver, Toronto and potentially a second location in Chicago. The intention is to migrate most of our Los Angeles equipment to Vancouver initially, with the latter points being opened shortly thereafter with new gear primarily for shared hosting & some virtualized offerings we’ll be adding to the mix.

Right now our goal is to add significant amounts of infrastructure in Canada: As much as we’re a global company, having the infrastructure within a quick flight will make expansion significantly easier. I’m the ‘hands-on’ type of guy when it comes to ensuring everything is perfect and often want to be on-site for even the smallest changes and construction. You would be surprised at how well I can micromanage a team, just ask Matt!

With the future comes a number of new projects & endeavors. Our areas that we’ll be concentrating on in short order are support, launching additional documentation and working on building additional ‘community’ measures. Once those basic facets of the foundation are out of the way we’ll begin working on new services, offerings and completing upgrades to our existing infrastructure.

We’ve got idle hardware awaiting some MySQL clustering functionality and within two months we should have some dedicated SSD machines online serving 100% MySQL only to open up some extremely delicious performance for databases. The days ahead are looking mighty fine from a technical standpoint.

Last but not least I want Fused Network to be one of the most socially conscious firms on the planet. Our ‘together’ program has been moving along swell but more backend needs put in place to truly make use of your referrals for the greater good. The intention at this point is to add the ability to ‘forward’ payments to a community group on Kiva so we can begin offering microloans to those out there that need it, of course the people the funds are delivered to will be decided by you that contribute with your referrals. Even better, we’ll be sponsoring some additional local charities, open source projects and food banks with more funds than ever. There’s tonnes of need and we’re going to do every little bit we can to continue ensuring it’s met with your help.

All-in-all, Fused Network is in a great position despite a couple of small bumps. There’s no one else I can thank more than each and every one of you as clients for continuing to support us, have faith in us and be there every step of the way. A big thank you from all of us at Fused for being there, we’ll continue to do the same for you.

Want some additional insight on the ongoings of Fused Network?
Follow @davidandgoliath on twitter (my personal account) and our @fusednetwork account otherwise you’ll miss out.

Enjoying what we offer thusfar?
Post a review of our services on Hostjury, GigPark and tell some friends about us. It goes a long way toward helping us keep your services rolling without a hitch and allows us to continue building our team.

The downside of this contraction
The downside of an economic contraction like the one we’re undergoing now isn’t that it’s necessarily a bad thing, in fact for the most part it’s great. Inflation tends to decrease and goods return to their affordable pricing, rent tends to remain the same and we go on with life. In this particular instance though a large part of the contraction is directly the result of a housing bubble bursting — things will be slightly different this time around. We haven’t seen rent prices decrease as rapidly as they should have been because people are still locked into mortgages and financing that’s priced higher than the property they own; As a result they need to retain similar pricing structures for rentals as they had prior to the ‘burst’, inflicting significant amounts of pain on their own tenants whose clientbases are dwindling slightly. Many tenants are simply walking away or stepping out when their lease expires instead of continuing onwards — they can’t get their landlords to agree to decrease on the price and the landlords simply can’t afford to reduce it any further.

But, despite all the bad..
Despite the slight squeeze in the economy, a large number of businesses are wielding the recession to their advantage. Winter has always meant downturns and slower growth in most industries but that doesn’t have to be the case — with the internet, local community and a hint of advertising your growth can still steadily increase. I recently read of a coffee shop that had increased their business several thousand percent by using twitter and other ‘community’ driven tools. In this particular case, they allowed their regular clients to make orders online before they’d arrive at the shop. Their business skyrocketed and they began to become a local ‘hub’ for all sorts of events & gatherings. A win-win, for both the clientèle and company owners.

There’s a number of great tools you can use online to really begin to increase your business. A number of them are considered ‘hyperlocal’, that is extremely targeted sites towards local businesses. A few that come to mind are Yelp* and citysearch– and although both are largely geared towards restaurants, shops and brick & mortar places they can still easily be wielded to garner additional traffic.

Online and offline, one and the same.
Something we often forget (myself included) is that online and offline businesses are truly all the same. Although both may differ in physical locations they largely depend on the same variables in order to decide whether they’ll sink or swim. A large part of any business is word of mouth and reputation, both of which are truly dependent (Offline, especially) on your community whether it be nearby or afar. Negative reviews or comments made online or through word-of-mouth can spread like wildfire and damage any business. I’ve learned this firsthand with some of our own clients that weren’t 100% satisfied but even negative comments can be wielded to your benefit. Remember that it’s always best to ask your clients what they think of your services first before they have the opportunity to tell you (negative or positive).

I’ve seen cue cards left about coffee shops asking clients to leave reviews on Yelp* and other locations, and although it may not seem ingenious those extra few comments left on the web could easily bring in thousands of new visitors each month. In colder climates in particular, many people (at least outside city centers) don’t often roam about without a purpose — it’s key to wield online communities and sites to your benefit and get as many content clients to them as possible. We’ve lucked out ourselves in that sites like Hostjury and Gigpark allow our own clientele to leave great reviews about us. Would you believe that 65% of our clientbase has arrived from either of these sites? We wouldn’t either, until we checked our statistics.

No news is bad news, online
Realize that not every review or peep you’ll hear about your company is going to be a positive one, but with some savvy and quick reaction you’ll be able to always explain yourself and your side of the story. The beautiful part about online communities is they often allow you the ability to respond to any negative commentary (or even positive) left about your company. The more people talking about you often garners more business though, whether positive or negative. You can interact on a whole new level where your clients were once inaccessible, you can be ‘real’ to them.

Local, yes. But don’t box yourself in
Remember that you’re not just a provider in your local community, don’t just offer a service or product. Be involved, get involved — and be local. I’m not saying buy local, in fact I believe in helping neighbors near and afar — especially as a company with clients in more than 45 different countries. Remember that as a retailer of any sort you have the ability to expand beyond your local community and start offering services to the world as well — it’s especially easy and there’s no reason for you to solely target your local market. I’ve seen companies go from a single employee to over thirty just by launching an online store and selling toys of all things. Their local targetmarket only had a few thousand consumers but their global reach was millions: They succeeded and there’s millions of other niches that your own products could easily fill as well. As much as you should think, act and be ‘local’, don’t forget there’s a market just within reach that consists of the entire planet. Don’t limit yourself to the few passerbys, sell globally.

If you are considering launching a retail store online, consider a few of the developers below who are happily hosted at Fused Network:
Sage Media
Peapod Studios
16Toads

Global market, local economy. Two birds with one stone.

There’s a number of exciting topics being discussed and it should be interesting as it’ll be my first time actually stopping in Las Vegas for anything more than gas. I just drove through this weekend on my way across the United States, a 2,400+ mile trip in my mean little Elantra.

If anyone is attending or in the area you should poke us. I’ll be staying in Vegas tonight and attending the first day of sessions. I’ll be hanging around in Los Angeles with Steven getting a few projects completed and enjoying the sunshine!

But it’s that time again as the week begins winding up to get back into gear. We finished up the week before the holiday’s as a sponsor of an event in Toronto, a success! The event HoHoTo raised over $25,000 (We contributed 10% of the total) for the daily bread foodbank in downtown Toronto, making the event one of the largest donations this year for daily bread. I can’t reiterate enough how great of a cause supporting local food banks are no matter the time — but especially relevant today with the slugging economy.

One of the more well-known Toronto bloggers, Mark McKay (And a future fused network client, right Mark? *poke* Especially as your other host is down as I write this!) clipped together a small video that I thought everyone might like to peek at. I did happen to get a quick kind word in (I’m the nerd in the red shirt) partway through the video. Luckily, for all of us, Mark did some decent editing and removed most of my embarrassing moments. Included in the video is a thank you from some extremely cool people on the internet (How can someone be cool on the internet, anyways) like Matt Mullenwag of Wordpress, Biz Stone of Twitter, Toronto mayor David Miller and Cory Doctorow, my internet hero.

I can’t even compile into words how great it is for such an awesome IT community to come together and help out, we’ll make certain that the daily bread is always in our prayers & on the top of our together charity list.

Of course there’s 1,000+ clients, the rest of the internet and only two tickets so we had to devise something really special to get to win. So we’ll make it as difficult as possible! In order to win there’s three requirements that you’ll have to satisfy. Three runners up will receive a tshirt from Threadless, so you’ll get something for your efforts even if you outright fail.

The first step: (To admitting you have a problem, I’m addicted to twitter!)
Even leaders have to be followers sometimes. So, I’m new to this whole twitter thing and with the number of hours I spend in the office answering your tickets — I don’t have time to make friends! You’ll need to “follow” me on Twitter:
http://twitter.com/DavidAndGoliath

If you’re not familiar with twitter, I won’t even begin to explain it but it’s sort of like email and blogging on speed. The sign-up process is easy enough and it’s a great way to get interconnected, less bloaty than facebook and you won’t have all of those photos to untag in the morning.

The second step:
You’ll have to say something naughty or nice about us somewhere on the web & ‘twitter’ the link to me (@Davidandgoliath your message here) You can post the ’something nice about us’ anywhere whether it’s your blog or a hosting review site.

Sound easy enough? Well, it is. You’ve got 24 hours!
Willy Wonka even gave out more so act now!

The perks, requirements & details.
1. We’ll be picking names randomly out of a hat. Winners for the two tickets will need to find their own transportation to the event however we’re open to playing chauffeur if you’re close enough. No limos, just a hyundai so don’t get too excited. The first two winners will be selected within 24 hours.

2. Winners of the threadless shirts & other random stuff (of my choosing) can live anywhere except Antartica and will be selected after the event completes.

3. If a winner cannot be selected within 24 hours for the tickets they will be randomly dished out on twitter to the quickest responding individuals nearby.

4. You don’t have to be a client of Fused Network to win, so join in the fun!

I do forewarn you, this is an extremely long post but we’d love for you to get all the way to the bottom. We’ve got some gifts lined up for those who do.

Ongoing giving.

Last year we had our ‘giveaway’ in which clients raised just under a thousand dollars for several different charities to lend a helping hand to their efforts. This year we’ve had an opportunity land in our lap to become the largest sponsor at an event here in Toronto on behalf of the Toronto Daily Bread Food Bank. I can’t thank you enough (nor can the daily bread users) for helping Fused get to the size it is so that we can help make a difference.

This year you’ve donated a significant amount to the event & charity (Hey, 2.5x more than Microsoft!) and we’re looking to increase that even further. The food bank itself helps serve 80,000 people on a monthly basis (35% of which are children) and we’re just happy to play a role in that and you should be as well.

Through our ‘together’ affiliate program we’ve been raising funds all year for different charities and with the odd economic times we want to scale that up even further. The system is really simple, every time you refer a user to us you get 100% of their initial payment which you can either choose to divvy out to a charity, yourself or future services with fused. With only a few weeks left of the year, you can help make a real difference at foodbanks & charities around that need it more than ever.

If you haven’t yet signed up for our ‘together’ program you can check under affiliates within your billing panel in your client area — it’s a bit obfuscated and hidden, but it’ll give you a link to generate and forward users through. Ones who sign up through that link generate funds in your account that you divvy out as you see fit!

There’s no easier way to give than by posting some links, banners and reviews on your sites — in the end, someone gets great hosting and the more charities helped the better! As always I prefer the ones that help out with direct needs like food, clothing and shelter but some clients have even selected greenpeace, the world wildlife fund and more. It’s up to you.

We’re blessed, let’s return the favour.
(Hey, even I’ve been taught not to let the left hand know what the right is doing but together we can make such a massive difference. Social media is the new way of starting movements, so spamming you is the next best thing! :p)

So, hey, what about that winning you mentioned? We’ve got some hohoto tickets & tshirts to give away

So, as a result of Fused Network being the largest (last minute) sponsor at the event we’ve been given a bunch of tickets to the event. Although I realize it’s on extremely short notice (Planning, schmanning) we do have two tickets available to give out. The event itself is on Monday at 7 PM EST here in Downtown Toronto at the ModClub, it was planned relatively quickly and will consist of about 600 local nerds, marketing and ’suit’ folks. You can’t find these tickets anywhere else and they’ve sold out faster than Governor Blagojevich, so here’s your only chance.

You can read more about the event here: HoHoTo

Of course there’s 1,000+ clients and only two tickets so we had to devise something really special to get to win. So we’ll make it as difficult as possible! In order to win there’s three requirements that you’ll have to satisfy. Three runners up will receive a tshirt from Threadless, so you’ll get something for your efforts. There are of course some simple rules and regulations.

Check out the post here for more information: HoHoTo: Win some tickets and gear!

Before I’ve even had a few moments to dig into it after upgrading about sixteen installations of it manually, I’m taken aback by just how thorough of development Automattic has put into the interface and every aspect of the backend. I’ll have more shortly but if you haven’t yet, upgrade!

Wordpress 2.7 Akismet statistics

If you have, what are your thoughts?

As of 15 minutes ago, Magento — one of the most often requested scripts for Installatron has been added to the mix of available installations. We will have many additional ones to come shortly but for now this should appease the masses. Magento is literally my second favorite script behind Wordpress, I’m more excited than most of you about it.

Magento is a feature-rich, professional open-source eCommerce (shopping cart) solution that offers merchants complete flexibility and control over the look, content, and functionality of their online store. It was launched in 2007, and is the fastest growing eCommerce platform on the market with over 500,000+ downloads to date.

Future scripts will include e107 and a number of other ones so keep your
eyes peeled.

For now, read more about Magento on their official site at http://www.magentocommerce.com and the feature list available here: http://www.magentocommerce.com/features

Matt Mullenwag at Wordcamp Toronto

Matt Mullenwag delivers his ‘State of the Word’ address in front of a crowd of developers, designers and regular old wordpress users at Wordcamp Toronto. The event was a success and I’m looking forward to tomorrow. The lunch Fused Network sponsored at the event (as well as tomorrow’s) was excellent. It was a great opportunity to meet some faces involved in design, development & open source — worth a visit

Photography by Rannie Turingan

“That is the beauty of free software, free meaning not only price but also the freedom to have complete control over it.”

The included features are more than sufficient to get anyone started with blogging on the web. Take a peek at the wordpress features page for more information. Now with all that in mind, let’s take a peek at some of the plugins, extensions and themes available to expand on the foundation that the open source project has laid.

Wordpress Plugins

Plugins for wordpress allow you to extend the functionality by adding additional features that offer things like Flickr integration, RSS feeds and even more advanced systems like Wordpress caching systems that turn your Wordpress frontend into static content to allow your site to load faster and reduce load on your server.

A couple of the more popular Wordpress plugins like Akismet, spam-blocking software for blogs, forums and more. We even use Akismet on our web hosting community because we’ve got enough Viagra and Cialis to last a lifetime. Gallery plugins, forums and all sorts of integration & extendability is available and of course best of all it’s all entirely free.

Wordpress Themes

Wordpress themes allow you as the end-user to change the entire look of your site from typography, css and graphics. With thousands of themes available for Wordpress, it’s difficult not to find several that you like. There’s numerous sites dedicated to Wordpress themes like Themeshaper run by one of our clients.

There’s many, many resources out there where wordpress themes could be had including the Wordpress theme directory. I’d personally recommend perusing sites like Smashing Magazine for more options when it comes to Wordpress.

In my next topic, I’ll delve into wordpress themes a bit more with some excerpts from a discussion regarding Wordpress, the GPL and ‘premium’ or pay2play themes. These first few posts were simply introductions into Wordpress and what it offers.

I myself have been using Wordpress since early 2004 after abandoning the blog services Livejournal, Blogger and several other content management systems that simply didn’t make the cut. Wordpress is extremely easy to use, has a user-friendly instalation system and upgrading and managing are even easy for my technically inept blog-wielding father whom has been managing several sites using it ranging in topics from the United Nations to Christian music concerts. The beauty of wordpress isn’t that it just makes blogging and contributing to the web easy — rather, that anyone can use it.

An example of that would be this video.

I say that it’s changing the face of the web because with millions of users, from fortune 500 companies to regular joes like myself use it to speak through the web: Anyone Everyone is able to contribute and use the web no matter their skill-level. It’s free speech. Hosting providers like ourselves offer easy to install systems to setup Wordpress in just a few clicks which really lowers the entry barrier even further.

Now where it gets extremely exciting for someone like me is in the ease at which I can modify the design and frontend of Wordpress to fit my needs. The blog we’re using right here on Fused Network for both our status blog and this one is Wordpress, of course!

There’s hundreds of sites out on the web where you can download different themes to use in conjunction with Wordpress like one of our very own clients’ sites, Themeshaper, Adii, Woothemes and many others.

If you haven’t yet, give wordpress a try using our Installatron system within your control panel. If you’re not a client, signup to Fused Network using the coupon fused25off to get a 25% discount so you can start using Wordpress now.

During a recent discussion on webhostingtalk (linked above) several statements were made about how “green datacenters” were the equivalent of fuel efficient dragsters. Rightly put — we’re not part of a very ecofriendly industry to begin with. In fact with all of the cooling, airflow and electricity needed to power the datacenters the shared, dedicated and backend (backup, monitoring, etc.) servers that your sites rely on this industry could be considered less than healthy for the environment.

The discussions however in my opinion didn’t hold much water. Sure, page-zone brought up that recycling wasn’t helping much (Kudos a’la Penn & Teller — careful there’s some choice language) but something we need to take into consideration is that first-phase stuff might not be all that helpful. Really, in actuality, we haven’t been properly recycling more than 15 years here in North America. What makes a difference isn’t necessarily the act of doing so (rather, according to the video it’s actually more harmful but I’ll leave that one for the management to clean up) but being more conscious of our eco-footprint.

Simply being more conscious of our eco-footprint will result in more ‘eco-friendly’ choices being made when it comes to conservation, waste and what we use to power our homes, work environments and sooner than later: even our servers. I’m not exactly Dr. Destruction when it comes to the environment myself. My Rollerblades and feet get more mileage per year than my car ever would. I skimp on the plastic bags, try to avoid packaging as often as possible and even make my purchases based on which products use less packaging!

Does it have any effect? I would hope so — even if my decisions are only impacting the immediate surroundings — in the end they’ll have an impact on companies, friends and family and maybe even neighboring countries as my (and your) purchasing decisions and living styles effect our consumption.

While according to Penn & Teller — I might just be wasting my time — or “feeling good” about it but in the end I may not be saving the environment now — but my offspring sure will be.

There’s several pieces of community software that I have built sites on these days. Most of which I have actually used here on the web hosting community forums as well, albeit temporarily.

There’s a few that I’m going to be detailing today including phpBB, Vanilla, punBB and SMF (SimpleMachines). Each piece of software has it’s benefits and drawbacks, hopefully you’ll find this post remotely useful.

Starting with the one I’d consider the underdog…

PunBB
PunBB is a fast and lightweight PHP-powered discussion board. Its primary goals are to be faster, smaller and less graphically intensive as compared to other discussion boards. PunBB has fewer features than many other discussion boards, but is generally faster and outputs smaller, semantically correct XHTML-compliant pages.

Success.
And they succeed at their mission. PunBB is very lightweight right out of the starting gate & for a basic community. The PunBB site features a great set of addons, plugins and frequent software and security updates. One aspect that I especially liked was a feature on their site named ‘SpinkBB’ which allows you to easily create a custom color scheme with minimal effort.

The underlying drawbacks I found about PunBB though was that it was almost too minimal. Many basic features seemed to be lacking but if the forum wasn’t for my business site, I would have continued to use it for personal use. PunBB does a great job at what it intends to do: lightweight ass-kicking.

PunBB Official Site
Official PunBB Forums

The next forum up is one of my favorites despite my inability to use it, at all.

Vanilla
Vanilla is an open-source, standards-compliant, multi-lingual, fully extensible discussion forum for the web. Anyone who has web-space that meets the requirements can download and use Vanilla for free!

Vanilla is one of those forums that you simply want to use. It’s minimalistic, absolutely stunning and basic enough that anyone can wield it. There’s a massive range of extensions and an absolutely gorgeous site for fetching them. The man behind Vanilla is Canadian as well, maybe that’s why I have some odd inextinguishable desire to have Vanilla’s babies.

However that’s where the love stops. Actually, that’s right where the abuse started. Vanilla is great if you wish to continue using it in it’s vanilla form or with any of the ‘released’ themes. Customizability, though?

Vanilla drawbacks
Vanilla has a stunning plugin system, a diverse range of themes developed for it but it’s theming and template system is absolutely horrendous. I have used many, many forum systems prior and had no problems making minor tweaks, fiddling and all-in-all surviving in the code (despite having zero coding ability). Vanilla on the other hand, despite reading the documentation and spending a few days digging around on the official forum left me dazed and confused.

It may be far too advanced for me or things are just in general obfuscated. I couldn’t get even the smallest changes implemented without an outright desire to drive myself off the nearest cliff. Since I’m in Toronto the trek to the nearest cliff would be several hours. Nonetheless, I was willing and ready to make the trip.

Vanilla is one of those systems you want to love but know you’ll end up in ruins as an alcoholic after attempting to wield it for long. A ten in my book.. for the masochist.

Get Vanilla
Official Vanilla Forums

Onwards!

phpBB
Millions of people use phpBB on a daily basis, making it the most widely used opensource bulletin board system in the world. Whether you want to stay in touch with a small group of friends or are looking to set up a large multi-category board for a corporate website, phpBB has the features you need built in.

phpBB is hard to deny in the open source community. It’s one of those forums that have been around and is older than rocks, it’s frequently updated and there’s a gigantic plethora of addons, plugins and themes available for it solely due to it’s age. It’s great, usable and the latest version really does have a lot to offer as a forum.

One of my own problems I have with phpBB though is my security concerns. As a piece of software it’s been around for such a long time that with all of it’s past, I simply can’t trust it to build a community on. With the past phpBB team’s delays and insane amounts of exploits being released for it… ah. But it’s hard denying such beauty — the latest version of it had an insane amount of effort put into it and is one of the most usable pieces of forum software out there today.

Even if you don’t consider using it on a long-term basis I would recommend at least giving it a try.
phpBB Official Site
phpBB Community

SimpleMachines
SMF can trace its roots all the way back to a perl powered message board, YaBB. After awhile, there became a demand for a php coded version of YaBB. So that is where YaBBSE comes into play. While YaBBSE was getting bigger and bigger, there were certain aspects of it that just needed improvement and reworking. The decision was made that it was best to separate from YaBBSE because it was a lot different from YaBB and it was best to start from scratch. At this point, SMF started being developed. On September 29th, 2003, the first beta of SMF was released to charter members, SMF 1.0 Beta 1. While this was a huge milestone for SMF, only charter members had access to use it. But on March 10, 2004, SMF made its public debut with the first public SMF release available to everyone.

Last but certainly not least, SimpleMachines. SimpleMachines or SMF for short (Simple Machines Forum) is my favorite of all of the available software out there today. It’s a great mix of usability and features, all the while still offering easy customization and addons.

While I admit I do find it a bit bulky and the ‘default’ template leaves a lot to be desired, I love it. Best of all? The community behind the system. Recently I had the opportunity to spend about 48 hours on their forum while a few of their team members made great efforts helping me move data from one old version of another forum (IPB) to SMF.

The process was not easy by any means and as it was one of my first times really digging into simplemachines from a technical standpoint, quite frankly it went horribly. Nonetheless their team was behind me 100% and even offered to help dig in on their own and spend their own time getting it up and running: To me, that tells me they’re both confident with their software and care about the community enough to help get new folks using it.

Kudos SimpleMachines.
Official SimpleMachines Site
Official SimpleMachines Community

Building communities isn’t the easiest thing to do but with free, open source software out there like the ones detailed above it certainly takes a lot of weight off our shoulders.

Thank you for all of the great work developers!
Keep it up

Service, at least on the internet, has become almost free. Daily I see advertisements for web hosting for mere pennies a month (See: Reality check for web hosting clients everywhere) that include 24×7 support, promises of hand holding, a free carwash and millions of dollars in google ad credits!

What a deal! At least you believe so, initially. The trouble with these sorts of providers is they’re either really selling themselves short, thirsty for market share or that’s really all their services are really worth. Eek, on thoughts of the latter.

Not so long ago I was contacted privately by a client who truly concerned we were selling ourselves short — after all, how can such great service be had for mere pennies? (32 cents a day, if you’re on our fused1 package in fact.)

Quite frankly, I would agree with him and his concerns. Service most certainly isn’t free and quality support requires constant investment and sacrifice. In essence the price our clients pay isn’t for the hosting. Still our pricing model is considered very inexpensive compared to a large amount of the providers out there and we’ll be making modifications soon to correct that substantially.

No, prices aren’t rising but we’ll be launching a new set of packages when we finally find some time!
For now, back to the hiring process..

Rich wrote an interview for me to fill out about open source and it’s role in Fused Network and my own life. I happily obliged and wrote a thorough response, the final version you can see here: An interview with Fused Network’s David McKendrick.

He also took the time to write up two exceptional articles on finding a new web hosting provider:
Finding a good webhost
Finding a good webhost: Part 2, Fused Network

I also did an embarrassing interview with Webhostingunleashed and I’ve learned my lesson about keeping my mouth shut when I’ve got nothing good to say: Interview with David of Fused Network

(Okay, so it’s not that bad.)
It’s more fun than writing ticket responses at the very least

As surprising as it is we were just short of hitting one of our goals this year — we were just short of our goal of hosting 1,000 domain names by January first. Instead we arrived at a nice even 800, up by about 600 since the beginning of 2007. (Honestly, I’m ecstatic about it nonetheless. I always set lofty goals so even just grasping a sliver of the original target is wonderful)

Now some of you may be wondering where I’ve been! During the past couple of weeks I’ve been hiding out in Florida taking some much needed time off but at the same time solidified some upcoming changes & plans.

Hey, where are semi-dedicateds, David?!
First off, I’m sure a number of you are asking “Where are semi-dedicated packages, you’ve been talking about them since June!”. I’ll admit we dropped the ball on launching our semi-dedicated packages, while they’re essentially available (and we’ve got two servers handling clients for them) we still have yet to launch the packages.

The primary reason is a decent one though, I want to get our site ‘in tune’ with our new offerings before launching them. There’s a number of different key areas that are currently being updated including a content overhaul — the new site will contain more information about our team, infrastructure & what really makes us different from other providers.

The other half of it is that I’ve been absolutely swamped with keeping existing clients satisfied (hey, a 3 minute response time average isn’t something to brag about but it’s decent!) & new ones content with our service. It doesn’t give me all that much time to devote to new development.

There’s a number coming in 2008 though, I’ll avoid tossing out time estimations but we’ve got a new cPanel theme in development, a site overhaul, new packages coming & some other goodies in store.

What’s the plan, stan?
First up on the chopping block are our current packages. We intend on splitting our offering into two different tiers at the moment — both business & personal. I’m also (slowly) getting to work on a new ‘blog hosting’ offering that has been on the backburner for a year. We’re about 6 years late to the blog hosting industry, but better late than never

Second of all we’ve been preparing to hire new representatives. We’re finally at that ‘breaking point’ where we can afford to dish out some funds for some new blood here at Fused. As we continue to overhaul our primary site you’ll see new information going up about our available careers — I’m really excited about the opportunities we’ll be offering soon.

There’s a tonne getting done & just all stewing together. I’m looking forward to it!

On the plate:

• Affiliate program overhaul — Cleaning up the semantics, setting up a more competitive offering & new ‘charity tallies’ so users can see how they stack up against others in the system (optional).
• Site overhaul — tonnes of new information being made available, new tools & hopefully an easy-to-use template system
• Knowledgebase Updates — We understand the importance of our knowledgebase and how unfun it is to use. An overhaul is expected soon.

We’ve also been completing an awful lot of custom development within the control panel. We’ve got new pretty little uptime & trend graphs available (already completed, just waiting to be inputted!) for shared and dedicated users. Once the new control panel theme is ready we’ll be implementing them.

So while I’ve been silent on a number of key development topics as of late (Ruby on Rails, Semi-dedicated packages, etc.) know it’s moving forward. Hopefully we’ll add some manpower before February and kick it into action a bit faster!

There’s lots coming, stick around for the show!