Ryan Wofford

Looking back through the posts I’ve shared on here, it seems that change, loss and regeneration have been underlying topics floating through a lot of the messages on my blog. Whether its a new app or piece of technology, or a life event… I am finding that Change is often the factor that leads me back to this forum to share with you.

Colby's "money" smile

About a year and a half ago, I lost my mom to a 17+ year battle with cancer. My big recent change involves another saddening loss… the loss of my dog, and long-time companion, Colby.

Folks who know me, probably knew Colby as well. There was a time (in college) when she rarely left my side. We traveled on road trips between Auburn and Athens, GA frequently to visit our friends up there. She was pushing 18 years old and was a great and loyal companion over the years. She will be missed dearly. Here’s a Facebook album of pics of her over the years, and the video below is a clip of her resting place. I decided to take her back “home” to Chewacla State Park in Auburn, AL. It’s a beautiful place I look forward to returning to more often to visit her.

In other news, things are going great with Adria & I. We are setting in nicely to the new home, and loving it. I’ve got an ever-expanding “honey-do” list of things to do around the house. To keep this loosely tech related, I’ve been using the “Task This” app to keep track of everything. Another handy little app is the iHandy Level to keep things straight (literally).

Our wedding plans are coming along. We’ve announced our date (save the dates going out soon) and have some registry info over on our wedding site.

Life at Deposco is going well. The company is in a growth period, with new customer acquisitions, as well as expansion in staff. My role continues to challenge me and present new opportunities. I will be traveling a bit in the coming weeks as I head out to strengthen our customer relationships, and meet some of the users and buyers of our services. I’ll be documenting all of this with videos and more over on our blog.

Stay tuned, and remember to embrace change… it’s what helps us grow!

Well, here it is & almost another two months went by before I got another post in. What can I say? We moved into our new house, work has been super busy and stressful, the World Cup has landed in full force…  and, while I’ve got plenty to say–this is just a quick post to apologize for the temporary site outage (if anyone noticed). I tried to upgrade both the core site to WordPress 3.0 and a bunch of Plugins at the same time, and that turned out to be a really bad idea. Of course, I know that’s a bad idea to try to push all of those things thru at once, but normally WordPress upgrades go pretty smoothly. This time, not so much.

After running, the page refreshed to the White Screen of Death. I was no longer able to pull up any pages, including admin pages. Not cool. After a few hours of Googling & debugging, I finally found the issue to be an incompatible plugin (Podcasting by TSG). I removed the plugin, and the site works again.

Just thought I’d let folks know in case any other WordPress users out there experience the same issue and are freaking out. If so, and it’s NOT an issue with the plugin I listed, here’s another post I found with an apparent solution I tried as well.

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Sometimes you just want to pull your hair out

Well, here it is… Almost a full two months exactly since my last post and I guess that is just an indication of how busy things have been in my life since my last post!

There are certainly a lot of things to update you on, both personal and professional. I’m writing this from the WordPress iPhone app, 25k feet up on my way back from the Material Handling and Logistics North American 2010 Trade Show in Cleveland. This was Deposco’s first foray into the trade show world and I was charged with putting together everything from the marketing strategy for the show to the marketing materials, to assembling the actual booth itself. It was quite an undertaking. I’ve attended smaller trade shows in the past, but this was the first I’ve managed from every angle.

The show was a four day show in Cleveland, featuring all kinds of exhibitors with products spanning the space within the four walls of the warehouse and beyond. Our strategic partners, UPS, indicated it would be a good fit, as it is the largest of it’s kind this year in North America.

The show from a technical perspective went off without a hitch. Sure, I had to overcome some challenges, such as building our entire marketing strategy around doing live product demos of our on-demand, SaaS warehouse management systems in our booth, then losing all of our demo guys to various other obligations… But we overcame and had a great show (and still were able to provide overview demos of our product). Knowing what our small booth and efforts cost, it was amazing to me the expenditure some of the exhibitors put forth. Let’s just hope some of the connections and prospects turn into real qualified leads for us!

What else has been going on? In a month’s time, with the help of my good friends at Schecter Technologies, LLC, we were able to completely redesign, develop, and launch the brand new website at Deposco.com. Stop by & have a look. This should give us a huge strategic advantage with SEO over the previously flash-heavy site, which was poorly indexed to say the least.

In other personal news, the Fiance and I have made great strides with finding and closing on our first home (just in time for the tax credit), as well as further wedding plans, so head on over to our wedding site for more news on that soon.

All-in-all, a really busy few months… I promise to try to keep this better updated, but as my friend Brandon Sutton recently posted over on his blog… “I’m No Superman” either!

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Image via Wikipedia

Hi I am posting this blog via the new dragon dictation iPhone application. This app allows you to speak words into your microphone and have them translated to text. You can then select all, and copy and paste into another application such as SMS or e-mail.

Here I’m going to try to post this to my WordPress blog…

edit: So, the above was posted via the Dragon Dictation app successfully. I did have to try a few times to get it to work, primarily because I believe I was probably speaking more words than it could process at a time (it did not specify any sort of limit). What I found I could do to work around it was speak a sentence, hit “done” and let it process, then continue recording and repeat that process until I finished what I wanted to say. Maybe not the ideal way to write a blog post, but certainly cool for shooting off a quick email or SMS message.

image courtesy of jima

With the launch of TweetDeck’s update that I wrote about yesterday, the support for displaying your Twitter lists as columns has gotten much better. The great thing about the addition of Twitter lists and column functionality in TweetDeck is that you can build lists of people or search trending topics, both of which can provide a wealth of information, and keep them all in one place by topic or groups of friends or whatever.

Additionally, you don’t technically even have to “follow” these users if you have added them to a list to see their tweets. This can take a little time to set up and manage, but I’ve started to really dig into it and it’s a great way to clean up the clutter, filter out the “noise” and focus on what matters to you most in a concise fashion.

So, over the next few days if you discover that I have suddenly “unfollowed” you, don’t be sad… As Tupac would say, “I ain’t mad atcha”, I probably just moved you to a list in an effort to stay better focused.

TweetDeck (for those of you who aren’t familiar with it–is a great tool for aggregating your social media accounts in a “dashboard”-type application) has launched an update today for the desktop version of their app that contains loads of new features and fixes.

One major feature for the push includes LinkedIn integration, so you can now update your LinkedIn status, view your connections’ status updates, and comment on updates from the TweetDeck dashboard.

Also included is Twitter list support, support for both the new and “old” retweets, and geo-location support (which adds a cool inline map for those geo-supported tweets).

These are all welcomed features strengthening an already excellent application for the management of your social media accounts and status updates. Hopefully they will push these updates to the iPhone app soon as well, but if history of past releases is any indication, we could be waiting a few weeks / months before it trickles down.

I just installed the WordPress app for iPhone and linked it up to my blogs, so I thought I would give it a go. As you can tell, I can update my blog but I see no way to add HTML links or images without hard-coding them. Let’s try a link to my Twitter account.