Because of all the kindred spirits and the sense of relaxed community, I’m not at all afraid to let my local customers know that I operate AloeRoot out of my house; this does not detract from the legitimacy of the business in the slightest because the AloeRoot office is an ongoing experiment in environmental sustainability.

I’m proud of the fact that AloeRoot doesn’t generate the kind of product that leaves waste – websites don’t take up any room in landfills. AloeRoot’s office supply consumption is nearly nil. I no longer have to commute to an office, so my car rarely gets driven. The central location of the house means that I can walk to the bank, the post office, the grocery store, and to meet many of my downtown customers.

Having an office in my house has many other, more personal benefits: I’m unabashedly in love with the fact that my wireless LAN allows me to set up my laptop here on sunny days:

I believe that a relaxed office environment contributes greatly to increased productivity. This summer AloeRoot has undertaken a very large server migration project, which has gone incredibly well – I attribute this to the fact that I did a lot of the more difficult work while sitting under a large tree, warmed by the sun and surrounded by rose bushes and chickadees.

In addition to the psychological benefits, working out of a small, energy-efficient house allows me to keep overhead low and to free up funds that would otherwise be spent on office space. This extra cash flow goes into my non-digital passion: developing an environmentally friendly living space.

Since I took up residence here last summer, I’ve added a vegetable garden, composters and clotheslines to the premises. So far this summer, we’ve enjoyed a harvest of rhubarb, raspberries, strawberries and green beans. Tomatoes and zucchini are next. I’m starting to look into the viability of grid-tied solar panelling systems, and I’m looking for a supplier of rain barrels so I can water the garden with captured rainwater.

Douglas Rushkoff wrote an excellent book called Get Back in the Box. The central theme is that businesses should stick with what they’re good at, and they’ll know what they’re good at when the owners are driven by passion and fun. I feel very privileged to enjoy my work, and to love doing it in such a great environment as North Bay.

WordPress Version 3 is now available; it features a host of improvements, enhancements and new features and we will soon be getting in touch with any of you, our customers, who are WordPress users. As per our normal practise, we will make complete backups of your existing installation before upgrading and we will test your system thoroughly once the backup is complete. Expect to hear from us soon!

AloeRoot has just enjoyed the privilege of building a website for The Bucktown Revue.

We created a virtual coffeehouse where fans of the Revue (a monthly event featuring down home stories, songs, musical acts, and humorous skits) can find out about upcoming performances, listen to the featured musicians, and plan their trip to the River Music Experience in Davenport, Iowa to enjoy the show.

Katie is a potter from Corbeil, Ontario and a recent graduate of the four year Bachelor of Fine Arts program at the Emily Carr University of Art and Design in Vancouver, British Columbia. We wish her great success!

This was a fun website to build, mainly because I could not stop giggling at the Critter Collection. Love those sheep!

Must Business be Evil? Heck No!
If you pay attention to the news media, you’re no doubt aware of all the large corporations that have abused the trust of shareholders, employees and customers and committed atrocious acts in the name of the bottom line. But there are many companies operating with a different set of ideals who are not only successful without being evil, but are highly profitable, have sound environmental policies, and are well-loved by their workers.

People, Planet and Profit
In Values-Driven Business: How to Change the World, Make Money, and Have Fun (Social Venture Network), Ben Cohen and Mal Warwick offer a look at many highly successful corporations that have evolved beyond the old business mentality to implement a triple bottom-line system: People, Planet and Profits.

Business Must Evolve
I loved this book, because it underscores for me and for other businesspeople that you can, indeed, be successful with an unorthodox way of doing things: one that involves valuing your workers, taking care of the planet and not letting the dollar be the almighty indicator of success. In this day and age, it’s becoming imperative that businesses rethink their old ways and move toward a more socially conscious methodology and this book serves as both a road map and inspiration.

Introducing the new Feminicity.ca – be sure to check out Joany’s line of clothing and the list of available dance classes. Congratulations on your new site, Feminicity!

What’s a Plugin?
One of the things we love most about WordPress is the variety of plugins available – snippets of code created by other WordPress users and contributed to the WordPress community at no charge. These plugins enrich the basic WordPress installation by offering extra tools and functions not included in the basic program. We especially like the SEO Pack that enhances search engine optimization efforts, and the Page Links To plugin that enhances navigation.

Community is Keen
Being a programmer in the Internet age is a great thing; the community of web developers is very generous and is willing to share their code, help newcomers find information, and freely offer solutions to challenging problems faced by people who are, technically, competitors. This willingness to help is not common to other industries, but developers know that there’s more to be gained from sharing information than from hoarding it.

Rudy Can’t Fail:
One of my favourite community members is Rudy Limeback, a longtime SQL developer who is very generous with his time on the SitePoint.com support forums. Rudy goes out of his way to help untangle sticky code problems without expecting anything in return. This represents the collaborative beauty of the Internet at its best, and it’s a level that non-programmers don’t often get to see.

Pay it Forward:
Programmers are, in AloeRoot’s opinion, honour-bound to pass this value on to their customers. Open-source (no-cost) software like WordPress is inexpensive to install and relatively cheap to maintain, so we have no right to charge exorbitant fees for installation and upgrades. We do have the right to be paid fairly for our time, but marking up a small website to $5000 (in one recent example I happened across) seems like robbery, especially when the customer doesn’t know what fair market value is for a site of that size.

Upgrades En Route:
On the topic of upgrades, new versions of WordPress are released fairly frequently, as are new versions of the plugins. AloeRoot does not immediately upgrade WordPress software for our clients every time a new release is available (unless the upgrade fixes a security problem).

Upgrades themselves can be completed relatively quickly, but preparing for an upgrade involves making a full backup of the website and all its databases first – something that takes time and costs the client. We prefer to wait until there are a handful of updates available first, make one backup and then perform the upgrades all at once.

On that note, if you’re an AloeRoot customer with a WordPress-driven site, you’ll be hearing from us soon. We’ve discovered a couple of new plugins we’re excited about and we’ll be offering to install those for you (at a fair rate, of course) while we perform your upgrades.

Happy Friday!

Registrar companies’ systems range from hyper-complicated (we’re looking at you, GoDaddy!) to undocumented and unhelpful, to outright user hostile (such as the questionable tactics used by the Domain Registry of Canada which are quite well documented.)

Understandably, these registrars are not eager to lose business so they don’t go out of their way to enable outbound domain transfers. Persistence and a little righteous irritation can carry you a long way in cases where you have to wrest your customers’ domain names away from expensive, bloated or exploitative companies.

I recently struggled to get two domain names away from Yahoo! They have posted helpful-looking instructions here to help you take your business elsewhere, but these instructions seem incomplete. After following them to the letter, our customer (the owner of an @yahoo.com email address) failed to get her transfer confirmation emails, three times in a row.

Feeling tenacious and righteously irritated, we changed the administrative contact’s email account to one of our @aloeroot.com email addresses and still the transfers failed. The confirmation emails were never delivered.

Finally we turned off the Private Registration option, waited a day or two, and queued the transfers up a fifth time. This seemed to be the magic formula: make sure private registration is disabled and voila – we have found our way out of the labyrinth.

We hedged our bet by continuing to use a non-Yahoo email account for the admin contact – the key may have been in disabling the private registration but in order to save experimentation time we recommend following our method. We sincerely hope these instructions are useful to you in your quest to create customer satisfaction.

Visit Art on Main at 143 Main Street West for a glimpse of the area’s finest art: woodturning, clay sculpture, bead embroidery, weaving, pottery, jewelry and of course painting is all represented in their excellent collection of local artists’ work.

The AoM Gallery at the back of their space features rotating exhibitions, so there’s always something new brewing. AloeRoot was pleased to work with this interesting group of creative folks – congratulations on your new site!

AloeRoot has contributed part of the profits from this project to a jasmine farmer in Cambodia through Kiva.org. We are pleased to support Kiva’s microfinancing initiative, helping other entrepreneurs make a living doing what they love.