Washingtons Green Grocer is the brainchild of John (Zeke) Zechiel and his wife Lisa. After identifying the need for better produce and deliverables versus store bought goods, John and Lisa planted the seeds for Washingtons Green Grocer in 1994. Every week, Washingtons Green Grocer provides customers with tentative lists of fruits and vegetables that will be available, and each customer can pick and choose what they would like delivered (yep, home delivery!) for that week through their online account.

Providing unmatched service and 100% dedication to custom satisfaction, Washingtons Green Grocer has been wildly popular and has exploded in the DC metro area. They currently serve all of Washington DC and the surrounding suburban areas in Maryland and Virginia from Severna Park to Arlington and all points in between north and south.

How does it work?

Every week, Washingtons Green Grocer selects 12 to 14 different fruits and vegetables and delivers them to your doorstep. On Friday’s, they email customers a tentative list for the next weeks delivery. If there is anything on the list you don’t want, you can log into your account and customize your box. For example, you can choose to receive only 7 items instead of the full box, or substitute items for other items. Each customer can choose exactly what they want and get it without fail every single week. You can also set custom schedules for delivery, such as every other week, or once a month, or schedule around vacation time. It’s all up to the customer!

Application

Such business growth commands the necessity of a powerful web application to tie all the logic together and keep things running smoothly. After getting tired of the shortcomings of their previous system, Zeke contacted us and we started talking about a full redesign of the front end and a re-architecting of the back end. After planning and mind-mapping the application to the last detail, Inclind began work on the project early in the summer of this year.

Their initial website was built on a rigid and inflexible Coldfusion system. The first order of business was getting all the existing data out and into the new system and giving it structure to make it easy to work with. As with all our sites, we begin with a base install of Drupal 6 to build from. Drupal is the best CMF (content management framework) available right now. Other packages that are simply CMS (content management systems- Plone, WordPress, Joomla) are not as adaptable and flexible as Drupal.

To handle the business end of things, Ubercart takes care of the day to day transactions for customers. There are over 5,000 active customers in the system. To make it as easy as possible to get started, we ask for your basic information up front and allow you to pick your items for delivery. After your account is created, a staff member at Washington’s Green Grocer selects the most appropriate truck route for you and you will begin receiving deliverables on the next scheduled day.

At this point, a customer can login at any time and adjust their delivery schedule, items for delivery, or halt deliveries. Customers can also browse recipes on the site and submit their own. Washington’s Green Grocer promotes healthy eating habits and you will find plenty of recipes on their website for that.

Backend

Along with the new visuals and customer functionality, we needed to build and provide lots of cool administrative stuff into the backend for easy management of customers, data, and content.

We also needed to be able to actively map delivery truck routes through Google Maps on demand and be able to filter them in a variety of ways. This helps Washingtons Green Grocer visually assess their delivery routes, their customers, and orders. We also also extended on that to provide filtering tools to narrow it down further to specific routes, specific clients, specific orders or orders with specific kinds of products.

Washingtons Green Grocer staff also have a variety of reporting tools at their disposal for viewing customer trends, requests, future forecasting, and production reports.

Check out Washingtons Green Grocer today!

It’s 2010. It’s time to stop using Internet Explorer 6.

Internet Explorer 6 was released like a virus on August 27, 2001 with Windows XP. That makes the browser almost 9 years old. Most of you don’t keep cars for that long. You trust your car to protect you from danger, that it has efficient gas usage and quality parts. As soon as it gets old, or you have service issues, you go get a new car. Yet, some of you don’t seem to be bothered that when you sit down to do your banking or purchase things online, you use a browser that has little to no security, easily delivers malware/virii/spyware, and does not adhere to the internet standards created by some of the top minds of internet architecture at W3C. That’s like going 80 miles an hour in a car made of glass, bald tires, and powered by a leaky nuclear core. Eventually you are going to get hurt.

With so many super sexy options out there for browsers, you owe it to yourself to upgrade. And why not? Browsers are free. You’re lucky. I remember paying for Netscape Navigator 4 just to escape Internet Explorer in the 90s. That’s how much I loathed it- and that’s how popular Netscape used to be. For the stubborn who refuse to upgrade, you are about to be left behind. Companies like Google are discontinuing support for Internet Explorer 6. Google knows whats up.

It’s time for you to take action. Please upgrade your browser today. Choose a flavor and enjoy better, and safer, internet browsing today. All of these browsers offer bookmark importing, so you can take your favorites from IE with you.

Google Chrome
Mozilla Firefox
Opera
Apple Safari

If you need assistance upgrading, we’re here to help.

There are some ‘gotchas’ though if you develop custom Drupal modules like we do. During the install process, Drupal only bootstraps the bare minimum to get the job done. I’ve noticed that if a module’s install routine calls functions outside of the .install file, the expected result tends to fail because files other than .install are not included during this loading process. It seems there is a special case for the file to be included, or you have to specify in your install profile to explicitly include the file (which takes a lot of time to do). To be specific, I have seen this happen with Drupal Boost, Drupal Gallery Assist, and our custom module Billboard, which tipped me off to this problem. The issue has since been fixed in Boost (and Billboard).

For us, the issue was creating custom ImageCache presets during a module’s install routine. This worked perfectly if you were going to the Drupal Modules page and enabling Billboard. What happens was the hook_install() function fired, included a definition file, and created presets based on that file. This fails during a Drupal install profile, where you use a script to install and configure Drupal automatically. This same issue occurs in Gallery Assist, and here is how I got around it:

It was pretty apparent that the code needed to come out of the install function. However, I needed to be sure that where I put the code would be compatible to the module loading process, and I’d need to be sure ImageCache was both installed and loaded before running the following code. Otherwise it would error out, and no ImageCache presets would be created.

Drupal has a crucial hook for modules. hook_init() allows you to perform tasks every time the module is loaded. In this case, I wanted to tell it to run a function and check for two default ImageCache presets. If they didn’t exist, create them. This approach solves three issues:

1. Getting around install profile limitations
2. Provide default ImageCache presets for Billboard module when it is enabled
3. Recreate the ImageCache presets if they are accidentally deleted by the user (or developer )

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<?php
 
function mymodule_init() {
    mymodule_create_default_imagecache_presets();
}
 
function mymodule_create_default_imagecache_presets() {
 
    $default_size = imagecache_preset_by_name('mymodule-default');
    $thumb_size = imagecache_preset_by_name('mymodule-thumb');
 
    if (count($default_size) == 0 || count($thumb_size) == 0) {
        if (count($default_size) == 0) { 
            $mymodule_default_size = "600";
            $mymodule_thumbnail_size = "80";
 
            $presets = array();
 
            // Default size.
            $presets['default'] = array (
            'presetname' => 'mymodule-default',
            'actions' => array (
 
                  'weight' => '0',
                  'module' => 'mymodule',
                  'action' => 'imagecache_scale',
                  'data' => array (
                    'width' => $mymodule_default_size,
                    'height' => '',
                    'upscale' => 0,
                  ),
 
              ),
            );
 
            imagecache_preset_save($presets['default']);
            $presets['default']['actions']['presetid'] = db_last_insert_id('imagecache_preset', 'presetid');
            imagecache_action_save($presets['default']['actions']);
            imagecache_preset_flush($presets['default']);
            imagecache_presets(TRUE);
 
        }
 
        if (count($default_size) == 0) { 
            $presets['thumb'] = array (
            'presetname' => 'mymodule-thumb',
            'actions' => array (
 
                  'weight' => '0',
                  'module' => 'mymodule',
                  'action' => 'imagecache_resize',
                  'data' => 
                    array (
                      'width' => $mymodule_thumbnail_size,
                      'height' => $mymodule_thumbnail_size,
                      'upscale' => 0,
                  ),
 
              ),
            );
 
            imagecache_preset_save($presets['thumb']);
            $presets['thumb']['actions']['presetid'] = db_last_insert_id('imagecache_preset', 'presetid');
            imagecache_action_save($presets['thumb']['actions']);
            imagecache_preset_flush($presets['thumb']);
            imagecache_presets(TRUE);
 
        }
    }
 
    return;
}
?>

What that says basically is ‘hey, do our default ImageCache presets exist?’ if not, it will create them at runtime.

I have tested this a handful of times with positive results, and, it works with install profiles since hook_init() is called after Drupal loads. Food for thought for all you Drupal developers out there. If there is a better way to achieve this feel free to leave a comment.

A few days ago, I took 10 seconds to fire off a question to John Carmack of iD Software, who basically INVENTED modern gaming as we know it, over Twitter. This guy is solely responsible for gaming today. He created Doom, Wolfenstein 3D, and Quake (not to mention causing me to log hours and hours of gametime) and spawned countless games in their wake like Half-Life.

http://bethblog.com/index.php/2009/11/05/john-carmack-on-doom-classic-development-fan-questions/

John Carmack, the legendary godfather of gaming answered my question from Twitter. I guess I ought to put Doom on my iPhone now, or at least die happy.

I’ve been using Twitter to connect with industry leaders, celebrities, and everyday people. If you’d like to know how you can utilize Twitter to build your business or online persona, we’d be happy to train you or your staff on Twitter, CoTweet, TweetDeck or a host of other Twitter solutions. Just give us a call at 302-856-2802, or tweet us @inclindinc.

NetApplications tracks and monitors tons of information on the internet and you are free to use the information in your own reports. For example, here is the month of October 2009: http://marketshare.hitslink.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qprid=2. That’s a lot of browsers! Older browsers like Internet Explorer 6 (common with Win2k-XP SP1) and Internet Explorer 5 (pre 2k) are hanging in there.

But how do such old browsers rear their heads a decade or more after their release when newer versions exist? How does Internet Explorer 6 persist?

On the one hand, you have a majority of people who buy a computer and never update it, either the software or the hardware. In such case, these people typically are ‘light’ users, where they generally check email and the news and not much else. Now that computers are available practically everywhere, including Walmart, many of these people will find it harder and harder to not get a new system. They are cheaper, faster, and more affordable than ever before. Those systems will be preloaded with Windows 7, OSX 10.6, or Linux and the newest browser available at the time of manufacturing. ‘Power users’ may not have the latest hardware, but they always have the latest software and keep their current system up to date with operating system updates. Most of them will be running Internet Explorer 7, or the more savvy will have Firefox, Chrome or Opera.

On the other hand, you have lots of public service offices like libraries, police departments, public schools and government offices. These institutions have IT departments, and those departments have budgets. A lot of custom software developed in the late 90s and early 2000s (even some still) were tailored directly for Internet Explorer 6. A lot of public school systems cannot afford to upgrade, and upgrading large companies with thousands of people may break the custom software that was developed in IE6 (which would cost thousands upon thousands of dollars in a rather tight economy). Nine times out of ten, desktop upgrades are voted down unless the situation is pretty dire, and also the current operating system needs to have had at least one service pack out. Company-wide upgrades to software will typically require some level of training as well, which means more time, and more money.

In that perspective, even though 23% of all internet users are using Internet Explorer 6, you could probably assume that half of them are institutions that cannot control their desktop environment (as mentioned in the previous paragraph). From there, you could do some more research and analyze data for the website you are working on and determine what kind of visitors they have. Typically we’ve seen numbers between 3-7%.

Well, now what?

The big debate on the internet now is how to handle users who continue to use outdated browsers. Do we leave them in the dust, unable to browse a website? Do we add in conditional code to handle specific older browsers so they have optimal experience? Should a pop up or page be loaded requesting them to get a new browser to view the site? The answer to that is not so simple. The issue is too big for any one developer or designer to make on their own, as most of us are not making sites for our own use, but rather we make them for clients. It’s bad business sense to say oh, you 10% of clients with Internet Explorer 6, you can’t use my site anymore. That could mean a few thousand dollars or more in lost sales, lost business, lost leads. Sure, fine tuning CSS and HTML or proper browser testing in general may feel tedious, but a few extra hours of work is a small price to pay to make clients as successful as they can be.

At least on the upside, it’s trending downward.

What are billboards (banners, header images, et al) you ask? Billboards are the large images you see on various websites that cover the header area. They typically contain marketing statements and imagery relevant to the websites purpose or page content.

Here are is one of my favorite examples:

Visit Southern Delaware Tourism Website

See that set of images just above the content, fading in and out? That is a billboard. With this module, you can create those in a matter of seconds.

After some brainstorming between Shaun and myself, we set out to create something simple, as simple as creating a Page node, without all the aforementioned hassle. After a week of coding, testing, testing and testing, we achieved just that. Now all you have to do is say, I want to create a Billboard, drop in your images (with a cool AJAX in-place uploader, you don’t even have to leave the page), and tell it what pages to display on and you’re done! It couldn’t be any simpler. You also have additional options available to you such as changing how the images display (random image, or fade in/out between images), setting ALT and Title tags for SEO (Search Engine Optimization), and select a resize option to size the billboard to (which is controlled and hooked into ImageCache!). Oh, on top of all of that, it’s all output via a single block. That’s right, you can have 100 billboards and just one block. Once you place it in the region, depending on your site theme, it’s ready to go. In the future you will be able to add blocks so you can have a billboard in the header, and also the footer or sidebar if you wish.

We have been taking feedback from our clients over the months, taking notes during training meetings, and analyzing massive amounts of performance data from our servers. It’s been pretty quiet in the blog, Facebook and our Twitter and it’s because we’ve been very hard at work. Over the last few weeks Inclind has been working at refining what we do in order to better serve, better train, and better our clients online presence. The Billboard module is just the tip of the iceberg, a precursor to the ultra-streamlined CMS package we have been putting together. There is so much going on, I couldn’t even begin to write up what will be coming in the next few months.

We’re here to serve you, to help you get things done faster, and make it so you don’t need a PHd to manage your site.

If you have any questions regarding Billboards, Drupal, our refined CMS package or need help managing your content, we are here to help. Give us a call at 302-856-2802, send us a tweet @inclindinc, or stop by our office.

Although, sometimes the difficult part is working with some of the community developed modules. Though the community works hard, every now and then you will find that something won’t work exactly as intended and you’ll have to dive into the code. We’re no strangers to that, being custom website and web application developers.

One such module, Pathauto, a very useful and must-have module allows you to define URL schemas based on the content type (blog entry, page, image) which comes in handy for consistent URLs, not to mention great SEO positioning. It takes care of cleaning up URLs for you, so you can have nice URLs like blog/category/my-post.htm instead of blog?category=5&post_id=4 without having to work with .htaccess rewrite rules like you’d usually have to.

While architecting a new application for a client, I noticed URLs were being cut off. They were not long by any means. The URL that caught my eye looked like this:

explore/about-beracah/frequently-asked-questions/what-is-the-difference-between-a-modular-home-and-a-traditional-stick-built-hom

The rules that I had set in place obviously were not being adhered to. The URL should be this instead:

explore/about-beracah/frequently-asked-questions/what-is-the-difference-between-a-modular-home-and-a-traditional-stick-built-home.htm

See those last 5 characters (e.htm)? They need to be there. So, okay, I checked the settings to make sure there was no cap on the amount of characters I could have in a URL. While the Pathauto default is 128, you are free to up it as far as 999. I figure 300 should suffice for any website, so I put that in the config and hit save. I resave my page, and the URL does not change.

Hmm. My instincts told me two things:

1. Either the database table field type is too small, or
2. There is a hard limit in the code itself regardless of config

The first one was quicker to check. Looking in the database, the field that stores URLs is set as a VARCHAR(255), which should be enough. The next test was to change this entry manually right in the database and save. That part worked, and my URL was as it should be. Going to my page again and resaving, the URL was cut off. That’s when I knew it had to be limited in the code.

1 line in the module contains this code when determining max length of a URL:

$maxlength = min(variable_get(‘pathauto_max_component_length’, 100), 128);

What this code should say is your maxlength is equal to the number you set in the configuration. In my case, I chose 300. When the code executes however, something else happens. The min() function that is wrapped around the returned value will negate anything I have set as the limit, unless it is 128 or lower. The variable_get function is a simple function that looks for a value in the database based on the variable name, which is our character limit. If I did not set a value, it would return 100 as a default if pathauto_max_component_length was not set in the admin.

So, as you can see, when that evaluates, you get min(300,128), and min will return 128, as it is the lower value, hence, any URL could only ever be 128 characters long maximum. At this point, I knew the problem and all I simply had to do was remove the min() wrapping that statement and we were good to go, changing it to:

$maxlength = variable_get(‘pathauto_max_component_length’, 128);

That says, if a custom value is not defined, default to 128. Perfect for my intentions.

Just a small bump in the road working with open source code. A little bit of a geeky entry, but problem solving like this is fun for me.

Update: I have been told that this has been fixed in the latest development release of the module.

A lot of the changes took place under the hood, so most people won’t notice much of a difference visually. This upgrade was strictly about performance improvements, with a few minor UI enhancements. Hey, I’m fine with that, as OSX Leopard runs smooth as it is on my Macbook. Among one of the big features is integrated support for Microsoft Exchange, so if you’re a Mac based business or an employee with a Mac machine, you can ditch Entourage once and for all tomorrow. All you IT folks out there with a mixed environment of Macs and PCs are probably all too familiar with the shortcomings of Entourage on an Exchange based mail system. I can’t wait to get it setup on my Macbook because honestly using Outlook Web Access to access webmail is a chore, especially on a system without Internet Explorer (Outlook Web Access is very limited in non IE browsers by design- bad form, MS). Our iPhone’s work well with our Exchange server and its about time that our desktops/laptops will too.

OSX Snow Leopard will include the latest versions of Safari 4, Quicktime X, and Finder. While Finder and Quicktime aren’t ‘new’, they’ve been rebuilt in Cocoa and purported to be much faster than current versions. Safari 4 comes with speed improvements and better Javascript performance.

Upgrading will cost you a meager $30, while the full version is a reasonable $130.

Links:

Gizmodo Review
Engadget Mac / Exchange Article

I’ll admit, I didn’t really ‘get it’ at first. It clicked for me a few months ago when I changed the way I approached these applications.

“I Don’t Get It!”

Most people assume that these websites / applications are largely recreation and localized to only them and a handful of friends. This really isn’t the point of social networking. What’s the use of adding a few people you already know and making your account private? Nothing new can be learned or gained from that and makes it about as fruitful as sending a text message on your phone.

True social networking begins by opening yourself up to the world and interacting with others. Yeah, I know what you’re thinking. There are a lot of crazy weirdos on the internet, but the chances that you will come across one is small, and even if you do, you can block them from all communication in a few clicks. I can’t vouch for MySpace, but I know that Twitter and Facebook are very big on security and deterring jackasses from contacting you.

The value in these applications lies in making friends with strangers and interacting with people online. How can these be used as tools? The best part about these sites is that it’s free across the board, there is no charge for using their services. With that its become a viable marketing platform for companies, bands, and entrepreneurs. Startups like CoTweet and LivingSocial have dominated the third party arenas, turning a sweet profit and infinite wealth of data from it’s users. Without going into too much detail, CoTweet allows you to share Twitter access within your company providing separate logins for users, but tracking everything they do. You can assign tweets to a user, receive direct replies, and it appends their initials to each tweet so you know who’s who. The advantage of this is you can have multiple people using Twitter on your behalf, instead of just one or two, and it’s all tracked.

Tweeting ‘n’ Bookin It

People love instant gratification, instant feedback and interaction. If they feel that a company is responding in real time, their opinion of them will be exponentially more positive than a company who takes 2 weeks to respond via email or phone. For instance, Comcast experienced a large outage last month. I tweeted that Comcast was down, and a few minutes later a representative from Comcast, Bonnie, had replied to me and asked my location so they could report back where users had no internet services. It didn’t fix our issue, but I thought that was pretty cool. Authorize.net had a datacenter damaged by fire, effectively halting credit card processing services for a LOT of people this summer. They sent all their updates out over Twitter, almost every 10-15 minutes, keeping their users informed of the progress and letting them know when service would return. That’s good customer service and PR to boot.

Consider another scenario, getting the word out. A lot of people have trouble letting others know about something they have to offer. That’s the beauty of Twitter and Facebook, they can be used for exactly that. I recently had a breakthrough in just how effective the two of these sites are combined last week. AOL Radio was running a promotion to advertise their new station, All Request. In the spirit of that channel, they were accepting tweet requests from 12PM to 7PM that day only. Whatever bands got the most tweets would be in medium rotation the first week or two. A plan formulated in my head, I knew that I had access to 45,000 to 50,000 emails of people between Twitter, Facebook and the message board for CKY. What if a percentage of them participated in this? Could we make a difference?

From Nothing to Something

I didn’t expect everyone to do it, but I figured if at least 10% did, something might happen. By 10AM I let everyone know what was going on, and by 8PM saw on AOL that CKY would be one of the bands played. We didn’t quite have the numbers to edge out American Idol artists as the Top 10 Requested, but who does? That’s millions of teeny boppers. But all things considered, it was a great effort and example of how this service can be utilized to your advantage. We gained exposure, word of mouth, and a spot on the station.

That same week, we tried the same idea and encouraged people to participate again, this time using Twitter and Facebook combined. Jimmy Fallon had put the word out he was looking for new bands to feature on his show, something ‘not radio rock’ that everyone knows (and loathes) like Nickelback or Three Days Grace. Everyone wrote in such a volume that Jimmy Fallon posted that they would be looking into it and applauded the effort of the fans in spreading the word. Would you ever think that a simple marketing campaign would get a response from a late night talk show host?

Now CKY has a good shot of being booked for the show, all because of some Twitter and Facebook marketing that took a few seconds by a few thousand fans, which can result in millions of viewers seeing them on a late night show. If half of them bought their album, or hell, even 10%, that’s a significant boost- and this is all without record label involvement or marketing firms. It’s a domino effect, hypermarketing, hyperdomino, (insert as of yet to be coined Web 3.0 terms).

The experience there really opened my eyes to the true potential of leveraging social networking applications. If you’re just going to update people with what you’re having for lunch, how many paperclips are on your desk or what you drank Friday night, don’t expect to get anything out of the time invested in using these websites. But if you’re looking to do more, you may find that you are rewarded with new friends, leads,  new clients, maybe even Jimmy Fallon.

Want to know what we’re up to? Follow us!

Twitter:

• inclindinc
• shauntyndall
• kevinquillen

Facebook:

• http://www.facebook.com/pages/Inclind-Inc/104739558550

Even if the email you’re replying to has many other people as carbon copies (cc), the next email you send back to the group is detached from the original. Your reply could also be lost if several others reply to the group. Email is also slow, subject to spam filters, and has the potential to be lost in transit. Every inefficiency that Email was created to solve has once again became an inefficiency in our fast paced world. Google wave is looking to tackle these problems and much more.

Google wave is a multipurpose communication tool. It’s somewhat a hybrid of email, text messaging (SMS, twitter, facebook), social/conference communication, and chat. You’ll be able to email other users of the service, allow others to join the conversation (at any point, with or without conversation history enabled) and manage all conversations using a drag and drop interface to keep everything organized.

Conversations are also no longer linear. Messages at the beginning of a conversation can be added after the initial messages, or you can add comments to other section (entire comments, or even individual words and statements) in the middle of the conversation. If you’re brought into a conversation, with history enabled, you can play a time line of message creation like a movie. This allows you to be brought up to speed on what messages have been added, when and how; without bothering your coworkers or friends to help make sense of the time line. Individual portions of a conversation can now also be split into their own conversations, with a different set of people assigned to it.

There is so much to look forward to with Google wave. We have only brushed the surface of what Google wave will truly accomplish. To get a better understanding of this application watch the video on wave.google.com, or on youtube.

Inclind Inc. is watching Google wave with wide eyes in anticipation of it’s beta that starts as early as September. It could allow our company to communicate much more effectively internally, and perhaps even with our clients in the future. Google has a sign-up on their site if you’d like to be notified when wave is available. This sign-up is also the pool from which Google will choose the beta testers.