I’m excited about the latest project I just finished up for Pink Cake Box. The idea for the project came from Matt McGee’s Small Business Search Engine Marketing blog. (Sidenote: Matt’s blog has some of the most actionable advice for small businesses – check his small business marketing section for great SMB advice.)

The idea is to use Google Maps as a vehicle for displaying one’s product. On Matt’s blog he originally profiled a lawn care company in PA who implemented the idea for their lawn care customers. Matt followed that post up with another implementation by a florist in Anaheim CA.

I figured this would be a great idea for our cake company. It could help visually depict our delivery radius and also help us showcase some of our cakes/cupcakes. I explored following the traditional user-created content approach for google maps (called Google My Maps) but that meant manually maintaining data that is already available on our website.

So I took another route – I created a wordpress plugin that automatically pulls data from our existing blog posts. I setup two custom fields for every post – “Lat/Lng” and “Venue”.

If the “Lat/Lng” field is populated, the plugin will automatically extract additional information from the post and display it on the map based on the latitude and longtitude coordinates:

We even placed a marking in Denver, CO for a cake we created while taping for the Food Network Cake Challenge. And I expect to create another marker in California for another televised cake challenge as soon as we are contractually allowed to talk about it ;) Also, I added functionality to link directly to items on the map using the post id. So for example, this link will take you directly to the Food Network cake in Denver.

The one downside of this approach is we don’t get the SEO benefits of using Google My Maps. Google My Maps can show up in Google Map search results. But the advantage of having this tightly integrated with our blog is a great timesaver and outweighs the cons of not having the map show up in google map search results.

The spirit of the wordpress plugin model for developers is obviously not centered around money. I had two main motivations for releasing my plugins to the public. First off, I wanted to use the plugins as a vehicle to help promote our small business. Secondly I enjoy creating things and watching other people benefit and use them.

Now creating is fun, but support is another story. The support process can be times time consuming and sometimes thankless. I initially kept up with the support requests, but now turn people away due to time constraints and other priorities.

So today I was thinking about ways the wordpress community could continue to encourage development and support of existing plugins.

I think the Top 1000 WordPress Plugin Authors list by W-Shadow is a step in the right direction. Recognition is a powerful motivator and I think the WordPress community would benefit if we continued to recognize the contributions of plugin authors in meaningful ways…

For example, how about rewarding the top 10 plugin authors with some prize? Even something like a wordpress t-shirt would probably go a long way to helping encourage more plugin development and support.

Just my thoughts…

Unfortunately I’ve been too busy with school, work and cakes to really put much work into my plugins.

However, I’m happy to announce that WP-PHPList now supports widgets! This was perhaps the most requested featured for the plugin.

And the best part is I didn’t have to do any work to add this feature! Credit goes to Rob Z at Web Geek Blog for widgetizing the plugin.

Click here for the WP-PHPList Plugin Page

Thanks Rob!

Today we released a new Twitter application on Pink Cake Box’s wedding blog.

The application is called SweetTweet and lets you send birthday cakes and cupcakes via Twitter.

With a lot help from a fantastic photo slider tutorial from Jesse Janzer, we created a slick photo viewer to allow users to easily select a cake to send via Twitter. Jesse put together a great tutorial and his wife is a fantastic wedding photographer in Utah.

We also need to thank Aravind Ajith from the Design Superhero for his free twitter bird icons. My design skills are poor at best and his twitter bird icon helped add some level of graphical sophistication to the application.

You can try SweetTweet for yourself here.

Ron has put together a code example explaining how to add additional fields to the PHPList plugin. Thanks Ron!

Thanks to a referral from Matt Mcgee, Anne had the opportunity to share some experiences about the power of social media and the web for helping grow your business.

Her article appeared in the magazine Small Business Asset magazine which is targeted at small businesses. Hopefully her story will help inspire other small businesses to help jumpstart their Internet strategy.

Upgraded our Wedding Cake blog over the weekend to wordpress 2.7. This is by far one of the best upgrades I’ve gone through with the product. The new interface is fantastic – kudos to the interface development lead Jane Wells for taking the interface to the next level. After a few minutes in the new sleek interface I don’t know how I ever managed in the old klunky 2.6 interface.

The comment threading functionality is also a neat feature. It requires from theme modifications – but fortunately not to heavily involved.

Congratulations to the entire wordpress development team. Great job!

I have a great appreciation for wordpress plugin developers. Having released a few simple plugins myself, I understand the time it takes to develop and test a quality plugin. On top of that, devoting time to support the plugin and keep it up-to-date as wordpress rapidly evolves is another effort in itself.

That’s why I appreciate the plugins Joost de Valk has been churning out.

Just recently I setup his Search Suggest plugin on our cake blog. This plugin offers a clever way to mimic some of the useful spelling suggest features offered by major search engines.

This is especially important on our cake blog. Using search meter, we’ve found that many people are searching for cakes using common misspellings. And while we’ve developed a plugin to correct common mispellings, this tactic doesn’t scale well as it requires us to hardcode common misspellings.

Joost’s plugin allows us to cover a wider array of mispellings. A good addition to this plugin would be a feature to allow wordpress admins the ability to add overrides for commonly misspelled words. This would be useful because the Yahoo API doesn’t work as well for word combinations. For example, the API will catch the misspelling for Haloween, but does not catch misspelling for “Haloween Cake“.

I suggest wordpress admins check out Joost’s complete lists of plugins.

I’ve been delaying the upgrade of our wedding cake blog to 2.6 because I wasn’t thrilled with the post revision option. However, there is an easy way to turn it off without having to edit any configuration files.

With this plugin, I can also turn off the autosave feature which often leads to multiple drafts of posts which I end up having to spend time deleting.

Once I had the plugin installed, the upgrade to WP 2.6.1 was smooth. I tested the upgrade first on our test blog and found no issues and then deployed it on our main site without any hitches.

Kudos the the wordpress team for another smooth upgrade.