Flourless Chocolate Cake w/ chili pepper

Flourless chocolate cake with a bit of heat

9oz Dark Chocolate (Pacha 70% cacoa – 3 1/3 bars)
6 eggs
1 tsp Vanilla
1/2 tsp Salt
1 Cup sugar
2 Sticks butter
3 tsp Cayanne Pepper
1 ground dried chili pepper
1 shot of espresso

Melt chocolate and butter.
Power whisk other ingredients for 4 minutes to build body.
Fold chocolate mixture and egg mixture until fully mixed.
Pour into 9” spring form.
Bake @375 in a water bath for 35 minutes.
Cool on rack before removing spring mold.

What is WordPress?

WordPress is Content Management System (CMS) that was first released to the public in May of 2003. It was primarily used for Blogging but over the years had matured into being used for eCommerce and other aspects of websites.

There is a trade-off when using WordPress as it is not as flexible as a Custom Website. Flexibility is present but at a cost. For instance, Themes are used to Style a site. The theme expects that you will set your content in the manner for which the theme was designed. If not, you’ll need to modify the theme and this is where things start to slow down.

Additionally, WordPress offers Plugins that do all sorts of wonderful things. The trade-off is that the plugins (and their raw source code) are also available to hackers. This means that if Hackers find a vunerability, you could find yourself the victim of a hacked website.

Being careful which Plugins you use as well as keeping them up-to-date, which can go a long way to protecting your site from getting “hacked”. Smaller plugins with a simple specific purpose are less likely to get compromised. If you need something unique or data-intensive, this could point to a Custom Website as being a better alternative.

Additionally, a Custom WordPress Website could be a good choice if you are looking to blend some custom features with the functionality that makes WordPress a good choice for Bloggers.

In summary, a WordPress site is one where the Customer does not need a lot of technical knowledge to be able to administer and publish their content.

We offer WordPress sites as well as Custom WordPress sites if you are looking to upgrade or start a put your business online today. Please Contact us if you have questions or are ready to start on your new website today.

At what point does your blog own you?

We’ve had the privilege of working with many great clients over the years. Recently we’ve taken on clients that have come from the Blog world where others have sold them on a Blog being the foundation of their sites CMS. Popular Blogs such as WordPress offer many great features that could save a client thousands of dollars in custom programming costs. In most cases these Blogs are also free. Perfect, right? What more do you need?

The problem comes in when you need to customize the blog to further your businesses goals.
Sure you can re-theme a blog. This creates the first hurtle for the customer that thought they were getting something at a low cost. WordPress Themes (the look and visual design of the Blog) have to be created in parts and then reassembled and published using the proper formatting of the blog. Next, if you want more than a different “look” you’ll need find a plugin created by some other programmer, install it and then hope the generic nature of blog publishing meets your specific demand. From this point the costs and time taken to achieve the new goal/changes ramp up significantly as new code needs work in the framework of the parent blog.

At this point a mini blog can come to the rescue.

Mini blog? A mini blog is an application created without all the overhead of a larger blog such as WordPress.
A mini blog simply does the basic features of a full blown blog but offers greater customization and simpler deployment in it’s very nature.
A mini blog allow the following:

• You publish blog type posts from an admin area of your site.
• It allows and manages the uploading and resizing of images and the creation of slideshows as needed.
• Full editing capability by office staff
• Sequencing by way of a simple ranking system.

Simple and to the point. The benefits now mean a mini blog can be set into an existing design simply by adding a page. There is great flexibility for the customer. The simple nature of also encourages more use and in-turn higher changes of achieving marketing goals for the Customer.

While it’s not hard to administer a WordPress blog or create your own themes if you are a Designer and Programmer or spend the time to learn the intricacies of these blogging applications, a mini blog frees a customer to focus on their goals, not learning to work within a generic framework of a large scale blog.

We’ll post some examples and gather customer response in future updates…

It’s been around as a term for quite some time. Will 2010 be the year it becomes common place? Adobe has the Scene 7 project and we’ve been contracted to integrate this system into a web application we have created over the past year.

We also have an on going project (RTK – Retailer Tool Kit) that is similar to SaaS. It allows backend development and expansion for all Members since the the primary code is shared. Members get continued benefits at a lower price point while the development is more focused as it needs only be released to one location rather than many.

Microsoft is also moving to a similar means of software purchase. You can buy a program outright or sign up for Software Assurance which while you are subscribed you get upgrades as part of the Service.

It will be interesting if people find merit in leasing their software. And as many companies release different takes on the idea it will be interesting to see which take hold and which methods of deployment and marketing are cast aside.

2010 will be another exciting year in the internet business world.