Dear Friends,

A formal update has been on my mind for sometime now, but has been readily usurped by the happy demands of married life and work at Sabramedia. I’m writing this brief update today from the kitchen table in our new home. Joslyn and I, married for a few days over a month now, have been working hard putting our home together and it’s nice to finally watch as things are settling into place. Thank you for all your well wishes and support.

Just a little while back, my brother Joshua and I began work on a collective sale of our niche websites to free up focus for work in our web development startup. You can see the work in progress on our sale over at: http://www.woldboys.com

Of note today, though, is a website Joslyn and I have been working on for over 2 years, MoldBlogger.com.

As of April, 2008, the website was bringing in over 4,000 unique and highly targetted visitors on the topic of mold. The “Ask A Question” feature gets an average of 4-5 questions per week. In May, traffic climbed higher to over 5,000 visitors. In June, we’re projected to pass 6,000, with 23 RSS Subscribers and no advertising. Among many other terms, the site is #1 on Google for “mold blog”.

The site is unmonetized at the moment. I have plans to pursue advertising contracts, but am balancing that decision between the time involved and the potential of selling the website and passing the opportunity on to someone else.

Interested? Let me know. I’m giving this a short window of opportunity before making a decision.

Working on MoldBlogger.com has been an awesome opportunity. My wife and I have learned a lot and we’ve had a tremendous amount of positive feedback. Before deciding the next step, though, we want to carefully consider our options.

Thank you for your time and I look forward to further updates in the near future.

Jonathan Wold

On an average work day, we take a 45-minute drive in to our basement office in Jasper, Indiana. Nick, Joshua, and I will typically commute together and meet up there with the rest of the team (currently 6, soon to be more). We were planning to head in to the office today to put in some overtime hours on an active project. Our ideas were changed by waking up Sabbath morning to this beautiful sight:

We had a wonderful day and went for a nice 2 mile walk in the snow after lunch. That evening, we spent some time sledding.

This morning, though, it posed a challenge to our plans of going in and pulling an “all day(er)” at the office. We decide to work from home. Nick, who lives just down the road from his parents house (who are kindly housing Joshua and I at the moment), came up to visit and we setup shop on the kitchen table and got back to work.

Here you can see Joshua designing away in the background. He handles all the design work for the company. He works primarily in Illustrator and is also starting to branch off into Photoshop.

To the right you can see Nick programming. Today we’ve been working out some small bugs on Blogster.com. Nick is fixing a challenge with the TinyMCE editor. He works with Zend Studio as his PHP IDE of choice and Navicat for MySQL work. He uses Firebug (on Firefox) for his AJAX/jQuery debug work.

And to the left is my humble little laptop. Today I’ve been answering questions on Blogster and making sure various projects of ours are up-to-date.

Life in our little startup (Sabramedia.com) is wonderful. I’m currently working full-time as a developer, exercising my God-given talents and abilities with CSS and interface development to work with Nick in building our application platform and working together on a number of implementations. My passion is niche marketing and, slowly but surely, opportunities are arising for me to do that full-time within the company. First, though, I will continue to be faithful in the small things and pursue my love of development.

We’ve been blessed with a lot of success and a lot of challenges which, as we’re faithful with each, continue to bring even more success.

Tomorrow we’ll be heading back into the office and going through another fast-paced day of work.

On Friday, I’ll be flying out to Oklahoma to spend a week with my fiancée, Joslyn. Fiancée? That’s right! On May 19th of 2008, I’m getting married! :) - As excited I am about working with the wonderful team of guys and girls that we have at Sabramedia, I’m even more excited about my future with Joslyn. God has been very good to me.

More on life in our little startup later. Once development demands have given us a bit more breathing room, I’m looking forward to sharing more on our experiences and the daily lessons we’ve learned on running a successful startup.

Have a wonderful day!

Jonathan Wold

It’s just after 7 AM this morning. In another 30 minutes or so, I’ll be heading downstairs to breakfast and, shortly thereafter, driving to the office in Jasper, IN, to start another day of work. It’s been a long and challenging week, but a rewarding and accomplished week, and it’s not yet over!

It’s over 2 months since my last update and as there has been no lack of progress in my life by any stretch of the imagination, I’ve finally been impressed and blessed with the time to sit down, start typing, and share.

The following is an outline and summary of the events of the past 2 months:

• Relocated From Woodburn, IN (Near Fort Wayne) down to Jasper, IN - This included not only a move of nearly all my earthly possessions, but also a relocation of what was once my business office in Woodburn to an entirely new business venture. I made the move along with my dear younger brother, Joshua, who works full time with me and the rest of the team in our Jasper office.
• Started A New Business - As this has occupied the majority of the past 2 months, a paragraph will hardly do it justice, but I will give a brief sense of things and look forward to sharing more details over the next few weeks. Through circumstances that Providence along could arrange, my brother and I met and made the decision to go into business with two bright and God-fearing young men, Nick Johnson and Gunnar Bruun. Nick and myself have both been blessed with several years of experience in web development and, when we met, we were both running successful businesses. Gunnar, Nick’s brother-in-law, was working with him full time as Joshua, my brother, was working with me. God led in our lives and the four of us made the decision to go into business together. The day after our arrival, we started work on one of the biggest projects we’d, individually, ever done. We’ve been blessed with tremendous success as we’ve moved forward and finished project after project and, though some of the days are long and our brains feel like they’ve run a half-marathon, we unanimously agree that we all love our jobs.
• Trained For, Ran, And Completed A Half-Marathon - On Sunday, October 7, the four of us, along with several other members of Nick’s family, ran and completed (in good time) a half-marathon in Evansville, Indiana. Joshua and I, along with Caleb, Nick’s younger brother, had opportunity to train for just over 3 weeks prior to the run. Prior to our training, none of us had spent much time running. We went from having never run more than a few miles at a time to being able to do easily do 8 at a time and, ultimately, the 13.1 miles of the half-marathon. We attribute the success as a blessing from God and a reward for the lifestyle choices we’ve made. All of us are vegetarians and seek to be faithful in caring for the bodies God has given us. I’m looking forward to running again :).
• Baptized - At 21 years old, though expressing a desire to follow Christ and seeking to do so with all my heart, I had never yet been baptized. On September 28, 2007, at just past 11:30 at night, I made the decision to commit my heart and my life fully to Christ and was baptized in a lake by Jeff Johnson, Nick’s father. I’ve never been happier. God has called me and has drawn me closer to Him all throughout my years and has blessed me and given me a happiness beyond expression. The decision to be baptized is a simple following in the footsteps of my Savior, a public expression of my commitment to Him. A few short weeks later, my brother Joshua, 20 years old, also made the decision to be baptized and, on a beautiful Sabbath afternoon, he committed his life fully to Christ.
• Attended Family Campmeeting - Earlier this year, two of my younger brothers, Joshua and Josiah, attended the Oklahoma Family Campmeeting. They were greatly blessed by it and, when it came time for the Indiana Family Campmeeting, Joshua and I, Caleb, Nick, Sabra (Nick’s wife), and Noah (Nick’s son), drove up to Timber Ridge for the 4 day meeting. We were greatly blessed by it and highly recommend it. I was encouraged and inspired by the testimonies and, since campmeeting, God has used the things I’ve been blessed to learn to call me up still higher in my walk with Him.
• Blessed With Ministry - A few months back, after reading Escape to God and being greatly blessed by it, I was impressed to share it, along with The Great Controversy through my personal website. You can read the offer on my list of Books That Have Changed My Life. Over the past few weeks a few requests came in, which I happily sent out. On Monday of this week, though, what began as a tiny trickle of requests began to grow into a bubbling stream. As of this morning, I’ve received over 200 requests for books from all across the United States. I’ve contacted the publisher of Escape to God and, Lord willing, I’ll be buying out their inventory of hardcover copies to fulfill the requests received thus far as well as the requests that continue to pour in. It may, at first, seem like a great expense. But in the light of the way that God has used the books to be a blessing to me and, in the light of eternity, sharing these books with all who will read them, no matter what it costs me, is the very least I can do. Both books have played a pivotal role in my life and have been a powerful influence for good. I am honored to be blessed with such an opportunity.
• And Much More.. - It’s the little things that count most of all. I have been so greatly blessed these past few weeks and months. There have been trials and great challenges, but through them all, as I’ve looked to God for strength, He’s heard my prayers and has helped me through. I can’t see what the future holds, but I trust God to take me through it and, come what may, I will continue to exercise faith in Him, knowing that He will lead me along the very best way.

It’s now time to eat and go to work. I thank each of you for your support and encouragement throughout the times I’ve been blessed to know you. For those I’ve yet to meet, I look forward to meeting you :).

May your days be richly blessed and may you be a blessing to others,

-Jonathan Wold

About a week or so ago, I was working on a WordPress project that called for an above average contact form. It needed to give visitors the ability to upload photos, receive auto responses and notifications, have built in spam blocking, and track submissions in the WordPress database.

After a bit of looking, I found cForms II, a WordPress contact form plugin developed by Oliver.

I began working with the plugin and was very quickly satisfied that I’d found a winner.

Now, in setting up this plugin, I made a mistake and was reminded of an important lesson, which became the inspiration behind this entry.

The contact form for this particular project was being used as an extensive questionnaire. As such, we decided to split it up over multiple pages to encourage people to make it all the way through. I came up with a way to do it, but it wasn’t working quite as nicely as I wanted it too.

So, I went over to the cForms II support forum and posted my challenge to see if anyone had any ideas or suggestions.

Oliver replied, letting me know that my request, though possible, was outside the scope of what cForms was meant to do. He also (and this is where the lesson comes in) pointed out the trend that people, developers especially, who’d been using and benefiting from the cForms plugin, had taken to the habit of removing credit for the work.

..And that’s what I had done.

Without even thinking it through, I had chosen to remove the credit link back to cForms from the client’s site. This seemed natural to me. The option was there; Oliver had been nice enough to provide an easy way to add or remove his credit link, and without stopping to think, I’d taken it off.

Now, sure, it’s all open source, we’re more than entitled to add or remove credits as we see fit, right?

Well, we certainly have that choice.. but is it fair?

In my case, there is no excuse. I’m a full-time web developer. I get paid for the work I do and I benefit directly from the work of guys like Oliver who’ve put their time and energy into developing a solid product. If it weren’t for him and guys like him, I’d have had to go and build the same thing from scratch.

Which brings me to the lesson that this served to remind me of, “And as ye would that men should do to you, do ye also to them likewise.” Luke 6:31 As a Christian, no matter what I’m doing, whether it be work or play, I’m to treat others as I would be treated.

Now, being thus convicted, I began to give the situation some thought and was blessed with an idea. In my redesign of JonathanWold.com, I had finished up the work by adding a colophon. Traditionally, colophons were used in print media to provide details about the publication of the book. In the web, we’ve begun using it to provide details about what goes on “behind the scenes” of a website.

I’ve decided to start making the addition of a colophon a habit, in which I’ll provide a list of the resources and technologies used in the architecture and design of a website.

So, a big thanks to Oliver for his work on the cForms II plugin and for being very professional about the entire situation. It was a timely lesson for me to be reminded of and I thank you for it my friend :).

And finally, last but most important, I give full credit for my work, the good work I’ve done, to God. Were it not for Him, my conscience would have never been pricked and my sense of integrity would be non-existant. The things I’ve been blessed to learn and the people I’ve been blessed to meet, have all come as a direct result of His hand in my life. The mistakes I’ve made I take full credit for, but the lessons I’ve learned from them and the victories I’ve gained by applying each lesson learned, all are due to a God who’s been forever patient with me and never given up.

Have a wonderful day my friends. Remember, give the credit where and to whom it’s due.

Until next time,

-Jonathan Wold

P.S. Credit for the awesome illustration up top goes to my brother Joshua, who, in addition to his work with me and the rest of the team, does freelance illustration on the side.

Cheers to the WordPress team on another fine release :).

I’ve been holding off on the tagging feature on a few client projects for this release and now that it’s in beta I’ll be looking forward to playing around with it and giving it a healthy test run or two before it’s ready for public consumption.

Also, thanks to Dean’s Permalinks Migration plugin, I finally made the switch from my old-school permalinks to something a bit cleaner this evening. With quite a few pages indexed and pulling traffic, setting up 301 redirects was important to switching URL styles and there’s no way I wanted to go through and do it manually. Dean’s work brought it down to less than 30 seconds. We’ll see how it affects traffic (if at all) over the next few days.

Have a wonderful rest of the evening my friends.

Until next time,

-Jonathan

P.S. I started up a WordPress Tumblr awhile back. It’s still a bit small, but it has some good resources for anyone interested in WordPress development. Grab the feed and pass along any additions you may have.