Stephanie Leffler at TEDxStLouisWomen

I've been a big fan of TED conferences for a number of years now. The acronym stands for Technology, Entertainment and Design.

TED is a nonprofit devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading -- through TED.com, our annual conferences, the annual TED Prize and local TEDx events.

The original main conference got so big that it branched out into several different local conferences around the world, sometimes with different themes or discussions. But always the important point is that the speakers are by invite only, they get no more than 18 minutes and their task is to speak about something that is the most important thing to them.

Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth began as a speech at TED. Other famous examples include Tony Robbins, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs and numerous others. All the videos are available online and some collections are available through Netflix. They are a big deal.

Imagine my surprise and delight when I learned that someone I knew had done a TEDx speech at a local St. Louis conference. Stephanie Leffler was the CEO and driving force behind MonsterCommerce when I started working there. Actually, I think she was the sales director when I interviewed and she was my first face-to-face interview. Very soon after that, her and her partner Ryan Noble would become the sole owners and leadership for the company, and would drive it's success skyward. She was part of the hardest-working team I've ever worked on hands down.

Here she is talking about the future of work, the expansion of freelancing and how cloud computing has birthed cloud workers.

I'll never forget that first interview in 2003, when she asked me the "where do you see yourself in five years" question. I joked that if it worked out, I honestly saw myself working at the same company for as long as possible. Three years and many layers of success later, the company was sold to Network Solutions. The two of them stayed on for many months making the transition of leadership as smooth as possible. By the time my five year anniversary had come along, I was still working there. She was not. She and Ryan took some time to themselves, and have been working hard on Juggle, CrowdSource and other projects ever since.

Congratulations to Steph!

Started Adding Products - HappyIsTheBride.com

We've recently started adding products to our wedding bridal supply store. I'm excited that Lisa and I have renewed interest in both this and other family projects.

New Project: Happy Is The Bride.com

This past week, I've begun a new project for my new favorite client called Happy is the Bride. This site will offer wedding supplies for brides of any age and couples renewing their vows.

LinkedIn: James Arconati

Sometimes I resist jumping on the bandwagon (arrogance much?) and sometimes I feel like I'm driving the bandwagon. I'm not sure I understand it, but LinkedIn is an online community building tool for fostering professional relationships. The invitation emails have very quickly made their little viral way through a large portion of my coworkers.

My personal opinion is that professional networking is better and of higher quality when it's actually done the old-fashioned way with business cards and hand-shaking, but perhaps I'm being a square.

MonsterCommerce - Where Have I Been?

So I haven't really talked about this much here, but the job I mentioned at the Ferguson-Florissant School District had not worked out exactly as I had wanted it to. I'm still personally examining and evaluating the reasons why and I don't want to get into that right now. Was it my fault? Was it something beyond my control? Who really knows? Digging too deep into the subject just causes frustration, so I'm just moving on. After that fell through at the end of November, I immediately began searching for a different job.

Needless to say, after a couple weeks I realized that no one would be hiring right before the holidays and new year. I tried refocusing my energy towards freelance work and perhaps working as something other than a web developer or technician. But none of these panned out either. After several interviews, refining my résumé about 10 times and dozens to hundreds of submissions through varied avenues and recruiters.

Through it all, I kept in touch with some old teammates and my supervisor at the best company I've ever worked for, MonsterCommerce. As it turned out, there was still an opening available for me, so I felt the invitation could not and should not be refused. Coming back is a little surreal, and very very fun. I can't believe the number of old friends who came up to me, very happy to see me. It was great and a little difficult to be humble.

Sometimes I'm surprised where my life will take me. There has got to be a plan or outline written somewhere for where I'm supposed to be. And right now, it seems a little random and chaotic, but I could not be happier with the overall results.

More About My Del.icio.us Archive

So I'm pretty sure that My Del.icio.us Archive has a Google Pagerank of 3 -- at least at the moment. The traffic for this site actually surpasses the root directory for the Arconati News - http://arconati.net/ site.

I just went through the site's controls today and smoothed out some of the settings. I especially concentrated on the "Blogroll" section, adding links to a lot of my friends' blogs. The following is what it looks like right now.

Blogroll

• Bryan Farr
• Derek Brink
• Kate Tuskey
• Michelle Nicholson
• Nikomas Perez

I also included links to my two main sites as well as Ferguson Christian Church and MonsterCommerce. I think one of the main reasons for the site's success (if that is the right word for it) is due to Wordpress' Trackback / PingBack features. In del.icio.us, I have been bookmarking a lot of high profile, high quality tech sites, and a lot of these sites list the most recent / most relevant links to their sites reciprocally.

The website builds itself. Thinking about it, every del.icio.us user should at least create a free Wordpress blog and make sure their bookmarks are being posted there every day.

New Blogger Version

I've just had all of my blogs upgraded to the latest version of blogger. It took a few minutes to complete, but was mostly painless. One immediate change I noted was that the dashboard lists all unmoderated comments and has a decent interface for viewing them. I noted immediately that this blog had five comments I didn't even know about. I'm wondering if they were there and I just never went to the "Moderate Comments" section, or if some bug had kept them hidden even on that menu.

I thought nobody read my blog and here were several different comments from people other than my close family. There were two comments from J.D., one on my post about Ferguson-Florissant School District and another post about Olivia's adventure in the supermarket late one night. I also had a comment on my post from last summer when I created the website for Ferguson Christian Church from our former Youth Minister, Nikomas Perez. I also got a comment on one of my posts from a coworker from MonsterCommerce, Janet Lackey thanking me for linking to her site, which I was all too thrilled to do.

Most exciting to me was a comment from an old best friend, Jeff Kirchhofer, who I've been thinking of getting back in touch with for the longest time. What bugs me most about this comment thing is that he posted a comment way back in January of this year and I am only finding out about it now. Don't I look like a jerk? Oh well, I'm emailing him now.

Ferguson-Florissant School District

As of one week ago today, I ended my last day at MonsterCommerce. This past Monday, I began my new job as a webmaster for Ferguson-Florissant School District.

This is very new and I have been quite sad to leave all my friends and coworkers in Belleville.

I have really wanted to post a much longer entry, kind of a goodbye message to MC, though I want to see my old friends again really soon. But the real problem is that I can't really get out the words, through distraction or lack of time.

The new job is treating me pretty well and I'm easing into it pretty quickly. I'm working most of the time on an internal site that is being used marginally, but will eventually become both the internal and external web site.

I'll post more later, both about where I've been and where I'm going.

Update (2006/12/14): To answer J.D. in the comments below (that I just noted today), I am going to post two quick screenshots of a before and after of the Ferguson-Florissant School District website. The new site is hosted at Schoolwires at - http://fergflor.schoolwires.com/ - and the old site was at - http://www.fergflor.org/ - however, the old site redirects (using Javascript) to the new site. If you try and load the old site you won't likely see it unless you tweak your browser a little (users of Firefox's Developer's toolbar, I'm talking to you).

Old

New

Oh and hey, I probably need some help, but from a licensed therapist. Thanks, J.D.!

Saying Goodbye to MonsterCommerce

The following was posted in a company-wide newsletter yesterday. I'm such a baby but it made me want to cry.

Tech Support wants to wish long-time Monster Jim Arconati the very best in his future endeavors. Jim's last day is this Thursday. He will be taking a Web Administrator position with the Ferguson-Florissant school district, which is three minutes from his house. His contribution to Support and customer service has been very much appreciated as well as working on the JumpStart program since its inception late in 2005. Best of luck ArcoJedi!

Network Solutions

As I have known for about a week or so now, the company I work for, MonsterCommerce, is being acquired by Network Solutions. I couldn't mention it much outside my immediate family as the information was under wraps until it could be properly announced in a formal press release. I've been writing this blog post for a few days, but couldn't publish it until now.

While I was initially unsure how to react to the news, it was broken to my coworkers and I well. There are always 'after-school special' stories about the family whose dad works for the small company that got bought up by the big company and now he's being laid off. But that is not what is going to happen here.

First off, I have been assured by all members of MonsterCommerce management that there will be no layoffs. The company is also not being moved and will continue to be located in the St. Louis Area. All of the leaders of the company will remain in their same place. Realistically, not much is going to change.

Why did Network Solutions do this? Basically, from my vantage point it would appear that Network Solutions was simply wanting to have a bigger play in the ecommerce software market. However, all of their current ecommerce, design and optimization packages were services resold from other companies. They could have created an entirely new division from scratch and attempted to compete in an already crowded market. Or they could incorporate an up-and-coming leader and put the full weight of the Network Solutions brand behind the experts.

That is exactly what they have done and I for one could not be happier. Obviously there will most likely be some changes, but mostly the changes are going to mean that we are going to have a lot more money and tools behind what we do. For instance, they are looking to hire about 170+ people by this time next year. That will more than double our already crowded house of around one-hundred.

We are also going to get access to better monitoring and testing tools and the full resources of the NS infrastructure and budget.

For more information on either company, go to Network Solutions or MonsterCommerce. You can also check out the links below.

MonsterCommerce & Network Solutions