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Lee Taylor

Changing Things UP.

Lee Taylor · Jul 2, 2010 · 10 Comments

“A fanatic is one who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject.“
– Winston Churchill

I write to you all out of ambition and hopefulness. Though I also write this in a time of change and adjustment. Over a period of recent dialogues, ideas, challenges, and even joys – I am announcing today as my last day working with Elias. One might wonder why (what seems to be the sudden) change? It actually isn’t sudden. Quite the opposite, actually. Let me give you a little background on Elias and the decision.

I had the great privilege of connecting with Josh and Eric years ago when their media company produced a mini-documentary on part of my story years ago. And for me, a privilege it was indeed. Years after, I decided that I wanted to be more purposeful in whom I shared my work-life, ideas, ambitions, and desire for integrity, transparency, top-notch quality, and desire to be progressively forward-thinking. The birth of Elias began, while Eric Clark and I decided to try at least one project together. With a fantastic experience on the first project together, we decided to pursue more, specifically with Magento near it’s 0.8 beta phase.

From that point, we worked hard until Josh came about a year later. We’ve grown into a full-force virtual company that exclusively specializes in the eCommerce (specifically the Magento framework). Some time after, we had the unique (and stellar) opportunity to connect with Luke Whitson, and connected so well that we all were in favor of him joining the Elias team with his skill-set and perspective. Since then, the four partners in Elias have extended our breadth of influence on the web into the Drupal, WordPress, and Magento communities (while even having built some of our own apps in the process).

We’ve focused heavily (and endlessly) on simplifying processes, efficient communication, improving the client experience, and nailing down the best way to manage/develop full-scale projects and integrations. I’ve worked in multiple roles (as much of the team has) such as: lead programmer, project manager, client interaction, we all took part in internal strategy, business development, and overall problem-solving.

As the years have gone by, I love the problem-solving, but have acknowledged amidst the years that the combination of coding and working virtually (with my personality) preclude me from leading social initiatives with culture, connecting people together, problem-solving in and outside of code, and remaining mindful of people – which are key for my well-being. My relational side has been somewhat neglected, and so I’m changing the pace, switching the role(s) I’ll be responsible for, and have decided to switch gears with Elias in doing so.

I intend to spend this next season pursuing a few other ideas my wife and I have, working with local partners and business in a consulting role, leadership and community development, and allowing me to become more relational (and less virtual) in these events. I have big dreams, and hope to position myself with more alignment to these aspirations by making this next move.

I can say it has been a privilege working alongside the fine group of Elias Interactive.

I am definitely still a doer, but I am definitely, also, still a dreamer of good and hopeful things. I want to incorporate giving into the next initiative I start up or join. And so I anticipate what is to come in this next season.

Should you ever have a need or simply want to connect, I’m here: doer [at] leetaylordoes [dot] com (skype: leetaylordoes)

Best to you all. It has been a great ride.
Lee Taylor

mel+lee

Dreaming In Code

Lee Taylor · May 24, 2010 · Leave a Comment

I’ve had a string (play on word there with a reread) of dreams where I was actually (and unrestfully) thinking of a creative way to twitter about my dream. Something like…

$_dreaming->inCode($_unfortunately->getAwake());

…is what I’ve got so far under the zzz’s.

Just unfortunate I can’t control my dreams any better than this.

Meet Our New Developer

Lee Taylor · Apr 28, 2010 · 1 Comment

Walking downstairs, I found my dog (and good buddy), Bentley, snuggling up close to our laptop. Were he human, I just wonder if he might want to be a developer 🙂

Bentley: Snuggling Close With Code

Screencasts with Jing and Screencast.com

Lee Taylor · Mar 23, 2010 · 1 Comment

Over the past year, we have been learning some valuable lessons regarding communication. As we’re all involved with the web, communication without “connecting” with the intended party isn’t really communicating at all. We’ve been working to apply this into as many areas as possible within the communication avenues that exist between our team members and clients each day. As an example, we’ve started documenting project requirements (mostly business-uses) via screencasts to communicate within a project.

Josh (Colter) recommended we start using the tools at Screencast.com and Jing. I started today, and am very pleasantly surprised at the ease of these screencast tools. Though I haven’t unraveled all of the features these both bring, I was able to download the software from Jing to record screencasts, as well as the uploader desktop tool from Screencast.com. Within minutes I had created a screencast, uploaded it, and shared it within a project for others to see with nearly perfect quality.

We’ll plan to begin using these for all of our modules, installation overviews, knowledge base support, and other areas to help communicate (and educate) our customers effectively.

Should any of you have another streamlined process or even general thoughts on using multi-media within the work you do, please do share. All is welcome.

Magento Issue: Checkout Redirect With SSL Installation And Sub-Domain

Lee Taylor · Jan 27, 2010 · 3 Comments

Considering the woes that can come with installing a SSL certificate. Yesterday, we ran into an issue with a client that I wanted to note, just in case anyone else may benefit from the scenario and solution.

logo

Scenario

We had the Magento integrated with SVN and have a post-commit hook that auto-deploys into our root directory on the server, using great server services from sites as ServerMania Montreal Data Center online. We originally had the httpdocs folder and the httpsdocs folder mirroring each other so that the httpsdocs folder would handle SSL (https) requests and the httpdocs would handle all other non-SSL requests.

As we were installing our SSL certificate, we changed the base_url and the secure_base_url to the appropriate (specific) URLs in place of the {{unsecure_url}} and {{secure_url}} generic values. All of a sudden, as soon as SSL installation was complete, the frontend would no longer transition from the “shopping cart” (url: http://cart.crankbrothers.com/checkout/cart/) into the “checkout” (url: https://cart.crankbrothers.com/checkout/onepage/). The checkout URL would redirect back into the shopping cart.

Solution

We realized that the sub-domain and shared docroot setup (httpdocs and httpsdocs, together) could be creating the issue. Thus, we simplified our setup (cheers Eric Dennis) to make httpdocts the separate docroot for both HTTP and HTTPS requests.

Game, set, match. Problem solved. By the way, you should check out Crank Brothers for a working example 🙂

Hope this helps save time for someone else!

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