Saving My Seedlings
by Amy Stevens Adams
As John mentioned last week, we have planted a container garden on our back deck. I am just learning my way as a new gardener and therefore we have hired Fiona, who is an experienced container gardener to help get us going. She designed a beautiful vegetable garden for our planter. For more info about Fiona and our garden projects, you may read John’s article, titled The Container Gardener.
At the beginning of last weekend, Fiona called to warn me that there was a heavy rainstorm headed to the Cape that afternoon/evening and she was concerned about my fragile lettuce seedlings that had just begun to sprout (they were maybe only 1/8-1/4″ high so far). The garden was just planted earlier in the week, and she recommended that John and I find a stable way to cover the seeds before the rain started. On top of that we were expected to get strong winds so we needed something secure. Thankfully, John and I are excellent at solving problems when we work as a team. So we headed off to Lowes…
Unsure of what we were going to create, we came home with a mix of supplies; tarps, bamboo stakes, twine, a staple gun and staples.
Here is our garden in the rain before we started. It is populated with herbs and flowers that are already stable, however we needed the cover because we have lettuce, carrot and radish seeds that aren’t established yet in the soil. In a couple more weeks we won’t have to worry ‘too’ much about rainstorms once the seeds take root and we have actual plants.
So we started by protecting our seeds. We gently covered them with strips of paper towels (per Fiona’s recommendation) to keep the rain and water from ‘splashing’ them out of place.
Then we put down bamboo stakes around the perimeter of the planter, and one longer one in the middle (to create a run-off when when put the tarp over it).
Next we covered it with an 8′ x 10′ tarp (our planter is 8′ x 3′) and because of the strong wind that was expected, we had decided to staple the tarp down to the deck. We gave this part much thought. Because of the wind, we knew we couldn’t just tie the tarp down, or even try to weigh it down, it needed to be permanently secured. So we put a staple in about every 10″ around the base of the planter.
It did rain all through the night, and the following day our make-shift cover was still in place! We used needle nose pliers to remove the staples, with little to no damage to the tarps and no damage to the wood. Now we can reuse the tarps and stakes if we encounter another big storm before the plants are mature. I’ll post more updates of my garden as it grows and flourishes.
I hope our solution can help anyone else who may have the same dilemma. Happy Planting!
-Amy Stevens Adams of Cape Cod Branding
New WordPress Mobile Site
by Amy Stevens Adams
In a week of exciting developments, this is no exception. CCBbuzz now has a mobile site! What does this mean for you? Well, if you use an iPhone (like J0hn & I do) or an iPod Touch then you can access our blog in ‘mobile’ format. Accessed easily by going to www.ccbbuzz.com on your iPhone, this gets you right to the important content on our blog and helps it load faster, all while still offering necessities like ‘search’ and the WP login. We are very pleased to offer this cool feature to our readers. This post will tell you why, & HOW we implemented the mobile site.
First, our ‘why’. We had decided to take our blog in a slightly new direction starting June 1st, one that focuses more on bite-sized chunks of information. We thought about what is important to us and realized that quick, easy-to-read snippets of info that teach us something in less than 5 minutes is what we like to see/read. Therefore, we think our readers would like the same. This goes hand-in-hand with the new mobile site. Now you can access our blog while you’re [waiting in line, grabbing lunch, in a taxi/on the train, waiting for a client, etc]. It is streamlined and brief. Add to that our love of Apple products and we have a winner!
Now the ‘HOW’. I’ve wanted to do a mobile site for a while, but had put it at the bottom of my to-do list, thinking it would be uber hard. Not so! By chance yesterday, I found a WordPress plugin, created by Dale Mugford & Duane Storey called WPtouch. What an amazing find! 5 minutes later we had a CCB mobile site! If you’re a WordPress user it’s simple, download the plugin and you’re done.
On top of the basics, you can customize some features. In your WordPress Dashboard, if you go to Settings > WPtouch, you’ll find a page for customization. It is fairly self-explanatory. I spent about an hour playing around with the different options; changing something, looking at it on my iPhone, changing it again, etc. The main things I did were to match the CCB colors on the Header of the page (this is done by entering your hex codes in the “Style and Colors” section), and I uploaded a custom icon for our homepage (the CCB bee).
The most time consuming part for me was creating the icon. I did it in Fireworks. I started with the infamous rounded-square that all iPhone apps use. I made ours CCB blue and put our new bee image in the middle. Then to finish, I added the rounded reflection (the smile-line on the top 1/3 of the square). Once finished, I sized the image down to 60 x 60 and saved it as a .png. The reason to leave it as a png is so the background can be transparent and the rounded corners won’t sit against a square background. All in all, it took me about an hour to get the icon perfect.
From there, you can upload the image on the WPtouch settings page (Settings > WPtouch in the WP dashboard). I had a bit of an issue at first. I attempted to save my image to my desktop and then upload it. This won’t work. Your image needs to be saved in wp-content/uploads/wptouch/custom-icons/. I didn’t have the folders “uploads/wptouch/custom-icons” in my WP folder, so I created them, saved my image there and uploaded the files using FTP (I use Dreamweaver). Once I had done that, I didn’t have any issue uploading the new icon on the WPtouch settings page. Once it was saved, I set my ‘default’ image to my newly uploaded icon. Now we have our cute bee as the icon instead of the default image. 
I recommend a mobile site, specifically WPtouch to anyone with a WP blog who wants to add convenience for their readers.
Oh, and if you’re curious how to take a screenshot of your iPhone… it’s simple.
1. Go to the page you want and line it up the way you want
2. Hold down the ‘Home’ button (the round button under the screen)
3. While still holding down the ‘Home’ button, press the ‘Sleep/Off’ button (the long skinny button on the top of the phone)
This will capture a screenshot and save it in the Photo gallery on your phone. You can download them to your computer the next time you sync.
That’s it. Hopefully you learned lots of cool info in less than 5 minutes!
-Amy Stevens Adams of Cape Cod Branding
The Key to Successful Business? Partnership.
by Amy Stevens Adams
As John has mentioned previously, partnership has been key for us with Cape Cod Branding. Combined, we are able to achieve more than we would separately, and our success isn’t just two-fold, it’s exponential. We often refer to ourselves as ‘PB & J’. Consider this, alone Peanut Butter is about a 4 on the scale of 1-10, and Jelly is likely a 1 or 2. Put them together and you have a sandwich that’s a 10. It’s the same with us, we’re a 10. Working together, we can accomplish the same as three, four and even five people, simply because we brainstorm so fast and come to conclusions and solutions with amazing speed.
Part of this is because John and I are able to add the ‘missing components’ to each other’s half-formed ideas and come up with something that’s original and amazing. The other part is that we are very similar in character, in that we are always thinking, evolving and learning. We are birds of a feather and we compliment each other well. This is crucial to a working partnership. John and I are both intelligent, ambitious people, but we will both freely admit that alone we don’t accomplish even half of what we can together. It is quite an amazing dynamic. We know that together, success is inevitable and failure is impossible.
When John and I first met, our friendship was strengthened by us both being small business owners; John as a Systems Engineer, and I a Wedding Cake Designer. It was great to have someone else who understood what it’s like in the lonely world of entrepreneurship. We had both come to realize that for business owners, the highs are very high, and the lows are extremely low. It’s great to have a sympathetic ear.
We soon learned that we work extremely well together, compliment each other strongly… and our business partnership was formed. Prior to meeting John, I felt that the best working environment for me was to be alone. I have always been a ‘loner’ so to speak, and have usually found that others hold me back when I’m wanting to move forward so quickly that they just literally can’t keep up. After meeting John and working with him, I realize that it’s just a matter of finding the right business partner.
In John’s post Snow & the Snowball Part III, he mentions the concept of ‘Marrying Up’. This can be applied to any relationship (marriage, friendship, business partnership, etc). Here’s a recap of the theory; in any relationship it’s important to feel that you’ve found someone who makes you a better person and challenges you to be your best. You need to feel like that person helps you to be the person you truly are and they allow you to shine. This means that your partner (in any sense of the word), builds you up, supports you, gives you credit for your work/ideas, listens to your ideas and energizes you. You feel like you can get more done with them than without, you work quickly and accomplish daunting tasks with ease, and you compliment each other’s strengths and weaknesses. In general, they are perfectly matched with you and together you keep things moving forward.
John compares us to a couple sine waves. When he’s up, I’m down, and vice versa. However, together we balance each other out and pull each other to the stable center.
What to avoid in a business partner?
Stay far away from people who hold you back, belittle you, beat you down, take credit for you work, or try to keep you from succeeding. This is lobster behavior. Lobsters pull each other down, thinking that is the only way to the top of the pile.
Your ideal partner should know that if you light someone else’s candle, yours doesn’t extinguish, quite the opposite, the two flames together make a stronger flame.
You’ll know when you’ve met a good partner, much like people instinctively know when they’re in love. However, if you have any doubts, consider the following;
- Is your business partner negative and convinced the two of you will fail or do they keep you positive, motivated and focused?
- Does he/she drain your energy and make you tired and worn out or are you excited and energized to work with them?
- Are they pushing you down to try to boost themselves up or do they brag about your stellar abilities and how fortunate they are to have a partner like you?
- Do you trust them?
- Do you have a gut feeling that they would hurt you for their own gain or do you feel safe and secure that they would never take advantage of you?
- Are they secretly working with clients/projects, taking your credit or do they relinquish control and allow it to be a true ‘partnership’?
The concept of ‘Marrying Up’ is very important to your success. It should be noted that if you feel you’ve found a business partner that is ‘better’ than you and you’re all giddy thinking that you’ve found someone who will pull you up and make you a better person too, by default….. well, I assure you that they feel the same about you. Marrying Up doesn’t mean that one person in the partnership is better than that other, it is equal. You will both feel like you’ve hit the business-partner-jackpot. I know this first-hand. It is simply because you both fill in the gaps that the other is missing. It’s a perfect yin & yang situation. I know with absolute certainty that I wouldn’t be the co-founder of a blog that has had 60,000+ visitors in 10 weeks of existence if it wasn’t for John’s insightful writing, and his ability to keep me motivated on the ‘down’ days. In my eyes, he IS the blog and without him, this would be nothing.
My challenge to you is to find your ‘Jelly’. That person that makes all your ideas come to life. Someone that you eagerly meet every morning and get excited with when you talk about future progress and goals. Make sure it’s someone you’re in sync with and you will be amazed at how your business flourishes. The right partnership can bring you success in a fraction of the time it would take by yourself!
-Amy Stevens Adams of Cape Cod Branding
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