Erik’s Blog: Board Shorts and Business Suits

I have been busy working behind the scenes on my newest site SprintRants.com and neglecting several posts that I have wanted to publish here. However, through my new site I learned a little php, a little MySql, and a lot of Wordpress. To give you a little background on Sprint Rants, I am a customer of SprintPCS cell phone service and not as satisfied as I could be, to say the least. I have been going through a battle for the last 2 months dealing with a phone that doesn’t work, customer service that can’t understand me, and local stores “Sprint Stores,” that have no clue what the main company is doing.

As I sat in a few of the stores, both here in Hawaii and on the mainland in Wisconsin I noticed that almost every person sitting in the store or walking out was disgruntled. Cursing the company or the service these people would walk out and let it out, let it all out. It got me to thinking that if these people were like me they needed somewhere to get it out. Friends just get sick of hearing how junky your service is and they begin to tell you to get another phone provider. But you know that isn’t an option because almost every service has something wrong with them.

That was when I came up with the idea for a sounding board of sorts. People could come to get updates on sprint offerings to see if there is a loop hole somewhere that they didn’t know about to make up for all the extra charges they see on their bills. It’s also place where I would give my week to week dealings with sprint and their customer service, or lack there of, just to keep you amused. Most importantly the site is for people to just come and leave their rants about how poorly they have been treated or not treated and read others rants and not so raves about Sprint.

In the process I was able to learn a few things about Wordpress, php, and mysql. I figured out how to use some plugins for a static front page and how the page hierarchy works making each page unique based on a specific template. The most important thing I started into was php and how it works with MySql. I was able to create a new field on the comment form, a new field on the wp-comments mysql database, and how to write a few functions to deal with the new field, a comment title.

I plan on writing a nice little outline about how I did that so people who don’t really know php or mysql could add the same field as me or to learn how easy it is to work on the files associated with Wordpress.

My 12 sites in 12 months is on it’s way and I continue to work on this site as well as Aloha Update in order to reach my 500,000 visitors a month goal. Hope you all are working towards your goals, and sorry if I kept some of you wondering what I’ve been up to.