Dolly Parton's Imagination Library -- Don't Miss Registering Your Kids!

This isn't really a review, but if you stumble upon this article and help spread the word about the "Imagination Library," well, it was well worth my writing about it.  I hope your family, friends and neighbors benefit from learning about a way to get free children's books mailed directly to your house.  Yes, it's true -- free books delivered to your kids through a national literacy advocacy program.



Just a few of the books our kids have received from Dolly Parton's Imagination Library this past year.

Strewn within a pile of magazines, bills, junk mail, and cryptic statements regarding health insurance arrives a wrapped package with your child's name officially printed on the mailing label, adding some excitement and pleasure to the otherwise blah business of life's daily postal encounter.  Alas, a diverse collection of many different books to enlighten your kids awaits -- many of these titles you may find in the library, or in book stores, others you may never find on public shelves.  Either way, you and your kids will be glad you registered -- classics and new stories, hand-drawn and photographed storybooks of all themes ready to encourage them to read more while you guide them through the stories.

If you have children, you really should go onto Dolly Parton's Imagination Library website  (http://www.imaginationlibrary.com/) and register them to receive free children's books.  The United Way of the Black Hills out here in South Dakota is an affiliate partner that we encountered in a public Rapid City event who gave us some literature about the program.  What a great cause -- and story.  Way back in 1996, America's own sweetheart, Dolly Parton, launched this literacy program to help kids in East Tennessee.  It has now grown to over 679,000 registered kids.  A heartfelt success story in a way that mirrors Dolly's own story of humble beginnings.

You can also visit their online store, they're always looking for businesses to sponsor them and their website also features Dolly's latest book, "Dream More", along with T-shirts and other paraphernalia they sell to help support the cause.  Please spread the word, and this link www.imaginationlibrary.com, to your friends and circles.

The more children read early on, the more prepared they will be later for life's challenges.  As a country, we all benefit when kids can read, so anytime we can encourage literacy, the better off we will all be.  Early reading skills lead to children being more capable to learn on their own, which empowers them to teach themselves.  It's also true that strong reading skills keep teenagers out of more trouble and they perform better in school.  Let's face it, kids are America's future, we need them to be smarter than we are.  In light of recent events, that might not be too hard, so let's encourage them to be A LOT smarter than we collectively as a country are now.  The more they can read for themselves, the more they can learn for themselves later and be more self-sufficient, skilled, dynamic, productive, marketable, innovative, and capable.  That's real progress.

UPDATE:   I think the database the Imagination Library uses could use some fixing up -- it seems sometimes people are receiving the same books at the same household if they have multiple children.  This could be an easy system update and save a lot of money in the future.  Please consider asking for some help -- I would be happy to look into this at no charge.

Side note:  Dolly, if you happen to be reading this article, we'd really love for you to sing our company's jingle....  I'm being serious.

- Aaron Belchamber

Need to Launch An Ecommerce Site Fast That Looks Clean and Professional? This Shopping Cart System Is Amazing at the Price of FREE!

Everyone wants to make money online.  Selling things is probably the easiest and clear-cut way to do this.  To sell effectively, you need a website that not only looks great, it must be reliable and secure.   I manage a few websites that net over $1 million in annual sales.  We are looking to fully redesign these ecommerce sites with the newest adaptive design and other technologies.  Being an "old-school" web programmer, the frameworks, templates and CMS's that have cropped up to assist businesses to launch a full-out web presence faster while looking better and being more reliable than ever, is quickly reaching its apex.  So much technology and innovation happen on the web so quickly, it's a bit overwhelming trying to live your life, do your job, and just keep up with all the changes and improvements.  The cycles of innovation are shortening and the lifespan of websites and designs are shortening even faster.

Your websites need to adapt to new devices.  If your website is not fully integrated to accommodate touch screens and tablets, you might as well start thinking about redesigning your website now.  More than 50% of your website visitors won't be using a mouse come late summer 2014.  The time to think about adapting and redesigning your web assets to improve your customer experience with your brand and increase your sales has long past.  It's better to react late than to stay the course with your outdated website with the small pull down buttons that most people on a tablet either won't be able to read or won't be able to click on.

Our team did some extensive research and decided to go with a shopping cart system and an easily-customizable theme.  We looked at all the options, including a bunch of free shopping cart systems.  The features in some communities are lacking, but we found Magento, www.magento.com, offered a "community" version that was full of features and affordable add-ons (or "plug-ins") that would reduce the SLDC (software development life cycle) from 3-4 months to less than a month.  We went with Magento and bought a theme pack from Envato.com that gave us the ground work already built within the Magento framework, saving us weeks of conceptual design phases.  Even though the customizable theme was less than $100, we still needed it to be adaptive so our website would look good on any device.  By the way, there are plenty of basic themes that look amazing on any device for the very low price of ..... free, you just have to look. 

We wanted some extra features with a particular design and style so we opted for a gorgeous template (I don't believe I'm saying this -- remember when "templates" looked so gaudy?  You could spot a template right when the page loaded?  Not any more.  Web developers, beware, if you're more of a web designer, you best refine your programming and database skills, because you will be going the way of graphic design for the print industry if you don't adapt....)  Anyway, it only took about 20 minutes to download the theme and install it into Magento.  It integrated seamlessly as you would hope, but probably not expect.  (I say "not expect" because that's when you usually get some cryptic error to only find out your web host doesn't allow you to change file permissions for certain directories in which case you should look for a new host.)  Speaking from experience, please make sure your web host accommodates Magento and ask for them to provide any guidelines in the case their server requires some changes to some files or settings before you go full bore into an install only to find out later you have to changes hosts or upgrade to a different server.

Magento's back end can be a little daunting, but there are tools that you can install to make life a little easier, including to help you automate the uploading of your products, images, and information in case you have a lot of SKUs and different product lines.  Depending on the size and scope of your online store, and the type of merchandise you have to offer, I would highly recommend saving the time and limited resources in the development process by setting up this free system instead of insisting your development team write it all from scratch.  I have developed plenty of websites from scratch -- the shopping cart, their back end and product databases, to the front end and full design from the ground up.  There is no need to reinvent the wheel when the open-source community has fully taken on the upkeep of these more labor and code-intensive (not to mention mundane) functions.  Imagine what you can accomplish by freeing up your business resources and the web talent around you to focus on more effective design, marketing, and performance!  You could treat your web development team to breakfast and boost morale instead.  (Sorry, subliminal message there, please ignore.)

Speaking of marketing, Magento is fully integrated with the big players in the industry.  Your website will end up high on searches very quickly, it's SEO performance index is astounding.  More people will find you faster because search engines trust sites that use Magento.  Setting up payments is as easy as plugging in your Pay Pal merchant account information, your Authorize.net, or whatever you use within minutes.  Magento handles many other tasks as well, such as customer log-ins, wish lists, customer reviews.  There are modules to help you "recover" abandoned carts.  Sales reports and everything you need to keep you up with accounting and tax records are built right in.

All these tools are managed through Magento's back end as an administrator and require very little actual web coding knowledge, though it would help tremendously if you had someone who could write PHP and knew CSS and HTML to refine pages and fix any issues that may arise.  There's so much to Magento, I couldn't begin to cover anything but the basics here.  I highly recommend visiting its website at www.Magento.com and learning more about the "Community" edition.  It's amazing what open source gives the masses access to.  Come to think of it, "open source" is the masses -- it's true empowerment for all, worldwide.  Long live open source code, the engine of innovation, the "Libertarians" of the web.

Need Trees? Lots of Trees?! Try the Arbor Day Foundation!

Once you buy a pass to any national park, you will start getting some interesting mailers.  Greenpeace.  No thanks, their approach towards environmentalism by demonizing capitalism is kind of disturbing to me.  The Smithsonian Institute.  We subscribed to their magazine, a very interesting read.

We then received some literature from the Arbor Day Foundation.  We learned you can become a member for only $20.  Another $15 and we bought ten saplings, baby trees, that were proper for our region of the country.  They arrived inside a single plastic bag in the mail a few months later.  The instructions were kind of vague, but they're trees.  You plant them in the ground.  Though there were 5 different trees in our package, they were color-coded but there was no print out explaining what each color meant.  Only later did I find this link that explained on their website what the colors meant.

We paid for 10 trees but only 9 arrived in the package.  Despite these few flaws, I think these trees will be an excellent value.  I say I think, only because it's only been six months since we followed the directions and planted them -- just in time for winter to come.  I want to share this information because no one else I've spoken with knew they could get baby trees from a respectable source for such an excellent value. 

I found the Arbor Day Foundation website was a plethora of interesting information all things regarding trees.  We all know trees are important, they also help property values. Trees aren't just good for the environment, they enhance your yard.  They provide shade, they prevent the ground eroding, they also attract and provide shelter for all sorts of wildlife.  Not to knock your local tree nursery, but if you have the patience to wait 3 or 4 years to watch a small sapling grow into the pretty picture in the Arbor Day Foundation brochure, remember that you paid only about $3 for that tree which has matured to fetch $30, $50, maybe even over $100 for each 5 to 10 gallon tree it has grown into.

Try to get that kind of return on ANY investment!  From the perspective of a sound financial investment, investing in a membership and some trees from the Arbor Day Foundation outperforms any stock value or investment most people will ever see in their lifetime.  Provided you are willing to be patient and invest in some water and a little fertilizer.

If only making your investments in your 401K grow that quickly would be that easy, and that straight-forward.  The best part is you don't have to wait 30 years until you retire to enjoy the many tangible benefits each and everyday from owning trees that, unlike your investments, will continue to grow well into the future.

Don't Envy Me for My Envi Electric Heater

The Envi heater, centrally mounted at the bottom level of our home.
Sure, it puts out heat, but so does our toaster.

This is a short review on the Envi electric heater, but first, I cant' help but provide a quick commentary on the state of our nation's energy infrastructure and the ridiculous, economic ironies it operates within and how it affects our pocketbooks.  No "smart grid" will be able to fix this fundamental flaw.

To generate electricity, we burn coal and oil in order to boil water that builds enough pressure to spin generator turbines that produce electricity that eventually is drawn to our home to operate our countless appliances to serve our needs, including generating heat to keep us warm.  Sound efficient?  Times that by 100 million homes.  You'd think there'd be a more efficient way we all could heat our homes in the 21st century.

Natural gas eliminates a lot of these physio/logistical inefficiencies since we capture the heat by burning it where it is needed and we don't lose energy by converting the energy into something else first (electricity) then convert it back into heat in order to stay warm those cold winter nights.  Using more natural gas is inherently much more efficient because of this incomparable advantage over electricity where heat is generated on demand as heat into heat and not first converted into electricity, to heat our homes.  That said, natural gas needs almost as much infrastructure as electricity to deliver its energy to the masses through millions of feet of pipes, containers, valves, etc.

Just a thought, now I'm really digressing from a boring product interview:  If only we could buy something at the supermarket with our food -- a "Box of Heat" which only we would buy as needed or in bulk like at Costco's, as we choose, eliminating the need of building and maintaining a separate distribution system and infrastructure.  I guess the closest thing out there is kerosene or propane tanks -- if only they weren't so heavy and dangerous (and more efficient).  Something that is completely safe to transport that weighed about the same as a gallon of milk that could heat a home for a couple of weeks.  Imagine, supermarket priced competition to heat our homes.

Still, lugging the "Box of Heat" to the house and inserting it into the centralized home heating unit still wouldn't be as convenient as just plugging a heater to an electric outlet and just turning a dial -- kind of like the many portable electric heaters available on the market today.  (Well, there's Culligan for water delivery, so why not a "Box of Heat" delivery service, then?  Since there would be no infrastructure needed to maintain and you were willing to pay a convenience fee for delivery, the cost of the "Box of Heat" would still deliver heat to consumers at much lower prices.  Okay, back to the product review....)  One of the electric heaters you may choose to look into is the Envi electric heater, which is sold online and advertises heavily in magazines, like "Popular Science" and the web.  It's a radiator with no moving parts, which ensures that most of the electricity it consumes goes to producing a slow and steady heat.  I like that efficiency model, it makes sense.

.... but I say "slow and steady heat", because without a fan to circulate the heat, it takes a long time to heat up an area compared to a normal space heater with a fan.  You basically need to keep it on most of the time you want a room kept warm, but without a thermostat, the cryptic control dial up top doesn't make it very practical if you leave it unattended, like to go to sleep, or if you have anything more useful to do with your time than stare at your new wall-mounted heater.  More than once I walked into the room the Envi was heating and the room was sweltering hot, so hot I had to open a window.  So much for the money saved in less moving parts.

You can mount the Envi heater easily enough on a wall, but the cord dangles, even when using the clips at the bottom that are supposed to hold the power cord, you almost have to fold the cord and snake it awkwardly to fit it underneath.  Then, it's hard to see the clips to fasten the cord in the clips to begin with.  It doesn't detract and hide the power cord well -- not ideal if little kids are around, who will inevitably pull the cord out and be exposed to a bare electric plug because they pulled the cord out of the socket.

Speaking of children around the heater, there is a single on/off button in the top front right side with a red LED light, inviting kids to push it on and off.  Since it's not better hidden up top like the dial and it's more clear what its function is than the dial, they're bound to notice it sooner or later.  The heater may be able to be mounted on any wall, low and out of sight, but it lacks basic tamper-proof measures for children.  You think you had shut the heater off because it's a warm day?  Think again!  More than once, we found the Envi heater on, pumping out heat, while the A/C was running, trying to keep our home cool.  In South Dakota, it's not atypical for the weather to vary 60 degrees in a single day, just in case you're wondering.

It all makes as much sense as our country's energy infrastructure, or buying a heater without a thermostat.  In short, the Envi heater is good for one thing -- augmenting heating your home on the coldest nights in that room that never seems to get enough heat.  Instead of installing a heater in that area, however, might I suggest you put in better insulation, or use that cooler room as your wine cellar/workout room?