• Shorten Links
  I love knowing when my links get clicked on, therefore I want all my links to be shortened by Bit.ly.
• Backup My Images
  I want all my picture uploads to Twitter, to have a small preview on the site as part of my Live Feed, this would also be a great opportunity for it to be uploaded to my Flickr account. So I want it to do that.
• Reduce Redundant Linking
  I need my Live Feed to know when not to post a Twitter update, so the Live Feed widget will also be the one to post to Twitter when I create a new blog post.
• Integrate with Lightwindow
  If I have a link coming in from YouTube I want to show a little screenshot of the video and if you click on it I want it to open a lightwindow box to play the video. I don’t want to lose my traffic to YouTube, they already get enough of that. I’ll include a link under the image to go to the YouTube page.
• Help Me Monetize
  My blog is a work of love. I get nothing for running the blog and it costs me a few bucks a year to maintain it. If I link to an item I’d love for my widget to automatically update the link to my affiliate link on those sites. I’m pretty sure others would appreciate it too once the widget is public.

If you have any other ideas for the widget please let me know. I’m pretty sure those features I’ve listed cover my wish-list in a plugin, but probably not everybody’s. The widget will obviously be open-source and available through the WordPress website once it is released. I just wanted to jot my thoughts down and hopefully get some feedback. This project still does not have a name.

Let me remind you, the report I was asked to write was completely made up.
I wear various hats here at the office and today I had to wear my “I wonder what they could possibly be running on their side and how can we ask them to fix it with minimum amount of impact to their development resources” hat.

The information I had was quite limited:

1. Medium size company
2. Their products that need to be shipped
3. They take orders online
4. Approval of orders may take up to 48 hours

The problems we were facing were quite simple:

1. Reporting is cumulative ( x orders yesterday, no details or timestamps)
2. No way to differentiate between orders
3. They seem to be having a hard time to make these reports

I immediately started thinking how I would make this system work if I had to build it from scratch. There has to be a way that you can identify the users because you need to know who to ship the product to, and there also needs to be a way to contact the users who’s credit cards didn’t work so you can re-market to them.For their purposes they needed a reporting system that allowed at least for these three things:

1. Clean order data for marketing purposes ( x products sold in the last y hours!)
2. Detailed order data for advertising partners ( sale x at this time was prompted by y partner with parameters z)
3. Sales only data for fulfillment ( ship x product to y address)

They were missing a way to give detailed information to the advertising partners in a way that did not give personal information to the advertising partner and also allowed the advertising partner to see if their campaigns were working or not. There also seems to be no way to add this functionality anytime soon which makes things quite complicated.

In my report I expressed the lack of these flexibilities would essentially make their system a Straw Shuttle, an idea, that while makes sense if you don’t see the whole picture, is fundamentally flawed.

Now we have a lot to work with them on, to get this reporting working for everyone, or had, since somebody forwarded the email and they didn’t quite care for my comparison of their ‘technology’ to a Straw Shuttle.

No more linking to The Onion stories on my email reports, understood.