So when I called Randy Davidson, our President & CEO, today to wish him a happy birthday I asked him how old he was getting. He couldn’t remember. He literally said “Let’s see. 1971. Uh…Um…I’m 37!” LOL. It’s that age, I guess. When you stop counting years and start counting grey hairs.

We decided to do a little video to wish Randy a happy birthday:

So Adam set up a “Dog Pictures” category so I figured I’d use it.  Since I work out of a home office for the most part, everyday is “bring your dog to work day”.  Dogen, our 7 year old English Mastiff, usually sits right beside my desk.  He pretty much has to be where you are.  He’s 225 pounds and makes a great guard dog.  I have a two minute rule for thieves.  Anything you can get in and take in two minutes flat is yours.  After that I can’t guarantee your safety. 

We recently made an announcement about adding a new forum at PrintPlanet dealing with lean manufacturing issues.  In addition to Cory Smith moderating, we’ve added David Dodd who will both moderate and lead discussions on issues like 5S, TPM, Kaizen, and others.

Visit the new Lean Manufacturing forums

This should prove a great venue to discuss and learn about lean manufacturing and how it can help your business.

We apologize for the site outage and inconvenience it may have caused yesterday. A problem occurred with our master database server that took some time to rectify. We were able to get everything back to normal late last night. There are a great many technical details that the guys worked through (thanks Wes and Adam). If you want to know what they were you can contact them directly.

Thanks for your patience and support through the downtime. We really appreciate all the thoughtful emails and phone calls wondering what was going on. It’s great to have a supportive membership and so many fans of WhatTheyThink.com! It’s clear what we do is essential to your businesses. We’re working to make sure interruptions like this are few and far between - as well as short!

If there is ever any issues with the main site or any other WhatTheyThink site, be sure to check this blog for the latest information.

We are experiencing some server issues which has caused us to take the main site at members.whattheythink.com offline. We are working on it and should have it back to normal soon. Check here for updates.

12pm: We have identified the problem and are working on restoring our primary database. We expect to have this accomplished in the next few hours.

5pm: We have finished checking the data integrity of our last database snapshot from 2AM this morning, and have identified the issue that caused the initial failure. Reviewing failure points and taking appropriate action to fix them. The site should be back up within the next 3 hours.

10PM: The site is back online. We are looking into the cause of the database failure that brought the site down today.

I just did:

I actually got 7!  Our friends and partners over at Bronto sent them along to welcome us and thank us for our business.  We just signed on with them to outsource all of our email efforts.  We’ll still keep a great many email functions in house, but all of our newsletters will be sent using the Bronto system.

We did this for many reaons.  The first was deliverability.  Our in-house solution was just at the point where we grew out of it, quite simply.  We’ve had some issues with people getting their newsletters and since we know our emails are an essential part of people not only getting their industry information but also connecting to us and the website, we felt an investment was in order.  So after many months of due diligence, we chose Bronto to partner with for email services. Their system also provides better statistics and tracking, which will help us make the newsletters more useful as we watch what really interests people.

I personally feel pretty good about it because Bronto embodies many of the same things that I think makes us a success.  They are creative, hard working, and they also like to mix in some fun.  The dinosaur in the mail backs me up on this.  They even have a special email address I can send a photo of “Bronto” in different places I visit.  Fun.  Too bad I didn’t have one before drupa or I could have sent them plenty of great “German brat eating Bronto” photos.

So we’re happy to be partnering with another great company in the online media space and look forward to many good things to come.  Hopefully you as a member will see our emails get better and better.

I got an interesting email from a PrintPlanet member today with a really good question and suggestion.  Our PrintPlanet community forum has been really strong with prepress workers.  This is not surprising as they are on computers most of the day and have Internet access.  I won’t speak about the amount of spare time they have or don’t have.  Some may be more productive than others. 

Here is part of his note:

I think, however, that press operators have a lot to add to the forum.  Practical, actionable information that can help other [struggling] printers.  Sometimes it’s just the little things in the press room - little tips which can benefit another printer.

So how to get them on the forums?  Pretty tough call.  However, perhaps something as simple (maybe not the most effective) way is to ask prepress operators to pass the URL on to the press operators in their shops to try and get them on the forums.  Just a single post or a once a month post…

It’s a long shot…but would make for some excellent practical discussions!

So I thought I’d put this out there.  What are some ideas on how we can get press operators more involved in discussions over at PrintPlanet?

Whoops! We goofed. Our daily list members were inadvertently sent the weekly digest version today. Sorry about that. Though the weekly is an informative newsletter, you should be up to speed on everything in it because you get the daily.

This was a mistake on our part and you are NOT subscribed to the weekly. We just hit the wrong button!

What? Another WhatTheyThink blog?

Yeah, that’s what we thought at first. But this blog will be different. Instead of focusing on industry news and information, this blog is about WhatTheyThink the company. Follow this space to get news about what we are thinking, working on, or struggling with. You’ll get updates from the people who make WhatTheyThink tick.

We plan on sharing all kinds of things that didn’t make sense to put anywhere else but on a blog like this.

Be sure to comment, as we love hearing from our members and industry colleagues.

So now…back to work!