Last month I wrote about idea fatigue and how, if not contained, your new ideas can rot away creativity. But what about when you work on other peoples ideas?

Creative freelancers, employees, contractors and consultants are all expected to take someone else’s idea and turn it into something tangible.

The key point here is how do you apply the same level of enthusiasm and passion that you give to your OWN ideas to an idea that is ‘alien’?

Truth is, you can’t. And this is very important because it gives you an opportunity to see the other side of the coin.

Your idea sucks

Think about the cynical nay-sayers and head shakers that often shoot down your own precious ideas (sob…) for a moment. This is how experienced and professional freelancers, employees, contractors and consultants should approach a new idea that is presented to them.

Your idea sucks Credit: akeeris

This brand of people are some of the most valuable you can meet because they offer a reality check. To be a good freelancer, employee, contractor or consultant then you simply have do this when working with other peoples ideas or the idea will most likely fail.

Sure, you may want the money that goes with the job and you probably want to be able to put your precious skills into action and get some experience – but you have to face the fact that as a paid hand you will never, ever have the same emotional connection with the idea as the person who originated it.

Caring about other peoples ideas

Thank about this example – did John Sculley really care about the ideas and vision that Steve Jobs had for Apple when he took the reigns as CEO? Evidence suggests not because he famously fired Jobs from Apple (the company Jobs founded). Sculley clearly didn’t not care about the future of the information age, he just wanted to sell more white boxes.

Credit startupquote.com

History tells us this was a big mistake because without Jobs’ vision/passion and leadership Apple almost went under. They became boring and bland – not at all like the innovative and expanding company we see today with Jobs’ back in the driving seat.

Don’t get trapped in someone else’s idea

Many years ago (…sigh…) I worked with two guys who wanted to start their own online business. The core idea wasn’t anything I believed in or was passionate about but I stayed silent, this was a big mistake.

I was a yes man for the first few weeks of the project and spent a lot of time working on the business idea designing concepts and developing a basic mock-up system for them to play around with.

At this stage the invoices were piling up but the product was junk and I knew it but still, said nothing.

Everyone loves a yes man Credit: photostock

Eventually after a month of work I made my opinions clear to the clients and they actually agreed that the idea wasn’t as strong as they had initially thought.

As it turns out they had been following my lead as the only creative/technical member of the trio and hoping that I and I alone would be able to mature the idea for them.

This was a disaster for me but a lesson well learned. I never got paid for the work and now I always make sure to vocalise my opinions and fears to a potential client before its too late.

This morning a client emailed me to report that their website had been hacked. The site ran a WordPress theme I had designed a few months ago and wasn’t held on any of my own servers but I was confident that I could get it back online, I mean, I think I’ve seen most WordPress-related hacks in my time right wrong

Turns out the hack was pretty a sneaky malware re-direction that it only kicked in when a search engine query directed the user to the site.

This is especially sneaky as it means that the site owners who probably had the site in favorites or just typed in the domain would most likely never find the hack until it had been lurking for a while.

Investigation

The first thing I did was check the .htaccess and index.php files on the site. The .htaccess file looked fine, see:

So, I moved on…. I checked the database, nothing, the theme, all clean, the plugins, all the plugins, they were all clean. So what was it? I checked for malicious hidden files in the FTP folders I double checked the data I looked for anything  and everything and nothing came up.

Google was no help either, this hack seemed to have been reported many times but it had many different solutions and none of them relevant here.

So a few hours into the investigation I went back to the start and checked the .htaccess file again. My plan was to add my own scripts to replace the default WordPress mod_rewrite code and see if it gleaned any results.

Doh!

Upon checking the main .htaccess file a 2nd time I noticed something that wasn’t obvious before:

GAH!! That’s it. The hacker had done the simplest of things to cover his tracks! By adding a few 1000 lines of whitespace and indenting the code in the .htaccess file it was hidden from view! I didn’t even think to scroll around the file the first time around!

So here it is the hack in all its glory:

A very simple hack but very sneakily done.

Fix

After removing the code the site now seems fine. How did it get there?? I really don’t know. The site isn’t hosted on any of my servers and I’m not contracted to find this out, the server tech can deal with that one. And I’m not even sure if its a WordPress-related hack, I mean, the rest of the site was clean. Only the .htaccess file had been messed with.

So if your site is sending you to malware portals or fake virus scanners then check your .htaccess file and please, dig around a little. Don’t waste 2 hours looking for something that isn’t there

The WonderThemes WordPress Theme Marketplace has have 1 micro-sponsor ticket and 2 standard tickets on offer for this years WordCamp UK in Portsmouth. Winners will also get a WordCamp UK t-shirt and a very cool WonderThemes t-shirt as well as some other cool swag at the event.

You also get to meet me which is always a bonus.

To be in with a chance of winning just check out this blog post over at the WonderThemes site.

Today, Friday the 13th of May 2011, at 13:00 I finally opened up the WonderThemes WordPress theme marketplace for open registration, yey!

Shipping my first major product

Over the past 12 months I’ve worked on WonderThemes in my free time so this is a major project to finally push into the real world. I really should be ready to party right now but over the past couple of days I’ve pulled far too many late night sessions leaving me a little drained and run-down but inside I’m dancing!!!

There were times when I didn’t think the project would ever be finished. The evolution of the site from its original conception to final product is quite a story, one I may tell one day, but not today, today I’m just glad its launched and SO happy everything has come together.

The summer of ’09

WonderThemes may seem like a new project as I’ve kept it under wraps for quite some time but its rooted WAY back in the summer of 2009 at my first ever WordCamp. In fact some of the illustration work like the mascot and landscape images were finalised way back in June last year – its taken that long to knit the other pieces together.

Under the bonnet

The entire system is built on a WordPress Multisite configuration hosted by the great guys at Site5 with a heavily modified e-Commernce package origionally develped by WPMUDev.

The bulk of the design and build work was done by yours truly with more specialised tasks such as the e-Commerce modifications and PayPal and the forum integration being farmed out a few valuable freelance consultants.

I’ve kept everything inside the WordPress-sphere where possible, even using the current version of the buggy/temperamental bbPress system for our support forums (thankfully the new more stable plug-in version is out soon).

In fact, and this is not a moan – just a fact, one of the major cause of delay was the constant upgrades to the WordPress core and the changes we had to keep up with. When I started building WonderThemes WPMU was still a separate product which I had little to no experience with and keeping track on top of this and its merger into the WordPress core was one of the major learning curves in the project development.

The hundreds of dedicated core contributors who develop WordPress deserve a lot of gratitude for their silent work on this project and I suspect many others.

BIG thanks to

Other than the vast team of WordPress developers I have a lot of people to thank for helping out on WonderThemes and also inspiring me to continue when I almost gave up:

Jonny Allbut - for being an inspiration to continue and a great sounding post. Jonny is the lead developer of the Wonderflux WordPress theme framework and my partner in the WonderThemes project. Although he has taken a back seat up to now we plan to move forward with some cool in-house themes as soon as the dust has settled.

Lee Willis - for developing the impossible and going the extra mile. Lee is the brains behind all of the e-Commerce and PayPal modifications in the WonderThemes system and a true gent.

Scott Jackson – for making my vision a reality. Scott is an expert illustrator and did the artwork on the WonderThemes site as well as my own avatar on this site.

Ryan Imel at WPCandy – for the extra push. Ryan has featured our little site a few times on WPCandy and its been a big boost to the project. His little unexpected kicks like featuring us in Theme Madness really helped.

Jordan Hatch – for giving a 2nd opinion. Jordan helped out with our support forum integration and is also stepping forward to be one of our first support team when the site matures. He’s done similar work before for WooThemes and is an expert coder and WordCamper.

The wife, AKA Mrs Jones (no website available) - for putting up with me without really knowing why. My wife doesn’t really understand the WonderThemes project, all she knows is I’ve been working hard and doing a lot of late nights and she’s been very understanding. She lets me know when its 2am and time for bed, she lets me know that I worked last weekend so this weekend I should have a couple of days off and she lets me know that even if nothing comes from all of this work everything will be OK. Out of everyone I thank her the most (sorry guys!).

If I’ve missed anyone, sorry, its been a rough week!