Pinyon Software, Inc.

The reviews are in and Utah Contemporary Theatre’s new online reservation system is a hit.

America’s first free professional theatre company needed a reservation system so that people wanting to see the shows could make sure they had a spot. Since UCT decided to stop charging for tickets, traditional ticketing systems wouldn’t work so I created a WordPress plugin that would allow visitors to their site to select a performance and reserve however many seats they wanted- within reason of course.

The plugin keeps track of how many seats are available for a given performance and gives the stage manager a report every night of who is expected and the number in their party. Admittedly it’s pretty simple stuff, but it’s amazing how much help a little automation can be to an organization like UCT.

Recently a good friend made the transition to the wonderful and challenging world of self-employment. Feeling his pain, I offered to help establish his company’s presence on the web with a website. The result is here at TERPconsulting.com

I chose WordPress as the platform for several reasons, the most important being the capability to modify page contents without having to hire a programmer. Even though there are no plans for a blog at present, the option exists if he wants it and WP is proving itself to be a very competent non-blog site platform. Most hosting companies offer installation of WordPress as a standard feature in their packages. Finally, community support for the platform has never been better and I believe its ubiquity can only benefit small-business website owners because they are not locked into one programmer’s “great idea for your website.” There’s a lot to be said for off the shelf products when they are as good as WordPress is.

Having said all of that, if you are in the market for Fire Protection Engineering and Code Consulting, please take a look at TERPconsulting. We anticipate adding a lot more content to this site, but for now it gives you the basic rundown of their services and how to get in touch with these outstanding professionals.

In November 2008 I started Pinyon Software as the first step in creating my own full-service web application development company. Most recently I’ve been working as the CIO of a small media company, but am in the process of transitioning from full-time employee to contractor. The company runs a website as well as video production and distribution operations and it’s my job to make sure all of the tech works. Since coming on in 2006 I’ve had the opportunity to manage a total website redesign as well as a major server consolidation and optimization in which we dropped the number of physical servers in favor of multiple virtual servers and cut our hosting bill by nearly 40% while boosting streaming video speed and site responsiveness. On the programming side, I’d been mostly relegated to maintaining the legacy PHP4 codebase, although recently I’ve had to drag it kicking and screaming to PHP5 for the migration to our new hardware. I’ve also been able write a little code for enhancement requests as well as the expected bug fixes.

I’ve been fortunate to wear many hats at this job: webmaster, IT support, project manager, programmer, still photo and video editor, and DVD author, but my favorite job is programmer. I like being given a problem to solve and creating and implementing the plan to use hardware and software to solve it.