Sometimes, life takes an unexpected turn. A few weeks ago, I began experiencing an odd sort of chest pain. I say “odd” because it was in this middle ground that I hadn’t felt before. I’ve had digestive pain, but that’s usually lower down, and while I’ve never had a heart attack, I would imagine that being higher up. You know, where the heart is actually located. As a result, I figured it was probably just some indigestion, or maybe some acid reflux.

I tried to get some rest, and after a couple hours and a short nap, it was gone, whew! A few days later though, it was back. We ended up leaving church early, and I figured I’d go home, get some rest, and wait for it to clear up. Except it didn’t…

By the time we got home, the pain was worse than the first time, and I was having a hard time breathing. When I tried to lay down, I got lightheaded and my hand was getting tingly. My wife drove me to the ER immediately, and they started checking for a heart attack right away.

Turns out it wasn’t a heart attack, it was “just” gallstones. Except they were getting stuck in my bile duct and could prevent my liver from functioning properly, and had the potential to kill me all the same. Writing that just now, it seems surreal. I heard the nurses and doctors say it, but it didn’t worry me at the time.

Oh I’ll admit, when I first when in, I was pretty freaked out. I don’t remember exactly when, though it might have been after my pastor came and prayed for me, but there was a peace that came as I surrendered myself to God’s will. From time to time, fear kept trying to gain a foothold. But I knew there was nothing I could do, so I trusted that God had a plan.

If He was ready to take me, nothing anyone could do would stop that. If He still had work for me to do, then nothing on this earth could thwart that either. I do remember the next morning, after being care-flighted to Billings, as I waited for them to be ready for the ERCP procedure, that my nerves were trying to stage a comeback.

I knew peace was not in me, so I turned on my phone and found a worship song to play while I waited. It started with a Fountains/Came to My Rescue medley, and then played Son of Suffering. The words washed over my nervous mind and the tears began to come freely as God’s peace returned to conquer my fears.

How can it be
That there’s a God who weeps
There’s a God who bleeds
Oh praise the One
Who would reach for me
Hallelujah to the Son of suffering

https://youtu.be/wBk4spqcXdM

I can’t take credit for any of that, any more than I can take credit for the blessings in my life. Any more than I can take credit for the incredible plan that has led me and my family to where we are today. Ten years ago, I never would have imagined a little side project becoming a business that could provide for my family. And even better, that we could afford to hire Adam, so that when I was laying in a hospital, there were no worries about things running smoothly.

Not that I put all my faith in Adam, as he’s still fallible :) But I knew God put us on this track, and that He would give Adam the wisdom he needed to get things through until I could return to work. There was no rush, no sense of urgency, and that was an amazing thing. To know that, through it all, God would take care of everything. When I could do nothing for myself, that He was right beside me and would see me through to the other side. That’s peace, a peace that “passes all understanding”, and it’s only found by putting my eyes on the one who reached for me, and bled for me, and wept for me.

This is the origin story of the EWWW Image Optimizer, a project/plugin that has become my full-time work and recorded here for posterity…

It all started when I was on a quest to find an Image Optimizer plugin. I found two that looked pretty good: WP Smush.it and CW Image Optimizer. WP Smush.it has file size limitations, is a bit slow, and some people have an issue with their images being sent to Yahoo’s servers (even if Yahoo states they only store them temporarily). In practice, I didn’t care about the privacy issues, but I did have technical problems using WP Smush.it and only got it to work about 75% of the time. Yahoo would later discontinue the Smush API, but it was eventually resurrected by a new company long after all this happened. So it was down to CW Image Optimizer, and then I discovered it used littleutils for optimization. I’m on shared hosting, and it wasn’t installed. I looked around the littleutils site hoping for precompiled binaries, but found nothing. Then I looked at the dependency list, and it was long. Some of them would already be on my shared host, but I quickly discovered two that weren’t: pngcrush, and gifsicle. These are the programs that littleutils uses ‘under the hood’ to optimize PNGs and GIFs. It uses jpegtran for JPGs, which my host did have. This created two problems:

1. I would need to compile several programs before I could even start on littleutils, and then I would need to install them in my /home folder  since I’m on shared hosting. Once I had those compiled, I would have to figure out how to tell littleutils where I had put all the dependencies, since they wouldn’t be in the usual places. Not fun.
2. Then, once I had compiled littleutils, it would still be in my /home folder. Uh-oh, CW Image Optimizer doesn’t let me tell it where I’ve installed the utilities. Bummer.

I had two possible solutions to my two problems:

1. Compile everything, and then hack the CW Image Optimizer plugin with the appropriate paths. This would unfortunately render it impossible to upgrade in the future without re-editing the plugin code, something I try very hard to avoid.
2. Create a derivative of CW Image Optimizer (since it is GPL3 after all) using the underlying tools that littleutils uses, and allow it to have configurable paths to the binary files of those tools.

I chose option two, because it also allowed me to include some more flexibility in the future. For example, early on, I added an option to keep metadata for JPGs in case that information (comments and EXIF info) is important to you. I also chose optipng for PNG optimization which is a derivative of pngcrush.

Within a week, it had 500 downloads. A surprising (to me) trend that would continue well into the future.

I don’t have a lot of words right now, but I feel blessed, and I want the world to know it. “…if they keep quiet, the stones will cry out,” Jesus said. So knock it off rocks, it’s my turn. I thank God for my family (immediate and extended), my home, my work and business, even our van that isn’t working properly.

We used it to go get a new (to us) coffee table today, and were able to bless someone else with a doll-house that will be used by two little girls. We’ve been really trying to impress on our children how blessed they are, in many ways, and it was really neat to see how well B did with choosing things to give away. It is hard for her, but she was a trooper, and did better this time around than any other time before.

I am blessed, and I want to make sure I never take that for granted. God pours out His blessings so we can share them, we are merely His stewards, and we must be faithful in that stewardship.

Yesterday, I saw an incredible contrast between two people, and it reminded me of what God had been teaching me. Most folks tend to fall into one of two camps (not sure where the rest go if they don’t fit these…): givers and takers. The Givers make you feel warm and fuzzy inside. The Takers make you go ‘meh’ or worse… Something God has been speaking to me about this year is giving more, and showing my gratitude, even if it isn’t financially. As a person who runs a business using WordPress, I benefit a lot from the contributions of others. And as someone who develops plugins for WordPress, others benefit a lot from my contributions. I could justify things by saying that I give away my work to so many people, but I also make a good deal of money from that work. If I don’t give more than I take, I’m a taker, and it’s a natural in-born attitude all of us can fall into.

So I started the year by giving back to many of the individuals and companies that make my business possible. These included the Debian project, Contact Form 7, Codefleet (Widget Visibility), and Athemes (Moesia theme). Yesterday, I was also reminded that there are plugins beyond these that I use on client sites, and my personal blog here at shanebishop.net, so that is phase two. I haven’t gone through and made a full list yet, but two of the plugins that I appreciate very much are WP Spam Shield, and Wordfence. They make my job easier, and allow me to put sites into auto-pilot (mostly), so they will be getting some gratitude from me financially.

Lastly, I want to give thanks to the One who makes all this possible. From whom every breath is a gift. Without God, I could do nothing, quite literally. But He also inspires me, and guides my steps in ways that continually amaze me. After solving a problem, I look back sometimes and think, “wow, how did I ever stumble across that?” Call it coincidence if you want, but I know who lights my way, and it isn’t some nameless phantom. The last couple months have been amazing, and just when I start to feel like God couldn’t get even more amazing, He does something that blows my mind.

I’ve never shared any numbers related to my business with anyone except close family (my wife, my parents, and my grandpa), out of a fear that folks would think I was bragging. So please know that is not my intent, at least not that I am bragging of my skills, or abilities. This is all a gift from God, and if I boast of anything, it is of His amazing provision. For some perspective, last year we had set a goal of grossing $10k USD before I quit my job at the college to work full time on EWWW I.O. We made the decision at the end of March, which was a month where we saw only $8,400 in gross revenue (before expenses). $10k seemed a long way off, but we trusted God to get us there by July. This was even though the last 10 months had not even seen that much of a revenue increase. So, after much prayer, the decision was made, and all we could do was trust God (and keep working hard). In April, gross revenue was over $11k… Take a minute, let that sink in. It was a $2000 increase month over month, something I had not seen for an entire year!

Lately, we have been setting other goals, and one of my long-term goals is to be debt-free by the time I am 40 years old. To do so, we have to reach at least $20k in gross revenue. 2016 had seen some small growth, but nothing substantial, and November was actually lower than last April. Enter the mind-blowing. In December, gross revenue reached a record high of $13,742, and I thought that was awesome as we cleared $100k in net income for 2016. Enter more mind-blowing. In January, we cleared $16,820 in gross proceeds. Wow… just wow. So again, don’t think that’s any of my doing, even though I work hard to move things forward. That sort of blessing only comes from One place, and to Him I give glory and thanks.