photo credit: quinn.anya

Chris Guillebeau offers his e-book 279 Days to Overnight Success for free on his blog. This is a great piece of writing that debunks the popular myths about “making it” blogging.

1. Don’t rely on Google/Adsense as a “get-rich-quick” vehicle – they aren’t
2. You don’t need millions of visitors and command of Digg to do well
3. You will have to work hard
4. Overnight success means ‘months or years’, not ‘days’

See for yourself – download it today.

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This week he brought up the idea of upsides versus downsides – how much effort do businesses put into minimizing their downside versus the time they put into offering the best user experience?

One of the primary examples from the post is that of a hospital spending a huge amount of time doing paperwork to prevent litigation and prevent people from getting worse when their primary goal (and reason for existing) should be improving the lives of the patients coming through their doors.

The hospital example was interesting and timely because in “real life” the Jewish General Hospital recently came out and said it has been able to improve patient care (upside) by reducing errors (downside) through its new(ish) full disclosure policy. This ties in nicely with Seth’s article because it proves that it is possible for even large organizations to let go of the status quo and achieve new levels of excellence.

In the case of the Jewish General Hospital, it seems paradoxical but by admitting and dealing with errors, the hospital is actually less likely to be sued and face costly litigation. In essence, they have found a way to improve patient care, cut costs, and foster an open corporate culture. Way to go!

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photo credit: Kongharald

Don’t worry folks, I haven’t disappeared. I’ve been buried under a mountain of RSS. One of the disadvantages of trying to stay informed about absolutely everything is that if you take just a few days away from the newsfeeds you will fall way behind.

Google Reader makes it extra easy to lose interesting posts when you scan too fast. I still prefer it over all other software I’ve tried so far.

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Valleywag was folded in 2008 and became a column in the overall Gawker site. Too bad… it was fun to see people get so upset over its (essentially tabloid) articles.

The main criticism people had of Valleywag was its willingness to publish unverified gossip in order to be the first to break developing stories. In Valleywag’s defense, the stories weren’t presented as fact, the magazine disclosed that it was operating on unverified rumour, and it was quick to update as new information became available.

That said, the wider issue is that a publication of Valleywag’s size and reach has a responsibility to get its information right the first time because the majority of its readers do not come back to check the updated status of new items – they expect to have already received the full story. The irony here is that the very thing that made Valleywag popular – the speed at which it spread its gossip – is what is was most criticized for.

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Please feel welcome to contact me if you’d like to share your own site, or one that you think is worth checking out. The genre is unimportant – I’m looking to fill my feed with as much great content as I possibly can.

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photo credit: michelb

You have to shake your head every time someone goes off about “netbooks”, those wonderful, tiny, cute computers that don’t cost very much. When you look at them, what do you really see? How about a crappy laptop that can barely run Windows. The thing is cheap in more ways than one – but somehow marketers have been able to spin that as a good thing and make big profits off useless hardware without needing to develop anything new.

This Brave New World Seems Just Like the Old

Anything sounds better with a little bit of spin – Web 1.0 is clunky, slow, ugly. Web 2.0 is a designer’s dream, sexy, with new technology. Well, no. The technology isn’t new at all – the web is the same. The only difference is enough marketers held onto the “Web 2.0″ buzz phrase and shouted it repeatedly long enough that it became accepted as fact.

What’s So Social About Media?

There was never anything truly “new” about New Media. There’s nothing earth shattering about Social Media either. Call it a new paradigm all you want, there is nothing different between it and “old” media: the goal is to communicate our message to as many people as possible. How others perceive your brand and how you react to that feedback is not something new and alien – it’s just a lot faster now than it used to be. Your audience is your focus group. Traditional roles haven’t changed one bit – their owners have.

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Facebook's New Look

Why Facebook Rocked

I’ve been a Facebook user for about three years so I’ve now lived through two major design changes. The first changed the layout from a bumbling mishmash of functionality into a surgical-sterile work-flow that made the side understandable and useful (to me). Facebook’s strength was the separation between users – everyone had their own “space” but fit together uniformly and professionally. It was a nice, grown-up place to be online.

What Happened?

Now Facebook looks rather generic. The focus is fully on users’ tweets status updates and I can’t tell where my profile ends and my friends’ begin. The layout still looks soothing and professional, but the service isn’t as useful to me anymore. The “Facebook” distinction is gone – I’d rather mashup my own Flickr and Twitter feeds instead of have Facebook duplicate the same functionality and sell my data to every bidder.

Will Twitter Conquer?

If you told me two months ago that Twitter would overtake Facebook, I would have laughed at you. Now Facebook has lowered its ambitions to the one-trick pony of social media / friend feed updates.

The two services weren’t in the same leauge before – Facebook was a massive profile site that I could use to connect to my real-world contacts while Twitter was and is essentially a public IM service. Now the two are basically identical in my circle.

I don’t mean to be a Facebook-hater. I still log in and give it a good effort; I just don’t connect to it anymore. Maybe the next update will bring the site more in-line with my usage and I can enjoy the service again.

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Canonical URLs force your site to use the same base path (www.yourdomain.com rather than yourdomain.com). But if you are working in a development environment – e.g. the development site’s address isn’t the same as your web site, but is rather something like 127.0.0.1 – you need to be able to make the switch to Wordpress without bringing your site down.

Since I end up having to look for this information so often, here are the steps I use to accomplish this amazing feat:

Download The Database

From the shell prompt of your server, dump Wordpress’ MySQL database into a backup file:

mysqldump –-add-drop-table -uusername -ppassword databasename > mysqlbackup.DATE.sql

Move it over to the new server and run this command to overwrite your target:

mysql -udb##### -p -hinternal-db.s#####.gridserver.com db#####_dbname < mysqlbackup.DATE.sql

Update the Database Paths

Log into your MySQL database and issue this update command to ensure Wordpress redirects to the new server:

UPDATE wp_options SET option_value = replace(option_value, ‘http://www.old-domain.com’, ‘http://www.new-domain.com’) WHERE option_name = ‘home’ OR option_name = ’siteurl’;

Next update the post URLs:

UPDATE wp_posts SET guid = replace(guid, ‘http://www.old-domain.com’,'http://www.new-domain.com’);

Finally, update your posts’ content to fix any internal links:

UPDATE wp_posts SET post_content = replace(post_content, ‘http://www.old-domain.com’, ‘http://www.new-domain.com’);

That’s all! Repeat these steps when moving from production to development and vise-versa.

As I said I typically search for this information whenever I need to move Wordpress sites. I find the SQL queries at: http://www.mydigitallife.info/2007/10/01/how-to-move-wordpress-blog-to-new-domain-or-location/

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1. VISTA: How to fix SQL Server Express Error – CREATE DATABASE permission denied in database ‘master’

One victim of Technorati’s success has been its blog crawler – that piece of software that scans its directories looking for posts and updates. As time marches on, new developments and ways of interacting spring up which ultimately make cataloging the blogosphere more complex. Many site owners were complaining that it took too long for Technorati to update their listings – they had to manually ping the service every time they posted new content.

Fortunately they have announced an upgrade to their crawler (they say it’s a total rewrite from the ground up) that promises to improve the speed and accuracy of Technorati’s blogosphere scans – what and who are blogs talking about over time.

This is great news in general – Technorati has been a great source of traffic and useful information; with the continued improvements we hope to see it continue to be a big part of our blogging experience.

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