(Reading time: 2 – 3 minutes)

This just in…

Hello!

I don’t actually need anything (even a reply!) but I wanted to thank you for your excellent Website in a Weekend.

It sounds like a joke, but I prefer to do things the hard way whenever possible because it usually ends up being the most interesting and instructive way to do it. I’m pretty confident about trying most things and usually a quick study, but I’m feeling pretty slow and stupid where this project’s concerned. The saving grace is your website which at least helps me break thing down into manageable, achievable target parts. It’s already been longer than a weekend, but I’m getting there!

Thanks,
M_____

…and my reply

Thanks so much for your encouraging words.

I have to admit I’ve severely burnt out on the blogger thing. So many people have the attitude “Just gimme the results so I can gets the monies.”

I’m not like that. I’m the A or F student. Blessing or curse, I seem to have to understand what it is I’m doing.

Which means I end up “doing it the hard way.”

I think it saves me time in the future though.

And I’m not the only one: http://learncodethehardway.org/.

My estimate is around 10-15% of people are “hard way” learners, and these are the people I want to speak to, to collaborate with, to be around. I hope you’re one as well.

Best,
Dave Doolin

Are you a hard way learner?

Most people aren’t, I don’t think. And that’s cool, even envious in many respects.

For those few of us who are, some words of encouragement.

You bring unique value. Not everyone needs or wants that value. Find the people who want it, need it, appreciate it. Let the others abide.

Stay the course! If it’s worth learning, it’s worth learning the hard way. Just be picky about what’s worth learning.

Take no criticism personally. Even when it is personal. Especially when it’s personal.

Have fun, enjoy life, and seek others on the hard road. We’ll travel together!

Post from: Website In A Weekend

Mailbag: Learning the hard way

(Reading time: 3 – 4 minutes)

A few weeks ago, I was working with a client to figure out why his blog’s microformatting is not configuring properly. In this case, he’s using my WordPress hRecipe plugin, but something isn’t quite right. The code passes the testing suite. Google Rich Snippets testing asserts the plugin works correctly for me. But not for him.

But that’s not the real issue here.

The real issue is I cannot give him a “solution,” because:

1. I don’t understand his workflow, and
2. We are not yet communicating effectively.

Applying the “5 Why’s” results in “microdata is hard to understand because it’s hard to understand.”

Context is critical

Which is ironic, because microdata is fairly simple… if you already understand something about structured content, how search engines work, HTML and CSS syntax, and probably a few contextually relevant odds and ends which slip my mind.

Know all that, microdata is trivially easy.

Our challenge, my client and mine, is finding that sweet spot where he learns just enough context to handle the issue internally (I’m expensive), and I don’t spend all his money writing a long treatise on material which is available for free all over the web.

So it’s hard. So what.

However, the impetus for this blog post came from P. J. Onori’s article “In defense of hard.” People who know me well won’t be surprised:

I agree with almost every word.

For this client, I wish I could give him a simple fix. But I don’t have one.

What I do have is potentially far more valuable: I know what’s worth learning and what’s not. Here’s what Onori has to say about that:

If a subject is naturally complex, work to make it no more complex than it needs to be, but no less. People are not naturally averse to complexity, however they need to know it is worth their time and energy. Educating them on how to do something is not enough, there should be education on why it’s important.

In this client’s case, for his business model being dependent on serving structured data to search engines, it would be smart and wise to learn as much about structured data as possible, and that includes HTML and CSS as well as the microdata.

Note that I stated “…as much about….”

I didn’t state “learn to be a designer/developer.”

I didn’t state “learn to be a WordPress guru.”

I didn’t state “master PHP programming.”

Learning about something is far easier than learning the thing itself. Learning about something is far more cost-effective and time efficient. Learning about something lets you identify and communicate problems, and maybe even fix those problems yourself, instead of paying me or J. Random Hacker to do something we probably don’t want to do anyway.

You owe it to yourself

I didn’t make the rules, and I didn’t invent the technology. I just report on it and implement it.

If your business model depends on your ranking in Google search results, I very strongly suggest you learn everything you can about microformats, microdata, schema and structured content. This technology is not a magic bullet, and it may not help you, but it’s clear that not having it will hurt you.

Post from: Website In A Weekend

Some Things are Hard for a Reason

(Reading time: 3 – 4 minutes)

Which is what (channeling Madonna) I have been telling myself over the last couple of weeks.

No, not gonna go all Castro here, not my thing.

But still, Madonna is famous for reinventing herself, and reinvention is a skill worth learning.

~~~~

Website In A Weekend is pivoting. That is, finding the next stepping stone on the business path to smashing success, by reinventing the site. Long time readers have been watching this reinvention, this pivoting process, over the last few months. It’s more evolution than revolution, and it’s nowhere near done.

Statistically, 90% of you readers should be doing this (pivoting, reinventing) as well. Unless you’re succeeding beyond your wildest dreams already.

Now, I’m not a big fan of the word “pivoting” applied to starting a small business, but it’s the word all the Cool Kids are using, so we’ll use it here.

And that’s what Madonna has done her whole career: pivoted her brand – her image – to stay relevant with the changing taste and needs of her audience.

I’ve done it too, pivoted my technical skill set to stay current with what’s driving the market. Back in the early 80s, I worked in the oilfield. In the mid-80s, worked construction. In the 90s, I tried to trump the whole process with formal education, which lead to more pivoting (at a much higher level) in wireless sensor technology and model simulation.

About 3 years ago, I started over, from ground zero, a total reinvention. Marketing is now part of everything I do, instead of being this more-than-slightly distasteful task unworthy of attention.

The curious, and game-changing, piece of this reinvention puzzle, is NOT that technology is becoming obsolete faster than it can be mastered. That sucks, but it’s a known problem.

Now, entire markets come and go within the span of a few years.

So, what?

So, this: mastery still matters.¹

In fact, it matters more than ever. Recall I just stated that technology and markets are coming and going too fast to master. While this is true, why are companies finding it so hard to find the people to fill jobs?

Because companies need people with mastery-level skills, who can instantly reinvent themselves to meet their market.

“But how,” I can hear you ask, “am I to develop mastery when markets and technology change so fast?”

Simple: focus on the hard, boring and market-independent skills that so few people do well.

“And what might those market-independent skill be?”

That’s an excellent question, allow me to restate it:

What are the market- and technology-independent skills you must master to allow channeling your inner Madonna?

I’m genuinely curious. Let’s discuss in the comment section below.

Before we get started…

~~~~

Lady Gaga appears to be on the same road as Madonna, continually reinventing herself to serve the needs of her audience. Check this out: the tramp can pivot!

Ok, now let’s talk reinvention

Post from: Website In A Weekend

Dude, you hafta channel Madonna (a Sunday Strategy)

(Reading time: 6 – 10 minutes)

I have a load of things to get done today. None of these tasks are billable, it’s a pure overhead day. But they are all necessary to keep the machine running, and that includes having some small semblance of a social life.

About right now, I need to add some “keywords,” like “blogging productivity,” just so Google doesn’t get overly confused about what we’re talking here. Search engines are literal-minded and not inclined to nuance, analogy, metaphor, ambiguity, obliquity or indirection. Which takes a lot the love out my writing. No matter.¹

The way this blogging productivity method works is by spending focused time reducing friction and clutter in your environment, so you can better focus on productive blogging in the future. Most people, myself included have a “messiness quotient” beyond which nothing productive will be achieved. You can leverage this time creatively. It’s grist for your mill. Your life as content, &c.

Watch…

1. Have your time clock running!

This is absolutely critical, and your clock doesn’t have to be running billable hours. Set up a task or project called “housekeeping” or “LMS” and run your clock against that. The psychological importance of knowing where your time is going when you have a large number of small, unrelated tasks to accomplish cannot be overstated.

I consider this so important I charge my time against tasks ranging from “Overhead” to “Blue Sky.” That way, at the end of the week when I see umpteen hours of Blue Sky in my ledger, I will know with perfect certainty that yes, I did indeed waste a bunch of time.

Clicktime is what I use, but it hardly matters, use whatever is easiest for you.

2. Catch up on email

I have found that letting my non-critical email stack up for a few weeks allows me to knock it all out periodically, with little cost. For example, today I’m cooking a Turkey (early Thanksgiving), which is a perfect time to smack the inbox down to zero.

Here’s what I do 1, 2, 3:

1. Mostly, I delete stuff.
2. Label and archive.
3. Task it out. See the next tip.

These tactics support a strategy of removing unwanted ideas from your head, as will be explained next.

3. Catch up on tasking

Concurrently with smacking down the inbox, I can move emails needing long term followup to my Trac tasking system. Trac isn’t very fancy. In fact it’s not much than a wrapper around a database query, emitting the result set into an HTML table.

I like that.

It’s unpretentious, powerful, easy to modify queries, and I can grab a CSV file if I really need one.

But whatever. Your project management tools only needs be productive for you. If you haven’t used project management tools before, Basecamp² is as good as any.

Building out task lists does not beholden you to actually doing those tasks. The exercise is to get rid of ideas. Get those pesky ideas out of your head, out of your inbox, and off of your scratchpads, moleskins and the like.

Note: you can do this while you’re doing other things. Go put a load in the laundry, offload some ideas from your inbox into tasking. Just takes a few minutes. Low commitment, high reward.

4. Update software

I hate those pesky model dialog boxes forever prompting me to update some application which is either irrelevant, or mission critical.

Yet at some point the machine must be serviced.

A day like today, full of all sorts other chores, is also a great day to carefully update your computer. For me, this included doing the whole Apple/iTunes/iPad/pod/phone thing. A great thing to do while I’m banging through emails.

5. Catch up on podcasts and screencasts

Personally, I am, most emphatically, not a podcast person. I’m not even a radio person. This causes colleagues such as Dave “The Podcast Guy” Thackeray no end of annoyance, but there is really no help for for it.

And it’s me, to be sure. I have a lot of respect for podcasting; it’s the future of journalism. I’m just a really bad podcast listener.

So, today, is one of those days, catch up on podcasts.

6. Computer cleanup

After a month or two of hard work, my computer desktop looks like a virtual tornado ripped through my file system, scattered files and documents and applications and other miscellaneous accoutrements of modern computing all over my virtual desktop.

Bloggers and their First World issues…

…and it’s all my fault: I use the desktop as a staging area for stuff I want to look at, but not right now.

Go further, learn something new. For example, I figured out how to remove the pesky hard drive icon from my desktop. Easy, sure, but I’d never taken time to just do it. Now it’s down and do I feel great!

Here’s a tip for keep your desktop cleaned off: use HUGE ICONS. It will fill up faster and you will have to deal with it. Itty bitty icons proliferate like bunnies in the Outback. You don’t want that eco-annihilation on your desktop, do you?.

7. Listen to new music

Tired of listening to the same old tunes while you’re knocking out the chores? Nothing worse than boring music when you’re already bored. Try one or more of these suggestions:

Bob Culbertson Cafe San Francisco

• Find a new iTunes channel (or Pandora, whatever) in a different music genre. This means if you normally listen to Country, listen to Western instead.
• Dig your your mp3 collection and find some of that stuff you download (you pirate, you) which you haven’t gotten around to listening to yet.
• Found a misplaced CD? This morning I found Bob Culbertson’s Cafe San Francisco, a CD I misplaced months ago. Time to spin it up.

Maybe you have a new music suggestion of your own? Great, leave a comment below.

8. Cook something

Fourth Tuesdays monthly are Super Tuesdays, and when Super Tuesday falls before Thanksgiving, I always cook up a storm. Instead of blogging (or programming, or whatnot), it’s all about cooking and cleaning.

If you don’t know what to cook, find a recipe site, say, Andicakes. Andi has been posting recipes a long, long time, and is also a long time hRecipe plugin user.

9. Write a blog post!

I’m not supposed to be blogging today. I’m supposed to be cooking, and cleaning, and getting ready for a bunch of people to descend on my home like a flock of crows on roadkill. Crows are serious business, I’ll have you know. Crows got culture. So I shouldn’t be messing around with this blogging stuff.

But I am.

I get some of my best work done – especially blogging – when I’m really supposed to be doing something else.

Try it. You might like it. And you might find it’s not only possible but a whole lot of fun to waste time productively.

10. Your secret productivity weapon

I promised ten, but I could only think of nine. Since I’m now (PTL) out of ideas, I’m going to channel Ze Frank and put the onus on you to come up with #10.

What favorite technique of yours have I totally missed?

Let us know in the comments.

And for those who celebrate, Happy Thanksgiving 2011.

Post from: Website In A Weekend

10 Tips for Blogging Productivity (when you have other things to do)

(Reading time: 4 – 6 minutes)

I read a lot of blogs about blogging.  Frankly, it’s hard not to since there are so few blogs about just “stuff.”  Sometimes it seems that 99% of the blogs out there just tell you how to blog.  Isn’t there another good topic to blog about?  Doesn’t anyone blog about yurts or homesteading or cooking or politics or the random thoughts of a deranged redneck?

[Dave: appropriate spot for editorial comment. -Bob]

{Bob: Nah, I’m going just keep feeding out the rope… -Dave}

One of my favorite reads on blogging about blogging is Copyblogger.  The crew over there is constantly adding posts that can help a blogger immeasurably in improving skills.  I read them daily, even if I don’t have time to read anything else.

One of their posts a while back was titled “How to Constantly Create Compelling Content.”  Now, far be it from me, a lowly, dumb, redneck, boiled peanut salesman with a blog sporting a poor Alexa score, to correct those guys.  When you are the top blog on blogging you gotta be doing something right, and they are.

While I agree totally with both the post title AND its message, I think its great advice for bloggers who have been around a while and are tweaking.  For the beginner who doesn’t have a clue how to get stuff read however, I’d suggest a shorter title/topic:

How to Constantly Create Compelling Content

Blogs that have been around a while might have a need for instruction on how to create compelling content, but beginning bloggers need to create content, and then more create content, and then create even more content.

Beginning bloggers, listen up… there are three reasons, two technical, one “artistic,” for y’all to create, create, create and not sweat the “compelling” part… for now.

Most reading this ARE beginners drawn by the site title (A piece of genius in my less than humble opinion.  Titles count ).  Commenters here are a whole different group, for the most part.

• Technical reason #1.  You decided to blog because you want folks to read  what you have to say when they visit your site, right?  Regardless of whether you want to share your profound thoughts or want to sell somebody something, folks need to visit your site, or more precisely, you need to get folks to visit your site.  That means having something to find.  Google, Bing, et al don’t do well searching the same ol’ static web pages with no new content over and over.  Like any monster, they must be fed fresh, raw meat… and lots of it, so… WRITE DAMMIT!

• Technical reason #2.  It is a sad but true fact that, despite Steve Jobs best efforts, so far computers don’t have emotions (I’m not sure Jobs did either).  Search engines only “read” blog content in a technical way.  Is your post slug SEO friendly?  How many links do you have in a post?  Do you have primary keywords in your title, first paragraph, and post description?  THAT a search engine reads, but a search engine doesn’t give a rats ass if you write like Louis L’Amour, Ann Rice, or Bozo the Clown…it sees how much you write, not how you write.

  A lousy fact but a fact just the same, is that to search engines it is quantity over quality, and you have to be found before you can be read, so…WRITE DAMMIT!

• Artistic reason #1.  While the old adage “practice makes perfect” is bullshit (Practice makes permanent.  PERFECT practice makes perfect.), practice DOES help improve skills…any skills…so guess what that means if you want to be a better writer?  You guessed it…WRITE DAMMIT!

There ya have it… the be all, end all, A-#1 rule for beginning bloggers… and sorry I was so bossy with the WRITE DAMMIT! stuff. Not.

Robert Hayles is a semi-retired Luddite, who actually wished Y2K had been as bad as advertised. Bob's hobbies include fishing, homesteading, alternative housing (yurts), cooking, annoying politicians by constantly asking them, "Is that constitutional?", reminding them who they work for, and suing them when they don't get the message. In his spare time, Bob blogs while hoping to someday take us back to 1850. Meanwhile he's happy cramming sharing his opinions with everyone. Visit Bob at Juicy Maters.

Post from: Website In A Weekend

The be-all and end-all rule for a hugely successful and widely read blog

(Reading time: 3 – 4 minutes)

It’s not quite 3 years since Website In A Weekend kicked off, at a Stirfry Startup. By my count, this article is the 501th blog post on Website In A Weekend, but I started writing a few days ago, so I’m calling it the honorary 500th blog post.

What’s so special about the number 500 anyway? I couldn’t really say for sure, but a whole lot of other people think 500 is really cool:

• Indianapolis 500: Skinny cars with fat tires roar ’round and ’round.
• 500 Days of Summer. Ok, it’s a movie, and I haven’t seen it, but Zooey
  Deschanel can sing to me any day of the week. Sundays even.
• The Fortune 500. You know, the top 1% which is doing 99% of the business. But let’s not go there…
• The card game 500. Related to Euchre. But we were a Pinochle family ourselves, so scratch 500 The Card Game.
• 500 AD. The Year of the Consulship of Patricius and Hypatius. As (maybe) chronicled by the absurd Thrillpeddler’s Theodora She-Bitch of Byzantium. (←NSFW, probably). Also, the beginning of the reign of Fergus the Great (when scots became Scots).
• And of course San Fran’s own 500 Club. I can’t do better than quote, so why try:
  

  A neighborhood dive that has seen “The Mission” through the beatnik, hippy, hipster, and dotcom growing pains; it still remains everyone’s favorite corner bar. Pull up a stool…..

500, what a cool number. And now Website In A Weekend has joined the illustrious ranks of the 500.

I feel special and you should too.

Our Next 500 blog posts

I won’t (can’t) say for sure what the next 500 blog posts here on Website In A Weekend are going to be written about. Based on search queries, sales, and what you, the reader, have proven to find useful, there will be more of the following:

• There will another edition of Blog Post Engineering coming around mid-March 2012, possibly sooner. Some parts are going away, there will be new material. If Google+ doesn’t follow Wave and Buzz into /dev/null, expect some in-depth material covering Google+ from a content-strategy point of view. This edition of BPE is being developed in coolaboration with Operation Nightfire.
• Operation: Night Fire. Like art? Stay tuned…

  
  

  Time for another unreasonably ambitious project with @baddeacon #mastery

  September 28, 2011 1:12 pm via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

  

  @websiteweekend

  Dave Doolin

• More WordPress plugin and development articles, some of which may be rather technical. Expect the same sort of in-depth treatment received by the Broken Link Checker Plugin.
• More content strategy for small business bloggers, and digital publishing for small businesses. Expect to see case studies.
• More cool guest posts, from cool guest post authors.

You. Guest post. Yes!

Website In A Weekend remains open to guest posting, and it’s even easier than ever before: send a draft article. If it’s accepted, you get your own WordPress account here on Website In A Weekend. This means you get your own byline as well, which ultimately means authorship credit on search results.

Your favorite 500

500 blog posts. 500 miles. 500 years. 500 Club. Such a wide variety of 500s.

What’s your favorite 500? Do you have one? You must share below.

And if you have your very own 500, definitely share.

Post from: Website In A Weekend

What’s in a number? (Blog Post 500)

(Reading time: 3 – 5 minutes)

Sooner or later, ya gotta REALLY sweat

As previously noted, cranking up a self-hosted blog with absolutely NO blog tech knowledge is an exercise in digging holes, and digging holes makes one sweat.  At some point digging holes gets old and you are left with three choices:

1. You can take the easy road, default to a BlogSpot or Blogger site, and let someone else do the lifting…just remember, you get what you pay for and you aren’t paying anything.
2. You can dig a little deeper…in your pocket…and pay someone who knows what they are doing to put the site together for you.  Hell, if you have deep enough pockets you can even pay for content creation…I’m not all THAT expensive.
3. Your third option is where the post title comes into play…Sooner or later ya gotta REALLY sweat.

Face it, a blog costs SOMETHING and there are only two kinds of currency in the world…and I’m not talking about dollars or francs or euros or yuan.

We only have two things we can spend… money and time… and that is our only currency.

Let me stop here for a second and dispel a myth.  Some of you think your knowledge…education, experience, etc., is currency, something you can “spend” to benefit yourself.  It’s not.  It’s an asset (think factory equipment) you use by spending your time to benefit yourself.  Your time is the currency.

So, back to the three options.

You can be cheap…spend neither time nor money…and go with option one, and get what you pay for.

You can look at the currency you have available and decide which you have more of, and if you decide your bank account is bigger than your time account there are plenty of folks who will lighten your money load.  Some of them will even do a good job for you.

Finally, you might be like me…far richer in time than in money.  It helps, in my case,  that I also happen to be a control freak and HAVE to know what is going on.  If this is the case, get ready, because…

Now is when ya gotta really sweat!

You can dance around it all you wish…I did for 17 months…but, at some point, you will accept the fact that an OK blog can be done using tools like the WordPress GUI , but if you want a REALLY kick-ass blog, you need to learn some…er…extras, and that will make you sweat.

On some you will sweat a little.  Scrounge around Website-in-a-Weekend.net and you’ll find some good info…for free, except time…on “toolchains” and which WordPress plugins are basic needs for a quality blog.  The web is full of blogs that claim to teach you all about SEO, and a few, VERY few, will actually help.  You’ll stumble across tools that will help you track your progress, like Google Analytics and Alexa, and you’ll be feelin’ pretty good about the whole blogging thing, and then…

And then you are gonna hit a wall.  In my case it was an inability to get a video to run on my site.  It looked good when I ran it on my computer, but it was too big to upload to my blog using the WordPress GUI, and when I tried to get it on my site through YouTube, YouTube trashed it, running it at quad speed…a 6 minute video running in 1:44.  Uh-oh.

My wall was videos… yours may be something else… but if you want a truly kick-ass blog, one that stands out, you WILL have a wall… and that’s when you really start to work.

There are some things you will need to learn that a non tech savvy type wouldn’t think of.

Robert Hayles is a semi-retired Luddite, who actually wished Y2K had been as bad as advertised. Bob's hobbies include fishing, homesteading, alternative housing (yurts), cooking, annoying politicians by constantly asking them, "Is that constitutional?", reminding them who they work for, and suing them when they don't get the message. In his spare time, Bob blogs while hoping to someday take us back to 1850. Meanwhile he's happy cramming sharing his opinions with everyone. Visit Bob at Juicy Maters.

Post from: Website In A Weekend

Time or money, there’s no other blogging currency

(Reading time: 3 – 4 minutes)

You know how it is when something just resonates with your very core? You watch or read something and your first reaction is “Hell yeah!” I love it when that happens.

Just now, I found this little pearl from Perry Marshall in my gmail inbox:

The word “learn” is only appealing to people who’ve finished drinking the pink koolaid, vomited up the poison, recovered from their near-death experience, mopped the puke off floor and decided there’s still got to be a way to make a business successful. They’re now prepared to find out what it is.

Feel free to read the rest of Who likes Planet Perry & who doesn’t. We’ll be here when you get back.

I have to say I agree with almost every word*

Learning for the long, long haul

Have you ever heard the saying “Overnight success usually takes about 20 years.”?

How many years in are you?

Do you even know where you started from?

Personally, I can’t say I know exactly where that mythical starting point might be. I’ve been doing some of this and some of that for a fair number of years. Some of it has worked, some of it, not so much. I can say one thing for sure: the more I learn, the easier it is to learn, and the easier it is to figure out what to do next.

The more I learn, the better I understand what I have been doing.

I’ve learned, often enough, that what I have been doing is neither what I think I’ve been doing, nor what I intended on doing. This is doubly difficult when it’s unclear what I originally intended.

Even better, I’ve been at this blogging thing long enough that I’ve seen a lot of people fall by the wayside. I guess they drank too much pink koolaid; couldn’t barf it up in time. For whatever reason, they are no longer with us.

The key point is this: when you are in it for the long haul, “learn” is a magic word. Over time, learning pays back with interest.

What’s your experience?

I just claimed that learning will pay back with interest. Here’s a recent example from my experience. Long time readers (bofem) know I sell a few short reports (i.e., whitepapers) distilling what I know into it’s essential form. One of these is a report on techniques for rapidly creating custom pages in Thesis Theme. Since creating that report, I’ve made a bit of coin selling the report, and also selling consulting and services based on my knowledge in the report. Learn once, get paid long time.

Do you have an experience to share where learning a little paid you a lot?

Comments are open for business.

If you have been drinking the koolaid…

Here’s a little something to brighten your day.

For what it’s worth… I was listening to The Judy’s since before SXSW even started. Top that.

Post from: Website In A Weekend

Learn is a four letter word – and a good thing too

(Reading time: 4 – 7 minutes)

Starting a blog?  First thing to do is grab a shovel and start digging

Some folks starting a new blog already have a lot of background info on the technical side of blogging from some source…prior blogging, techie job, etc.

Not me…I started my blog before learning that little round thing on the side of my laptop was a CD/ROM drive, not a cup holder.  Working from stupid, the first thing I did was grab a shovel and start digging a nice, deep hole.

After spending 2-4 hours a day for two weeks playing with the theme options I had my blog designed (two weeks that should have been 45 minutes max.) and was ready to write.  Now what?  I actually sat down at the laptop and wrote my first, very short post:

“OK…now I’m a blogger.  Now what?”

“What” turned out to be sporadic attempts at keeping fresh content flowing.  I was moderately successful and the content grew as I added posts.

Right here is where I started digging the hole.  As I said, I was writing posts…the problem is I was calling them pages, and publishing them as such.  20-30 posts in I had 20-30 pieces of content I had designated as pages, and a thought crossed my mind:

“Oooops, I think this is gonna be a problem”.

“Gonna be a problem” is where I started REALLY working on making that hole deeper.  It wasn’t a problem…yet (those “yets” will always get you eventually) so I kept writing posts and calling and treating them as pages.  Unfortunately, it’s easy using WordPress and the Atahualpa theme to dig yourself way, way deep before you know you are in trouble.  Using “parents” for pages you can keep things categorized…sorta…for a long time.

Then one day I realized how hard I was making my readers work for information.  If someone wanted to know about radiant floor heat they had to drill down through “yurts” from 6 general topics, then “construction” from construction, yurt living and yurt history, then “radiant floor heat” from 6 different construction topics.

That is just too much to ask of readers.  I made the first smart decision about the blog backend since I started…

I Googled “WordPress, page vs. post difference, page to post changes“.  Up popped a website by some guy out in California who called himself “Dr WordPress” (yeah…right!) [long story -dave] with a website called Website-in-a-Weekend.

This was going to be easy… I’d email this guy and ask how to change pages to posts automatically without re-doing everything and I’d amble along writing posts and actually calling them posts, not pages.  Problem solved, blog chugging along, right?

Not exactly.  Doolin NEVER gives a simple answer, even to the simplest question [Bob lies like a dog here. -dave].  He takes answering a question to the art form level.  I ask how to make pages posts and back comes an email:

1. How much traffic do you have?

2. How long have you been indexed by search engines?

3. How many of these do you need to change?

4. If you don’t mind, send me the URL of a few of these so I can see what you mean.

I don’t think this is going to be that big of a deal.

-d

ps: I would like to use your question in a blog post.  Thanks!

OK…I’m looking for free advice…I can do this little bit.  I can send him a few URL’s and why should I care if he uses it in a post?  So…off went another email to the good Dr D, and sure enough an email was in my inbox pretty quick.  My thought?  “Oh good, now I can fix it and move on.”

I didn’t know Doolin then like I do now.  The email read:

Bob,

Ok, it feels like you have a lot to say, and

not quite sure how to

1. Say it,

2. Present it.

Will you commit to a 7 step “blog improvement program” over the next 2 weeks?

It will cost you about an hour per day (no money),

and you’re going to have rewire your belief about

technology.  Tech is *hard*.  It’s hard for *everyone*.

People that are good with tech are simply inured

to the pain.  That is all.

What I’m going to ask you to do is read

a few of my blog posts, and implement

exactly what I ask you to do in those posts.

If anything is unclear, leave a comment

on that post, I’ll fix it.

You WILL get traffic as a result of this.

-dave

ps: It’s not hard to succeed at blogging, but it does take commitment, and time.

pps: Answering your original question, it probably doesn’t much matter at this point… you need more structure and focus first.

That first question…”can I change pages to posts”…was one year, one week, and 4 days, 528 emails back and forth, ago.  I’m still learning how to not dig holes for myself, and I’ve gotta admit, Doolin has been a great help.

Don’t tell him I said that…his head will swell up.

Next time we’ll talk about how to climb out of that hole.

Robert Hayles is a semi-retired Luddite, who actually wished Y2K had been as bad as advertised. Bob's hobbies include fishing, homesteading, alternative housing (yurts), cooking, annoying politicians by constantly asking them, "Is that constitutional?", reminding them who they work for, and suing them when they don't get the message. In his spare time, Bob blogs while hoping to someday take us back to 1850. Meanwhile he's happy cramming sharing his opinions with everyone. Visit Bob at Juicy Maters.

Post from: Website In A Weekend

Starting blogging? Sharpen your shovel, you have some digging to do!

(Reading time: 9 – 14 minutes)

Freelance self-protection is building self-regulating structure into your business such that critically important decisions make themselves.

Freelance self-protection is codifying best practice by eliminating ruinous practice.

Ever had one of those weeks where nothing went right? That was the week I started this blog post.

For the most part (not all of it), I set myself up for it. It’s all my fault; I have no one else to blame.

For whom I’m writing…

First and foremost, I’m fundamentally a scientist, with strong engineering skills, growing business skills, who treats work as art.

WordPress has a motto: “Code is poetry,” which states it exactly right.

This philosophy puts a premium on understanding.* When you’re at that point where you actually need to understand what’s going on, you’re in the right place at Website In A Weekend.

Specifically, I enjoy working with:

• Bloggers who enjoy learning more about the website operations aspect of their business. It’s not just code; there’s a lot more to it than that.
• Coders and geeks coming from other languages, platforms, services and want to learn more about WordPress, and more about blogging.
• Web design professionals who need to understand more about the technical aspects of the web, especially web applications, and most especially WordPress.
• Writers who want to master this game of marketing and self-publication on the web.
• Self-publishers using blogging as a launchpad for marketing writing, editing and publishing services, and written products such as ebooks.

Did you see any marketers in that list?

Nope.

Marketing is an important aspect of all business activity, but without other aspects of business activity, we’re back to the Cheeseburger Model, without anyone actually manning the grill. Not gonna happen around these parts.

However…

…while marketing isn’t a current strength, I’m delighted to help marketers with the non-marketing aspects of this web and blogging stuff.

For whom I’m not writing…

Conversely, if you fall any of these categories, we may not be a good fit:

• “I just want someone to handle it for me.”

  Excellent! I’ll have a list of resources, at various price points, where you can just Get It Handled. Since you aren’t willing to spend your time, you will need to spend your money. Typically, the greater your investment, the greater your return, in either time or money.

• “Can’t you just fix it?”

  Yes, and it’s probably going to be expensive.

• “I can’t afford…” Well, you can’t afford me. And this has nothing to do with hourly rates. It has to do with thinking of cost versus value. From experience, clients focusing on cost are rarely satisfied. It’s like, no matter how little they spend, they seem to feel they could have “gotten a better deal.”
• “Why is this so hard?”

  I could write a very long blog post about why it’s so hard.

  The short answer: you and I, and our little websites are not important to the people in charge of products, software implementations and web standards. For various business reasons, making it easy on customers is not perceived as profitable.

  If you want to be important, spend a few million dollars on web technology, send some FTEs (full time employees) to sit on standards boards such as W3C, and contribute your time and money to relevant open source projects.

  After a few years of demonstrated commitment, you may be accorded a voice.

  Then you can see about making it less hard.

How to raise a red flag

Here’s something which came through my email a few months ago:

The woman I work with at the church needs help moving her rubyonrails website to a new host. She has a very simple site. Her current host is ripping her off at $50/month! She needs someone to back it up and reopen a new account with them. But I think, and she agrees she should open her account with bluehost or someone else. Her current host has been giving her lousy service. She had no idea she was being charged so much.

Can either your intern or your remote guy help her with this? There’s no design work involved. Just a backup and transfer. It’s Rubyonrails not wordpress. Do you have someone you could recommend? Please email her directly.

After an email exchange with the woman with the website, I passed. Here’s why.

The value of the work has already been framed as low.

• Very simple site. True, and having written in Rails was definitely a mistake. The site is simple, Rails, not so much.
• Ripping her off at $50/month. Strong words. Perhaps the friend is simply underutilizing the value provided by the hosting service.
• An intern or remote guy. Well, it’s 2011, and Rails coders around here run about $110k/year. It’s not exactly “intern” work. And there is the other subcurrent of “people like us don’t get their hands dirty.”
• No design work involved. Invariably, this turns into “If it wouldn’t be too much trouble (and I know it won’t) please tweak the page this way and the make a new image for the header.” Invariably.
• Just a backup and transfer. Probably so. But who takes responsibility if it’s not? I mean, who pays if it goes pear-shaped?

I am sure the writer of this email meant well. And the friend is a non-profit of some sort and on a limited budget. But San Francisco is packed with non-profits, many of which expect reduced rates (or pro-bono) for work. While I believe it’s important each of us contribute, it is important to ensure there is food in the fridge. This looked like potential quagmire: high risk, low return.

Referrals

In short, don’t want ‘em.

Yes, you read that right, I don’t want referrals. I don’t want referrals sending people to me to “Get Work Done.”

You’re welcome to send people to Website In A Weekend.

Think of it as my first layer of screening: people not interested in reading here at Website In A Weekend will not be a good fit for my services.

If you need chores such as basic maintenance work, a theme or plugin fixed, or your design modified, there are many specialists who are happy to help you. Furthermore, you can get such work done using providers registered with services such as Odesk and Elance for very reasonable rates, about the same as what Starbucks pays baristas.

Here’s the thing: just as a mechanic assumes some responsibility for your automobile, people who work on websites assume responsibility for their work. Domestically (in USA), this means they can be sued.

For me, assuming such responsibility at a Starbucks price point is business suicide.

If you’re seriously interested in full service attention on an ad-hoc basis, I recommend Anca Mosoiu at Tech Liminal.

In the future, I plan on offering premium services on a contractual basis through a consulting company.

Current services offered through Website In A Weekend

The services offered through Website In A Weekend are strictly limited to technical education and technical coaching. My readers and customers learn what needs to be done, and how to do it for themselves.

The most important thing to understand is this: I provide education, not advice. What you do with that education is your business:

Bob: “Dave, how do I do X?”
Dave: “Well, Bob, that depends on what you’re trying to accomplish.”

Along with services, Website In A Weekend offers educational products.

Educational products

Website In A Weekend’s product model starts with a “write to learn” series of blog posts focusing on specific aspects of blogging, website design, construction and maintenance, and small business information technology subjects. Once a critical mass of information is published, the blog posts become the basis for a paid product. These initial blog posts are like the high dive at the swimming pool. Reading the blog posts get you in position, but to really master your material, but you have to take the plunge.

Currently, Website In A Weekend offers two products. The first is an ebook with supporting multimedia material for publishing blog posts. To learn about really publishing a blog post, purchase Blog Post Engineering.

The second is a membership site for learning the ins and outs of maintaining your self-hosted WordPress site as part of your small business information technology effort. To learn more about operating your website as part of your small business information technology system, purchase Blog Maintenance Challenge.

Freelancing lessons learned

I’ve turned down a metric boatload of freelancing work this year.

Invariably, all of this work shared one or more aspects of the email quoted above. And none of which understood the value of the work which they wanted done.

The value must be reciprocal!

Loads of tedious work for low pay with high risk of customer dissatisfaction is not worth taking.

Here are a few things I’ve learned.

• As a freelancer, you are not required to arbitrarily support any random plugin or theme.

  If, for any reason, you’re not comfortable with a plugin or a theme, turning down business on that basis could be very smart.

• You are not required to work with arbitrary hosting companies.

  Every hosting company has a different suite of capabilities; the workflow is different for each. It takes time to learn the procedures for each hosting company.

  If you’re not comfortable with the client’s choice of hosting companies, and they aren’t paying well enough to make it worth your while, perhaps this is the wrong customer.

  For example, I don’t work with MS Windows hosted sites. I’m not familiar with Windows, I’m not comfortable with Windows, and I’ve had an extremely unpleasant experience in the past attempting to deal with a website hosted on a Windows server. I’m not telling you, the customer, that you shouldn’t host on a Windows server… I am saying I’m not the right person to call about that.

• When someone opens a discussion with “I’m on a budget” they aren’t.

  Seriously, they don’t have a budget!

  This is just code for “I don’t want to pay very much.”

  In my experience, people with enough savvy to operate on a budget know the cost of the services they wish to purchase… but more importantly, they know the value of those services.

  If you, the customer, really do have a budget, and you really don’t know how much it costs, simply state “How much can I get for the $X I have budgeted for my project?”

Speaking of money, it turns out my colleague Josh Kholbach just published “A Comprehensive Guide To Handling Money When Freelance Programming” which I recommend you read right now. Seriously, it’s good, Josh really knows this business.

There’s more I’m sure. Feel free to add your own experience in the comments.

And look, more link(s):

• Client red flags, from Sitepoint.

Fellow freelancers (& bloggers)

I’m pretty sure most of this is old hat to experienced freelancers. And I’ve known a lot of this intellectually all along.

But there is a real difference between “knowing,” and really knowing. It’s a difference I feel in my gut.

They all say if it makes you nervous to publish something, it’s a sure sign you better publish it. This article definitely falls into that category for me.

And by all means, add your experience below!

Post from: Website In A Weekend

Freelance Self-Protection: Screening for your right customers