From the category archives:

Networking

Poor programmer’s website monitor

If you manage your own web site, it’s critical to know when there are problems, and hopefully you’ll know before your users do. There are several enterprise-grade server monitors and website monitors available ranging from free to expensive, but if you need something right now that’s simple and free, you might consider the solution I [...]

Read the full article → May 26, 2009

Measuring success

A hundred objective measurements didn’t sum the worth of a garden; only the delight of its users did that. Only the use made it mean something.
Lois McMaster Bujold, A Civil Campaign, 1999
US science fiction author

Consider how much time you spend looking at analytics such as web traffic, Twitter followers, Facebook friends, or Technorati rank. Now [...]

Read the full article → March 20, 2009

Don’t reinvent the wheel

As a programmer I’ve heard the phrase “don’t reinvent the wheel” dozens (if not hundreds) of times in my career. It’s generally a reference to reusing existing source code to perform routine, well-defined programming tasks — stuff like sorting, searching, parsing and much more.
Within the past few years, however, the scope of what can be [...]

Read the full article → March 4, 2009

Do it your way

The more you read online, the likelier you are to be confused by all of the conflicting opinions from experts (like me). Naturally we all have opinions and hopefully our opinions are evolving as we’re getting smarter. The reason that I write with strong convictions is because I have strong opinions that are weakly held [...]

Read the full article → March 3, 2009

Twitter for small business

I ran into a friend of mine at lunch today who asked me several good questions about Twitter and how it might help in his business. As we talked, I realized that there was a good blog post in the questions and the answers.
First off, it’s really important to know what Twitter is and what [...]

Read the full article → February 25, 2009

No secret sauce

In regular day to day life, I get asked a lot of questions about marketing on the internet and blogging. A lot of the time, the questions are:

How do you get more Twitter followers/Facebook friends?
How do people find your blog?
How can I increase my site traffic?
Do you (or Can I) make money on the Internet?

Sometimes [...]

Read the full article → February 24, 2009

No man is an island

No man is an island, but your web site … it might be. Technically your web site is supposed to be a part of the grand interconnectedness of the web. You’ve done the SEO, provided great outgoing links and you’ve even built a few doorway pages to help people find your site. But they’re still [...]

Read the full article → February 23, 2009

Fill a need

Sometimes there’s not much to be added to a really great article like this one: Why You Can’t Make Money Blogging. My favorite part: “Provide value. Solve actual problems. Uncover what’s bugging people and fix it for them.”
Online business is just business.

Read the full article → February 21, 2009

Email is so 20th century

I’m sure by now you’ve heard that email is dead. Most of the time when people talk about the death of email, it’s not about the death of email as a tool for interpersonal communications. We all still use email everyday to communicate with coworkers, friends, family and it works great.
The problem relates to communicating [...]

Read the full article → February 20, 2009

On conversations

When is the last time you sat down with someone for the express purpose of learning? Maybe your neighbor is a professional video editor and you’ve been thinking about creating a family DVD for the holidays. Assuming that scenario, would you ask for advice?
I find it interesting that people spend so much money on professional [...]

Read the full article → February 18, 2009

← Previous Entries