In yet another attempt to discover Twitter’s value, I started following more people yesterday. Then I spent time lurking and trolling, reading and scrolling. My dominant impression: there’s a whole lot of huckstering going on.
General
Most articles in this category address general Web and Internet issues. Some of them are rants and ramblings that may have less to do with the Web and the Internet and more to do with life lessons and business lessons.
Short(er) Form Video
If you’re scratching your head over Vine and Instagram video, Mitch Joel offers an interesting perspective in last week’s Short(er) Form Video blog article on Six Pixels of Separation. Money quote: Who knows if Vine or Instagram will win this short-form social sharing video war? We just need to be asking better questions. For every […]
When a client trivializes your work, call a time-out.
In the spring of my senior year at Harvard, I was awarded the contract to make passport photos for any of my fellow Quincy House residents who needed them. By "awarded the contract" I mean that the assistant to the House Master was a friend of mine who knew I knew my way around a darkroom (that may have come out wrong…), and so she gave the project to me. This is the story of a brief encounter with one of my customers — and what it still means to me 40 years later.
Enough already with the formulaic blog titles
Scanning my newsfeeds tonight and finding way too many salesey, hypey headlines linking to boringly bland blog posts, I was overcome by a sudden and strong visceral dislike for the formulaic, overly-clever blog titles that are everywhere on the Web these days and which, admittedly, until tonight, I have been all too inclined to emulate (and recommend to others).
It’s got to stop. And stopping has to start with me.
Hang out with a friend online
This is the story — still unfolding — of the vendor and the client who became friends and started bi-weekly video hangouts for the alleged purpose of exploring joint venture opportunities but really just so they can visit on a regular basis and laugh a lot. I highly recommend you try it yourself.
What are WordPress Post Formats, and why should I care?
Whether you’re a blogger, a reader of blogs, a WordPress developer, or a content marketing consultant, you have reasons to like the Post Formats feature of WordPress. This article explains what Post Formats are and why you should care.
Post Formats have NOT been removed from WordPress 3.6 core
Contrary to what you may hear from sources who fire before ready and aim, Post Formats have not been removed from the core of WordPress 3.6, which is due to ship any day now. Only the new User Interface for Post Formats has been removed. My take from lurking around Make.WordPress.Core: The development team decided […]
Do you know what business you’re in?
When people ask you what you do for a living, do you answer in terms of the products or services you deliver or the activities you perform to deliver them? That’s fairly common and, of course, not actually wrong. But it’s also not particularly helpful or inspiring. Here’s an exercise that could dramatically improve the success potential of your business.
Don’t blindly do what your customers ask you to do just because they asked you to do it
Yesterday I had the audacity to say that customers are not always right. I suggested that we, as professionals (and this is true in any field, I think), have a responsibility to first ask why before doing what our customers ask us to do just because they asked us to do it. (Both yesterday’s blog […]
First ask why
Yesterday I wrote about fellow WordPress designers/developers discussing the best way to automatically delete old posts from a blog. My point yesterday was don’t. Don’t delete old posts from a blog. With very few exceptions, old posts have value, both for human readers and search engines.