For many, building a product or service is something that has to be done on the side. Having a full time job means that your primary day time hours are spent on someone else's baby. If you want to create your own baby, it's going to take some sacrifice. With this in mind, it’s important to establish, daily, an attitude for the long haul. Apart from the occasional long, late night work session, progress on your baby is going to be slow. Glacial even. You have to have the right mindset in place t…
There are times when the changes that the Internet has wrought in my life over the past 10-12 years simply amaze me. One of those areas can be simply summed up as content. It's a lump of items that can be hard to define, but I believe content is applicable. Consider everything the Internet brings us these days. News and events. Sports. Entertainment. Knowledge and research, information (and speculation) on a subject of interest. All of these come mixed together now on one medium. Often from the…
The term craftsmanship brings to mind skills of yesteryear. Woodworking, textiles, cobbling, and smithery all come with the connotation of years of honing one’s ability, of apprenticeship. And, in our modern world where most of us don’t know how items for purchase come into existence, I often mourn the loss of the careful consideration men would give to their craft in these professions. But my sense of loss also comes with hope. The reason is twofold: we're seeing a resurgence in young people p…
Imagine someone using a headline or statement like that? As if a hammer, or any other tool used by a craftsmen of wood products, would be given so much credit that it greatly affected the usefulness and quality of the end product. Let’s use an example that’s closer to home. Copywriting is taking the life out of web design! Right. As if well written, carefully crafted words that evoke the right tone and cleverly communicate the nature of the business or service contained within a web site will r…
https://blog.evernote.com/blog/2016/12/21/write-things-experience-information/
Growing up in an agnostic home, I was unfamiliar with the idea of Lent [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lent]. Of fasting in general. But as I've matured, I've come to appreciate the idea of denying yourself for a period of time. It takes practice, but there is much to be gained by the act of withholding from yourself. In the most recent issue of Offscreen Mag [http://www.offscreenmag.com/issue4/], I was hitting on this idea. > Thanks to the good writing of others, I've been thinking a lot about…
Once upon a lifetime, I enjoyed conducting interviews with people I followed online. Over time, those interviews have sat in the corner of an abandoned SQL database. No longer! They've been taken outside, beaten with a stick, and are ready for a fresh set of eyes. If you enjoy a long conversation with various internet celebrities, give this a look: * Dan Benjamin [https://chrisbowler.com/journal/probing-the-hive-mind] * Dezene Huber [https://chrisbowler.com/journal/interview-dezene-huber] *…
One benefit of being slightly older in the web field is that I've had the chance to work with a lot of different teams. You learn what works well and what doesn't with teams of various sizes. And a key factor that always comes into play is processes. Processes are a part of work that many folks would rather not think about. The term can sound much too formal, or corporate. The problem is even if you don't think about processes, they exist. Reality is that you have processes, whether you've thou…