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There is no place for just shitting all over other people's work - (37signals)
Hiding behind your Twitter avatar and telling the world how terrible everything is is pretty easy. It’s even funny sometimes. Putting yourself on the line and making something original is really hard work. Which one do you want to be. Which one deserves our respect and attention?
via 37signals.com
If you've never built anything, it is hard to relate to how difficult it is to actually create something. Anything.
I was fortunate to grow up in a house full of makers and tinkerers and I feel that I have a half way decent vantage point on how challenging it is to take a block of metal, a piece of clay, a blank canvas or an empty text editor and make something really, really neat.
This post today by Jason over at 37Signals is extraordinary.
Sometimes You Have To Destroy The Village
Currently, I have 4 or 5 sites that I have hosted at GoDaddy that run Wordpress. This one, Hope For Holly (hosted at Media Temple – which seems to be working fine), Building Castles and a couple of others that I’ve started, but haven’t done much with. I’m a business guy, not a PHP Programmer. Each time I launch a site I have the regular frustration with versioning, design, picking plug-ins, etc. Frankly, I’m done with it.
This past weekend, I noticed that my site wasn’t sending trackbacks and ping backs. I have no idea why. It seems to coincide with my upgrade to 2.3.3, but I really can’t tell. I spent about 6 aggravating hours trying to figure out why to no avail, so I’m scrapping the idea of hosting it myself. I’m tired of managing upgrades only to have to upgrade again 5 days later, I’m tired of having to keep plug-ins current for fear of security holes, I’m tired of futzing with CSS and PHP to try to get the site to look exactly the way that I want only to have it not do exactly what I want. To make matters worse, when I tried to do the export from GoDaddy, I found that SpamKarma had left 88MB of spam in my SQL database. So I needed to figure out how to delete that. Again, not a programmer, I just want to write.
I originally decided to run on WP because I wanted to learn basic PHP and SQL stuff. Now that I know that, I’m done. I’ve moved to the hosted Wordpress.com site and I’ll see how things go. I don’t love the look of the site, but I love the idea of it being much easier to use and manage. I’d much rather spend time writing blog posts than messing with PHP pages, stylesheets and upgrades. I don’t know what this will do to my RSS feed, which I’ll be porting over (via Feedburner) in the next day or so. I suspect that to will break. Please come back and update your link.
Building Castles - My First Blook / EBook
I'm really happy to announce that I just published / posted my first blook / ebook, Building Castles.
I've been wanting to write an ebook for a long time. I really want to continue with my theme of getting into sales as that has received a ton of traffic, but I don't think that I have enough material yet. I've also been wanting to write one on being the spouse of a cancer patient, but that is really just too damn depressing.
What was left was putting some closure on the home remodel blog that I kept as we built our house. I had been meaning to do a few final posts with all of the details on what we learned, but thought that compiling everything into an ebook would be easier for me and for readers and it gave me a chance to actually write an ebook. Score on both accounts.
The actual process of creating an ebook is a lot more challenging than I thought that it would be. It was really fun, but when you get into licensing photos, getting the format right & consistent, and posting it, you learn that writing and publishing isn't just sitting on the beach, drinking beer and collecting a check.
Over the past few months, I've spent a lot of time conversing with other ebook writers, writing myself and futzing with word & the pdf that is the end result. However, I really believe that the end result is pretty nice.
I've made the book available in 2 formats, a free blook (blog & book) and as a paid for ebook. It is the exact same thing with a different title photo. I used PayLoadz to handle the transaction (totally different subject, I've been trying to find a place that handles micropayments for IP, PayLoadz seems dto do a really great job of this).
Check out the site. If you want the book, drop me an email and I'll send you the link for it if you promise to forward it to a few other people.
