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Mike’s Laws of Business
Once upon a time, I wrote an article called “How to bootstrap a consulting business”. It was a good article and was well written for what it was designed to convey. The last line of the article sums it up pretty well:
“The hardest part about the process is having the willpower to make the leap into being self employed. After that, it’s really not that hard.”
If you want to get anywhere, you have to start your own business. It doesn’t matter if you do it alone, or if you have one or more partners. The most difficult thing to do is get started. And that gave rise to Mike’s Laws of Business.
Read MoreHow to Convert Your Blog From SubText to WordPress
No matter what anyone tells you, there’s more to changing blog engines than just clicking a few buttons and importing data. It tends to be a fair amount more complicated than that. In my last post, I highlighted some of the reasons, both rational and not so rational for my decision to change from SubText to Wordpress.
However, with the research links I found on Google, I still ran into a myriad of problems which the resources I found didn’t address. I felt there was more hand waving than hand holding. I like to hold hands, so here’s how I converted from SubText 1.9.3 to Wordpress 2.7.1.
Read MoreAbandoning SubText
Writing and maintaining a blog is like getting married. Once you choose blogging platform, you’re essentially stuck and changing blogging platforms is about as painless as getting divorced. In the best case, it’s not any fun. In the worst, you lose pretty much everything you ever had.
For more than a year now, I’ve been considering changing blog engines. Interestingly enough, that time frame also coincides quite nicely with my dramatic drop-off in blog posts. Why put more work into a blog if you’re just digging your hole deeper? I knew that every blog post I was going to add was just going to increase the amount of work I’d need to do to perform the conversion and decrease the motivation to actually move to another platform.
However, last week I decided to finally bite the bullet and just get it over with. After all I’d been absent from my blogging duties for nearly a year. With my Masters degree now out of the way, I really didn’t have a good excuse to put it off any longer. So I started at the most obvious place imaginable for how to convert my blog from SubText to something else. Google.
I suppose I should back up a little bit and explain my reasons for abandoning SubText. After all, I do a fair amount of .NET development and SubText is written in .NET with a SQL Server back end. Let me put it bluntly.
I had higher expectations for SubText as a platform.
Read MoreHiring for a Single Founder Company
Hiring your first employee is hard. In a single founder company, the job is even harder because there are many complex issues that you need to juggle simultaneously, some of which aren’t remotely related to evaluation of the person you’re trying to hire. In this article, we’re going to completely ignore how to evaluate a…
Read MoreThe Widescreen Laptop Conspiracy
For the past six to eight weeks, I’ve been on the lookout for a new laptop. Now, I know that I have high standards, but I can’t believe that some of the things that I really want in a laptop are no longer available. About a year ago, my old Dell Inspiron 8100 was about…
Read MoreThe Lifestyle Entrepreneur
Some 20 years ago, I knew I wanted to own my own company. At the time I couldn’t differentiate between being the CEO of a company and owning the company. As the years went on I began to realize the differences, but it never changed what I wanted. Throughout college, I watched as many of…
Read MoreGoals for 2007
Just before last year, I set forth my Goals for 2006. I haven’t yet formally done that for 2007, but I’m only about a month late so lets get to it. I think we need to start off by taking a look back at the goals for 2006 and see how I did. Goal 1:…
Read MoreHow to get any job you want
“Peter, most people don’t like their jobs. But you go out there and try to find something that makes you happy.” – Joanne, from the movie Office Space Look where you will, and there are statistics showing that anywhere from 50% – 87% of people are unhappy with their jobs. No matter how you decide…
Read MoreFor Love Or Money
I wrote this article the day that Bill Gates announced he was leaving Microsoft to pursue a career as a philanthropist. It sat on the shelf until about two weeks ago when I started helping Rob Walling edit his article Nine Things Developers Want More Than Money. I couldn’t help but be reminded of it,…
Read MoreThe Single Founder Myth
My previous article, Startup Myths Debunked, seemed to attract quite a bit of attention in the developer community. In particular, people who left comments seemed to agree with “Myth#3: I need a partner”. Paul Graham who is one of the more influential voices in the startup community recently wrote an article titled “The 18 Mistakes…
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