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Archives for September 2008

Do you have trouble staying disciplined?

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The single biggest hurdle to online success is lack of discipline.

In my experience online, there has been one glaring issue that “work from home” employees encounter: lack of consistency and discipline. Whether you work for yourself or for someone else, when you work from home, the temptation is to put work off until later … to sleep in … to read the political blogs … to watch the pMetrics live stat ticker for hours and hours … to justify the one, no two, no three games of Madden 2009.

More than anything else, I think that freelance workers on the web have to struggle with the lack of structure that working from home introduces. It’s this reason that so many online employers pay on a performance basis rather than a salary basis. But even performance based pay doesn’t solve the problem completely because it fails to account for loss of momentum (i.e. if you start a project and your new employee works for 3 weeks and then decides to work intermittently for the next 3 weeks, your plan to monetize the new site suddenly takes a back seat, and you start losing money. Sure, you can let the employee go, but then you’ve got to reinvest time in replacing the person, regaining momentum for the site, etc.)

When I hire a new full time salaried employee, as I’ve done five times in the last four months, I’ve come to the conclusion that the only way of managing the new work-from-home situation is to closely monitor productivity. I hate micromanaging, but after employing dozens of full time employees, I’ve noticed a clear and distinct pattern. It doesn’t hold for everyone, but I’ve found that most work from home, full-time employees, left to their own devices, end up putting about 3-5 hours in on any given work day, when they are being paid for an 8 hour work day. Because of this natural human tendency, the only recourse I have is to repeat my expectations a few times, set minimum performance standards along with incentives, and if that doesn’t work, start applying pressure by voicing my disappointment and potential consequences.

I hate voicing my disappointment. It creates a negative work environment. I also hate setting minimum performance standards. My preference is to set performance incentives that motivate an employee to go above and beyond the call of duty. But that doesn’t often work. Rather, as most of us can understand, the incentive of sleeping-in or playing video games in the middle of the day often wins out.

How Portable Is Your Blog?

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Photo taken by foxypar4 illustrating Coming And Going and has been filed under the Creative Commons license.

Ever stop to wonder how portable your blog is? I mean, you are using WordPress today but do you think you’ll be using WordPressa a year or two from now? What if you started on Drupal and then want to move to WordPress? This is the situation that Performancing is in and I find it rather archaic that many of these publishing systems or content management systems do little in the way of allowing users to export data. The closest I’ve been able to get with Drupal is by using what is called (Views) to create an RSS view for the past 2,500 posts. This doesn’t help me at all when there are thousands of posts from 2005-2008 published on the site. As I searched high and low on the Drupal module site looking for ways to export the content into at least an XML file, I came up empty handed. Considering XML has been around for awhile and it is 2008, I find it to be a joke that Drupal along with other publishing systems do not support the exporting of important content out of the box. Important content being tags, post meta data, post content and comments.

eXtended RSS:

Although not perfect, WordPress provides not only a myriad of different ways to import your content into their system, but it provides you with a way to export your data into an open format. This open format is called WXR or eXtended RSS. When you export your content from WordPress, this XML file will contain your categories, tags, pages, comments, custom fields, categories, and most importantly, your content. This allows you to easily migrate your WordPress content from one WordPress installation into another or, moving between a self hosted WordPress installation into a WordPress.com account. Why can’t Drupal or other systems support this type of functionality? WXR from what I know is an open format because it is based off of XML. I realize that just about every content management system does their own thing, but how nice would it be if they all supported an open format like XML or eXtended RSS.

Based on my research of the various CMS’s that exist, the only one I have seen that supports eXtended RSS is WordPress. Just about every other system out their is portable if you count the fact that they support MySQL. However, in 2008, why must we continue to subject ourselves to hiring MySQL database gurus in order to migrate content from one system to another. Couple this with the fact that most of these systems are open source, why can’t these systems provide an easy way to import or export important data into them and let the end user decide which system they want to use instead of having people become locked into a specific system. Although some will argue that you are not locked in considering if the database that contains your content is MySQL based, you could hire a database guru to migrate your content. I just find that to be unacceptable.

Perhaps there is hope though. Browsing around the Habari Project wiki, I came across a page that contained information regarding potential projects for the Google Summer of Code. Thanksfully, Import/Export appeared to be one of the projects:

Many tools permit one to import from their prior tool, but very few provide any kind of export functionality. The Habari project believes strongly that your data is more important than the tool you use to publish it. To that end, the Habari project would like to initiate a cross-platform export format so that end users can move between publishing solutions with greater ease.

Now, if we could only get every other CMS Development team to acheieve this level of thought, end users would be much better off. No word yet on the progress of the project but I find it enlightening that the Habari team is at least acknowledging the need for such a system.

Conclusion:

I think in a perfect world, all of these open source projects such as Habari, WordPress.org, Drupal, etc, would get together and work with each other to make sure that each system could import the data that is exported from each other. Seems to me as if the XML file format provides an excellent open platform for this to be based on. I’m not sure if EGO has any thing to do with this not being a reality yet or if the perfect world is simply too complex for this to happen. Every system does things their own way which is why the initial format should be an open standard instead of something created in-house. What an aggrevating experience it is to see the Drupal forum have an entire section dedicated to migrating to Drupal but not have a forum dedicated to migrating from Drupal.

Your Thoughts:

Please share your thoughts and opinions on this subject within the comments. Let me know if you are sick of being burned by content management systems not providing an easy means of exporting your important content.

WordPress 2.6.2 Released

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WordPress 2.6.2 was released due to a weakness that has been discovered in something known as mt_rand(). WordPress 2.6.2 is a critical release for those of you who allow open registration on your blog. Here is the reason why:

With open registration enabled, it is possible in WordPress versions 2.6.1 and earlier to craft a username such that it will allow resetting another user’s password to a randomly generated password. The randomly generated password is not disclosed to the attacker, so this problem by itself is annoying but not a security exploit. However, this attack coupled with a weakness in the random number seeding in mt_rand() could be used to predict the randomly generated password.

Along with this critical fix, 2.6.2 is an interim release and therefor contains a few other bug fixes as well such as images that were always inserted into a post at full size, RSS widget linking if there isn’t a link, and the inability to control where a user redirects to when they log in. You can view the rest of the bug fixes here (Fixed Bugs In 2.6.2).

I have already upgraded my blog without a problem!

Show off your Identi.ca (Laconica) feed with a) WP plug-in or b) raw PHP/MagPie solution

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  • Solutions: Use the ‘dingshow’ WordPress plug-in or Publish Laconica (identi.ca) dents with PHP/MagPie solution.
  • Purpose: If you like to show off your identi.ca or any other Laconica microblogging feed on your site.
  • Features include working author links, @ links, general links and working #hashtag links.

PHP/MagPie: Download ‘DingShow’ a.k.a. ‘DentShow’

filzo.de/dingshow_plainphp.tar.gz

“Ding” is kind of a translation of “dent” to German. The meaning is “thing” or “something”.

MagPie had to be patched on my server. Solution and description is here:

@filzo Patched #MagPie here: http://is.gd/2fEV (Scroll to “Technische Notiz zu MagpieRSS”) Description etag bug: http://is.gd/2fF6

To show off your identi.ca/Laconica feed simply edit the last line of the index.php.

The Author of this PHP/MagPie solution for identi.ca/Laconica is:

Philipp Czora
Identi.ca: @filzo
Web: filzo.de

The idea to create the raw PHP solution was forcefully pushed at him after he developed the dingshow-plugin for WordPress 🙂

Thanks and a big hat tip to Philip!

Google Trends: The Big Picture

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Here is yet another way of visualizaing the data presented by Google Trends for Websites. It’s called BigPicture and is a mashup of data which represents recently searched items, sites that are losing traffic and sites that are gaining traffic. Simply hover your mouse cursor over the lines in the graph to see emphasis placed on their line to view the domain name. To add your domain to the graph, simply type it into the search box. Naturally, I submitted Performancing.com. Based on the results between July of 2007 through July 2008, we have peaked at or over 10,000 visitors but have leveled off since then.

Brightly colored lines were recently searched by other visitors to this site.

Red lines indicate sites which are losing traffic. Blue lines are gaining.

Of course, the sites with lines at the top of the graph include Yahoo, MSN.com, Live.com, Microsoft.com, and Wikipedia.com. One thing I didn’t see was Google.com. Even if I went to the Google Trends website itself, I couldn’t do a trend search for Google. Did they design it that way or is there another reason?

WordPress Is Good At Winning Surveys

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Steve Smith who writes for Orderedlist.com has published the results of their recent Content Management Survey. Keep in mind when reviewing the data that OrderedList.com caters to Web designers and those are the folks who most likely responded to the survey.

Although there have been countless debates on whether WordPress is a CMS or not (See the comments of the survey to see another one), it topped the list for which CMS people used. This actually coincides with the results from our own poll on which self hosted publishing platform people used. Surprisingly, the choice of (Other) came in second, meaning there are either plenty of custom CMS’s which people are using or, there are many content management systems that are still under the radar. ExpressionEngine took the third spot.

ExpressionsEngine took the cake as far as satisfaction level. WordPress contained a 41% Very Satisfied rating while all other systems equaled 43%. ExpressionEngine however, contained a whopping 64% Very Satisfied rating. ExpressionEngine is a paid for solution so it is easy to see why the satisfaction rating is so high. If you are going to pay for a CMS, it is likely due to the fact that it suits your needs. Thus, the higher satisfaction levels.

The survey also displays data on whether people prefer to host their own CMS or choose a hosted solution. Also noted at the end of the survey results was proof that designers are control freaks. No big surprise there.

It is obvious that the majority of publishers and bloggers are using WordPress. But my question is why?

Are You Being Attacked By Spam?

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Back in July, I informed you what I believe to be the best comment/Akismet configuration in WordPress. This is the configuration I use on my own WordPress powered blog but for the past two nights I’ve checked my email after work, I’ve noticed that my blog had been slammed by spam bots. I’m used to seeing something being advertised in these comments but this time, these comments appear to be garbage text. Check out the screenshot to see what I mean.

Typically, with my configuration, I’ll see 4 or 5 spam comments in my moderation queue as most of the other spam comments are made on posts older than three months. With these however, all of the posts which have been spammed have been within that three month time span and the content of the comments have no rhyme or reason. Seems like a giant waste of time and or money.

Anyone else experiencing this type of behaviour?

Free eBook On Personal Branding

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Chris Brogan is not just a name anymore, it’s a brand. Chris has released a free eBook to the public today called Personal Branding For The Business Professional. The ebook is in PDF format and clocks in at about 15 pages. The book covers everything from strategy advice to over 100 different ideas and tactics to use.

Chris Brogan is a social media maven who always gives more than he takes and this is yet another example. It didn’t take me long to download my copy, will you be doing the same?

Thanks Chris!