I’m not good at managing my time. Nothing would get done.

I thought my brother lost his mind because he was Mr. Efficient. When he had deadlines at work he always had things done before hand. He always found the most efficient way to get things done. This flowed in everything he did, for example, taking a trip. His plans would be minutely planned so the idea of him not managing things efficiently and effectively as a business owner did not compute. I thought perhaps he had fear of the “unknown”, perhaps did not want to risk something stable for something unstable (a new business).

He explained that he “needed” someone to account to otherwise he would blow off whatever it was he scheduled to do. He enjoyed what he did and the “fun” would disappear if he was the boss. He didn’t like management positions either. He knew himself well enough to know that if he started a business, even if it was something he enjoyed doing, his personality type was not complimentary to it. He wasn’t disciplined enough.

Knowing Yourself

Everyday I encounter people who want to start businesses, a blog, create video, etc. and they have these big plans about their success. Not only do they not have a plan about how they are going to get there often they are not realistic about their personality and if their personality meshes with their goals.

An example, how often do you see sites that boast “daily content” but are not updated daily? Or are updated daily but the content sucks? These people are probably good people but obviously not suited for daily updates. The amount of time it takes to write quality content on a daily basis is considerable. The reality is the person who does this isn’t business minded due to the multitude of the mistakes made.

Reality Isn’t Always Pretty

My brother understood his limitations and focused on his strengths. Instead of starting a business knowing he was lacking traits that were needed, he was the best employee he could be. He enjoyed his work and was often recognized for his performance.

Being a business owner or even a good blogger requires the person to be able to consistently, over a long period of time, do what is needed for success. For example, I get up early every morning and check on our sites, delete spam, glance at email, etc. Not a couple of times a week, every other day, sometimes at 7 or sometimes at 12…every morning (unless I say otherwise) the sites are checked early. Contrary to popular belief, I don’t like getting up early but I had to because of the kids (I don’t anymore). There are times when I get up, check the sites and lay back down but my job is done. Every day. After about 11am, my schedule goes out the door. I make sure the kids eat around the same general time but as far as work I wing it every day based on what needs to be done and I love that because I don’t really care for routines too much.

Doing Your Own Thing IS Work

I’m not a programmer. I’m not a designer. Yet I have websites that have code and designs. If I want to accomplish something and I don’t know how to do it I will research on how to do it. If I want to understand search engine optimization I will research it. If I need to go to school and gain some knowledge I will do that (and I did - I have a master’s in Business Management). In other words, doing your own thing requires more dedication than most realize - consistently.

If you want to write daily articles on your commercial blog (or update on a set schedule) think about all that is required. The topic. Do you need links? Can you back up and prove your point? Do you need confirmation from a source for the article? Is your data accurate? Consider the time it takes to write and proof the article. If it is a commercial blog what about the time to market, network, and manage the blog? If your blog traffic isn’t increasing why isn’t it and how do you plan to resolve that issue?

Honesty is the Best Policy

My brother was honest with himself about his personality traits and how they applied to his career. When I decided to start my business I did the same thing. Going through blogs as I do everyday (some of them personal, some of them commercial) I wonder if they were honest with themselves when they started their venture.

Your turn.

We don’t have the luxury of always having time to wait until the right person can get a task done. We don’t have stockpiles of VC money to tide us over. When something needs to get done there should be someone around that can get it done. Before we all stuck to what we knew, but I have found that each of us are getting more and more comfortable with letting someone else handle a small task that we would usually do ourselves.

Here is a very, very general breakdown of the areas we cover:

• Mike: Design
• Scrivs: Code
• Tyme: Content

Now if there is a small change in the design that I see needs to be done I have two options, ask Mike to do it or I can do it myself if it can be done. Many times if Mike is already on it I will ask him to fix it, but there are times when I know I can jump in and make a quick change. If Tyme sees something that needs to be moved around in the backend then she can usually do it herself. In the past there were a lot of requests for Mike or myself to do them, but over time I think she has grown comfortable with managing our sites which I am sure has made her job of getting stuff done much easier.

Give Up Your Territory

In larger corporations there is a need to control what you do. If you are the designer you don’t want anyone else touching the design because that might make you feel less valuable or more expendable. You don’t want to teach anyone how to make a change across the site because then if they can do your job and their job, why would the company need you? In a small company you can’t have this mentality. With three people we don’t have the time or resources to stake claims in territory. Sometimes if we need to cross over, we need to cross over.

We need it to be efficient. We need it to survive. We need it to keep moving.

Now this doesn’t happen overnight. We’ve been together for a while and we still aren’t the most well oiled machine, but we are much better than we were in the past. As an individual you have to trust the people around you. You have to trust that they won’t attempt to do part of your job if they really can’t do it. You have to trust that when they do part of your job they will do it correctly. You have to trust that if they need your help they will ask for it. You have to trust yourself that when the time comes and you see an opportunity to teach them an aspect of your job that will make everyone’s lives easier that you will do it.

You see in a small company there needs to be a hat rack because you will wear many hats. When you are done with one hat you put it back on the rack because someone else in the company might need that hat for a bit. Remember though just because you can wear a hat doesn’t mean you should. Also remember that there are some areas where only you will ever wear the hat. With us these areas are:

• Always nice whether he hates you or not: Mike.
• Always willing to ask a question that makes no sense to anyone in the world: Tyme.
• Always good looking even when he just wakes up: Scrivs.

Nobody will take that hat from me.

In April, Switch To A Mac published a rumor saying that the 3G version of the iPhone would not be the big news at the Worldwide Developer Conference in June, instead, a new touchscreen-enabled device would make its debut. Steve Jobs’ reasoning for skipping 3G in the iPhone came down to battery issues, however Steve Wozniak isn’t buying it:

“I don’t understand why it would be a battery issue. I get as much life on my 3G phones as I do on my non-3G phones. Maybe I’m wrong, maybe I’m not paying close enough attention. But I don’t think that’s it though.”

Woz is obviously a smart guy, and knows Jobs well, and that’s why I think there’s something more to the 3G story.

In all of Steve Jobs’ presentations on the iPhone (debut and the SDK launch) he has touted its WiFi abilities far more than its cellular antenna, and has rarely made mention of Mobile Safari load times when accessing sites on a normal cellular network and not over WiFi. Apple builds wireless devices, operating on the newest standards (one of the first with a 802.11n product) and the iPhone is no exception as it thrives in WiFi-enabled areas.

Keeping in mind how advanced the wireless technologies are in all of Apple’s products, I can easily see Steve saying to his crew “people are going to use WiFi anyway so f*ck 3G” when it was first being launched. Steve is famous for picking a solution he feels is superior to what’s out there, and then dropping it into a product and leaving no alternatives. He hates the stylus so not only does the iPhone use touch to navigate, he lambasted the stylus in his iPhone launch presentation. Apple was the first to kill the floppy-drive in its original iMac, mainly because Steve felt the CD was better so that’s all there was to it. Now, in the MacBook Air, he has rationalized away the optical media drive altogether saying that since you’re wireless (and WiFi is everywhere, right? Right?) you don’t need to lug around optical media, you can just get things from The Cloud™ over a fast connection. Yeah, it has the remote drive software feature, but that seems like a way to appease people who can’t 100% agree with Steve’s CD-free decision… yet.

So applying all of what I know about wireless capabilities and Apple’s technological leap-frogging ability, I see the addition of 3G to the iPhone as merely an evolutionary step, not a revolutionary one, and Steve only announces revolutions. I guarantee that Jobs hates the concept of 3G and sees it as a backwards step. In his mind, the prevalence of WiFi hotspots will only grow in the future, and even more mile-spanning frequencies are on the horizon like WiMAX and the recently-auctioned 700Mhz spectrum. These are the future, so why support 3G? Well, so that iPhone naysayers no longer have a checklist point to write about when comparing the iPhone to other smartphones out there. Give the iPhone 3G and there’s no longer a “but…” in iPhone reviews. Once iPhone v2.0 software is out with all the enterprise features, and it’s got 3G, what else can you say about the Blackberry?

The iPhone Is Out

The iPhone cannot be ordered at Apple’s online store as it has been “currently unavailable” for about a week now. You think this is merely a function of Apple forgetting to order enough? Absolutely not, and if it were, Jobs or Apple would have made a formal announcement as to not upset shareholders. The iPhone’s unavailability is a sign that a refreshed iPhone is not only on the horizon, but coming fast. How many more days will go by before Apple lets customers buy their start product from their online store? My guess is that the 3G iPhone will be released this week or next week, with only a press release to signify its arrival. Steve has bigger fish to fry.

iPhone pad, iPad, iPod pad, Or Some Other Name

A quote from the previously linked Switch To A Mac entry:

Over the past 12 - 18 months, several sites on the web have speculated about the existence of an Apple mobile device. Some have questioned its existence, whether it will be a Mac tablet or next generation Newton, and if it will resemble the iPhone and iPod touch. The existence of an Apple Ultra Portable Device can be traced back to 2004 when Apple’s CEO Steve Jobs hinted at the All Things Digital conference that the company developed but decided not to ship an Apple PDA.

The touch technology developed for the iPhone has already made it to the iPod touch, so why not more devices? When Jobs introduced the iPhone, he said that touch technology was a revolutionary step in the history of user interfaces. First, the mouse. Second, the click-wheel on iPods. Now, the iPhone’s touch screen. Another Apple product using the touchscreen is coming, and I think it’s coming in June.

The product has been rumored to be a tablet with a 720×480 resolution display, full touch capabilities, and about 1.5-2x the size of the current iPhone. Jobs was quoted as saying that Apple did develop such a device in the labs, but decided not to ship it, and this was back more than 3 years ago. Now that the iPhone is out, you don’t think that Apple has learned a lot in the past 3 years, enough to create another leap-frogging innovation like a tablet?

The 3G iPhone is coming in a few days, and the next generation of Apple products is being released at the WWDC on June 9th. Baleed dat.

That would have never have happened listening to his music.
That probably wouldn’t have happened looking at an interview.
It happened because he was chilling, talking to his audience and his crew (Banks was there along with another guy I can’t remember what his name is).

Unfortunately for the other two (Banks and what’s his name) I walked away with a negative impression. So bad of a negative impression I don’t see how they could turn it around. See, it goes both ways. If you have an opportunity to interact with your audience by all means do so but all people aren’t meant to do that.

Back to 50 Cent, he made some very good points which is why he “won” some of my respect. He talked about business, handling business, not wanting to carry people to their success, how people change when they get money, talked about some of the business decisions he made, how current trends impact the music industry, etc. He talked about life, how people are supposed to transition and grow up (and how Banks wasn’t doing that), how there is much to experience and the different cultures he experienced.

I’m still tripping I watched 50 Cent. Not only watched it once, I went back a day or two later and watched it again. Actually I listened to it the majority of the time (while working) because they were just sitting there talking. When someone sent me the link I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. He has a social site and I suppose the streams and videos will be apart of that site. I don’t like the site and I’ll probably write an article ripping it apart later but he was honest why he was doing it: so he wouldn’t need other social network sites.

But, I had to be open to the idea of watching 50 Cent in the first place. The notion of trying and not letting the perceptions I had get in the way. I’m glad I did.

Be open to trying new things. You might discover you like things you never thought you would.

Some people like to assume that working on your own is a luxury. That you can do whatever you want and honestly you can do whatever you want. You choose if you want to work. You choose how hard you want to work. You choose when you want to get something done. The problem is those decisions all effect your money and status.

Miss a deadline at work and you get yelled at for a bit. Miss a deadline with your own company and who is going to yell at you? The consequences go deeper than that. You miss a deadline and you start to miss out on a lot more stuff.

But at least you are doing what you love if you are on your own right? The problem is you can get so caught up in the loving part and forget that there is a business part behind it. There is that part where you have to keep in mind how the money is going to come in. Everyone always says to do what you love, but nobody says do what you love for free.

If you want to go out on your own you are going to have to learn to wake up. Trust me, it can be easier said than done.

• IE/Win Guillotine Bug
• IE6 Double Margin Bug
• IE6 Mishandling Of Button Elements & Form Submission

Elements disappearing, layouts borked, forms not working correctly, these are all things that occur within IE version 6. IE7 is far better in its handling of rendering issues, but the problem is that people still use IE6 and you have to worry about them. The IE6 version of 9rules.com is a little ragged but it is about 98% the same. The only reason I was able to do battle against IE6 somewhat successfully at 9rules is that I knew what to look for and I knew how to fix the issues, most likely with the underscore hack.

The underscore hack is called a hack for a reason, it invalidates your CSS. However on the other side of the argument is that it works. It easily allows you to make a website work in Internet Explorer 6 and, in the end, if it works then it’s fixed. At least in my world… the world where sites need to be made live on a schedule and IE6-wielding visitors come to your site in double-digit percentage hordes. It works but it’s not pretty.

Another option is to serve a completely different CSS file to various IE versions using conditional comments which only IE understands. This is a cleaner separation and is preferred by many (I’ve used it, it works nicely) but the thing to keep in mind is that it’s still a hack. It’s a non-standard way of sending style data to IE while ate the same time sending style data to other browsers.

Oli, one of our big users at Chawlk, posted this comment:

“There are few reasons to *need* to hack CSS. You can usually get around the problem by refactoring your XHTML.”

Now, I disagreed with that, mainly because I’ve worked on specific issues that I don’t think could be fixed by refactoring XHTML alone. It’s true that many designers think they need to hack their CSS to make something work cross-browser, when all they really need to do is use best practices in developing their CSS-based layout from the onset, but there are small cases when you have no choice. Sometimes you have to serve different CSS files, different rules, JPGs instead of PNGs, etc.

But hacking your code should be your last resort. My general rule is if I spend a solid 30 minutes trying to work around a rendering issue within CSS and still can’t make it work, then I’ll pull out the hacks. At the end of the day, I just don’t have time to be messing around with IE issues and I need to make it work. CSS hacks just work, and I use them, and will continue using them. You should too, but be smart.

The following are lyrics from a song called Got Me Going by Day 26:

there’s no other love
there’s nobody else I’m thinking of
only a baby as special
how could I ever forget you
and let the moment slip away
we’ve been here for a while
and I just wanna take you away
you got me doing things I never do
I can’t stop feenin and dreaming about you
and about your love it feels so real to me
you know what to say
and you know just what to do
come get me
whatcha got for me
I wanna see
I’ve been waiting way too long
got me losing my cool
don’t know what I’m gonna do
you got me going

The song is about a man’s love for a woman but it can be applied to love in general. One person loves another person very much and wants to take it to another level. Further in the song they say “just let me be, be all that you need” because after waiting, the struggles, etc. it’s time to move forward - together. Passion, excitement, endurance, commitment, loyalty - the song has it all. Now that we have an understanding about love and passion, I’m about to apply this to writing online…because I’m smooth like that.

Passion shows…

It is somewhat easy to tell when someone is passionate about their writing and those that are doing it because it’s “the thing”. Those blogging because it’s the hot new thing are experiencing a crush with blogging. Bloggers that are expressing and sharing their passions are like the excerpted lyrics above.

When a person loves or is passionate about their blogging it shows. The person does not have to say, “I love to blog!” for it to show just like a person doesn’t have to say “I love you” for the person he or she loves to know it or know when someone loves you in return. Actions speak louder than words. Actions speak when there is silence.

The person that is passionate about their writing will embrace all aspects of it. The blogger will pick a decent host (to the best of their ability) and, if he or she encounters hosting problems, will rectify the situation. The person who is passionate about their content (meaning their content is important) will take steps to back it up in case something goes wrong. The person who is passionate about their blog will tweak it in an attempt to improve it. This does not mean the person will morph into a designer but the blog will look like a well-cared lawn - some look better than others but one can tell when a lawn is being maintained and when it is not.

When a person is passionate about their writing and cares about their users the blog will have the features a user would look for: about page, easy to subscribe to the blog, perhaps options to subscribe depending on the target audience, contact page, easy navigation, tags and or categories, interact with readers, etc. The content will be published when promised and the presentation of the content matters to ensure the user is able to easily read their content.

Round 6: May 7th, 2008

9rules has a new round coming up. When I look at blogs I look for the passion and love to show on the blog. When I load a blog in my browser and I’m puzzled about the direction of the blog, confused while reading an article what the author is trying to say or look at a site and my corneas are damaged because the site has colors that should be a sin to put together, I remember when I felt a lack of desire to blog and was blogging for reasons other than passion - and it showed. One of the reasons why we do not accept new blogs into 9rules is because so many people are excited about blogging and dive in, only to bow out a couple of months later.

It’s hard to think of original content and that is where passion gives an edge. The person that is passionate about their blog will come up with original content, will track down that interview, will confirm whether a lead is accurate, will take extra care creating a tutorial, writing a review, explaining design or programming elements, etc. The extra effort isn’t a chore, it can be a joy, something exciting and fun. It’s an essential part of the process.

I hope if I look at your blog for Round 6, the passion shows. If you don’t feel the passion or the love for blogging, why are you doing it?

If I could offer you one piece of unsolicited advice it would be that you start treating 9rules like a business with a definitive goal to either sell for a certain price (ideal) or maintain a sustainable income (difficult).

Now for anyone this can be good advice, but I wondered what is so different from treating your company like a business and treating it like a passion or something else. I didn’t know how I was personally treating 9rules. Maybe I was treating it like a business and that is how I conduct business. Maybe I was treating it like a hobby. Maybe I was simply treating it as the one thing I believed in online. Either way to Marcus it didn’t seem as though I was treating it like a business in his sense of the word.

And to be honest with you…thank all the toes on the llamas of the Andes mountains for that.

You see as a business you are almost obligated to let go of anything that doesn’t make money. Something not working? Toss it aside and move on. From a business perspective then 9rules would’ve been let go a long time ago. Not because it didn’t make money, but because after so long it didn’t make X amount of money. Because there had been so many changes you would’ve let it go for something more stable maybe. Or even better maybe a new set of leadership should’ve been introduced to guide 9rules to the glory land.

Have you ever been involved in something that where the people behind it didn’t have a passion for it? It sucks. Maybe our fault early on and for the last couple of years was that we didn’t have a passion for money. We didn’t always do what was the “right” thing to make our big money maybe, but hell if we knew the exact path to take we would’ve taken it from the beginning. Not like we chose our own path for shits and giggles.

You see, we do treat what we do like a business. We aren’t always serious because business doesn’t always have to be. Our business is more about the three of us and how we interact with people than the bottomline and maybe that is completely foolish on our part. However, we also wouldn’t have been able to try and fail as much if all we did was focus on the bottomline. I’m not saying it’s the best approach in the world to business, but it was our approach.

Do we have our new approach nailed down now that we have been through the trial and error stage? We sure think so.

As a designer, I’ve always thought about the success of MySpace and how design had nothing to do with its success. People want what MySpace was offering, so they could only do wrong if their design was so horrible that it hindered the abilities of the site. It doesn’t. It’s good enough. If people can hop in and accomplish tasks, use the site, create what they want to create, then the design has succeeded.

Design isn’t what something looks like. Design is how it works. — Steve Jobs

People who have seen the new 9rules design (launching this Wednesday) have said that it’s the best 9rules yet, far surpassing the previous iterations. This conclusion is probably a function of the following variables:

1. It fulfills their 9rules need, the need to easily find great member content.
2. It doesn’t get in the way of fulfilling need #1.
3. It’s nicely designed, but not overkill.

These seem like stupid easy things to accomplish with a site, but when you’re deep in the site and have been running & using the site for many years (like we have) then you lose sight of what really matters. Previous iterations had more content on them, more types of content, so the various pages were more like a jump-off to guide you to the pages you really wanted to view. That technique is not the way to go, and it only took me 3 years to realize it:

People don’t want to click, they want to see.

The new 9rules is all about seeing, right off the bat. Get on the site, see what you want. Reddit does this very well — they know what users want and they drop it all in your lap right on the homepage.

Give people want they want as soon as they see your site. Don’t give them a tidbit and hope they click to see “the full list” because it doesn’t happen. Give them what they want. Figure out what the user is buying and sell it to them. Don’t mess around.

I am great friends with Mike and Tyme and I like to believe I know them very well. Because of this I know what approaches work with them with regards to asking questions and assigning tasks and I know what will easily piss them off. The issue I use to have was always concerning myself whether our friendships would deterioriate because of how I treated them from a business standpoint.

Now we have had our rough patches, probably more than usual for a small company, but take into consideration we don’t get to see each other face to face so misunderstandings happen a lot and we sometimes deciphering sarcasm from brutal honesty can be difficult.

What I’ve come to realize that as much as we like to pretend that business and personal should be separated most of the time they just aren’t. If one of us is having a bad day then it is almost unfair to think that you should treat them as you have any other day because you are part of a business. If a person wants to take the time to tell me about the weekend they had between the hours of 9-5 who am I to complain about it? Really what is the difference?

I don’t think I am going out on a limb by saying that because of our business ties our friendships have been saved more times than not. I can name a number of occasions where if we were simply friends we would have all walked away from each other because as they say “who needs friends like these?” So while you may be sitting there cursing the gods for making Patty the hot girl in accounting work for the same company as you, I thank the gods daily for keeping Tyme and Mike in business with me otherwise they would have left me stranded with nothing but my 9rules pillow to call friend.

I fuck up a lot when it comes to communicating. It’s my selfish nature to cut people off, tease them or simply inquire why they are talking to me about a certain subject. Too often I separate the business with the friend and don’t realize that when we talk we are talking as friends who just happen to be in business together. It’s really the best of both worlds once you realize and get used to it.

When I started working for myself I always said the only aspect of company work that I missed was the ability to interact with others daily. Now I have that on an almost 24/7 basis and sometimes I find myself complaining about it. I just can’t seem to win with myself, but that is no surprise since idiots always lose.

So instead of thinking of it as business vs personal, maybe there should be a greater synergy between the two than you think. Besides, listening to Tyme talk about her WoW adventures or Mike tell a story of the dog making a mess of things will always be more entertaining than trying to figure out RSS aggregator issues.