I was looking at JuggleFrogs’ website - it helps you find reputable tradesman - and I came across this article by Miranda de Freston, the company’s founder. It’s all about BlueForest, a firm that builds treehouses. Really big ones for grown ups. And I want one!
I edit a blog - Ambitious Companies - for Hewlett-Packard about the intersection between technology, business and corporate strategy. Here are links to some interesting articles:
The greener PC. About the environmental impact of PCs and how thin clients, virtualisation and remote client solutions can reduce it.
Bad Language talks about me as a writer. Ambitious Companies is much more about my professional interests. It’s what I write about rather than how I write it.
Anyhow, I would encourage Bad Language readers to take a look, take a feed and contribute to the conversation.
Slashdot tipped a BBC article about the (allegedly) parlous state of the UK games industry.
The discussion on Slashdot is very interesting while the news item is actually a lot of special pleading by the games industry: universities are rubbish, we need tax breaks etc.
I’m a refugee from the games industry. For over ten years, until 2000, I ran a game development studio called Intelligent Games. I worked with some great colleagues and produced some work that I am still very proud of.
There are lots of things wrong with the industry and graduate skills may be one. In my experience, though, there was a much bigger skills shortage on the management and business side. I confess my own shortcomings here too - I started the company when I was 18 - but lack of experience is only part of the story.
Some publishers had business ethics that would make Tony Soprano blush. Individual producers (the people we dealt with at our publishers) were often unprofessional, lazy and incompetent. The level of cynicism and bullshit was unbearably high.
In the eight years since I left the industry, I have never looked back. All my clients today are professional, dedicated, ethical and hardworking and, more important, they’re all good at their job. I like working with them and I respect them as individuals and managers.
I think the games industry is suffering from the British disease. Individual talent and genius thwarted by lousy management, an anti-business culture and cynicism. It is typical that the industry body cited in the BBC news article is called “Game’s up”.
It’ll go the way of the British car and aviation industry, the Mini and Concorde. And the British space programme (yes we had one of those too).
On a more positive note, today I learned what a tourbillon is.
In the meantime, I’ve found a version of his masterwork, the Patterns of conflict briefing.
Sun Tzu’s Art of War is sometimes read as a business manual. There are some who think that John Boyd was the Sun Tzu of our age. His Patterns of conflict presentation was a six-hour briefing that is highly influential in American military circles.
I can’t find a version with narration but here’s the slidedeck - all 198 slides. It won’t take six hours to read it but it’s worth spending 20-30 minutes going through it.
A picture may be worth a thousand words, but John McGarvey from 123-reg has produced a video that is worth two thousand. It covers the basics of writing for the web and why it is different from writing for print.
Useful articles (without videos - sorry) on this blog that deal with writing for the web include:
It’s a short paragraph at the top of the page. It’s surrounded by white space. It’s in small type.
It goes on to consider the differences between reading on screen and on paper.
The author draws on guru Jacob Nielsen’s work. In particular his comment “[U]sers are selfish, lazy, and ruthless.” So, it’s all our fault then. (Well, since I am a paid up member of the Nielsen for President party, actually, it’s all your fault.)
I saw my first Amazon Kindle on Saturday. I was in the Louvre Museum and an American chap was using it to look something up. He gave me a demonstration and it looks pretty cool - smaller than I thought. Perhaps the differences between reading online and reading from paper are narrowing.
There’s a great article in Slate today about the growing trend to measure journalists’ productivity by the number of column inches they produce. While that sounds reasonable, in fact, for most kinds of writing it is a bad idea. It got me thinking about how to budget for, plan and measure writing output.
Avoid perverse incentives. Don’t base your incentives on word count or copy inches alone. Why? Well, a lobotomised monkey could bash out 1,000 words in a few minutes. I know that at full tilt I can type about 1,000 words in half an hour or so. But are they the best possible words in the best possible order? No. Kinsley’s kicker pretty much says it all: “So, that’s 1,003 words. Can I go to lunch now?”
Expect good work. (Encourage excellence.) If Woodward and Bernstein had been under pressure to file copy - any copy - to meet productivity goals, they wouldn’t have broken the Watergate story and they wouldn’t have exposed Richard Nixon. And it is hard to imagine that Donald Murray (guru of mine and author of Writing to Deadline) would have got a Pulitzer if his editors had only looked at quantity not quality.
Allow for research and editing. My rule of thumb is “One-half, one-third, one-sixth“. Approximately half my time is spent researching and interviewing. One third is spent proof-reading and editing. Only a sixth is spent actually writing. This is a guideline that I used when I wrote computer games (designing, testing, coding).
Don’t do free pitching. Yesterday I was asked to do some free pitching (i.e. free work in the hope of winning a larger assignment). See my previous rant: If you pay peanuts, you get monkeys. I said that anyone who agreed to do two days free work with no notice is either woefully underemployed (i.e. not good enough) or willing to prioritise new business over paid work from existing clients (i.e. heedless of deadlines and client trust).
Agree a specification, a word count and a budget. See Better briefs for writers. In my experience, without a clear brief, proper research and a professional relationship on both sides, you’ll get bad copy. And bad copy costs big money.
Don’t budget by daily rate. I can quote you any daily rate you like but unless you come round to my house and watch me work, you have no idea how long it takes me to finish your job. The daily rate is a convenient white lie and agencies seem to quote the daily rate their clients want to hear regardless of how long the work actually takes or the bill at the end of the day.
Use a transparent pricing mechanism. I generally work on fixed price against a detailed specification. I have a per-word rate that encompasses research, writing and editing. But because the word count and rate per word are fixed, my customers get a very clear, easily-budgeted price. This works very well for me because my regular customers can easily plan and budget my projects without having to come to me each time for a quote and without any awkward haggling.
People often ask me to help them create a website. In the past I’ve tended to do all the work for them but this is getting increasingly time-consuming so I’ve put together this DIY guide to:
Buying your own domain name
Building a simple WordPress website
Setting up email and web forwarding
My objective is to let people get their own ‘proper’ email and website address without having to pay a lot of money for hosting - just the cost of registering the domain itself.
While there are free registration and hosting options - Microsoft Office Live is one - I prefer the idea that people own and manage their own domain name. I also think that WordPress is a very good website system for non-techies (and for geeks like me, come to think of it). It is a content management system in its own right and you can use it to create professional websites or personal blogs.
So here goes…
Set up a domain name
I use 123-reg.co.uk to manage my domain names. There are other options, but this is the one I know best. Here’s what you have to do:
Find available domain names. Use the domain search tool to find the domain name you want. You may need to experiment with different variations and/or accept a less well-known top-level domain (e.g. you might be able to get badlanguage.net but not badlanguage.com because someone else got there first). It helps to choose a company name in tandem with the domain name so that the two match up. Check out my article on how I chose my own domain name.
Pick additional domain names. Consider registering several different top level domains, if available. This will make it impossible for cybersquatters to buy them later. Popular choices include .com, .net, .org and .co.uk. John McGarvey has written a very useful article on choosing these additional names. For example, I registered stibbe.net (my name) but also stibber.net (a common phonetic misspelling of my name). Similarly I registered GolfHotelWhisky.com and GolfHotelWhiskey.com (with and without an e).
Don’t buy anything else. At this stage, you don’t need to buy any other options from 123-reg.co.uk - don’t get email, hosting etc. Just buy the domain names you want.
Set up a free WordPress blog
Set up a WordPress account. Go to WordPress.com. Click on Sign Up Now!.
Choose a blog name. For simplicity’s sake use the same name as the primary domain name that you registered early. (I’ve already registered so your screen may look subtly different from mine, but you’re smart and you’ll figure it out.) For the purposes of this tutorial, my blog is called Way of the Panini. I love paninis and I already registered this domain. Don’t worry about the .wordpress.com bit for the moment - later on I’ll show you how to make the domain you registered link to this site.
Bingo! You have your new blog. Of course, you still need to go into the blog and set up a few things. Click on Site Admin. I suggest the following steps (use the Help button to get more advice - I’m not going to teach you how to use WordPress!):
Manage > Posts. Delete the “Hello World!” post and create an introductory post of your own.
Manage > Pages. Edit the default About page with some information about you and your blog.
Manage > Links. Delete the two default blogroll entries and add some cool new ones. (Can I suggest adding this blog - a bit of link love would be nice payback for all this free advice?)
Design > Themes. Choose a sexy new theme for your site.
Design > Widgets. Add Text (put a brief bio in it - see mine as an example), Search, Categories, Recent Posts, Meta.
Design > Custom Image Header. Definitely add a nice picture from your library.
Settings > Reading. Switch on all the enhanced feed options (i.e. Add to Stumbleupon etc.)
Take some time to experiment. Write a few posts. Try your blog on for size. You can always edit or delete things later. Here is my simple new blog.
Link the domain name and the website
Go back to 123-reg.co.uk. Log into the control panel. Scroll down to Manage Domains. Select the primary domain and click Modify domain.
Click on Web Forwarding. Click the Non-framed web-forwarding radio button and enter the full address of your WordPress.org blog. (In my case this is http://wayofthepanini.wordpress.com/). Don’t change anything else. Scroll down and click Update Web Forwarding.
Bingo! Now when I enter www.wayofthepanini.com into my browser, it takes me to http://wayofhtepanini.wordpress.com. Now you can put the domain name on your business card or on your email footer and it’ll look grown up and professional.
Forward emails to your regular email account
Set up email forwarding. Go back to 123-reg.co.uk and this time select E-Mail Forwarding. What you’re going to do is arrange for emails sent to a user at your new domain to be automatically forwarded to your existing email account. For the sake of example, I’m using Google Mail. Enter the user name and the forwarding address and click Update Forwarding. You can set up as many of these as you like and you can have several different incoming address go to a single recipient. This means that you can give people your shiny new address and continue to use your existing email system to read the messages.
Set up Google Mail. What you need to do now is set up Google Mail to send OUTGOING messages with your new address as the reply-to address. Luckily for me, Google have already published detailed instructions for doing this. Now outgoing messages will appear to come from your new address too.
Use Microsoft Live Writer. It’s much easier writing posts offline than doing it in the WordPress environment, and the tool I recommend is Microsoft Live Writer.
Once your blog is big and popular, you might consider upgrading your hosting, and the following tips might come into play:
Set up proper domain mapping. Wordpress.com can also do domain mapping although you may want to find a friendly geek to do the techie stuff for you. (Don’t ask me, I cost too much!)
Get proper hosting. I don’t use WordPress.com for my own sites. I host them using NativeSpace but there are plenty of WordPress-friendly hosting companies. This takes more technical work - you have to install and administer your own version of WordPress and you need to set up your domain to link to your properly-hosted site. However, it is the more elegant, professional solution. Luckily, you can export everything out of your existing WordPress.org account into your new site when you’re ready to upgrade. These guys will also manage a domain for you and registering with them and having them host the site is another way to do this but, as I said before, I think it is better to separate hosting and domain management. Similarly, when you’re ready to upgrade your email system, you can use 123-reg to change MX records - I use a Microsoft Exchange Server and it works fine, for example.
And finally…
Feel free to comment and add additional suggestions. If you find this article useful, please add it to Digg, Del.icio.us or Stumbleupon using the links below. If you want personal technical support (even if you are my mother, my wife or my best friend) please send me chocolates, flowers and substantial cash donations before picking up the phone.
Aileen, my wife, came up with a classic line this morning: “Did you just say something that made me think of something?” It’s not one of the great questions of history, which include:
What would you do if you know you could not fail?
If anything’s possible, what’s important?
But at least it beats “What’s my motivation?” I recommend that every writer marry an actor.
I edit a blog - Ambitious Companies - for Hewlett-Packard about the intersection between technology, business and corporate strategy. Here are links to some interesting articles:
Regular readers will know that I have an interest in military history. (See How to improve morale and confidence and Interview with Stephen Bungay.) I’m reading an excellent biography of John Boyd (Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War
There’s a great article in Slate today about the growing trend to measure journalists’ productivity by the number of column inches they produce. While that sounds reasonable, in fact, for most kinds of writing it is a bad idea. It got me thinking about how to budget for, plan and measure writing output.
This will tell you everything you need to know about creating a blog in WordPress.
