Tips to Improve your Development Productivity

July 31, 2007 | Comments (5) | Filed under: General

Of all the questions I receive via email, I think the most prevalent two are how do I stay productive? and how can I consistently think of new ideas without burning out. If you do a quick scan of many of your favorite blogs, you’re almost guaranteed to find at least one post touching on these very subjects. Here are just a few articles on productivity I found in a quick 5 minute search on some of my favorites:

• Pro Blogger: Productivity Tips
• John Chow: Maximize Your Daily Efficiency
• Blogging Tips: Increasing your Productivity
• Earners Blog: 12 Tips to Increase your Earning & Blogging Productivity
• Randa Clay: Secrets to Productivity
• Daily Blog Tips: Blogging and Productivity
• Instigator Blog: Over 100 Great Productivity Tips
• Freelance Switch: Keep Getting Things Done - Slow Down the Queuing

Basically, the reason there are so many of these types of posts out there, is because everyone wants advice and there really is no magical formula that will work for everybody. If you need some tips, your best bet is to absorb as much information as you can from as many sources as you can. Try things out until you find what works well for you. I can almost guarantee you that after you’ve done that, your final work flow will be as unique as it is for the 8 blogs mentioned above.

What I thought I’d do with this post is share some of my own productivity tips from a development standpoint. Many of the articles you find focus on bloging or how to keep your site interesting over a long period of time. Very few touch on things from an online business standpoint or from a programming/site design standpoint. Since the majority of my time is spent in this arena, I thought I’d talk a little bit about what works for me in keeping my productivity moving along…

• Keep multiple projects on the go, and shift gears when you hit a roadblock. At all times, I’m probably working on a minimum of 5 different projects at once. Right now, I’m in the process of designing two new websites, building a new site infrastructure, and writing 3 different blog posts. Whenever I hit a road block on one project, I switch gears to something else temporarily. This helps reduce my idle time where I’d blankly staring at the wall, and it also lets me put the issue I was having at the back of my brain where subconsciously I can work through the problem. At a minimum, when I eventually come back to the project, I’ll come in with a fresh perspective, which is the key to overcoming whatever roadblock held me up.
• When a project gets down to the point where you’re wrapping things up for launch - focus! When wrapping up all the loose ends to finish up a project, it’s really easy to want to do something more interesting. I usually have a really strong urge to do something more interesting and not do tedious things like validate my XHTML or fix an obscure bug. When this is the case, I force myself to focus on these projects until they’re complete. If I didn’t, I guarantee I’d have 10 sites right now all 90% ready for launch… 
• Tackle the things you struggle with first. For me, this is crucial. I’ve mentioned before, the aspect I struggle with the most is graphic design and by association web design. As a result, the first thing I do on any project is tackle design first. Once I have a design in place or even just a logo/site name, it’s enough to drive me through the entirety of the project. I would assume it’s similar to being an author, and choosing a title for your book. Once I have the design/branding out of the way, everything else is much more comfortable and therefore easier to remain productive while doing. If I leave the design till the end, it can weigh on my brain and slow down my progress on other aspects.
• Look for inspiration from other projects. When your mind is full of clouds, look for the blue sky. If you hit a wall in your projects, one of the best ways to get around them is to look for inspiration from other projects and designs. Just seeing what someone else has programmed can be enough to subconsciously push yourself into getting your own solution off the ground. 
• If you need a breather, just do it! Some people believe that if you’re having trouble solving a problem, the best way to proceed is to focus harder and push through it. I have the exact opposite opinion. If I hit an impasse that I can’t get through, sometimes the best medicine is just to take a breather and focus on other things for a while. Go for a beer, go see a movie, hit the gym, watch some TV, etc etc. Just a little distraction from your current issues can clear your mind and make you more productive when you get back to it.
• If you can’t figure something out, put it out of your mind till the next day. A few months ago I was working on a project and had a programming error I just couldn’t figure out. I spent 4-5 hours straight staring at my screen and finally went to sleep angry and frustrated at 6:00 in the morning. After sleeping on it for 3-4 hours before having to get up for work, I woke up, hit my computer, and solved the problem in less than 10 seconds. Now, If I hit a problem I can’t seem to work out, I try not to waste my time by agonizing over it while I’m getting increasingly tired and increasingly stupid (RedBull doesn’t improve your intelligence!). Switching to a new project temporarily or even just catching some Zzzz’s will save you time in the long run, I guarantee it. 
• Think about names and features, sometimes they help drive development. When I get really deep into a project, I occasionally reach a point where I’m not sure if everything I’m doing is going to work out and improve my business. When that happens, I like to sit back and think about things like new features or names for our sites/products. I also like to think about how I plan to monetize the site and how I think it will perform in the long run. This kind of future thinking helps me visualize the completion of the project and can get me over the hump and actually wrap it up.
• Start your day by tackling the painful stuff first. If you’re a human being, then you probably have things you need to do everyday that you’d rather not do. You also probably tend to procrastinate about those things and put them off until you run out of time in your day. I know I do. Before I finish working everyday, I like to make a list of all these painful chores and when I start working again, they’re the first things I strike off my todo list. If you do all the exciting stuff first, it’s way too easy to get caught up and neglect the painful stuff. So, until you start outsourcing the painful parts of your daily routine, it’s best to get them done first if you want to be at your most productive throughout the day. 
• Try to finish every day with something interesting. Before I finish up my work for the day, I try to always tackle something interesting. This helps me remain productive because when something is interesting I tend to think about it in the back of my mind for a longer period of time. This helps me stay interested and also creates an urge to continue it the next day, and hit the ground running as soon as I start working again. If I’m stuck doing things I think are painful first, the anticipation of jumping back in on the exciting project helps me get through the chores that much quicker.
• Never be afraid to let something go. For many of us, letting go is hard to do, but one of the biggest detractors from productivity is agonizing over minutiae. We’ve all been there, with that application that works well but doesn’t do one tiny thing you want it to. You spend 10-20 hours extra on it just to implement the one feature that no one but you will ever use. I know I’ve been there, but keeping your productivity high also means knowing when to let something die off that’s simply eating up all your time. Sometimes it’s just a feature other times it can be an entire idea. If you analyze your project and the time you still need to invest out weighs the potential from completing it, it might not be worth the drop in productivity on other projects to complete the effort.
• Setup a work area that enhances your workflow. While not 100% a productivity issue, I think that your work area can really enhance or detract from your ability to get things done. If you need peace and quiet to get things done, then your workspace should be somewhere that you can achieve that. If you need loud music and movies playing in order to work, you need to gear your workspace accordingly. At the end of the day, you workspace should reflect your work habits and your productivity will improve because of it. Here is a look at my workspace in my home office. I can’t get anything done without music going through my headphones and I’m lost without my second monitor

The bottom line is, only you know when you’re most productive and the only way to find out what works best is to experiment. You can take advice from other people, like me, but at the end of the day you’re still going to have to tweak it to work for you. What are some of your best tips for productivity when it comes to development and design? What keeps you going, especially when the work that needs to be done is not very interesting?

Redirecting Traffic from One URL to Another using .htaccess

July 25, 2007 | Comments (9) | Filed under: Traffic

Recently, I’ve been in the process of migrating from my old blog (www.fuzzyfuture.com) to my new one Bookmark Bliss. There are a variety of reasons I’ve decided to make the switch, but the short version is that I wanted to move to a URL that more accurately conveyed the theme of my content and also is not tied up in any way to my business. When moving an existing site from one URL to another, there are actually quite a few things you might not think about that you need to take care of. One of the biggest is properly redirecting traffic heading to your old content to the appropriate location in your new site.

You want to do this for two reasons. The first is to make the change seamless to your existing readers. When visitors arrive at your old site via search engines, social networking sites, back links, or even just plain old bookmarks in their browser, the last thing you want to give them is a big glaring 404 error indicating page not found. That’s the fastest way to lose that reader forever by convincing them that your site no longer exists.

The second reason to redirect traffic is to maintain as much of your existing search engine result placements and back links as you possibly can. If your old site existed for any length of time, you’ve inevitably built up links to your content from other sites on the web. In addition, your content has probably started to bubble itself into Google results and, depending on how much work you’ve done, might even be ranking well for your targeted keywords. If you’re running a blog, you might also be interested in maintaining your “authority” points in Technorati as well…

The bottom line is, you want to minimize the losses in visitors and ranking as much as you possibly can…

If you’re running a WordPress blog, there are many plugins available that can help you accomplish this goal. For example, in my quick search I came across these two, Permalink Redirect and Permanent Redirector. However, I personally find the best way to accomplish this goal is to redirect traffic from your previous URL manually using mod_rewrite (a convenient mod_rewrite cheat sheet) and your .htaccess file. Choosing the right tools to accomplish this goal really depends on your level of technical expertise as well as your flexibility requirements. Nonetheless, no matter which method you choose, the form of redirection you ultimately want is a 301 redirect.

A 301 redirect is a method of telling web browsers and search engines that a web page or site has been permanently moved to a new location. Usually a 301 redirect includes the address to which the resource has been moved. Web browsers will typically follow 301 redirects to the new location automatically, without the need for user action. A 301 redirect should be used whenever a website is moved to a new domain name (URL) so that search engines will quickly change their indeces and, in theory, preserve the search engine rankings that the site had at the previous domain.

If you’ve gone ahead and moved your site entirely from one location to another, but maintained an identical structure for your articles, you can simply add the following to your .htaccess file and completely transfer all your traffic via a 301 redirect:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.old-domain.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.new-domain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

While this may look a bit complicated, what it is basically saying is that any visits to your site via your old domain name should have the old domain replaced by the new domain, but keep everything else in tact. So, http://www.fuzzyfuture.com/contact-us would redirect to http://www.bookmarkbliss.com/contact-us. The R=301 tells Google and other visitors that this modification is permanent, and that they should update all their links and rankings to reflect the change. While there is no guarantee that Google (or anyone else for that matter) will give you full credit for your links and page ranks, you can expect that as they update their index, your old pages should be replaced by your new ones in the SERPs.

Even Technorati makes an effort to regenerate your authority over time and slowly propagates in your new redirected links:

If the domain of your blog is different (example: myblog.blogspot.com is now myblog.com), please note that we are unable transfer or combine links from different URLs at this time. Links are URL-based and are unique citations to that blog at that time. However, if you permanently redirect the old blog URL to the new blog URL by sending a permanent redirect response (HTTP Status 301) to anyone requesting the old URL, it will help consolidate your online blog presence for all web aggregators and help have your links reestablished eventually. Apache’s mod_rewrite is a popular method of handling such requests.

For the specific case of redirecting Fuzzy Future to Bookmark Bliss, I needed a little more flexibility then I was able to get from standard WordPress plugins. My goal is to continue to use the Fuzzy Future URL, but still have all my old blog pages redirected here. I needed a solution that redirected most of the incoming traffic, but not all of it. To accomplish this, I ended up customizing my own .htaccess file to get the desired result. Here is the .htaccess file currently in place at Fuzzy Future.

If you take a peek you can see that while it’s slightly more complicated then above it’s really not that bad when you look at it. All I’m really doing is changing where some pages end up in my new site, as well as making sure all my categories and archives arrive at their correct locations. With this file in place, I can now continue to use the www.fuzzyfuture.com URL for a different website, while still not losing any of the traffic and rankings coming to my older articles.

Using a 301 redirect on your articles is not generally a speedy process of change. Google and other engines will very slowly update their records and can sometimes take upwards of a year or more before finally filtering out your old URLs. So, when implementing a 301 redirect on your site, be absolutely sure that this is a permanent redirect that your are planning to keep active for a very long time. One month won’t cut it, so make sure you’re there for the long haul.

if you need help with mod_rewrite, there are several great resources you can check out in addition to the cheat sheet I linked earlier. The mod_rewrite forums, digital point, and the webmaster world forums are just a few of the many resources. Of course, you can always get in touch with me as well and I’ll do my best to give you any help that I can. Even better, leave a comment and some one will surely be able to point you in the right direction.

The 5 Biggest Mistakes I’ve made as a Freshman Blogger

July 19, 2007 | Comments (15) | Filed under: Blogging

When starting a blog, there comes a point inevitably when you sit back and reflect a bit about where you are and where you’re going with your site. For some of us this happens in the first month while others can go years before they reach it. Ultimately, you ask yourself, what am I doing right with my site, and what am I doing wrong? This is the state I found myself in at the beginning of this month. To try and better analyze where I was at, I made a list of some of things I’ve done wrong as a freshman blogger (especially those things that are holding me back), and I decided to share that list.

In my opinion, these are the 5 biggest mistakes I’ve made as a freshman blogger:

Not building a brand and site that I was willing to part with

This was a real killer for me. Originally, when I decided to start blogging, I used a URL that I have had for quite some time, FuzzyFuture.com. I really like the URL and in fact, my company is titled the same thing and the original use for the URL was as a portal for my online freelancing business. I converted the site to a blog when I decided to stop doing freelancing and as many of you know already, I started blogging there on a regular basis. The problem with this, however, is that I am not willing to part with the domain FuzzyFuture.com. This really limits my future options with the site in that anything involving its sale to a third party is completely off the table.

Now don’t get me wrong, the offers definitely weren’t flooding my inbox. I simply think that for someone like me, who started blogging as an experiment, to completely eliminate one of my potential options for revenue is a mistake. To help address this, I’ve decided to separate my blogging from my business side of things and as I’m sure you’ve already noticed, we’ve moved everything from Fuzzy Future to Bookmark Bliss.

In the long run, no matter what the future holds for your blog, keeping all your options open is never a bad move. I really regret not doing that from day one.

Picking a schedule that was too hard to maintain in relation to my other obligations

When I first started blogging, I was really gung-ho and was posting at least one post a day, sometimes two or three. After the first few months though, I started to find it really difficult to keep up that pace. This was not due to a lack of things to write about but more due to time limitations. My schedule for blogging started to slip and slip and gradually got to the point where I was posting one post every 3-4 days. I apologize to everyone who stuck with us through that, but I do feel that it was a learning process in which I came to an understanding about just how much time I really have if I want to sustain it.

It’s like a long distance marathon. If you start out sprinting at full speed, make sure you have the endurance to keep going or those that are slow and steady will gradually pass you by. Here at Bookmark Bliss, it turns out our readers are actually ok with a slower posting rate (our subscribers have gone up 150 since I slowed down) but I’m committed to a minimum of one post a week from here on out. Some weeks I’ll have time to do more, but each week you can expect something fresh and new available on our site.

Failing to do enough promotion of my site through RSS and backlink generation

This was a big oversight on my part, and one a colleague of mine never fails to rub in my face. I was so busy starting out with blogging, that I really neglected the backlink and rss aggregator work that really would have improved our readership over the long haul. Fuzzy Future suffered a bit for it on the last pagerank update when we jumped only one rank from 2 to 3 despite having almost a dozen posts that individually were PR5 and PR6. I’ve definitely learned my lesson with this, and from here on out a major focus will be on building up Bookmark Bliss traffic over the long haul.

Overdoing it with social networking sites like Digg and Del.icio.us

This was definitely a big mistake made at Fuzzy Future due to the way our site was originally designed. Initially, we added a Digg button and a Share This button on every single page of our site. This was to encourage people to Digg up submitted articles. Instead, many of our readers submitted articles to Digg on their own, including pages that never had a chance in hell of making it to the front page (things like link roundups). As a result, many of our articles got buried by Digg users, and within the first two months our URL had been flagged by Digg similar to John Chow. Basically, this completely cut off Digg as an option for us.

In retrospect, I think it’s better not to encourage people to submit your content to social networks simply because of the fact that not all your content deserves to be on social networking sites. Really, only your best content stands a chance of gaining a following on these sites, so it’s better to be selective rather than aggressive.

Not spending enough time communicating with the community in my niche

Finally, I was not spending enough time in my niche getting to know other bloggers. I’ve met some great readers who’ve taken the time to stop by our site and I’ve also met many others visiting sites myself. I don’t think I made enough of an effort, however, and with Bookmark Bliss I hope to make a lot more connections with great members of our community. In addition, I’m also going to look into possibly guest blogging on some other sites, in order to gain some new readers as well as get some guest readers here on our site. I think guest blogging is a great way to get to know your community and help introduce your readers to new sites and authors they may not have known already.

So those are what I feel are my 5 biggest mistakes I’ve made as a freshman blogger. Personally I think that this kind of reflection is absolutely crucial for anyone who plans to keep blogging over the long haul. Only by figuring out where you’re going wrong can you correct your course and get back on track. So, for those of you out there who’ve had your own time to reflect, what do you think are some other big mistakes that bloggers make starting out? What are some other mistakes you think I’ve made starting out? Hit me! I can take it

Fuzzy Future becomes Bookmark Bliss

July 18, 2007 | Comments (3) | Filed under: General

First, I want to apologize to everyone for the last few weeks that Fuzzy Future wasn’t updated. I finally decided that I needed to make a change right away, and since then have been focusing on getting this new site up and running.

So without further ado, allow me to introduce our new site: BookmarkBliss.com. From this point on, Bookmark Bliss will be the new home of all content currently here at Fuzzy Future and gradually I will slowly phase Fuzzy Future out and let Bookmark Bliss take over. I’ve already migrated all of the content and comments so those of you who are regular readers can jump over immediately without missing a beat.

With this new site, I will be maintaining a regular posting schedule of at least one new article every week. I’ll also be focusing more on the business of being an Internet entrepreneur with articles intended to help you get a leg up in online business.

To help make the move as painless as possible, I’ve transferred over all the posts and comments as well as converted Fuzzy Future’s feed. What this means is that for most of you, you won’t need to do a thing other than update your bookmark.

So please, join us over at the new site and let us know what you think of the new layout. Also, thanks to everyone for sticking with us through this transition. We really appreciate it and I think you’ll really enjoy what we have in store for the future.

Streamlining your Online Business through Outsourcing

July 4, 2007 | Comments (12) | Filed under: Online Business

As I’ve mentioned here before, probably the weakest weapon in my web arsenal is the ability to design a good, unique, site layout. I’m pretty good at using Photoshop, as well as other design packages, but my big roadblock is artistic skill. I’ll be the first to admit that a design that can take me 20 hours to do could take someone with artistic skill an hour and completely blow mine out of the water. We may be on the same skill level with Photoshop, but a true designers ability to work with color, layout, and flow is really something that can make the difference between an amateur and professional looking layout.

Knowing this weakness and instead of getting frustrated and wasting my time working on crappy designs, I play to my strengths instead by outsourcing a lot of my design work. Outsourcing has kind of a negative connotation, especially in North America, because the first thing a lot of us think about when we hear that word is loss of jobs to cheap Indian call centers. While that is definitely one type of outsourcing, the actual definition is much more broad. Basically, it’s the idea of giving a job to another person in order to free up your own time and money to work on other things.

Do the people you give the work to have to be in another country outside your own? Absolutely not! Outsourcing could be as simple as getting a friend to do designs while you work on the back-end logic. Even if you don’t know someone who is willing to help out, there are literally hundreds of sites on the web that can easily help you out with almost any aspect of your online business.

Here are just a few examples, for a really comprehensive list of freelancers, check out the monster list of freelancing job sites.

1. Programmer Meet Designer
2. eLance
3. Project4Hire
4. Blog Posts for Sale
5. RentACoder
6. Get a Freelancer

It’s not just programming and design you can outsource either. You can hire people to help you write your blog or even just to be your personal assistant and help you maintain your schedule ( assistu, ivaa, b2kcorp ). Basically, if you can think of a task, there is probably a service or auction site out there with people just itching to help you get it done.

Now I know what you’re saying, this stuff must cost a ton of money and how can I afford to hire people to do any of this work for me?

To be honest, when you look at the work from the perspective of time spent to do it yourself, I think in most cases it actually is cheaper to go with an expert. Take myself for example, I recently was in need of 5 unique Wordpress templates on a specific topic. Each one was on the same topic, but all 5 designs had to be different. To come up with those designs myself, would have taken me literally 10-20 hours, and the end result would have been workable but far from amazing.

Instead, I put up a project listing on eLance, and I paid a designer $200 for the layouts (I just needed Photoshop mockups). So if I value my own time at say $25 per hour, at a minimum I would have wasted $250 doing the designs myself. Instead, I received 5 excellent designs and while those were being done I managed to launch all 5 sites. So basically, I doubled my throughput and saved myself a designer’s headache in return.

I think you’ll also be surprised at just how cheap some jobs can be done. For me, I always assume design is really expensive because I estimate it based on the time it would take me to complete the same task. In reality though, a designer takes a fraction of the time it takes me to do the same work and so in a lot of cases it really isn’t that bad at all.

In the end, it all comes down to maximizing your efficiency and playing to your strengths instead of succumbing to your weaknesses. You should always try to improve in areas you need work, but you don’t want to do that at the expense of progress for your business.