When was your last idea?  Did you write it down?  Did you actually follow through on that idea?  I’m going to guess that the answer is “no”.  Most ideas are either forgotten about or shot down.  I tend to forget about ideas because I never write them down.  This can easily be solved by writing it down on my palm, post-it note, or an email to myself.

Ideas that are remembered are also usually not executed because you mentally shoot them down.  For some reason the human mind likes to play it safe and not take risks.  This is also when the human mind makes up excuses and puts up a mental barrier.

Some of the common barriers are:

• Start-up Costs – Do you really need Microsoft Office for everyone, the best laptop, an office, or setup an LLC? – Just to name a few.  You probably don’t need the latest and greatest software, hardware, and etc.  There are many open source products out there that can give you the same or similar functionality of the name brand stuff.  Can you rent an office or the equipment?
• Lack of time – Well, you’re going to have to make time!  Believe it or not, you may already have some “free” time and you just didn’t know it…  Do you take the bus to work? How about using your laptop, phone, or even a pen and paper to write your blog posts, business plan, or respond to client emails?  How much time do you spend reading the paper, blog posts, or watch TV? Sounds like that’s some quality time you could be using to work on your next big thing.
• “Someone else beat me to it!” – Who cares! Learn from their mistakes and make your product or service even better.
• “No one will buy it!” – Just remember, “you need to sell your problem before you sell your product.”
• “I don’t have the expertise” – I bet someone does.  Use your network: You friends, twitter, Facebook, an ad in the newspaper (not sure about this last one) but I’m sure you’ll find someone.
• And so many more

“The only way to solve the perfect problem is to blow away one of the barriers.” So what’s the problem?  Pick the biggest barrier in your way and blow it away!

Long story short, stop making excuses, find the barrier(s), and blow it away!  Good Luck!

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Today I had the privilege to see Seth Godin in person.  Long story short, my mind was blown with his insights on public education, resumes, and so much more!  Disclaimer: I have not read his new book Linchpin yet, but I plan on it!  Some of today’s highlights include:

Public Education – Brainwashing

From 8am-3pm we are teaching our kids to become drones in today’s society.  Raise your hand for this, follow these directions to do that, you must use a #2 pencil to write, and quizzes are on Friday.  As a result, some workplaces have benefited from this phenomenon. McDonalds is a great example. Ray Kroc was able to take the McDonald brothers hamburger stand and create a scripted, repeatable process that just about anyone could reproduce.  He also influenced the food infrastructure beef, chicken, and others.  Franchises heavily rely on this brainwashing from our public education system. – Follow all the steps and you’ll be successful.

There is also a negative result of this way of learning…  When today’s kids are done with school they heavily rely on these sets of instructions to live from day to day.  What’s missing? – Critically thinking and problem solving.  When presented with a problem they tend to ask for the answer instead of trying to figure it out on their own.

What can be done?

• From 3-10, maybe 8? – Parents should be teaching their kids critical thinking and problem solving skills.  Forget about the TV and video games and do something that stimulates the brain in a positive way.
• Remember that when you’re at work you don’t have to memorize fact after fact (depends on the job) but you can look things up in a book, internet, or even a SME.  I can speak from experience that there are some classes from my undergrad and even my graduate program that I remember absolutely nothing about. Why? – Because I crammed all of that information into my brain for a test and I was never given the opportunity to apply that textbook knowledge.

Just figure it out!

Project Management – Ship It!

Many projects tend to fail due to scope creep, lack of funding, last minute changes, and various other reasons.  Get these things out of the way right away!

Physically write down the follow and sign it!  Assign tasks/deliverables to people, not groups.  Most importantly, hold people accountable!

1. What is the project?
2. When does it ship? – Deadline
3. Who is responsible for shipping – List the individual that is responsible in the end
4. What are you afraid of?
5. What are you really afraid of?
6. Why are you afraid of the above?
7. Why should your customer pick your product?
8. Who is the customer?
9. Who are the key influencers, gatekeepers, and authorities?
10. Does anyone else matter?
11. What does your devil’s advocate have to say?
12. Who can stop the project?
13. Who else can stop the project?
14. Who is essential to the success of your project?
15. What does perfect look like?
16. What does good enough look like?
17. List ever task and milestone.
18. Who becomes your competition?
19. What does failure look like?
20. Plus it / Minus it – What can you add/remove that would significantly add value to your project?
21. Thrash it – Go to town on tearing the project apart
22. Agreement/Sign-off – Get a signature in pen to proceed with the project with all of the feedback given in the steps above.

Here is a video similar to his speech today – different examples though.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Last Words of Wisdom and Quotes

• “Send kids to public school from 8-3 to learn how to become part of society but home school from 3-10″
• “Become remarkable by choosing tasks that have no limit/ceiling.”  Once you get a 300 in bowling, you’ve hit the top.
• “You don’t need a resume. Your trail of breadcrumbs online proves that you’re the same and probably has more info.” – This has created some contention…
• “If you’re not committed to failure, you’re just avoiding it.”
• “I had a hammer and everything looked like a nail.”
• “Sell the problem before selling solutions.”

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There have been a few changes on how Twitter Tools integrates with twitter.  As a result, here is a test post.

I will admit that it was a bit tricky to follow the instructions from Twitter Tools and then interpret them to twitter’s online form…

What you need to input:

1. Application Name – Enter in what your normally publish to twitter.  i.e. “shealaughlin.com new blog post”
2. Description: “twitter integration will wordpress, twitter, and shealaughlin.com”
3. Application Website: “http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/twitter-tools/”
4. Organization: “shealaughlin.com”
5. Application Type: “browser”
6. Callback URL: “http://www.blog.shealaughlin.com”
7. Default Access Type: “Read & Write”
8. DONE!

It should be noted… Until I publish this, I have no idea if it works or not…

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WordPress Basics by Mitchell Hislop (twitter / website)

What is a theme? A theme is basically a skin or template for your content. Themes will contain different styles, layout options, and some other customizable features. Some of these features include: multiple column support, customizable headers, icons, and more.

Two themes that Mitchell recommend are:

• Atahualpa “is a good theme to start with and there are a ton of options.
• P2 “is another good theme – focuses on microblogging”

There was great discussion around canned themes vs. customizing vs. creating one from scratch. This decision will likely depend on the purpose of your blog, the desired branding, and the required functionality. Note: if a theme doesn’t have the functionality you desire there is probably a plugin for it.

If you choose to customize themes there are different ways to go about it. You can choose themes that are easy to customize, this might include child themes, or you can get dirty and edit the HTML, CSS, and PHP.  Child themes are fairly easy to edit as the code is usually separated. As in, all the core PHP, JavaScript, and etc are in different files than the customizable code. This helps distinguish what is the customizable items vs. the “don’t touch this or your site will break” stuff.  Note:  If you ever need help looking up a WordPress function, variable, or code snippet refer to the Codex.  It has all the information you need to get help from installation to customization.

Hint:  If your WordPress site is “broken” try disabling all of your plugins, test the site, and enable your plugins one by one. If you’re a little savvy with your FTP client you can easily rename your plugin folder to disable all of your plugins at once.

Pushing Content to Twitter – Two popular plugins are Twitter Tools and Twitter Feed

Documents / Attachments – Is there a way to show the file size of a document? Mitch’s recommendation, use a thirdparty site like Scribd, Dropbox, Flickr, etc.  A comment from the audience was, “more often than not, clients will want to stay within WordPress and not have to use/learn another service.”  With that said, you can manually add the file size as part of the file name and then add the file URL manually through the WordPress interface.

BuddyPress by Toby Cryns (twitter / website)

Installing – In order to use the BuddyPress feature you must Install the BuddyPress Plugin. This can be done by going to the Plugins –> Add New –> Search for “BuddyPress”.  Note: The plugin is named “BuddyPress”.

BuddyPress Forums – To use forums you’ll need to create a forum by creating a bbpress forum.

Notes:

• Currently BuddyPress is not available on WordPress.com
• You cannot combine themes.  You need to use the BuddyPress theme or a BuddyPress compatible theme.
• If you don’t know what you’re doing, go with the default theme.
• Toby’s tutorial can be found here.

How to move WordPress to a different server by Ray Champagne (twitter / website)

- Long story short, use Ray’s tutorial. – Note: There are some references to WordPress MU… The doco will be updated with WordPress 3.0 information in the coming weeks.

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Have you ever thought of switching/migrating one of your Gmail accounts to a different one?  I did and I’m about to tell you how I did it.  I had one those Hotmail like screennames (clevername.somethingorother) that I used for years.  Recently I’ve been debating on using my official Gmail account (shealaughlin).  With that said, there were a few things that have often stopped me:

What about my.

• Email?
• Google Calendar?
• Google Reader?
• Google Voice?
• Contacts?
• Filters?
• Feedburner?
• Google Analytics?

Luckily, I was able to answer all the above questions AND migrate all of my data/info.  This is how I did it.

Importing Your Old Email

1. Log into your old email account.
2. Settings –> Forwarding and POP/IMAP –> Select “Enable POP for all mail”.
3. Log into your new email account.
4. Settings –> Accounts and Import –> Add POP3 Account.
   Note: Normally you would you the “Import Mail and Contacts” option BUT Google does not support this option for Gmail to Gmail transfers. Thus, the following steps must be followed.
5. Enter the email address your would like to import.
6. Enter the password for the account.
7. Click “Add Account”.
8. Done!

Exporting/Importing your Google Calendar

1. Log into your Google Calendar.
2. Settings –> Calendar Settings –> Calendar Tab.
3. Select Export Calendar – This will prompt you to save your current calendar entries as a .zip file.  Save!
   
4. Log into your new Gmail account/Google Calendar.  Hint: I recommend using a different browser.  This will enable you to be logged into multiple Gmail accounts at once.
5. Browse to find your .zip file and unzip.
6. Settings –> Calendar Settings –> Calendar Tab.
7. Instead of selecting “Export Calendars”, select “Import Calendars”.
8. Select the new .ics file you just unzipped.
9. Select which calendar you would like the imported events to be “attached” to.  This was my default calendar.  However, depending on how many calendars you have, you might want to create a new calendar to import your old events.
10. Done!

Transferring Your Google Reader Feeds

1. Log into your old Google Reader.
2. Settings –> Reader Settings –> Import/Export.
3. Click “Export your subscriptions as an OPML file”.
4. Log into your new Google Reader.
5. Settings –>Reader Settings –> Import/Export.
6. Click “Choose File” under “Import your subscriptions”.
7. Select the .XML file you just downloaded.
8. Click “Upload”.
9. Done!

Transferring Your Google Voice Account

1. Enter all the the required information into the “Request to allow Google Voice account transfer” form.  Note:  My request was fulfilled in less than 3 hours.

Exporting/Importing Contacts

1. Log into your old Gmail account.
2. Click “Contacts” –>Export –> Save the .csv file based on your export requirements.  Note: I only exported “My Contacts” as this would remove the erroneous contacts that were not important to me.  “My Contacts” is usually your address book.  If you don’t select “My Contacts” then all of your email correspondents will be exported.

1. Log into your new Gmail account
2. Click “Contacts” –>Import –> Import the .csv you exported in step 2.
3. Done!

Exporting/Importing Filters

1. Go to the Google Labs section of your Gmail account –> Enable “Filter import/export”
   
2. Go to Settings –> Filters.
3. Select the filters your would like to export –> Select “Export” at the bottom of the filters menu.
4. Log into your new Gmail account.
5. Go to the Google Labs section of your Gmail account –> Enable “Filter import/export”.
6. Click on “Import Filters”.
7. Select the .xml file you just exported and accept the changes. Note: When you import your filters AND apply those filters to your existing mail, this will then re-create the labels you had in your previous account.
8. Done!

Transferring Your Feedburner Account

1. Log into your old Feedburner account.
2. Select the feed you want to transfer.
3. Select “Transfer Feed”.
   
4. Enter the email address you would like to transfer the feed to.
5. Log into your new Gmail account, open your email, and accept the transfer request.
6. Done!

Transferring Your Google Analytics Account

Unfortunately, there is not way to transfer your account BUT there is a work around.

1. Log into your current Google Analytics Account.
2. You’ll have to add a new user for each of the websites your would like to transfer.
3. To do this select “edit” for each account.
   
4. Select “Add User”
   
5. Enter your new Gmail email address.
6. Change the access type to “Account Administrator” – This will give your new account full admin rights to the respective website/settings.
   
7. Save changes.
8. Done! Your new account should be able to view and edit your Google Analytics preferences.

These were just a few of the Google services that I absolutely needed (and actually use) to move over while switching accounts.  I would definitely be interested in alternative methods to the steps I have stated above and also the steps required to migrate the other Google services that are available.

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If you’re like me you may have waited until after work or even school to download the latest iPhone OS.  You might also be a little disappointed like me in the download times for the 378MB file.  First, DON’T DOWNLOAD FROM iTUNES! – It takes way too long!  Try downloading it directly from Apple (links below).

If you need help with installing the above software package you can reference another blog post of mine.

So… What’s new?

• Multitasking
• Folders
• Unified Inbox
• Threaded Email
• Gmail Archive (instead of delete)
• Integrated Spell Checker
• Custom Home Screen Wallpapers
• Digital Zoom w/ Camera (5x)
• Bluetooth Keyboard Support
• Search Yahoo or Bing vs. Google
• New Contact UI when Editing
• and much MORE!

Sources:

• The New iOS4 Shortcuts, Features, and Settings You Need to Know (Lifehacker)
• The Complete Guide to Using iOS 4 (Gizmodo)
• It is here: Apple ships iOS4 — go get it! (9to5 Mac)
• Ars reviews iOS 4: what’s new, notable, and what needs work (Ars Technica)

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Testing – Check
Integration Issues – Unknown
Theme 2010 – Awesome!
Nothing else report at this time.

Welcome to WordPress 3.0.  So far I’m digging it and some of the features from the 2010 theme are awesome!  More to come…

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Speaker: Jon Dahl
Twitter: @jondahl

What’s the Difference?

Startup

• You’re making something that someone wants.
• You own something.
• You can sell that something for money.

Consulting

• You’re selling your services.
• Your service is a special skill set(s).
• You don’t own anything besides your skills.

Suggestions

Startup

• Again, make something that people want.
• Statistically startups are more successful when there is more than one founder.  Note: I don’t have the reference for this statement.
• Have awesome founders!  An awesome founder can be defined as CRAP.
  • Compliments others.
  • Respects others.
  • Animal – goes balls to the walls to get stuff done.
  • Parity – shows equality with others.

Consultant

• Be good at what you do.
• Manage relationships.
• Relationship failures result in project failures.
  • If there was a surprise in the project – relationship failure.
  • If the client is frustrated with the current progress – relationship failure.
  • If the client’s requirements are unclear – relationship failure.
• Proactive communication can prevent most relationship failures.
• Deliver that “warm and fuzzy feeling”.  The following can do just that:
  • Frequent updates.
  • Answer phone calls and email promptly.
  • Don’t forget the tasks your agreed to follow up on and complete.
  • Create low expectations and beat them. – I’m a little skeptical of this one.
  • Meet or beat deadlines.

In summary, having a startup sounds more worthwhile and rewarding that being a consultant.

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Presenter: Mike Hugo
Twitter: @piragua
Website: whenworksforyou.com

Mike had a great story to tell that many of us can relate to.  Mike had a ton of ideas rolling around in his head but never executed on his ideas until he realized what the problem was…  He thought about his ideas so much that he became overwhelmed and as a result he would convince himself that his ideas were not worth pursuing.  Mike summarizes this process into 7 stages.

1. Idea – We all have ideas and they come to us in different ways.  Be sure to write them down.  I would recommend keeping a notebook or even your phone next to you.  You can then take notes in the middle of the night if needed.
2. Dismissal – This is where we convince ourselves that the idea is not worth executing.  For example: “Someone has already done this.  Why should I do it?” or you overwhelm yourself with all the different bells and whistles your idea could have.
3. Plausibility – Narrow the scope of your idea down to the point of actually being able to implement your idea.  Start with the basics (alpha or beta) and you can always add more features.
4. Implementation – Stop thinking and start doing! Most importantly, set a deadline and share this deadline.  Share your deadline with your friends and family.  They will help keep you on track and will hopefully give you grief if you miss it.  Your friends and family can help you test your product out when the time comes.
5. Trim Scope and Modify Deadline – KISS (keep it simple stupid)  Step back and assess the “nice to haves” vs. the “required functionality”.
6. Tell the World – Go on Facebook, Twitter, MySpace (if you use it?) and tell the world about your product.  Most importantly, ask for feedback and take action upon that feedback.
7. Repeat

At this point in time you’re probably wondering what the above has to do with developing a web application while riding the bus… Well, Mike did in fact develop the above application while riding the bus.  He just happened to note his behavior along the well.  So… What lessons did Mike learn while riding the bus?

1. If you sit in the back of the bus you can comfortably open and use a laptop.
2. The bus doesn’t have WiFi and the additional cost for a WiFi card was not worth it.
3. People tend to look at you funny if you’re using a laptop on the bus or they want to rubberneck to see what’s going on.
4. Mike rode the bus for approximately one hour per day (half hour each way).  There were a few times where he missed his stop because he was too involved with his work.  Sometimes a half hour wasn’t enough time to complete the task at hand.  So, he would then go to a coffee shop for an additional half hour.
5. In addition to his normal development time on the bus Mike would also carve out some time at home to work on his project.  He would usually do this while his wife was at work or not at home.  Remember, family first.

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Presenter: Kevin Whinnery
Email: KevinWhinnery@gmail.com
Twitter: @KevinWhinnery

In lieu of learning Objective C or Java to develop an iPhone/Android app there is another way! Kevin’s presentation encompassed the use of Titanium Mobile (TM). TM allows anyone to build apps faster by allowing the developer to use web technologies (JavaScript) to build native mobile applications.

Developer Note: In order to develop with TM you will need to have the native SDKs installed. It was recommended that you preload the Android SDK prior to TM (supposedly it takes a while to load).

Titanium Mobile Benefits/Features:

• Cross Platform
  • iPhone
  • Android
  • Blackberry (soon!)
• Real Native Apps
• Open Source (free!)
• Social API integration – there are some good Facebook examples
• Data Access – connect to SQL databases
• Integrated Analytics

Here are some real examples of apps that were created using TM:

• Oil Reporter – this was developed in approximately 48 hours
• SnapPost (iTunes) – this was developed by Kevin
• Grub.it (iTunes)
• Scoutmob (iTunes)

A dditional Help/Resources:
http://www.developer.appcelerator.com
http://www.vimeo.com/appcelerator
http://www.github.com/appcelerator/KitchenSink
http://www.appcelerator.com/download

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