Jordy Blog

MidMarketMaven posted Matt Marsh‘s notes from Stephen Covey’s recent speech at the University of Utah:

“Finally, [Covey] asked how many people in the room had created a culture in their lives that at least permitted, if not encouraged, those around you to kick back against what you say, to which very few responded yes.”

I can’t believe that anyone in their right mind wouldn’t do everything in their power to get as much constructive criticism as possible. Still, there are employers who basically pay their employees to agree with them. It’s a weird mentality that pitches personal vanity against personal success. I for one would take success every time, but you gotta let people love themselves to their own detriment. :)

Inviting an Unbiased Critique

When seeking an opinion on a developing idea, don’t say, “Here’s my idea! Don’t you love it?!” Instead, get meaningful feedback by inviting criticism: “Here’s my idea! Will you shred it to pieces it so I can make it better!” Smart people realize that they will get smarter by testing their ideas against those of others. They take notes on any areas that need fixed or clarified. They evaluate suggestions, make necessary changes, then try again. This refining process of acting on valuable criticism can make a bad idea good, and a good idea great. Thus criticism is a crucial ingredient of continuing improvement.

Criticism Prevents Problems

Of course, in the business world, this revision process hopefully happens well before a proposed product or service hits the market. Critiquing a product early on prevents potential losses and gives the company the benefit of resolving problems in the quiet of the boardroom rather than the echo chambers of an unforgiving market. Great leaders allow their ideas to be subject to the criticism of employees and coworkers so that they can fix potential problems before they solidify. Inviting criticism allows you to get it right the first time, often saving time, money, and reputation.

At the very least, valuable criticism from coworkers, employees, and trusted friends will give insight into doubts that may arise from potential investors and customers. Even if the criticisms are baseless, they may help you determine where clarity might be added to your message to avoid confusion and increase deal flow.

Constructive Criticism Builds Buy-In

Employees and coworkers who are encouraged to critique an idea take pride in the idea as it is modified to reflect their own input. Even if some recommendations are not taken, employees benefit as their concerns are calmly and logically addressed. Either way, a consensus develops, and team members become more likely to take a personal stake in their work.

Inviting criticism makes employees feel that their input is valued and important. This leads to intrinsic motivation, higher productivity, lower turnover rates, and the comfort of knowing that you can be effective without being a jerk. :)

Investors, partners, and customers also feel a degree of ownership in ideas that they have helped develop. Take your more polished ideas to them and ask for their criticism. Are there better ways of accomplishing your common goal? Can your investors, partners, and customers recommend or even co-develop other, better strategies? As people become more involved, each becomes a confidant and a trusted partner in your success. Having furnished their ideas (much more than mere money) they become contributers and allies, dedicated to making the idea succeed.

Yes-Men Breeders Prefer to Stay Stupid

In all your business dealings (especially if you have “subordinates”) watch out for yes-men. People who flatter you instead of voicing their dissenting options do you a great disservice by letting you remain in your own stupid ignorance and self-deception. Friends don’t let friends be stupid.

If you find yourself surrounded by the “overly-reserved”, note that their unwillingness to voice concerns it is very likely your fault. If there is something about you that makes them reluctant to question your ideas, change your behavior. Create a culture where you can benefit from others’ insight.

Learn to respect, trust, and openly reward people who are willing to stick their neck out to set you straight. Publicly acknowledge your weaknesses so people feel like they can offer advice and help without offending. Be approachable! Otherwise, your ideas will never be as successful as they could be with a little help, and you will struggle to make them work one hard-knock at a time. Save yourself the trouble by inviting and responding to criticism up front.

“Critical” Take Aways

You should proactively invite criticism. Ask for it! The people you deal with have concerns, and you can’t resolve them if you don’t know what they are.

Invite criticism in the planning phase to refine your product and presentation and avoid major marketplace mistakes. Use trusted criticism to refine your ideas until they become winners.

Invite and respond to criticism to achieve crucial buy-in from stakeholders.

Get over yourself! People can’t help you and your ideas improve if you don’t create a culture of constructive criticism.

Lastly, be wary of ideas that seem too good to be true; they probably are! Bounce them off of smart people who will do you the favor of telling you you’re wrong. Review, refine, then try again.

It looks like Google SketchUp is now live. But besides enabling users to put mock ups on Google Earth, I’m having a hard time seeing how this acquisition fits into its Google’s overall search strategy. Still, it looks pretty cool and will probably be great for branding. Plus, I believe that if it’s cool enough, a revenue model will follow.

A free trial version is available for download, but it’s currently only available on Windows. Alternatively, if you’d like to see a great, fully-featured, open-source 3D graphics and animation suite, check out Blender. It’s definitely not as sleek as Google SketchUp, but it’s much more functional.

Google’s Summer of Code is a great opportunity for IT and CS students to learn new skills, improve their resume, and make a little money during the summer. Plus, it offers students an opportunity to work with some really big-name open source software organizations.

Google is not taking applications yet, but it should be really soon, so keep an eye out.

Most people don’t know this, but WordPress automatically builds RSS feeds for specific categories. So if you wanted to syndicate only “tech” stories from the Jordy Blog, you could use this feed:

http://jordy.gundy.org/wp-rss2.php?cat=3

To view which id you could use for a category-specific feed, just click on a category and see what is listed in the address bar. If you don’t see a number, the blogger is probably using a non-default permalink structure (which is good for SEO purposes by the way).

(If a WordPress blog has nested categories, a feed of a parent category will automatically grab any stories belonging to child categories, so there’s no need to classify a story in multiple categories of the same lineage –the most nested applicable categories will do. That also means that there there’s no need to subscribe to a child category’s feed if you’re subscribed to the parent.)

Another cool trick is that you can syndicate several categories at once, and WordPress is smart enough to give you only one instance of each unique post (even though a story might be listed in two or more separate categories). For example, here’s how you would syndicate just my Technology and Business categories:

http://jordy.gundy.org/wp-rss2.php?cat=3,2

No dupes!

But there are several reasons why you might not want to syndicate by category:

1) Category syndication is a little tricky, and you’re lazy.

2) Most bloggers don’t know that the feature is available, and if they do, they know that almost no one uses it. They are unlikely to cater to your needs, categorizing and nesting appropriately, etc. And if they ever move their blog, they’ll likely not redirect category-specific feeds.

3) Category specific syndication means you might miss out on some cool content (especially on the Jordy Blog).

Overall, category-specific syndication is mostly handy for blog aggregation since you may want to syndicate several people’s views on ‘X’, but don’t really care about ‘Y’, and ‘Z’. But since most people aren’t aggregating blog feeds, most people don’t care.

Do you?

My boss, Paul Allen (the lesser) asked me to blog about how I redirected his entire blog site to new domain without losing traffic. So at the risk of boring some of my more technical readers, but also in the name of retaining my job, here goes. :)

Before the Move

First, the part I didn’t do. Before the old site could be redirected, the new site had to exist and look sharp. Blake created a mock-up of the new look and feel and sent it to XHTMLized, a great company in the UK that returned a working WordPress theme the very next day for $150. Mike installed the latest WordPress on the new domain and put Paul on a blogging freeze while he imported the database from the old domain.

List Links that Should Redirect

Once Mike was finished, I made a list of links to the old domain that should redirect to the new domain if clicked or pasted into the browser. I picked a link to each different page type that I could think of. Although yours may vary (depending on what type of site your moving and what kind of link structure your using), my list of old links looked like this:

Main
http://infobaseventures.com/blog/

Post
http://www.infobaseventures.com/blog/2006/02/16/transparent-companies/

Category
http://www.infobaseventures.com/blog/categories/companies-to-watch/

Archive
http://www.infobaseventures.com/blog/2006/01/

Syndication
http://www.infobaseventures.com/blog/feed/
http://www.infobaseventures.com/blog/comments/feed/

I emailed this list to myself so I could test each link out after the redirect. Be thorough when making your list so that you don’t lose readers (or traffic from important links) during the move. For instance, if you forget to redirect your feeds, plan on losing your most tech-savvy readers.

Use Consistent File and Directory Naming Structure

If you use a similar (or at least consistent) directory and filename structure on your new site, you should be able to write just a few redirect rules rather than one for every page. If you’re just copying an normal directory to a new location, you don’t have to do anything here. If you’re using a CMS like WordPress, make sure that your new site is using the same permalink structure. In WordPress this is configurable in “Options > Permalinks”. The end goal is to keep the URLs of each of your pages looking similar.

You can test whether a redirect will be simple by doing a find and replace on your link list, then testing the new links. In my example I replaced “infobasemedia.com/blog” with “paulallen.net”, then tested each link to make sure it brought me to the appropriate page on the new site. They did. If yours do too, your redirect will be easy. If they don’t, you should probably fix your new site and try again. Alternatively, you can do a redirect for each page type, but it will be more difficult. It may however be the desired effect, if the whole reason for redirect was to modify your directory structure without taking a hit in traffic.

Decide if you want “WWW” in your URL and Stand by Your Decision

After I tested my new links, I tested whether the new links also worked without the “www”. They did. This may seem counterintuitive, but for SEO purposes, you actually don’t want them both to work. Or better, you want one to be a server alias redirecting to the other so that links to either URL land on just one, which is good for Google Juice. Which should you choose? It doesn’t really matter as long as you’re consistent. Traditionalists like the “www”. Some newfangled whippersnappers don’t.

Since I didn’t do the server alias for paulallen.net (Mike did), I’ll show you the pertinent parts of virtual host configuration file for Provo Labs.

<ServerName www.provolabs.com>
DocumentRoot /var/www/html/www.provolabs.com
...

<ServerName www.provolabs.com>
ServerAlias provolabs.com
Redirect permanent / http://www.provolabs.com/
...

This makes it so that if you try to go to http://provolabs.com/, you will be redirected to http://www.provolabs.com/. Is this vital moving a website? No. But it’s nice, and it’s better setup the site properly before you start directing traffic to it. At the very least you should know whether you want to include the “www” so that you can redirect it to the one that you plan on ending up with.

Making the Redirect

So, after much testing, you should finally be able to make the redirect. This is actually very simple. You just want to test it beforehand to make sure it’s seamless for your readers.

Here’s the code I put in the .htaccess file of the old blog site.

# Redirect permanent /blog/ http://www.paulallen.net/

Pretty easy, huh? I clicked save and opened up my list of links that should work. But some didn’t. I quickly commented the redirect out and looked again. There were some mod_rewrites on the old site that needed to be deleted for it to work properly, a common problem having to do with the permalink structure. So I removed the offending code, saving it in a separate file for backup. With the next try, it all worked. There were only about 2 seconds of traffic lost in my first attempt, and even that landed on the new site –it just didn’t land on the right page at the new site.

Google Juice

This is all just guesswork, but one important thing to note here is that you should probably use the permanent redirect. This tells people to update their links to your pages. It also tells Google that links coming to your old address should be credited to the new one. Despite this, you will see your PageRank go to 0 because Google dings your new address for being new. Don’t worry about that; nobody cares but you. If the traffic and content is still there and all inbound links are landing (with a permanent redirect) on the right pages, your users are still happy and your PageRank should go back up with a little time. In the interim you will still probably still place fairly well in natural search results for Keywords that you have really targeted. And for traffic from paid results and links, your PageRank obviously doesn’t matter.

But if you have a for-profit site that sells seasonal products and you need the money to eat, you might consider doing the switch in a slow season. And if you can afford to have something decent on the new URL being indexed by Google even months before you make the redirect, that would probably help too. Again, this is guesswork.

Link Checker

Despite testing all the main page types, we still missed a small number of pages because we did a database dump and import rather than copying an entire directory. Overall, we did what we wanted to do, and under normal usage it would have been perfect. But we forgot to check the old blog’s document root for html files and directories that were created outside of the standard WordPress administration panel and were (therefor) not in the database. The omitted pages were insignificant enough that we would not have known immediately that they didn’t work. Luckily Mike decided to use a link checker (like the free one I mention here) to verify all the links on the new site worked. Sure enough, there were some broken links to content that should have been there, but wasn’t. So there’s a little clean up to do (even still), but chances are that none of his readers noticed.

Do it Right the First Time

Demming’s seventh rule of TQM is “Do it Right the First Time”. The same axiom applies all over in life, and it certainly applies here. If you can get your site setup in the right directory and the domain in the first place, you save effort and uptime down the road. So if you can, just do it right the first time. Pretty obvious, I know –but it does take a little foresight and planning.

Deepest Apologies

Well, hopefully that wasn’t the longest post you ever read. If it was I apologize, but you might not be in this mess had you exercised a little self-control earlier on. Despite it’s length, I hope that somewhere in this long mess of verboseness you found a little nugget of wisdom that will be helpful to you the next time you move a website between domains or otherwise. If not, it must be because you didn’t look hard enough. Try reading it again. :)

PS. Let me know if I missed anything.

Netflix is suing Blockbuster, almost immediately after receiving a long-awaited business model patent. I personally hope the courts reward Netflix; Blockbuster’s imitation is just too flagrant… Plus I just hate Blockbuster. :)

TinyURL.com is a neat little site where you can submit a really long URL to make tiny. When someone clicks the TinyURL link (or pastes it in their address bar), they are briefly taken to the TinyURL.com page, then instantly redirected to the appropriate site. It’s a real simple concept, but it’s also really handy, especially when you’re posting a long URL into an email where the text wrap might break it.

For example, this gargantuan 322 character URL:

http://maps.google.com/maps?daddr=157+E+Rosemary+St,+Chapel+
Hill,+NC+27514+(Hell)+%4035.914810,-79.054805&saddr=Micr
osoft+Corp,+1+Microsoft+Way+%23+8,+Redmond,+WA+98052+(Micros
oft+Corp)+%4047.644154,-122.118906&f=li&hl=en&dq
=hell&cid=37062500,-95677068,15779228992678768709&ll
=54.876607,-93.691406&spn=43.504226,119.882812

… becomes this a sleek and paste-friendly one.

http://tinyurl.com/f7enh

Only 24 carbs chars!

I use that particular TinyURL link to give directions all the time. :) Very handy.

XHTMLized.com is a great service where you send in a design for a webpage and they return a webpage in valid CSS or XHTML. They are very fast (less than a week) and pretty cheap (only $150). They can even return your design as a WordPress theme or whatever you like. Not a bad deal if you want it fast.

This email exchange between the City Manager of Tuttle and the lead developer of CentOS Linux is one of the funniest things I’ve read in a long time.

Here’s the hard-hitting local news coverage.

My good friend Doug Collins will be playing guitar with country music star Julie Roberts on the Grand Ole Opry at Carnegie Hall tonight. You can watch his performance at 6PM Mountain Time on GAC.

Doug and I were together in our first little rock band (dubbed Social Faux Pas) in junior high. He and Jared Harding played the guitar while Reed Spencer did drums and I thumped along on the bass. We were great for our age and had a few little gigs around town, but we weren’t very good overall, and Social Faux Pas (like most bands) fizzled out before it could really take off. Those were fun times though, and I’ll always remember them fondly. It’s been well over 10 years since, and Doug has gone in to play in Jerry Town, the City Coyboys, and a myriad of other local Utah bands.

Although I’m not a big country music, I’m excited for Doug to have some big name validation for his career choice. Doug is a fantastic musician and a gifted guitar player. He’s been working the music scene for a long time and really deserves this big break.

So check out Doug Collins’ guitar with Julie Roberts at the Grand Ole Opry. If I know Doug he’ll make it worth your while.