Archive for the ‘Miscellania’ Category

I couldn’t find any usb drives tonight so i brought out an old external hard drive. That picture is one of the first “mastheads” of muddylemon.com circa the late 90s.

I also found this poem from the same time period:

Different Person

i used to be a different person, I used to have different thoughts
I’m not sure if i changed characters, or merely shifted plots;

I used to be a different person, I was someone I once knew
I don’t remember changing, I doubt I really grew;

I used to be a different person, I lived in another place
I died, I disappeared, I barely left a trace;

I remember my former self, in flashes at times
I see myself speaking as if i’m reading lines;
I can’t remember my old motivations
I can barely sense those old sensations
I was who I would be, without knowing why
and now I wish I were who I was, or was it just a lie?

Caught this discussion on reddit between a few well-intentioned redditors asking for advice about a very early stage startup. I can’t promise to invest quite yet.

This site was offline for three days due to the unbelievable incompetence of Dreamhost. There is no excuse for a company in the business of hosting websites to fail so miserably and so often. The reason for the outage is unclear, their infrequent updates would refer to different pieces of failing hardware. The backup server, which is oddly singular in their parlance, failed while restoring to a new server that failed for similar hardware reasons.

I’m off to the cloud!

Update: It took a couple days to move off of dreamhost due to more unplanned outages as well as a hacker accessing their authentication database requiring mass password resets. Srsly.

When I was a kid my dad bought us a video game system for Christmas. This was in the early eighties — the height of the Atari era.

We got a Coleco-vision.

It came with Donkey Kong. We were lucky that it came with a game because there weren’t any other games available. Literally. The Coleco-vision was discontinued and we’d already missed the closeout sales on Coleco games. I think any that were left were likely being used as a mulch over the buried ET Atari games.

A few years later we were introduced to the Nintendo. The kids who lived across the street had won a vacation to Guam.  The highlight of the trip was when Rusty, the younger sibling, had stumbled across a hundred-dollar bill on the beach. Rusty had kept the bill on his person for the entire trip, sleeping with it under his pillow. Upon their return this windfall was immediately applied to the purchase of a Nintendo Entertainment System.

Until that point our only exposure to Super Mario Bros. and Duck Hunt was in Nick’s house up the street. He lived in one of those oppressively decorated houses that always smelled faintly of peanuts. He was allowed to have at most one friend over at a time. We would sit quietly on their velvety couch and watch Nick play. We never got a turn. It was his Nintendo and he was going to play it. If we wanted to watch, that was fine, but he felt no compulsion to share the experience. Still, we could pretend we were playing. We’d sit behind Nick and twiddle our thumbs and wish Nick would actually try to go down that green pipe. “No,” he’d reply. He had done that already and it didn’t interest him.

You can imagine how exciting it was to have a Nintendo in the neighborhood not controlled by a sociopath. It wasn’t long before we discovered that NES could breed Machiavellian machinations that pre-pubescent boys are not ready to handle.

Rusty, the younger brother, had found the money. It was an open and shut case. Mickey was happy for his brother. Rusty, though generally a dull boy, realized instinctively what sort of leverage he had suddenly acquired. It was delicious. When we’d come over to play, Rusty was a gracious host. Anyone could play if they asked permission. He would set time limits. He would arbitrarily alter the limits. We would pray the he would not alter them further.

He was at times capricious and cruel and then suddenly generous. Pre-pubescent boys have limited social sophistication but all of us quickly learned how to curry favor, flatter and conspire.

All of us except Mickey.

As the older brother, and the oldest by a hair in the two block radius that defined our territory, he was used to a certain level of discretion and control. Being suddenly bankrupted, by his little brother no less, was more than he could bear.

Mickey seethed. He plotted. He used what leverage he had, his superior size and experience, to the best of his ability. Games got rough, accidents happened. Tensions rose. After a few weeks, he didn’t even come into the room. He’d stay in his bedroom making model planes or reading.

Afternoons in our neighborhood followed seasonal patterns. We spent the summers outside on our bikes and at the pool. We’d build bike ramps at the bottom of the big hill and test our bone strength and our mother’s nerves. When the weather worsened we’d move inside. Roaming from house to house we’d encamp in each other’s basements, living rooms and bedrooms. It was our customer after school to pick a house to gather at. Since the acquisition of the Nintendo, Mickey and Rusty’s house had become the default destination.

One rainy autumn afternoon, I went to Mickey and Rusty’s house and found it empty. I hopped on my bike and rode a soggy circle around the block. At the other end of the street I saw a pile of bikes in front of Phillip’s house. Phillip had a sweet little den in his basement. He’d set up some old furniture and milk crates into a makeshift lounge behind the stairs. It was an ideal hangout with proximity to snacks in their basement pantry. There was an unspoken rule at Phillip’s house that you didn’t go upstairs. I had been up there a couple times for particularly urgent bathroom breaks. Upstairs his house was dimly lit and smelled heavily of stale cigarettes. His mother was usually asleep on the couch with a loud television tuned to an afternoon soap opera.

I walked around his house to the sliding glass door in back. Inside was every boy in the neighborhood, including a bawling Rusty. I came in and asked a boy on the edge what had happened. “Rusty lost his Nintendo to Phillip.” he told me.

“What do you mean?”

“He bet Phillip his Nintendo that he wouldn’t… you know that mean old lady with the little grey dogs? He bet that Phillip wouldn’t pee on her porch.”

I considered this. “So he did it?”

“Pfft, he rang the doorbell and waited until she came to the door.” My eyes widened. “I think he got some on her shoes.”

Rusty had made a stupid bet. At the very least he was a poor judge of character. Phillip was the kind of kid who would eat a grasshopper for a dollar. More to the point, he was the kind of kid who would eat three grasshoppers and a worm on top of it just to make sure you didn’t welsh on the bet.

After the peeing incident, I was told that Phillip casually flipped the old lady the bird, zipped up and rode down to Rusty’s house to collect his winnings. Rusty responded with the only reasonable course of action available to him. He went to Phillip’s house to tell his mother. Phillip’s mother answered the door and listened to his story while dragging dramatically on her cigarette.

At the end of his story she asked, “So, what do you want me to do about it?”

“Make him give it back to me!” Rusty said.

“Why? You made a bet, didn’t you?”

Rusty blinked.

“Just think of it as a good lesson.” she concluded and closed the door.

That led to the meeting I had discovered. The boys in the neighborhood were divided. We could see the point that a bet is a bet and Phillip had more than satisfied it. However, we could also imagine what it would be like to lose such an enormous asset. Phillip was trading future game time for allies, mostly among the kids from his end of the street.

Rusty was far too agitated to make much of a case for himself. As the arguments escalated we suddenly felt a cold draft. Behind us Mickey had come into the basement. Without saying a word he walked up to Phillip and punched him square in the nose. Phillip collapsed as blood spurted down his face. Mickey reached behind the couch and picked up the Nintendo. He carefully wound up the wires on the controllers and the duck hunt pistol. He lifted the hood and checked the game inside. “Come on, Rusty. Let’s go.” He said.

We backed up and opened a path to the back door. Mickey walked out with Rusty silent behind him. Phillip’s friends poked at him and whispered. Phillip got up and pulled a roll of toilet paper down from the shelf above him. “Go home.” he said.

We left.

I stopped at Mickey and Rusty’s house and looked in the front window. They were sitting on the floor together laughing. They each held a Nintendo controller and were playing Super Mario Brothers. They looked like they were having fun. I didn’t want to interrupt them, so I went home.

A man crosses the street in rain,

stepping gently, looking two times north and south,
because his son is asleep on his shoulder.

No car must splash him.
No car drive too near to his shadow.

This man carries the world’s most sensitive cargo
but he’s not marked.
Nowhere does his jacket say FRAGILE,
HANDLE WITH CARE.

His ear fills up with breathing.
He hears the hum of a boy’s dream
deep inside him.

We’re not going to be able
to live in this world
if we’re not willing to do what he’s doing
with one another.

The road will only be wide.
The rain will never stop falling.

“Shoulders” by Naomi Shihab Nye, from Red Suitcase. © BOA Editions, Ltd., 1994.

The guy that usually cuts my hair wasn’t in today. I always wait for him when I go in. Not because he’s a particularly skillful barber, but because of an awkward moment that happened the first time I went to that barbershop.

I had gone in for a haircut after a two year hiatus. For one year I shaved my own head for reasons that I could never really articulate. At the end that experiment I just stopped cutting my hair. I had never had long hair before and being a married guy in his mid thirties with a stable job I couldn’t think of any reason to not take the time to see what I looked like with long hair.

One day having observed the inescapable conclusion that I looked like a homeless person with long hair I impulsively chopped it into what resembled a shoulder length Rachel.

Obviously I couldn’t walk around looking like a tranny who couldn’t afford hormone pills, so I headed down to the Southside Barbershop. I chose that shop because I knew the guys that worked there were the tattooed rockabilly type and I hoped they could do something interesting with my hair.

When I got there I found two barbers with customers in their chairs and a couple waiting on the side. I sat down and read the comics from the eviscerated weekday newspaper. After a few minutes one of the barbers got my attention and invited me up.

I hesitated.

Upon arriving I had already selected a barber in my mind. The other guy had a great beard. This guy, the one ready to cut my hair, was mostly bald with a wiry and patchy beard. Usually I would prefer the barber with worse hair as I assumed they cut each other’s hair and I’d want the guy who did a good job and not the one that did a bad job. This guy didn’t leave me much to work with. They both had beards and I figured the rules were reversed for beards. So I wanted the guy with the full lumberjack beard not Wiry McPatchyface.

So I said, in a manner that I hoped would hint that this was a long standing tradition, that I was waiting for the other barber, Tom.

“Oh, ok.” Wiry said and sat in his chair. I looked at the other two guys waiting.

“Do you…” I pointed, Vanna White style, toward the chair.

“No, ” said one, “I’m just here to hang out.”

The other guy shook his head. “I’m waiting for Tom.”

“Oh.” I looked back at Wiry who was sitting directly in front of me. I wanted him to know it wasn’t because I thought he was a bad barber. My mind raced and in a moment of cringe-inducing fail it settled on: “I, uh… I just think he has a better beard.”

“Yeah.” Wiry said. “That’s ok.”

We all sat in awkward silence until another customer came in the door and got Wiry busy again. Finally the door chimed. It was the mailman. A few painful minutes later the door chimed again. The guy looked at the three people waiting ahead of him.

“Is there a long wait?” he asked.

“No,” Wiry said, “I’m open.”

“Oh, I was…” the man hesitated. “I usually have Tom cut my hair. Are you all waiting for Tom?”

The guy ahead of me said yes. I considered changing my plans. I didn’t have a real reason for waiting for Tom before but now that everyone else was insisting on it I felt like I might be on to something. I nodded.

“I’ll come back later then.” The man said and left with a wave. Wiry went outside for a cigarette.

Since that day I’ve been committed to Tom’s craftsmanship out of sheer social awkwardness.

Today, however, Tom wasn’t there. Wiry was thankfully busy with someone else. Not wanting a repeat of my first visit I immediately accepted the invitation of a new barber I’d not seen before.

After getting through the first pass on my overgrown head the new guy, let’s call him Ponch, noticed my forceps scars. I have two small bald patches on either side of my head that stem from some aggressive forceps work by the doctor who delivered me. They’re not particularly noticeable and most barbers have seen them before. Ponch, however, seemed new to the razor.

“What’s this man? You have a big scar up here.”

“Yeah,” I replied, “there’s another on the other side, too.” Ponch looked and confirmed this.

“What happened, man?”

“I was shot.”

“No way! For reals?”

“Yeah, it was a through and through. 9mm.” Ponch’s eyes grew wide.

“How’d you not die from that?”

“The doctors say it was a miracle.” I said. “It was a first for medical science. My brain actually ducked.” Ponch looked confused. “They don’t even know how it happened, but I had an MRI and the doctors could see some stress marks where my brain ducked to avoid the bullet. It only had to go down about an inch or so.”

Ponch put a finger on each scar and considered the trajectory. He whistled. “Wow, you were lucky. Who shot you?”

“My dog.” I said. Ponch stopped clipping. “She was scratching at the door of an old farmhouse we had rented in Vermont and knocked over a gun display. Apparently one of the guns was loaded and fired. It hit me right there on the skull as I was bending over to put on my shoes so I could take the dog out. My wife found me and got me to the hospital.”

“Oh my god,” Ponch said, “What happened to the dog?”

“That was the saddest part.” I said, “She felt so bad about what happened that she stopped eating. Would just sit by the back door and whimper. The day I got home from the hospital she had thrown herself against a bookcase until it came down on top of her and killed her.”

Ponch blinked. He finished my cut and I paid him, thanking him for doing a great job. A new customer came and settled in Ponch’s chair as I left. As the door closed behind me, I could hear Ponch saying, “Man, you have to hear about how the last guy got shot in the head!”

Are you the sort of person that never remembers to buy cards? Birthdays, Christmas, Get Well…. it just doesn’t occur to you.

It’s not that you don’t love the people in your life, you’re just not the sort to express it by buying stationery.

Here’s your solution: The Once A Year Card

It’s a card that very directly and clearly states that I am sending it to the recipient because I want them to know that I occasionally think of them, that I feel empathy when they’re sick and I sincerely wish them the happiest of birthdays on whatever date their birthday may actually be. If they got married recently then “Congratulations!” If they had a child then, well… “Congratulations” for that too! Unless one of us is Jewish in which case it is more fun to say “Mazel Tov!”

As far as Christmas goes you’re free to assume my family had an awesome enough year. If anything particularly important happened you read about it on Facebook. That is, if it was any of your business.

Some people need to receive decorated paper inscribed with a poem or a joke that expresses the feelings that I am at least pretending to have. That is a reasonable demand and to accommodate your quaint but perfectly valid expectations I offer you this, The Once A Year Card.

Merry Whatever and Have A Jolly Humbug!

We need a course correction. The world is changing and technology is introducing new ways of distributing power and ideas. In some ways a correction is inevitable. Then only question is what direction we’re going to pick.

In times of great technological change options become available that simply weren’t possible before. Fortunes are made and lost, businesses pivot and react, politicians opine, preachers stir up anxiety and the clever take advantage of the shifting situation.

It is unlikely that extant systems of power are going to facilitate an orderly transfer from the old networks of family and corporate control. You can see that in action in the lawsuits vomited out of the RIAA and MPAA and other bastions of rapidly disintegrating leverage. You can see it in the consolidation of broadcast media. You can see it in the rigidity of polarized politics solidified by data driven gerrymandering and campaigning. The old power structures know a fire sale when they see it and they are stocking up.

The correction is unlikely to come from tea party rallies or professional agitators. They are tools of traditional power and were a useful distraction that gave the media something to talk about other than what was really going on.

Our society is a tangle of legacy systems, spaghetti code and undocumented APIs that far too many people rely on to ever expect a major rewrite. We will see the same sort of patches that we’re applied in Teddy Roosevelt’s emergency scripts. Those later formed the base of FDRs major framework upgrade. If we’re lucky, we’ll get something like LBJ’s Great Society expansion pack. Republicans want to fork the whole thing for a stripped down system where everything is static and private. Nobody is going to sign off on any of that, so we’re just going to creak by with occasional emergency patches and more committees sent off to draw up a spec that will never get implemented.

So how are things going to get corrected this time? This time it’s up to the users. Users are pragmatists. Users aren’t interested in reading manuals or getting nagged about upgrading all the time. If they have to, they’ll patch together excel documents and screenshots and MS Paint drawings, but they’ll get it done.

One example of this is the Occupy Wall Street movement. The goals of this movement have been endlessly debated. The powers that be are exasperated because they can’t figure out how to make these people just go away. Lately they’ve tried police raids and talk radio mockery. The occupiers remain infuriatingly inscrutable. If they won’t offer solutions, why should we pay attention?

The point is paying attention. The point of the movement is to get in the way. For years dissent has been marginalized as the sphere of acceptable opinion has lurched further and further to the right. Media personalities are incentivized to confuse and distract. Even now the bobbing heads on cable news are spreading rumors that the Occupiers are having sex in public and defecating on the sidewalks. They hope to dehumanize the occupiers and keep the hoi polloi from identifying with their fellow citizens.

The movement has remained peaceful and undistracted. They remain encamped in the shadow of power. A power that betrays its nervousness in sporadic outbursts of state violence.

Will the occupy movement change anything? I doubt it will directly. It has changed the discussion and radicalized a lot of pepper sprayed citizens. I think most importantly it has given us an object lesson in power.

Who is defended, who is beaten, who is heard, who is silenced… by speaking up and demanding an answer in the public sphere the occupy movement has laid bare the priorities of the 1% and their government.

What we do with that information is anyones guess. The only thing we know is that the future will be a lot different than now. That’s not prophecy, just recognizing the turbulent transitions that are shuddering through every human institution.

We’ll be living in that future. It’s up to us to decide what life will look like and what organizations will survive. We have the tools and the information to build a sustainable and human centered future. Of course, we also have the tools to oppress and exploit each other. What we decide to do with these tools will be a matter of loud and contentious discussion in our streets, government halls and media. The most important thing you can do is be part of that discussion.

This post is a step by step walk-through to setting up a new online store using Magento. It is not just a technical guide, but a comprehensive guide to:

1. Setting up your Magento server environment
2. Downloading and installing Magento
3. Setting up a Magento development environment
4. Selecting and applying Magento themes
5. Selecting and Installing Magento Plugins
6. 10 Must Have Magento Plugins
7. Magento Optimization Tips and Techniques
8. Configuring your Magento store
9. Security and Performance Best Practices for Magento
10. Content Management and SEO Optimization for Magento
11. Configuring Product Types in Magento
12. Bulk Upload of Products into Magento
13. Customizing Magento with PHP
14. Common Gotchas and Problems with Magento
15. Using Google Products, Shopzilla and Aggregators with Magento
16. Magento specific Google Analytics settings
17. Creating Conversion Funnels in Google Analytics for a Magento Store
18. Conversion optimization with Magento
19. A/B Testing with Magento
20. Writing your Privacy, Shipping and Returns Policy for Magento
21. Trustmarks in your Magento Checkout Process
22. Effective Email Management for Magento Stores
23. Integrating third-party CMS systems and WordPress into Magento
24. Acquiring high converting traffic to your Magento store
25. Customer Retention strategies for Magento

Introduction to Magento

Magento is a popular PHP based e-commerce web application. A company called Varien developed the Magento platform and released it in 2008. The company that owns the application is now called Magento, inc. and is now  100% owned by eBay.

Magento is available as a free and open source application. It is also sold in other editions by Magento, Inc. I am focusing this guide on the Community Edition of Magento. Some parts, especially the marketing chapters, are applicable to any Magento store, and generally to any online store.

Magento is very powerful and very configurable. This means, of course, that Magento has a steep learning curve. However, the application is carefully and logically organized, so by learning the basics you will find the concepts increasingly clear and may find yourself a Magento expert in no time!

 Check back soon for the first in my Magento Series, Setting Up Your Magento Server Environment.

How do you get your product or pitch in front of potential customers online? It comes down to “Where are your users?” and for each answer to that question “Can I afford to reach out to them here?”

Most people who know the gist of online marketing, but haven’t tried it, will say “Google Adwords!” Unfortunately Google ads are priced at exactly what companies bigger than yours with more cash to use can afford. Google is as close to the definition of an efficient market than anything that exists today.

Google is the easy answer because everyone goes there. It’s like the DMV. So soon after you get your site up and running you’ll come across one of those ubiquitous $100 Google Adwords coupons. You’ll apply that to your account and start poking around. Perhaps you’ll try a test of a little ad. Ten seconds later your budget is gone and you’ve had 14 clicks, the most promising of which meandered about for 30 minutes before stumbling on to your “Contact Us” page and writing you a dirty limerick.

Google is serious business.

So then, you’ll swim back to other side of the pool. Perhaps a $100 bucks deposited with 7search will get you farther.

And it does! You’re getting 80 clicks a day for like 4 bucks. One or two of those zombies even click something before disappearing into the aether. You look a little closer and see that the referrers are sites from which your visitors were just trying to escape.

How do you find real people that will visit your site on purpose?

I like to picture my potential customers and try to figure out where else they’re going online. Online groups and forums, professional networks and social media sites… a good place to look is first page of results for your core keywords. You know, those keywords you were going to bid on? Those results are usually within a click of a community that you can participate in.

The most relevant and affordable clicks I’ve ever gotten on an e-commerce site I run were from an answer on some random Q&A site. That site was the number 3 result for a highly competitive product name keyword. We’ll call it “Acme Widgets.” What was amazing is that the question “Where can I find the best price on Acme Widgets?” had been sitting there unanswered for months. So I logged in and answered the question with a link to the product page on my site. The link was a no-follow! This wasn’t SEO, this was telling people where to buy what they were looking for because they asked. It worked! Every day I would get a significant number of visitors from that page. They’d click around and add the stuff to their cart and occasionally actually check out.

I had been wholly concerned with getting my page in the blue ink on the top of that SERP on Google. I had bid on that term and lost copious amounts of money. It had slipped my mind that the reason I wanted to rank for that term was so I could connect with the customers searching for it. Getting off of Google and SEO forums and into the communities where my customers were interacting was more effective than any link building I had attempted.

Interestingly enough, it was also the best link building program I’d tried. It turns out that communicating with real people on the internet is a great way to get people talking about you in their forums, facebook walls, twitter streams and blogs.

There is a time for promotion and there is a time for communication. When your customers invite you to talk with them, I recommend you respond. It is time consuming and messy. Customers have odd questions and can be abrupt or dismissive. They can put you on the spot.

The idea of a marketing machine, whirring constantly in the background, leading customers down a narrow funnel with all their questions or objections snapped off with ruthless efficiency is alluring. Especially for introverts who are all to eager to trade the ambiguity of human interaction for the certainty of good math.

You can’t get to the math until you’ve done your measurements.

To tell you the truth, if you’re launching a new venture you will get more value from asking your customers questions than you will from giving them answers.

Try this, instead of using your $100 Google Adwords coupon to run ads for your products, run them to a survey landing page. On the survey ask what they think about the product, ask them how much they’re expecting to pay, ask them anything. Don’t forget to ask them for their email address. You don’t need to toss that address into a faceless newsletter pile. Read their answers and respond. You’ll learn how your real customers make decisions. You’ll see perspectives that you can’t emulate in an algorithm. And it’s fun!

Someday you hope to have the budget to broadcast your message across the web. You have a much better chance of getting there if you launch close to your customers and listen before pitching.

Other Ideas?

When you’re starting up a new venture, you often don’t have the cash to experiment and make mistakes in an expensive market like Google Adwords. What other traffic building ideas work when you’re on a tight budget? What have you tried?