If you’re a marketer or a WordPress user, you might like the WordPress plugin I recently created. Based on a principle taught by Seth Godin, it lets you treat new visitors to your site different from returning visitors:
Category: Main
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Free e-book leads to book sale
Along the lines of my previous post, The Value of Free, I thought I’d point out a success story:
I found an essay called The Paradox of Choice by Barry Schwartz. Turns out it’s an excerpt from his book by the same name. After sending around and discussing the essay with several people, my roommate bought the book.
By offering a free excerpt from his book, Mr. Schwartz earned a book sale he would not have otherwise had. He also shared his ideas with over a dozen people through me alone. For some people, sharing the idea is the most important part.
I just bought Norah Jones’s latest single “Thinking About You” from Yahoo Music, a good song made better by the fact that it’s offered in 192 kbps unprotected MP3 format. That is, there’s no Digital Rights Management (DRM) to “control” it. The publishers take the risk that I’ll (illegally) share the song with all my friends and the world at large, while I Mr. Consumer enjoy the play-anywhere convenience.
The Wall Street journal reports that Yahoo Music General Manager David Goldberg favors unprotected downloads:
Antipiracy software on music isn’t helping the industry because the same music is already available without copy protection on CDs and through Internet file-sharing programs. What’s more, many consumers don’t like the limitations that copy protection imposes on how and on which devices they can listen to their music. (The Wall Street Journal)
This also allows Yahoo Music to compete with the iTunes Music Store since these unprotected MP3 files will play on any iPod.
This week on Forbes.com Cory Doctorow, sci-fi author and co-founder of BoingBoing.net, explains the value of giving away something for free. He invokes Tim O’Reilly who said, “Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy.”
As a consumer, I have too many choices and not enough attention span. To win my attention, give me something for free. To win my wallet, make it easy to buy and consume your product.
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Being present
While home in Las Vegas, my father and I discussed the benefits of “being present”. Peace of mind comes from not being worried about the past and not being overly anxious about the future. Enjoy the now.
I’m most present when I’m riding my motorcycle. I’m almost never in a hurry — it’s about the ride, not the destination — so it’s immensely satisfying. Jeremy Zawodny feels a similar “peace, focus, and mental calm” while flying a plane. (In his words, the imminent threat of death is a factor.)
In fact, it’s a measure of faith to know that the past is forgiven and the future will take care of itself.
Last night John, Jonathan, Alvaro and I got together to talk PHP over dinner and dessert. I had fun and learned a lot. Here are my notes:
- Sitening is a web development consultancy with a bunch of cool online tools and what appears to be a good blog. (I haven’t read it yet.) John printed a post from their blog about databases and PHP. I’m going to subscribe to it.
- We talked about Qcodo, a code generator that John likes because it’s simple.
- Alvaro really likes Propel for creating database objects to perform CRUD operations. It’s “intuitive” to use.
- We discussed apt-get vs. yum, with the winner being apt-get.
- We discussed Ruby on Rails and the similar frameworks for PHP such as Cake, Symfony, and PHP on Trax. John and Alvaro think these frameworks are too limiting, though if the scope of your project falls within the conventions of the framework they can be nice. They both prefer a lighter-weight framework.
- Alvaro is building a custom, light-weight framework that will be simply combine Propel and Smarty. He’ll release it at protonframework.com when it’s ready.
- Alvaro recommends the Selenium Firefox extension for code testing and automation. It can record each of your steps as you use your web app, then you can set up assertions (unit tests?), then you can run the recorded tests each time you make changes to your web app. This seems like a great way to test web apps consistently and thoroughly. I’m looking forward to trying Selenium.
- We discussed the virtues of SVG and lamented that Internet Explorer doesn’t have better support for it. John uses SVG extensively for creating reports and modeling streets and traffic flow in his work.
- Alvaro really likes XPath, a language for querying an XML document. On the browser side, XPath is useful for finding a certain node in the DOM. Firefox has a built-in Javascript function for running XPath queries on the DOM.
- With AJAX John can change SVG reports in real time by changing the specific DOM node that needs to be updated. XPath could be useful here.
- On the server side, XPath is useful for screen scraping. You can retrieve an HTML page, run it through Tidy to convert it to XML, then use XPath (through the PHP DOM library) to query it. Alvaro says its easier and more portable than writing regular expressions, which is how I currently do my screen scraping.
- There are Firefox extensions for working with XPath. They allow you to click anywhere on a web page and see the XPath query that would retrieve that element.
- Martin Fowler’s book was recommended.
- By using the Apache directive “ForceType”, you can forgo the “.php” extension on your files and create pretty URL’s. (ALL of your files are parsed for PHP.)
The food was good and the company was excellent. I look forward to doing this again.