Peter Van Dijck’s Guide to Ease

Paul English: how to set up 2 wireless access routers and connect them to increase range for your home office.

Bootstrapping out into open space - Archives - Blog - 0xDECAFBAD Blog: “I look at nifty services like del.icio.us, BlogLines, and Flickr, and think, Hey, I have some good ideas, too. I could possibly put together something like this. But how the !@#$% do those guys pay their hosting bills? Let alone make a living?”

Here’s a great overview of social networking-y companies and their business models.

Lightweight Business Models Lightweight Business Models at Web 2.0 (Jeremy Zawodny’s blog): “Don’t build a ton of features, build a few really great deep features”. Yes yes yes.

O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference 2005: (About Flickr an opening up API’s as a business strategy): “Capturing the creative energy of the hive can be scary. It requires giving up some control, and eliminating lock-in as a strategy.”

Opening up your API’s doesn’t reduce lock-in! If an ecosystem of applications develop that depend on your API, how exactly does that reduce lock-in?

I just bought 512M of RAM for my laptop. Can I keep the old 256M RAM in there and have a total of 768, or do they not mix? My laptop is an hp pavilion 5700 running Win XP. And if not, anyone want an old 256M RAM module?

Now that I’m self-employed, I need some business cards. Two questions: one, a good online place to print them? Vistaprint gets decent reviews, and you can get 250 cards free (+ 7$ shipping), although I don’t mind paying a bit. Two: should I have different cards for different aspects of my business?

I just made 3 short phonecalls to Belgium (from NYC), using SkypeOut. It was cheap: only 15 cents, and worked great.

virtualteams.com: Networks and virtual teams: article on how far-flung teams can be super effective, if they do 3 things:

1. They exploit diversity. The team can’t just be diverse; it has to make the most of it. Our teams credit their creative breakthroughs to challenging people from different disciplines, cultures, and the like to come up with something better together. They did.
2. They use pretty simple technology to simulate reality. By today’s standards, what they use is not very complicated. More than 80% of the teams use teleconference calls and shared websites. More than half used IM even when their companies prohibited it. Only a third used video conferencing. Some banned email.
3. They hold the team together. It takes a lot of communication. Some leaders spent as much as a third of their time just on the phone with team members.

I am starting to work on far-flung teams, and one observation so far: we’ve been wanting to do meetings over Skype, but because of technical problems, we went IM instead. IM meetings are extremely effective. Something about IM gives you a few seconds to think before you talk. It just works. Meetings last only 10 to 20 minutes, and we usually take 2 to 4 decisions in such a meeting (2 people). If you’ve worked in coorporate America, you’ll know that’s much better than the standard (meetings 1 hour, 1 decision per 3 meetings). Imagine the time we save! We haven’t gone back to Skype yet, and I don’t think we will.

I am looking to get a phone number. I spend time in Belgium, New York, and sometimes in other countries in Europe, so a VoIP number I can take with me would be good. I also want to be able to receive faxes. I already have Skype, so I can use that for outgoing calls, if needed, so I don’t need unlimited outgoing calls. I mainly need incoming cals. It should of course have voicemail. Finally, I’m working for myself now, and it should be affordable.

1. BroadVoice
   20$, unlimited free calling to Belgium, US, Canada and a bunch of other countries. Or, for $9.95 unlimited calls within NY state only.

2. Lingo is similar: $19.95 for unlimited calls with anyone in Canada, the US and western Europe. The basic plan is $15 and gives you 500 worldwide minutes.
3. Sunrocket: for 25$ you get unlimited US calls and free equipment.
4. Vonage is $24 for the unlimited plan (US and Canada only), $15 for the basic plan (500 minutes in US or Canada). It doesn’t include Western Europe, so for me, that’s bad.
5. A regular landline in NYC. How much would that be?
6. Get an extra line on my girlfriend’s cellhpone. 10$

Can I get fax service with any of these? Experiences?

Note that charges are always more than you expect in the US. Broadvoice has a good table explaining other charges. The Broadvoice service ends up being $312 a year, or 26$ a month, not $20.

Long Copy vs. Short Copy (Signal vs. Noise): “MarketingExperiments.com recently set out to see what impact the length of sales copy has on a website%u2019s conversion rate. The results: long copy clearly outperformed short copy in all three of their tests.

This is something we’ve wrestled with at BasecampHQ.com. We like to be as descriptive and informative as possible. But there’s a downside to this approach. Many visitors are intimidated by large blocks of text and just tune out the site and the tool when they see long copy. We’ve heard from some visitors that a large amount of copy can make the tool itself seem complex (i.e. if it takes this much text to explain it, can it really be simple?).”

This is the kind of thing you should be able to test side by side - deliver half of your audience a long version, half a short one and see which one performs better.

Om Malik on Broadband: Skype-to-plain phone, on the cheap supposedly. I love Skype, but I hate my dodgy ADSL modem that connects with USB. Note to self: don’t get USB modems. They are twitchy and eat up a lot of time trying to fix them.

One of the true joys of working with OpenOffice instead of Microsoft Office is its strenght in exporting. I can export to MS formats or PDF supereasily. Creating multiple versions of a document is easy, whereas with MS Office it has always been a pain.

OpenOffice isn’t perfect (it’s slideshow program for example is not as good as Powerpoint), but being open really has advantages.

Dina on gobal teams. Global teams, small startups. I’m starting to work in circumstances like his now that I am an independent consultant.

The first tagline for my first project was really bad. I’m developing a wiki hosting service, so my tagline (naturally!) was (ready for it?): “Powerful, easy wiki hosting”. Clear. Succinct. Describes the services. Sucks.

I let it rest a bit. Later, when I was writing and rewriting copy for the website, it dawned on me that the one big advantage users were going to get out of this service was that they could get their groop, team, class or whatever writing. My service would make it easy and unresistable for people to write and share stuff.

Good taglines don’t describe the service, they describe the benefit. So I went back to the tagline. Something like “Get them writing!”? Nah. The “them” is too distant. Too aggressive too, you can’t force people to write.

I still haven’t figured it out. I’ll report back later.

I’m looking for a good calling plan. I spend 70% of my time in the US, 30% in Europe. My calls have the same distribution. In both places I have broadband internet. Lingo
looks interesting: “You get unlimited minutes each month to speak with anyone in the U.S., Canada, and Western Europe” says their website, for 20$ a month. I could carry the box with me when I travel between Belgium and NYC.

Feedback and or experiences welcome!

I spent yesterday and today upgrading my Colombia site to Drupal 4.5.0, after my host had moved my site to a new server. Drupal wasn’t hard to upgrade, it has a pretty decent upgrade script, even though I had to move first to 4.4.0 and then to 4.5.0. I ran into an error in 4.4.0, but after upgrading to 4.5.0 it dissapeared :)

Meanwhile, I am also setting up as an independent information architecture consultant. Tips on consulting books and accounting software are very welcome!

The Cult of Lone Coders. There is a new breed of small software developers out there.

I’m looking for helpdesk/ticket software, where customers can open tickets and you can answer/close them. Hotscripts as hundreds (a typical hacker kid project), but after looking at about 15 of them I still haven’t seen one that emphasises usability over functionality. Most interfaces look like you’re looking straight in the database. Any recommendations (I wouldn’t mind paying a small amount)? All I want is an easy to use customer interface, and a somewhat powerful (that lets you define canned answers for example) support staff interface.

So I have this account - that I spent some time setting up and inviting people to by the way - on one of the social networking services, but I can’t remember which one.

Marketeese is sneaky. I was describing the support you get with different levels of an online service I’ll be offering next year, and I caught myself writing things like “Basic discussion, advanced support and personal support”, when what I was trying to say was that you get access to the public discussion board, tickets & full phone support. There. Much clearer, and just as short.

Om Malik on Broadband: Glocalizing your phone. Since I am starting a time in my life when I’ll be between Belgium and New York a lot (they have about the same amount of inhabitants), I’m experimenting with phone services.

Skype is working great for broadband to broadband calls. There is often some fiddling with headphones, cables and mikes and such, so for now I’m using it for planned calls: let’s call tomorrow at that time. You have to be at your computer after all. Biggest advantage: it’s completely free. Skype also lets you call landlines (and mobiles) at prices similar to using a calling card, but I still have to be at my computer to do it.

Next I want to try out one of the VOIP services, which are closer to a real phone service, and are significantly cheaper than a real phone service. The new one mentioned in the article above even allows unlimited calls between the US and Europe, if I understand it correctly. Calls to “real” phones. Lots of interesting stuff. Still, all these services do have problems now and then, so they’re still not as solid as a tried and tested old fashioned phone.

I’ve been setting up my home office and trying to get some good working practices going. Having 2 desks, one for the computer and one for paperwork helps me stay away from idle surfing. Having a radio helps spending a lot of time in this place. I’m also writing a detailed log of things I’ve done. It often helps to write down what I’ve done, and where I’m stuck, in order to decide on next steps. Moving on!

Feld Thoughts: Bootstrapping Top 10 List: “If your answer to “What kind of company are you going to start?” is something like “Well, I have a few different ideas…” stop immediately.”

Good reminders about starting your own company. I’m one of those people who always have 20 different projects going on and (and this is the scary bit) tend to not finish many of them.

Here’s a question in the ongoing quest of starting my own company. I’m a pretty bad sysadmin, so I’d like to work together with someone good for some projects I have planned.

Have you worked together with a sysadmin on an irregular basis? I don’t imagine paying someone every week - my ideas won’t bring in enough $ for that. Apart from becoming one myself, what are my options? I just need someone to set up a server (nothing too complex, I could do it myself but it would take me two weeks where it would take a pro a few hours, plus I want it done properly.), and to check it now and then (hopefully rarely).

Is hoping for a working arrangement for a situation like this naive? Have others done it? Should I learn ALL skills needed to run the web based services I am working on? Any tips or experiences welcome!

One of the nice things about life without a job (where you work on your own projects or consulting), is that you can take your time to learn. When I worked for companies, things always had to be done now, and I didn’t feel I could spend a day doing research on something.

Now, I’ll spend a day or two on research - it’s an investment. It’s also lots of fun.

I’ve spend 10 hours so far trying to get my laptop to work with a linksys wireless card. Their support is good because they have chat (I like chat support, even though it’s often slow, at least you can ask questions), but we haven’t been able to fix it. I’m sure someone who knows their stuff and with access to the computer could fix it in 15 minutes.

Working for yourself is great, but where do you get tech support when you need it? I’d happily pay someone to fix this, just don’t know where to go. If you work for yourself, how do you deal with this? Any pointers?

I’m at the point where I’m considering buying another laptop, or re-installing XP from scratch, both way too painful for something stupid like this. Am I going to just have to deal with it and spend 10% of my time wasted trying to fix things like this?

I have decided to quit my job, and start my own company. I’ve learnt a lot working on information architectures for enterprise portals here in the US, but the time has come to move on.

I have many plans, I’ll talk about those later. But first, this summer, I am going to spend a few months traveling. I love to travel, but being in the rat race for the past 5 years has meant I haven’t seen as much of the world as I wanted to. So that’s gonna change. India’s first on the list. I only have two months this summer, but it’s better than nothing.

Meanwhile, if you want to discuss a project you think I might be interested in, or are looking for an information architecture consultant, get in touch.

I plan to mix consulting with creating my own projects. Exciting times!

This post should only show up at the top of the working without a job category.