I’ve instituted various time management and task management “systems” for myself over the years. I’ve almost always had a daily task list with automated reminders for routine things like “remember to check on backups”. I’ve grown into being very strict with how often I check and answer my email. Those things are [...]
Archive for January, 2010
No Longer Shipping Internationally
Effective yesterday we are no longer shipping packages internationally. This also includes US Territory addresses and APO addresses.
Much like closing down Tastefully Driven, there were a lot of reasons behind our decision, but it can all pretty much be summed up by saying that it was too much work for how small of a part [...]
How One Book Changed My Career
I don’t know why, but I found myself thinking about this the other day and it kind of blew my mind.
Above is a picture of PHP and MySQL for Dynamic Websites by Larry Ullman, my very first web development book that I purchased in the Summer of 2004. I bought it for $24.99 at [...]
Customer Service Quote of the Year
From Small by Choice, Whether Clients Like It or Not, a New York Times article about a successful small Chicago pizza shop that only opens 4 days a week, doesn’t do deliveries, has an owner that makes every pizza by hand, and refuses to allow customers to customize their own pie (emphasis is mine):
Q. In [...]
How I Worked Last Wednesday
Most weeks I go to the warehouse on Monday, Tuesday, and Friday, leaving Wednesday and Thursday to – in theory – work from home. I say “in theory” because those days always get filled with errands and the gym and lunches with friends, especially lately because during the holidays I was at the warehouse [...]
Decision Making and the Competition
One more thought on us shutting down Tastefully Driven. I find it interesting to ponder how little we factor our competition into making decisions like this.
Clearly shutting down our Amazon store will help our detailing competitors. They will sell more products and probably will sell more at a higher margin since there’s one [...]
Goodbye Tastefully Driven, So Long Amazon
In an effort to become more efficient, more profitable, and more flexible, we’ve decided to close Tastefully Driven and stop selling our products on Amazon.
Effective March 1 the e-commerce store will be closed down and we will sell any remaining inventory (non-detailing of course) on Amazon. We’re running a 30% off sale to [...]
This is Why I’ll Probably Never Pursue VC Funding
From Rand Fishkin’s post about his long, expensive, and ultimately unsuccessful journey trying to raise VC money for his company SEOmoz (emphasis is mine):
I tell this story about our VC experience to a lot of people – it seems to be a subject that attracts great curiosity and I, of course, love to share. Most [...]
Looking Forward to 2010
I’m not really a big New Year’s Resolution guy. I mean, what’s the real difference between last week and this week? All that changed was the calendar.
But in business it’s a little different. When your fiscal year aligns with the calendar year like ours does, it just makes sense to take [...]
How I Handle Customer Service on a New Feature
Graceful error handling is something that all good web developers pay attention to. There are too many weird scenarios out there for everything to work perfectly. Too many browsers, too many flavors of operating systems, and too many people that will do things that you never could have dreamed of.
When we were developing the new [...]
