I had a birthday recently. On my birthday I made a sort of “resolution” to try to write atleast one post per week. This is week 3 (or 4 maybe) after that birthday and I’m just writing the first one. Sounds about right for a resolution, eh?

So here’s what I thought I would do. I’m going to make a list of some things that I plan to write about so I can reference it and have quick ideas in the future.

One of the things I want to write in depth on is the dangers of leaving your wifi open. I’ve read some really scary stories lately that in retrospect could probably have been predicted. I’ll give you the short version of my recommendation right now… lock down you wifi. No matter how altruistic your motives for leaving it open to whoever wants to use it allowing them to do so is not worth the potential legal issues. I just added security (or attempted to anyway) in the last couple of weeks, and I just hope no one did anything too shady before then. I’ll give a full writeup at some point in the near future.

Another thing I’ll be writing about will be some things I’ve learned business related. It’s been another year that I’ve been running a website that COULD make money and I will share some of what has and has not worked for me along those lines. The things that didn’t work were either due to being a poor idea in general or perhaps due to poor execution. I’ll talk about advertising on Facebook, google adwords, arguing with your customers, plans for revenue streams.

I might talk about kids. They are certainly a never ending source of material. The same parents can have kids that are opposite in so many ways it can be almost comical if it wasn’t so frustrating. One child knows exactly why they do everything… the other child believes “I don’t know” is an answer to why they did anything wrong. Bill Cosby would be proud of the second.

Not too long ago my wife and I purchased a new house. Well, actually, there’s nothing new about this house. It’s about 40 years old and full of “issues”. Some of them are purely a product of neglect (it was vacant for almost 2 years prior to our purchasing it), some of them are due to the house’s age, and some of them are simply “things I wish were different”. I’ll be learning a lot of new skills on this one…

I have a tendency to avoid paying someone else to do something until I myself have done the same thing. For example, when I was 19 or so I decided I wasn’t going to take my car to get the oil changed. I’d change it myself. It did not end well…  I emptied the wrong fluid. I dumped the manual transmission fluid when I pulled the plug ( which explained why my oil was purple) and before I knew it my car was in the shop anyway… for a more expensive fix. I went ahead and finished the oil change myself though first.

So why did I decide to do it myself? Is it because I like working on cars? Nope, not really (though I do like to understand how they work just in case). It’s because I wanted to know (1) can I do this myself and save some money and (2) If I can do it myself for less money, can I save enough money to make it worth my time. If there answer to (2) is “no”, then I simply won’t do it anymore. I’ll pay someone else, but I want to know what I’m paying them to do.

I felled a tree with an axe last weekend. It was very satisfying. The tree was approximately 40ft tall with a trunk diameter of around 10 inches. It was a lot of work. And despite the satisfying feeling of watching the tree fall to the ground caused by my sweat and determination I now know WHY I would pay someone to cut down any tree bigger than that one. It is simply not worth my time / pain / equipment / etc to do it myself. Previously when getting estimates I might have thought “200 dollars for that tree… is this guy trying to rip me off?” or “I have to get 5 estimates just to be sure everyone is in the right ballpark”. But now, having done it myself, I know what I would quote myself, and I know that it likely takes me two or three times as long as a “pro” so I can adjust accordingly. I also know that I can spend the time I would spend on the tree working on a new computer program… or doing some house maintenance I’m actually good at… which is likely a far better use of my time. Heck, I might be able to make the $300 working on computer stuff in the amount of time it would have taken me to cut down the tree and haul it out to the curb. In that case, I can rest well knowing that both the contractor and I win. I can write that check with confidence and without regrets or hesitation.

When possible, I suggest doing the things you would pay someone else to do atleast once. Maybe you’ll find you like it and are good at. Maybe you’ll just reaffirm your decision to let someone else do it. Either way, odds are you’ll learn something useful.

(I pay someone to change my oil. I can get it changed for about $13 at the right time of day and it only takes about 10 minutes. I can barely buy all the supplies for that price, and it would likely take me an hour. I know how, just in case, but for now, it’s worth my time and lack of frustration to write the check and rest well knowing that it truly is the right decision as opposed to the “easy” decision.)

Anyone creating websites has come across a need for color charts. Whether picking a background, a font color, a border color, or any other colored control / feature it is crucial to have some sort of reference to work from. I’m not that artsie (sp?) so I don’t have the color codes memorized due to high use, but I also hate going and looking for decent ones.

As I find decent charts, I’ll add them here.

The main reason I like this first one listed is that it has not only the codes, but it shows me pictures of each of the CSS standard color codes. I am often coding away and am trying to pick a color but the intellisense only has the color NAME… not a sample next to it. Now I can whip out my handy dandy color chart via the link below, find the color I want visually, and then use the name specified next to it. Life is good.

Color Chart: http://www.neopets.com/~triflot

I just read the following article while I was trying to determine if static named pages are better for seo than those with parameters in the url. I’m always impressed with the things that are returned when I google something. It is often not entirely relevant to what I was looking for, but can be very interesting anyway.

If you get a chance and you are interested in SEO at all, you might give the following a read:

http://www.stonetemple.com/articles/top-10-bad-SEO-ideas.shtml

From the article:

===============

So what’s the bottom line? There are really two major things you need to do:

* Learn how to communicate to the search engine what your site is about. Many of the problems listed above relate to common practices that make the search engine’s job harder, or even impossible. Learning how to build your site so that the search engine can easily determine the unique value of your site is an outstanding idea.

* Don’t spend your time figuring out how to beat the search engine. It’s just not a good place to be. You may even succeed in the short term. But if you do succeed in tricking them in the short term, the day will come when you wake up in the morning and a significant piece of your business has disappeared overnight. Not a good feeling at all.

Take the same energy you would have invested in the tricks and invest it in great content for your site, and in the type of marketing programs you would have implemented if the search engines did not exist.

This is how you can grow your business for the long term.

“On the flip side, if you want to start and grow a business that you retain control of, put money in the bank from  and can make a long term commitment to, then always remember that sales should be the first thing you focus on when you wake up in the morning.  Profitable Sales to happy customers is the best path to making money. If you go to bed at night thinking about how to sell more and how to make your customers happy. You probably are in a good place.  If you go to bed and wake up thinking about how to raise money to stay in business, you might as well get the new business cards and think about what your new consulting blog is going to look like” – MC

The quoted text below was copied directly from BlogMaverick.com with the permission of Mark Cuban.

There are few things more exciting than starting a business and getting things rolling. The fear, the adrenalin, the excitement, the hope that every entrepreneur feels, are all intoxicating. In fact, very often they are TOO intoxicating. Very often, along with some success comes the feeling of invincibility. I have been in situations where I have told myself that Im smart, I know what Im doing, that I will figure things out as I go, so its OK to take on this new opportunity.

Those were usually the times I made mistakes. In a lifetime of running businesses I have developed a lot of rules that have been almost infallable, here are a couple of them that I use religously to this day.

1. Everyone is a genius in a bullmarket
A lot people think that if they are picking stocks that keep on going up, its because they are smart. They fail to notice that EVERYONE is able to pick winning stocks when all stocks are going up. (Much like we are seeing in this fall and winters stock market). The same principle applies to business. Entrepreneurs have to be brutally honest with themselves and recognize where they have added value and where they have gone along for the ride. There is nothing wrong with going along for the ride and making money at it, but it will catch up with you if you lie to yourself and give yourself the credit for the ride.

Sports Leagues were the perfect example of an industry that thought they were responsible for growth when in reality it was a bull market for rights fees.

First the advent of cable created competition for sports rights that increased the value of sports rights. Then Satellite TV came along that created increased competition for cable and broadcast for sports rights, so sports rights values went up. Then the competition between rights holders themselves creating regional sports networks increased the value of sports rights. Today, sports are in a sweet spot because of the rise in adoption of TIVO like capabilities by TV viewers. Sports is the most TIVO resistant programming.

Smart sports rights holders, like we are trying to be with the Mavericks, recognize that it wasnt our brilliance that to this point had pushed up our TV rights revenues. It was the market. Its our challenge to recognize what we can do to push the value of our programming further. Its a bigger challenge to recognize that its possible that the bullmarket may end and we have to be sure our programming is of sufficient value to our customers and viewers to be able to maintain or continue to increase in value.

Its also our challenge to recognize whent there is opportunity.. Sports is one of the few TIVO proof programming options to advertisers. We have a unique chance to lever up our viewership to prove our value as a TIVO proof option to advertisers by integrating value for our advertisers into our games and by working to increase our viewership. Its critical not just because we want to protect and increase this revenue stream, but because across our revenue streams it has the most upside. Advertisers want a way to stay in front of the largest possible TIVO proof audiences, with the unique experience of HDTV, congregating at the same time, rather than picking them off one at a time as in an on demand universe. One gives you a number the next morning, the other takes a long time to aggregate into an audience size of value. That makes it a unique opportunity the Mavs have to work hard to leverage with our partners.

For the Mavs, its also important to realize that we cant raise ticket prices forever without pricing ourselves out of the market. In fact, we lowered the price of all tickets in our upper bowl and created a TWO DOLLAR ($2) ticket for 10 of our games. Fans can get 10 games for 20 bucks. That lowering ticket prices is the most powerful, least expensive marketing we can do. It leads to a more positive brand value and committment to the Mavs, which helps us create new products that leverage the live nature of our product.

Its not easy, but we recognize that much of our past increases in revenues were the result of industry trends as much as our efforts. We have to make sure to do whatever we can to focus on winning the battles in case the bullmarket does not continue.

Which leads to rule #2
2. Win the Battles you are in before you take on new battles
Everyone of my businesses has a make or break battle going on and so do yours. There is one battle in your business that you are not winning, or are battling to stay in front.
In our film business, its the battle to get people to theaters without spending more than we bring in box office. With the Mavs, its the battle of making our game experience in the arena and on TV so compelling that its strong enough entertainment on its own to draw an audience and make our advertisers happy. I cant control how a game on the court goes, but I can make sure that if you come to, or watch a game you have a great time doing it. On HDNet, its how to keep on raising the bar and find or create programming that our subscribers feel committed to and take ownership of. I can spend as much money on a show as a big network, but they are wrong 95pct of the time. Its not a model i want to copy. Its the ultimate challenge to find a new way to get results.

THese literally are the 3 problems that I focus on. They arent issues that just popped up. THey have been challenges in these businesses for years and present a moving target that require my ongoing and continuing focus, today and most likely for years to come. Its an intellectual challenge I really love. Its truly the sport of business. Sure, I deal with operational issues, but pretty much every other strategic element of my businesses I have learned to delegate. Thats not easy for an entrepreneur to do. In my past, I would have taken on everything and anything that I thought could add value to. I had to be in the middle of everything. No longer. Ive learned to hire people that I can build trust in and let them take the ball and run with it.

Of course not every business has bench strength. Some entrepreneurs wont hire people that have complementary skill sets. Others just are small business and cant afford it yet. For those businesses, this rule is all the more important. If you are the main engine behind your company, taking on new challenges will only dilute your ability to win the wars you are in and of course increase the risk of injuring your primary business or core competencies.

In fact, this is the biggest issue I have with the NBA and our international efforts. Its not that I think there is no opportunity internationally , there is. The problem is that the “CEO” of the NBA is in the front and middle of every effort. His efforts are diluted on both fronts and we risk losing multiple important battles. If the metrics for the lines of our business that drive 75pct or more of our business were skyrocketing, thats one thing. But we aren’t winning the battles we are in. We aren’t losing, we just aren’t winning, we are treading water.
International isnt going anywhere. China as an example has great potential and it always will. If we were dominating in our core revenue lines, I could easily be the biggest proponent of an International NBA effort (minus contributing our players to competitive enterprises) . The NBA needs to find someone who can lead and win each of the battles. Trying to use one person as the leader for both is a huge mistake that is not worth the risk fto lack of execution it exposes us to.

I have used the same logic with HDNet. HDTV is taking hold all over the world. In many areas its booming. We sell those markets content via salespeople, but I have said no to offers to bring HDNet t
o the rest of the world as a linear or online network . Why ? Because dealing with the rest of the world takes a lot of time and focus. It takes going out and hiring people to run it, and training them and then being available to help support their efforts on an ongoing business. Every minute that i spend, or our top people spend dealing with the rest of the world is a minute not spent fighting the battle to make HDNet and HDNet Movies the best networks they can be here in the US. We are not a business that has maximized our growth here, we are just starting to accelerate. Taking any resources away from that battle would be a huge mistake.

Its the same with Landmark Theaters. We could go international, but winning the battles here are far more important and again, every minute our leadership spends on the rest of the world is time and focus lost on Landmark here in the US.

Its a huge lesson for entrepreneurs. Win the battles you are in first, then worry about expansion internationally or into new businesses. You do not have unlimited time and/or attention. You may work 24 hours a day, but those 24 hours spent winning your core business will pay offer far more. It might cost you some longer term upside, but it will allow you to be the best business you can be. To use a sports metaphor, get the fundamentals right and then add to your fundamental skills before you try to take on the trick shots.

Rule 3 is the natural extension of rule 2.

3. You can Drown in Opportunity
Few businesses only have one opportunity. Every entrepreneur’s mind goes crazy with the new and exciting things they can do beyond the new and exciting things they are already doing. The risk is that you can drown in all these opportunities. Far too often when an entreprenuer hits a rough patch or competitive challenge, the temptation is too “turn on the thinking cap” and find something new for the company to do. Don’t fall to the temptation. As an entreprenuer you have to know what the core competencies of your business are and make sure that your company focuses on being the absolutely best it can be at executing them. Bottom line is this. If you are adding new things when your core businesses are struggling rather than facing the challenge, you are either running away or giving up. Rarely is either good for a business. In fact, by chasing these opportunities, you may be assuring that you drown in them.

These rules are things I check off against before I undertake new elements of a business. Hopefully if you are an entrepreneur it will.

The quoted text below was copied directly from BlogMaverick.com with the permission of Mark Cuban.

You only have to be right once -

In basketball you have to shoot 50pct. If you make an extra 10 shots per hundred, you are an All-Star. In baseball you have to get a hit 30 pct of the time. If you get an extra 10 hits per hundred at bats, you are on the cover of every magazine, lead off every SportsCenter and make the Hall of Fame.

In Business, the odds are a little different. You don’t have to break the Mendoza line (hitting .200). In fact, it doesnt matter how many times you strike out. In business, to be a success, you only have to be right once.

One single solitary time and you are set for life. That’s the beauty of the business world.

I like to tell the story of how I started my first business at age 12, selling garbage bags. No one ever has asked if I was any good or made money at it. I was, and I did…enough to buy some tennis shoes .

I like to tell the story of how I started up a bar, Motley’s Pub when I wasn’t even of legal drinking age the summer before my senior year at Indiana University. No one really asks me how it turned out. It was great until we got busted for letting a 16-year-old win a wet t-shirt contest (I swear I checked her ID, and it was good!).

No one really asks me about my adventures working for Mellon Bank, or Tronics 2000, or trying to start a business selling powdered milk (it was cheaper by the gallon, and I thought it tasted good). They don’t ask me about working as a bartender at night at Elans when I first got to Dallas, or getting fired from my job at Your Business Software for wanting to close a sale rather than sweeping the floor and opening up the store.

No ever asked me about what it was like when I started MicroSolutions and how I used to count the months I was in business, hoping to outlast my previous endeavors and make this one a success.

With every effort, I learned a lot. With every mistake and failure, not only mine, but of those around me, I learned what not to do. I also got to study the success of those I did business with as well. I had more than a healthy dose of fear, and an unlimited amount of hope, and more importantly, no limit on time and effort.

Fortunately, things turned out well for me with MicroSolutions. I sold it after 7 years and made enough money to take time off and have a whole lot of fun.

Back then I can remember vividly people telling me how lucky I was to sell my business at the right time.

Then when I took that money and started trading technology stocks that were in the areas that MIcroSolutions focused on. I remember vividly being told how lucky I was to have expertise in such a hot area, as technology stocks started to trade up.

Of course, no one wanted to comment on how lucky I was to spend time reading software manuals, or Cisco Router manuals, or sitting in my house testing and comparing new technologies, but that’s a topic for another blog post.

The point of all this is that it doesn’t matter how many times you fail. It doesn’t matter how many times you almost get it right. No one is going to know or care about your failures, and either should you. All you have to do is learn from them and those around you because…

All that matters in business is that you get it right once.

Then everyone can tell you how lucky you are.

Apparently the last time I set up MySql I did it using some cheap (like crappy) installer. It didn’t include any of the extension dlls. I’ve now decided it is much less of a headache to simply download the zip file and do the configuration myself. A link to the instructions I followed. Worked great when I did so.

Installing PHP.

The path used for PHP is just an example, you can choose another if you want.

• Extract the archive in C:\PHP (Rename it if necessary)

• Rename C:\PHP\php.ini-recommended to C:\PHP\PHP.INI

Configure the Session directory

• Open C:\PHP\PHP.INI

Make sure you remove the initial semicolons!

• Find

;session.save_path = "/tmp"

replace it with

session.save_path = "C:\WINDOWS\TEMP"

• Find

; **You CAN safely turn this off for IIS, in fact, you MUST.**
; cgi.force_redirect = 1

replace it with

; **You CAN safely turn this off for IIS, in fact, you MUST.**
cgi.force_redirect = 0

Configure PHP extensions

• Find

; Directory in which the loadable extensions (modules) reside.
extension_dir = "./"

replace it with

; Directory in which the loadable extensions (modules) reside.
extension_dir = "C:\PHP\EXT"

If you can’t find “extension_dir” in your C:\PHP\PHP.INI file, add it to the bottom of the file.

MySQL extension

As Gallery 2 uses a database to store it’s metadata, you need to enable database support in PHP. This guide uses MySQL, but the procedure would be similar for Postgres or Oracle.

• Find

;extension=php_mysql.dll

replace it with

extension=php_mysql.dll

Gettext extension

• In order to make the localization of g2 (multi-language) work you need the gettext extension of php. This can be enabled in php.ini. G2 does hint you for that. However gettext is a little strange extension.

• Find

;extension=php_gettext.dll

replace it with

extension=php_gettext.dll

But now comes the crux. php_gettext.dll is depending on \php-install-dir\dll\iconv.dll All other extensions work flawlessly for me. But gettext.dll required me to put iconv.dll into a dir that is included in the searchpath. E.g. /windows/system32 I then overreacted and copied all dll’s to that /system32 dir. The manual of php 4 tells you to copy the dll’s to the /php-install-dir/ but that only works if you add manually the php dir into the path statement of windows.

GD2 extension

Find the extension in your php.ini and remove the # in front of the line ;extension=php_gd2.dll

• Find

;extension=php_gd2.dll

replace it with

extension=php_gd2.dll

....

Make PHP available to IIS

Set the system path to include C:\PHP

• Click on My Computer -> Properties -> Advanced -> Environment Variables
• Scroll down the System Variables (bottom window) and doubeclick on the PATH variable
• Add the following to the end (make sure you add the initial semicolin)

;C:\PHP

• Click OK

Make PHP.INI available to PHP

• While you still have the Environment variables window open click new
• In the Variable Name field enter

PHPRC

• Set the Variable Value to

C:\PHP

This will make PHP.INI available to PHP (We will verify this later)

Configuring IIS

You have a choice of whether to setup PHP to use the ISAPI extension, CGI executable, or using FastCGI. The ISAPI extension is not fully stable, and the CGI executable’s performance is very poor because after every request the php-cgi.exe executable is unloaded. So if the php-cgi.exe executable is always loaded into memory then that would greatly increase the performance. There are two ways of doing this.
1. Spend $500 for Zend’s own WinEnabler [2]
2. Setup the free FastCGI program that does the same thing as WinEnabler

The recommended way of running PHP on IIS is using FastCGI. Below you will find instructions on how to setup PHP using ISAPI but if your site is going to serve lots of pages, you will probably want to go with FastCGI.

Add the PHP ISAPI extension to IIS Web Service Extensions

• Click on Start -> Administrative Tools -> Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager
• Expand the local computer in the left pane
• Click on “Web Service Extensions” in the left pane
• In the right pane, click the blue underlined text, “Add a new Web service extension…”
• Enter “PHP5 ISAPI” as the “Extension name”
• Click the “Add…” button and browse to the php5isapi.dll file in your C:\PHP install directory
• Click Open -> OK
• Check the “Set extension status to Allowed” checkbox and click “OK”

Adding the PHP parsing to your IIS website

Note: You can add this either on the top-level Web Sites or to individual web sites beneath it. If you add it to the top-level web sites node in the left pane, it applies to all websites on the IIS instance. You can also choose to only install it on specific websites beneath the top-level node, in that case it will only apply to that site. The procedure for adding is the same for both scopes.

Be careful when applying this to the top-level node, as it will override settings defined in the individual websites beneath it.

• In the left pane, expand Web Sites
• Right Click the website you want to configure, and select properties
• Open the Home Directory tab
• Click Configuration
• Then go to the Mappings tab
• Click Add…
• Enter the full path to php5isapi.dll in the “Executable” textbox or click the Browse button to browse your way to it. If you have followed the path recommendations in this guide, the fill path should be C:\PHP\php5isapi.dll
• Enter .php in the Extension textbox
• Select Limit to, enter GET,POST,HEAD
• Click OK and verify that .PHP is now included in the Application extensions listbox
• Click OK

This configures IIS to understand what to do with files ending with .php

Adding scripting permissions

• While still having the Web Site Properties dialog box open, click Home Directory
• Make sure that “Execute permissions” dropdown is set to “Scripts only”.
• Click OK

I recently set up a issue tracking software called Eventum. Boy was it FUN! The 3 minute install took me about 4 1/2 hours. I had to upgrade mySql (actually I chose to when I started to get an unexpected error during the install – turns out my install was missing some dlls). That upgrade was a real pain in the butt… until it I got it right. It only took about 10 minutes once I figured out exactly what to do. Then Eventum only took about 10 minutes from that point. Here’s a gotcha in eventum though. The source of this information is here. I just removed that setting and POOF… everything worked.

From: Date: April 26 2007 11:41am
Subject: SUCCESS!! Eventum 2.0.1 Installation on WinXP/SP2+Apache-2.2.4+PHP-5.2.1+MySQL-5.0.37-nt community edition
List-Archive: http://lists2.mysql.com/eventum-users/3965
Message-Id: <4847DBE579D78B4A9C610E2EA77B463413BED730@inblrk999msx.in002.siemens.net>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain;
	charset="iso-8859-1"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

Hi all,

A Million Thanks to Gaetano Giunta for providing the "breakthrough" =
tip!!

I feel the Eventum Wiki needs to be updated with the following info =
ASAP!!

1. The SQL Mode should NOT have "STRICT_TRANS_TABLE".  This is set by =
default.
   I changed it through the MySQL Administrator GUI and restarted the =
MySQL
   Service.  The "SQL Mode" setting is under "Advanced" tab for "Startup
   Variables", in the MySQL Administrator GUI.

2. PHP should have the "Gettext" extension enabled in addition to the =
"GD"
   and "MySQL", without which, although the Setup goes through fine, we
   would still get a blank page while trying to do the first login.

Now, I am able run both 1.7.1 and 2.0.1 on my laptop!!

Thanks and rgds,
Watson