w.y.s.i…WTF?

Great post on Problogger.net that gives some tips on what to do when you get burnt out trying to keep up with the latest Web 2.0 and Social Media flavor of the week.

Feeling Overwhelmed by Social Media and Web 2.0? - Here Are 5 Tips For You

Especially #4. That’s the kicker. At least for me.

As what I call a “web generalist”, I have to try to keep up with just about every new trend in web development, design and marketing. And then decide how, why, when and if it should or could be used. And the decision is getting almost impossible to make.

Jquery or MooTools or Prototype/Scriptaculous or Spry?
PHP/MySQL or Ruby on Rails or Cold Fusion or ASP.net?
Joomla or Drupal or ModX or Custom Built CMS?
Twitter or Tumblr or Pownce?
Facebook or MySpace or whatever new will overtake these?

Of course the only real, true answer for these or any other question like these, is this:

“Depends.”

Depends on what you know, depends on what you need to do, depends on the client, depends on the server, depends on if Mercury is in retrograde, depends on if the shake machine is broken again at McDonald’s.

And therein lies the problem -with so many options now available and potential case scenarios, the decisions we need to make are getting harder and harder to come to, much less have a significant amount of confidence in.

So with all the options, and the lack of clear solutions, how do you know that if you head down one road that at the absolute, least opportune time, you might find yourself at a dead-end and need to turnaround, trudge back to where you began and start all over?

Basically, you don’t.

But, the trick is to not get bogged down in the decision. And the tips in the ProBlogger post are great for those.

Remember #4 - Focus on the Goal, then choose the tool.

Look at #3 and focus your energies on the tools you have.  That will probably make the big part of your decision right there. Ruby on Rails looks really interesting, and I see more ASP.net and Cold Fusion jobs out there at better salaries, but I know PHP and have invested several years in it. If I can do what I need to with it, why stress myself out and choke on a project just becuase all the cool kids are using Rails or the guys making 6 figures are using ASP.

Their #5 - “Have Fun” - always encouraged, but sometimes, just not likely. Sometimes ajob or task just won’t be fun, but knowing what you need to do and how you are going to get through it, will make it a lot less miserable. To quote Depeche Mode “just hang on. …Suffer well”.  But a word of caution: do not fall into the Tinkerer’s Trap, where you make the foolish decision to take on learning a new tool for a project as a method of learning it. Deadlines are not your friend when learning a new skill set or understanding a new system. I have done this very thing under a project deadline and had my successes (Joomla and ModX) and had collossal failings (Flash + XML + PHP - stil haven’t cracked that 3 yrs later.)

And #1 - “You are not alone”.

Right here with you.  I’ll save a seat on the breadtruck for you.

With the recent attention Google wanna-be “cuil” is getting, I thought it may be time to take a look at some of the other websites that try to pawn off the lack of ability to secure a strong domain name by using a ridiculous spelling of a normal every day word.

(and I know how hard it is to get a good domain name nowadays, so I understand trying something different, but really…)

1. Cuil.com - pronounced “cool”

Ok thank goodness som article explained it becuase I never would have guessed. Of course, everyone knows that available 4 letter domains became non-existent eons ago (in internet years), but this is really stretching. Whoever came up with this one was probably smoking a little too much Web 2.0 “kraq”.

2. Kuler - pronounced “color”

Adobe must not think much of their built-in spell check to let this monstrosity out into the wild. Plus, it is just a SUBDOMAIN at adobe.com. If you are only using it as a subdomain, why not just call it whatever you want.

3. Sphinn - pronounced “spin”

SEO is one of my focus areas so I always run across this on and it just “phisses” me off. Any reasonable person would likely read this and think it was pronounced closer to “Sven” and hey, who wouldn’t be interested in a social linking site to articles for and about about dudes named Sven.

This one always reminds of the dork quiz bowl team I faced off with (and obliterated) that called themselves “ghoti” a.k.a. “fish” (explanation). But for the life of me, I dont’ know what the usage cases for a silent “h” are when preceded by “p”. (and yes, it is possible to be on a cool quiz bowl team)

There are more out there and I’ll update this post as I run across them.

Got some you want to share? Post in the comments!

But right now I am hungry, so I think I will kuk some dhinnr.

Shenanigans, poppy-cock, balderdash and any other term or phrase you may use to describe something completely out of line.

Canadian ISP tests injecting content into web pages

I will admit that I haven’t been following the whole net neutrality issue as closely as I should have, but I just dont’ see how anyone could have thought that this would fly and that the company won’t get reamed for trying it.

What is really strange is that it was a Canadian ISP - wouldn’t have thought that one of the sleaziest moves I’ve seen in a while would come from our oh-so-polite neighbors to the north. Just proves that stupidity knows no borders.

Sure, they may have cheap prescriptions, college paid for and Metric, but it isn’t worth putting up with that kind of bullshit.

But then again, they did give us Bryan Adams and Celine Dion, so I shouldn’t be surprised…

Can’t say too much about this, but I found out the other day that one of my site designs was ripped (again). Ripped in a bad way. There is CSS on their site that doesn’t do anything and there are commented out sections and links to pages that don’t exist (but were required styles and retired pages on my customer’s site). And not just that site, the thieving bastards decided to steal other pieces from another site and an email I did also. So what should I do? What act of vengeance should I unleash on these pilfering asshats?

You want to know what I am going to do?

Not a damn thing. And that is the most frustrating thing about it.

“Why the hell not?” you may be asking (or not, but either way I’ll try to explain.)

Without divulging too much, here is the lowdown (and I apologize for the vagueness, but I do value my job and you never know who can put 2 and 2 together.)

I work for a firm that specializes in a certain niche market, providing design and marketing services for both small businesses of that market and the larger companies that serve those businesses. So we do B-to-C and B-to-B for that niche market. And we are even more specialized within areas of that market, so everyone knows just about everyone. So you would think that since everyone knows everyone, something like this is not very likley to happen. I thought so too. But we would both be mistaken.

One of our largest B-to-B customers also owns a small business like all the other ones they serve. So we did some work for that business’s small business and some of their not-so-small businesses. Well, one of their customers liked the small business site so much they decided to go ahead and use it for themselves. So why would we let that slide, why would our customer not want to evoke the almighty copyright infringement smackdown?

Because, the thieving customer is also one of their biggest customers.

But was it really the customer? I can’t be certain, of course, but if one considers the source of the email piece they ripped off (it only went to the B-to-B customers) I find it really hard to believe that it was some reckless web monkey and not someone affiliated with the business itself.

So here I am. A customer’s site has been stolen by one of their own customers and I can’t do a thing.

Sad things is that it really just comes down to money -  nobody is going to say anything because the business that stole it, spends a metric assload with the big business. Does that entitle them to take what they want? Not in my book - they could obviously afford a legit site. In fact, if they liked all that work so much, all they had to do was call my company. It is what we do. But instead of choosing to employ the same people to produce a theft-worthy site for them, they decided to just take.

But I can’t do a damn thing. Grrrr…..

Dammit, karma, hurry up.

So the work week is done (yeah, right) and I was relaxing by checking my stats, and it looks this site just lived up to it’s name . I feel like a Dad who came back from a weekend trip to find out that his shy, quiet child threw a 4-keg blowout where the whole high school showed up. And I could’nt be happier (Hey, the kid didn’t break anything and this means he must have friends).

So while I was busy at work handling impossible turnaround times and being chastised for my lack of psychic abilities, this site went off and got itself noticed to the tune of over 750 visitors in just 3 days at the end of July. Considering that the days leading up to the deluge of visitors, the site averaged 2.84 unique visits/day for that month (yes most days ZER0 people), you can begin to see how unexpected it is.

Why, you may ask? Looks like UserFriendly.org had some people curious about “WYSIWTF” that day.

(plus the comic was also submitted to Digg so this may be the closest I ever get to the Digg-effect)

Thanks for the halo traffic, Illiad!