Ben Roy

Yesterday I had something of a flash of personal insight that should never have been that. Why not? Because it was something that I already knew, that I understood.

For one of my businesses, a social bookmarking service, I've been planning to outsource the bulk of the ongoing development and maintenance work by hiring a full time employee in a more modestly priced market than the US. In case that was a little too weasely, we wanted to hire some cheap overseas labor.

I didn't used to dig on New Year's resolutions, but a couple years ago I had a change of heart for reasons I don't recall or never knew. Either way, I'm now a fan and try to create achievable, challenging, and meaningful goals each year.

I wrote last year about creating SMART goals, or those that are specific, measurable, actionable, realistic, and timed. I've had success with setting goals that meet these criteria and am doing the same this year.

There's something about getting a project buttoned up and out the door that's just not easy. What is it they say? The last 10% of the work takes 90% of the effort? While the exact numbers might be off, the idea seems pretty sound.

There's a related idea when it comes to quality of software, or quality of the design of the software, which says that the last 10% of getting to perfect is much more work than the first 90%. In other words, just because you can get something built 'pretty well' on the cheap doesn't mean that you can get all the way there for just a bit more.

I love it when life comes along and illustrates something for you in a completely unexpected way. Take my shopping trip the other day at Costco.

We were browsing through the produce section and saw boxes of plums. These plums looked great - nice color, no real blemishes, very uniform. There was one problem though in that they were HUGE. They had to be double the size of what you normally think of when it comes to plums.

After a fairly minimal amount of research into an ideal first airplane, I ran off to the local hobby store and picked up the Super Cub LP. It's what they call a trainer, a plane designed for learning to fly. It's relatively slow (top speed of 30 mph), has forgiving flight characteristics, and takes a crash pretty well (supposedly). All that said, it wasn't the plane that I intended to purchase, but they recommended it over the one I'd been looking at. Plus it was in stock.

Ok, so it was originally 1909, but it seemed catchier to latch onto the whole "99" thing. I've been wanting to try out a diet that cut out all of the processed and artificial junk that is in most of our food, but I always get caught up in the details. What exactly do I mean by 'processed', what's in and what's out, etc.

My sites are slowly coming back online, one at a time. Every time another one pops up I get excited that maybe the rest of them are fixed too, but it's never the case. As they come online I'm running my own backups so I never find myself in this situation again.

For the short term, manually running backups manually is ok, but since I will now be keeping regular offline backups for all my sites I'm going to need an automated solution. There's some stuff off there, but I'm tempted to put something of my own together.

I'm in the middle of learning a very harsh lesson. Almost a week ago, all of my websites went offline. As of today, only a handful of them have come back up. My blog, obviously, is one of them.

The problem is that my host is being completely unresponsive. The 4 times I've contacted support, I've been told that they're working on it and will 'update me shortly'. Well, I've never gotten an update that wasn't a response to my inquiry.

I said not too long ago that I was going to test out the waters with producing some content instead of just thinking about software. I'm not quite to the point of creating content for sale, so I'm starting a little smaller and simpler: I'm putting together a few reports on some of the most common questions I see from newer marketers (or sometimes not-so-new).

Most of the people I interact with in the Internet Marketing world are making money by selling information. Information is readily available, doesn't necessarily require any specialized skills, and is fairly quick to package up and deliver. I guess that makes selling it a great business model, and plenty of people are quite successful doing so.