thirdbIT

So I woke up this morning and saw that 7 people had saved my method_missing post to delicious. How can this be? I wondered. Who even reads this blog? We checked our stats and saw a bunch of pageviews, because someone linked to us from Reddit (No, we didn’t submit ourselves. We have two small children, here, people, we don’t have time to go around flogging our blog under pseudonyms. We barely have time to flog … never mind). Anyway, then someone else commented, quite correctly :

This isn’t “10 things you should know”. It’s ten paragraphs, each assigned a number for no reason other than the fact that “X things…” lists are better reddit/digg-bait.

It’s funny, because I had a whole paragraph in the original draft about precisely that. I went back and forth about calling the post 10 things, and I went back and forth about numbering the things, and I dithered about the numbering, and the post took me three hours to write and I had other things to do, so I finally decided that the paragraph about whether to call the post “10 things…” was gratuitous meta-blogging, took it out, and left the numbers in.

I’ve never written a 10-things post before. I’m not a ‘pro-blogger’. I do sometimes read posts like ‘10 tips to publicize your blog’ though, because I need money, and therefore I need work, and so one way I can try to drum up Ruby on Rails work is to try to contribute to the community in some useful way, and if you’re going to contribute it helps if people are reading you, at least a teeny bit. Etc. So what the hell, I thought, I’ve been meaning to write about method_missing for a while, I’ll see if I can do it in a 10 things format.

So I wrote out all my thoughts about method_missing, and it looked nothing like 10 things. I reorganized it to make the major points more obvious. I took out some stuff that didn’t belong. I revised. Still more of a meander than a 10 things. More revising. Better structure, but not 10 unrelated things; more like 10 points, each leading to one another. (Hmm, an essay. But the internets don’t like essays! ) Okay, I did my best, I thought, time for bed.

And then I wake up and there we are on reddit, with the harsh light of a tiny amount of publicity showing me up as an obnoxious blogging publicity-hound.

Oh well. 7 people thought the post was interesting and useful enough to save to delicious, so that’s something.

And no, I don’t really have a list of 10 things I didn’t know about Reddit. Just one: I had no idea how successful a tactic it was to call something “10 things…”. Beyond my wildest dreams. Though I don’t think I’ll be doing it again anytime soon. Go ahead, reddit readers, flame away!!

So we’ve moved the site over to Wordpress from Typo. We experimented with two rails-based blogging engines, Typo and Mephisto (which seems more popular in the rails world right now), but Wordpress is a mature and widely adopted platform and in the end it made more sense to us to go with it. We’d rather not be solving software problems others have solved a million times over. (Which is why we also won’t be producing a to-do-list app any time soon. Online to-do lists! A billion to choose from, and yet somehow, none of them make my work get done. Though actually, I just bought a copy of the PDF book Flexible Rails, since I’ve decided to pick up AS3/Flex in my spare time, and the tutorial project in the book is, of course, an online to-do list.)

I’ve been delaying posting this notice because I keep looking for a blog post I read a month ago which convinced me I ought to think about Wordpress, as it was an explanation for a rails blog running on WP, and a damn good explanation at that. But I can’t for the life of me find it again. I found several other people who moved to WP after experimenting with the rails blogging engines, but not the post I remember. The explanation was, basically: right tool for right job. WP is good tool for blogging. No need to reinvent. Etc. Except the post was more eloquent than my restatement. Oh well. Lost in the ether.

Also, Max had to run a cron job doing some voodoo the details of which I forget to keep the Typo instance in good shape. Wordpress is faster, and, we hope, more stable. (No, I am not making a comment about the stability and speed of Ruby on Rails in general, just a statement about one instance of one app on one host. YMMV.)

Anyway, Max has a script for migrating the database from Typo to WP, and he’ll post it any second now.

One reason Max is not so sure that we should ever go into business ourselves is that it obviously requires sales (”You had your own corporation back in the day, sweetie,” I say to him. “Yeah, but I didn’t have to sell myself much.” says Max. Or, as another friend of ours says, you can just barnacle yourself to some other business that takes care of the sales and farms work out to you.)

People who are good at sales seem to be from some alternate universe, and the idea of having to spend a lot of time selling ourselves is just ick. We resent the idea that not only are we forced to work for a living (and do all the stuff that actually accomplishing stuff at work entails, not to mention sitting through ugly slideshows with fancy and useless ‘effects’, eating Trader Joe’s cookies that someone left by the water cooler just because they’re there, and waiting for three days for the helpdesk to finish setting up a login that you know takes exactly two minutes of effort to accomplish) — not only are we forced to work for a living, but in our free time we must work on working. See my thoughts on the meaning of “career” (is it cheating if I add a link to something later, when I’ve actually written it?) We have a bunch of other stuff we’d like to do besides sell ourselves. For example, here I am, writing this blog entry for our “professional presence” blog, which, as noted previously, everyone says we have to have these days. But we have an unprofessional blog too (no, I’m not telling you where it is, go find it yourself if you’re so damn nosy. Or just click here to read all the deep dark secrets about us that you’d discover on it. ) And maybe I’d rather be spending this time working on the other blog, or studying my French verbs, or weeding my garden, or playing with my kids. But noooo, we have to have a brand.

How will we come up with a brand when we resent and distrust the whole notion of brands?

Why should I even be writing about this? Because I’m sure we’re not the only shy marketing-averse techie people who are hung up on the whole “creating a brand” thing everyone’s always telling us to do, and are thus holding ourselves back from being able to make money in the simplest, most pleasant, most efficient way possible.

First we have to get past all these marketing types telling us we need to have a brand. Brands are fine for those people, obviously, from some other universe, but why should we have to have one? We don’t want to do marketing. We just want to interview our users to see what their ridiculous desires (uh, I mean requirements) are, draw some screen mockups and non-UML-compliant app diagrams, write some code, configure some stuff, make some useful docs, and be done. (See how sneaky I am: Reqs. Code. Docs. Done.)

Once again, Amy Hoy comes to the rescue. (She gave me my first Ruby pep-talk, on the first day I started learning Ruby, oh, a month ago. Not that she knows me or anything.) Amy Hoy tells me all about pimpin’:

Oh blech, I can hear you thinking, an article on marketing. But wait a moment. Among geeky types, the word “marketing” has an evil reputation, I know. But pimpin’ ain’t marketing.

Pimpin’ goes oh-so-much further.

The act of marketing products is often taken to mean creating desire where there isn’t any, creating dissatisfaction in the viewer/reader/whatever, manufacturing needs and generally trying to create a false image of a product that will convince a viewer he just haaaas to have that thing. Archetypes: misleading beauty ads, “lifestyle” soda ads, and Ronco.

Now, I disagree with the above definition, but that’s the reputation the word has and I’m going to just let that one lie.

The act of pimpin’ products, on the other hand, never involves any kind of questionable tactics. Pimpin’ means putting your product’s best foot forward. Accen-tuate the pos-it-ive. It means not shirking from self-promotion, and shouting your product’s position, features and benefits loud and clear. It means making the acquisition (download, purchase, whatever) process as simple as possible. It also means having a very non-murky message. Archetype: any time when you can get in, download the product/information you want, and get out in under 60 seconds.

And, unlike marketing, pimpin’ has no “g” in it. You have to know that’s a point in its favor.

Of course, we don’t have an actual product to sell. Just us. But we need to sell Us, or at least one or the other of Us. So the advice applies. We need to have a brand, and we need to pimp it. There’s no use complaining about how we don’t wanna, cuz we have to. Even if we never go into business for ourselves full-time, people don’t stay in jobs anymore like they used to (so we hear). We’re gonna have to keep finding other jobs, and keep coming up with new ways to get people to pay us.

So there it is. We must have a brand. Ideally, of course, we end up with too much business to keep up with, and we don’t spend much of our time selling ourselves. People just email us to ask if they can hire us. But if we want that to happen, they have to find us, they have to read us, they have to know us, and they have to know what’s great about us. And they won’t find us, read us, know us, and know what’s great about us unless we tell them.

As long as we’ve got bills to pay, and as long as we don’t want simply to be cogs in a corporate machine, over-working ourselves in our cubicles, we’ve got a brand to build. Or rather, some pimpin’ to do. Sorry Max, but that’s just the way it is, and it doesn’t have to be as painful as all that. We know we’re awesome, and we just have to be able to tell a good story to everyone else about why that is.

Max and I have another blog. It’s lightly anonymous, and we’re trying to maintain some semblance of separation between that online life and this one. We refuse to have only a professional online existence, because our lives are not just about work. Not that there’s any way we’ll keep all personal references out of this one. But, you know, in general, we’re gonna try not to talk about politics, sex, mental illness, cute things our kids do, etc., here on three bits.

But I can’t stand the idea of feeling like we’re ‘hiding’ something, or always worrying about covering our tracks between the blogs, or that someone will discover our other blog and feel shocked and betrayed by the information that is on it. So I’d like to take this opportunity to give you the highlights of our other blog:

We think George Bush should be impeached. We’re members of Amnesty International and the ACLU. Our kids are brilliant and beautiful, and say really funny things all the time. They are most certainly geniuses. When I was pregnant with my older kid, Ari, I got suddenly suicidally depressed and had to go on sick leave. Those darn hormones, what kidders they are! With Aya I puked the whole time and was so anemic I had to get a blood transfusion. Again, those crazy female hormones. Love ‘em. I don’t plan to get pregnant again, ever. We’re concerned about global warming and peak oil, and we worship Al Gore, and while we wish he would run for President, we’re not actually sure he should, for his own sake, not because he’d be a bad president, because he wouldn’t be, he’d be an amazing one. We’re into local, organic, small-farm foods. We insist on continuing to call Whole Foods Bread and Circus, and think it was the stupidest marketing decision ever for them to change the name. I mean, where would you rather shop? Obviously at a circus. Um, what else? Oh, we swear. We hate Hummers. We are sometimes intemperate. In our other online life, I still write more than Max. Not such a blabbermouth as his wife, he’s not. Or, as Willow once said “I too know the love of a taciturn man.” That’s a Buffy reference.

Okay then, that’s pretty much it. Hope you’re satisfied now.