Learning from other people’s mistakes is a heck of a lot better than learning from your own.

Continuing the *Camp franchise, a group of entrepreneurs with failures under their belt held an unconference in Philadelphia to focus on their failures. It was last weekend. Sad I missed it!

Check out FailCamp. Hope they post their slides and such soon!

BarcampDC2 is coming up in September/October – are you ready?

We’re just wrapping up a planning meeting for BarcampDC2, here at Murky Coffee. We are looking for sponsors and such, and soon opening it up to people to register. If you have an idea or are interested in sponsoring, check out the wiki here!

BarcampDC was a pretty big turning point for me. Having lived in the DC area for so many years, I had never even thought about reaching out to the tech community in the area – I wasn’t even aware it existed. It was there I met Ann, Justin, Keith, John, (the four of whom are sitting here planning the event with me) and many others, whom I consider mentors, colleagues, business partners, and friends. There is no doubt that where I am today is a direct effect of showing up that morning and talking to people.

If you are in the area, come on out!

I’ve started working with my mother to post a bunch of her artwork (20+ years of it) on Flickr!

At a wedding – the cake was designed to match the artwork!

Straight up, Paul Graham has a page up on YCombinator’s site about ideas they would like to fund.

In light of all the recent Facebook and Social Media frenzy, which, to me, has very little impact outside of it’s self-engineered ecosystem, I’ve been thinking about ideas that that solve issues that really matter.

Look no further than this list.

Really gets the ideas flowing.

Going down this list, I found 5 or 6 “pains” that really intrigued me. The juices are really flowing. What can you think up?

The usual frenzy and buzz surrounding Facebook will peak today as Facebook has their second developers conference. Mike Arrington thinks he know whats going to be launched.

• Facebook payments platform
• Facebook Connect
• Three tier application system

We’ll have to see what happens, but….

• The Facebook payments platform will only work is if it is ridiculously easy to pay for something. However, with increased ease of use comes decreased security. My girlfriend has access to my Facebook account. My friends leave themselves signed into my computer occassionally. I leave work signed in to Facebook. No-one regards their Facebook account as particularly sensitive, maybe at most somewhere in between e-mail and your online bank account. How can this be secure, yet usable?
• It will be nearly impossible to have premium applications that cost money. With the barrier to entry for a Facebook application, free knockoffs relying just on advertising will replace it.
• There will be a run on Facebook enabling e-commerce stores, assuming Facebook allows this.
• The tiered application system will be interesting. I have thought for a while that their needs to be a premium tier, where application developers can pay a certain fee to have better listing/support/features. With the top tier limited to a few applications by the top developers, most applications will be fighting not to hit the bottom tier.
• Facebook Connect… that will be cool.

In order to better establish a web presence for myself, I am rebuilding my own website. I have big ideas for this, displaying my writings, past and present, my interests, my friends, my work, and also as an living technical showcase for my abilities.

One feature I wanted to have is a display of whatever I am up to in the online world. I wanted, to start out with, aggregate my Flickr, Tumblr, blog, Twitter, and Facebook accounts. In the future, I may add more.

I played with a few different tools for this to run off of, including FriendFeed. In the end, I decided on building my own with Yahoo! Pipes, both as an exercise, and in order to closely control how it works. Yahoo Pipes can be powerful, but at the same time cumbersome to work with.

It took a lot of tinkering around, but I finally got it to work

Then I made a minor variation to it, to show the one most recent item out of each. This way I can show them all together, if I choose to.

I plan on modifying these pipes so you can customize it for yourself at some point in the near future.

Out of desire to learn something new, and in part due to specific needs on upcoming client engagements, I sat down and plowed my way through Expression Engine. After about five or six hours of slugging through Michael Boyink’s amazing tutorial, I’m feelin’ a bit like Neo (youtube video below)

Having started out hacking out sites in phpNuke way back in the day, then b2 (the predecessor to Wordpress, that’s how old school I am), and moving to mainly Wordpress and a little bit of Drupal, not to mention numerous homebrewed solutions for client sites, I had a laundry list of things I was looking for.

Here’s what is awesome.

• Custom Field Groups – When you are building a site, most pages have more than one block of text. It’ll have some content boxes on the side, intro text, images, etc. While, say, Wordpress, is only really is suitable for having a title and a main body of text, in EE you can build sets of content, and assign them to specific template pages. This makes it ridiculously easy to build out and administer complex pages.
• Separation of content and display. ExpressionEngine handles organization and entry of the content. The template, when called, pulls any content it requires from the database. Most content management systems work vice versa, where templates are called to display specific pieces of content.
• PHP-less templates. I had gotten used to telling my web designers to avoid touching anything between <? and ?> . EE uses template tags that resemble Smarty. And, in my opinion, is easier for a non-developer to understand.
• Minimal need for plug-ins. Because it has so much built in, there isn’t that much need for them.
• There are a ton of other suprises – you’ll really only learn if you work your way through the tutorial.

But:

• It’s not free. You can download a free version to learn off of, but if you want it for commercial use, it’s $250 bucks. It seems pricey, but for what you are getting in the short and long run, it’s a drop in the bucket.
• Building a site in EE relies heavily on wiring things up in the control panel (the tutorial spends 75% of the time in there), which can be confusing and often mind-numbing.
• Because of that, it’s hard to rely directly develop the design and the site together. The design should be set and all CSS/HTML completed before you even think about firing this up.
• While, yes, it can run blogs, it was built as a general-purpose CMS. If your site is primarily a blog, I would still recommend using Wordpress or MovableType.

Mindy over at Viget has a great write-up of switching from Wordpress to ExpressionEngine. She points out some of the same issues, and gave some great pieces of advices for those used to Wordpress.

Looking to start out in ExpressionEngine? Download the core edition, and then pop over to Boyink’s tutorial. It’s a whopping 17 chapters, with a lot of repetition, but it is worth it to really lock down the cycle of building templates, weblogs, field groups, etc.

Alex and I went to Disney World mid-June, as a graduation present. While I had been to Disneyland every year as a kid, I had never been to Disney World in my life, let alone Florida!

The logistics alone were amazing, and worth the prices. I checked my bags in at Dulles, and we never saw them until they showed up in our room. Same going back; someone just came and picked them up, and again, didn’t see them until they showed up in the baggage carousel in Dulles. We gave them our flight info, they arranged shuttles to and from the park. We didn’t even have to get boarding passes, they showed up on our doorstep one morning, along with a note of where to meet the bus. Little things that, done in scale, cost little money to the park, but make a huge impact on guests. Props to you, Walt.

Lego store. Heaven. I’ve been dating Alex for 2 1/2 years, and only then found out that she had never once played with Lego. Nearly killed our relationship right there.

I think the most remarkable thing about Disney is not the branding, the characters, or even the rides. It’s the message that they focus on, that you can accomplish anything you dream about. It’s in every show, every ride, every song, every parade. You feel good when you are there, and never want to leave. I found myself looking online for a Disney Parks soundtrack, just to have in my office.

We were among the first 100 people to ride the Pirates of the Carribean ride the first day it re-opened (it was remodeled to look more like the movie, which was based on the original ride…). They definitely dumbed it down and simplified it, it used to be really fun, with lots going on, or at least the Disneyland one was.

Here is what Space Mountain looks like, with the lights on! It broke down for a little bit. Once the lights are on, it looks pretty dumb, like a roller coaster you might find in a parking lot carnival. But with the lights back off, it was still pretty thrilling!

The parades and shows were AWESOME. I know I shouldn’t like them as someone who was 10 years old fourteen years ago, but whatever. Admit it, you loved them too.

<3

A little over two years ago, in the summer between graduating and starting a “real job” I spent a good amount of time at the gym, brushing up on my various web skills, and building cool apps. I didn’t necessarily want to get rich off them, they were more exercises in taking my ideas and actually doing something with them, rather than letting them linger in the netherworld of unrealized dreams.

One of the ideas I had come up with was a tool called YesterdayI. YesterdayI was based on a simple purpose: just write a short passage about what you did the day before. Meant as a lifestreaming tool, you would end up forming a series of small blog posts, a daily journal of sorts. Microblogging.

I built it, but, as is so common in the world of small web applications, I did a half-assed job at launching it (I’m a rockstar designer/developer, not a marketing guru), no-one used it, and by then I was already on to the next cool idea. So here it stands, frozen in time, lingering on some web-host I have set to auto-renew.

Then Twitter came, followed in suit by a dozen copycats, and made microblogging a household term. Now of course, Twitter serves an entirely different purpose, and has a whole host of features I never had thought of. But it’s always interesting to see how I was on a similar track.

I’m not complaining that someone stole my idea. I may have missed the boat on this one, but at the same time, I am well aware that ideas alone don’t matter. It’s about execution, marketing, positioning, and being in the right place at the right time.

It would be interesting to rebuild this, and see where it could go from there…

Also interesting to see how much my skills have changed since then. From the elementary javascript to table-heavy design (not to mention a generally ugly design), it’s always great to take a look back at past work and critique it, just like an author may look back at an old text or an artist look at one of their earlier works.

My first job out of college was working for a major consulting company. As is common in large companies, corporate principles and values are conveyed through long-thought out materials… standardized presentations, decks, and emails.

One of the values that was always conveyed to me was creating and maintaining a standard work-life balance. At that point in time, I couldn’t understand what that meant. Don’t you just come in the morning, do your work, and after eight hours, go home? As I was working in the government-consulting sector, with strict laws limiting the amount of hours I could legally work in a week, that wasn’t an issue. I was forced to maintain a work-life balance. My work-life balance heavily favored life – with a clear barrier delineating work time and personal time, and a set quota on the former.

As I moved on to my new role as a core member of a startup creative agency, the world flipped for me. I find myself at the extreme opposite of the spectrum, where work becomes such a dominating factor that it has all but eliminated the aspects of life one takes for granted. Eighteen or twenty hour work days. Six or seven day work weeks. Fighting for that little bit of time to go out and even grab groceries. It’s all self-inflicted, of course. I chose this path.

When you are working for yourself, or in any kind of environment with no set roles and an endless flow of both possibilities and deadlines, the work never stops. You can’t see a project and assume one of your other fifteen thousand co-workers will take care of it when you are the only one out of the three of you who can handle it. There are no timesheets, no rules.

Enhancing productivity becomes even more important.

Isolating problems.

And sometimes, leaving things on the table and getting a good night’s sleep!