Stupid Sucks!

This post was guest blogged by Simon Koldyk of ScribbleWiki

If your running any sort of website you most likely have some sort of stats (if you don’t have one check out Google Analytics, its free!).  On a blog you have a RSS feed; but, you don’t know who is looking at that or who has that in their feed reader.

Enter Feedburner, which was bought by Google last year.  You can go to Feedburner.com put in your feed, it spits out a new feed for you and then you just take a Wordpress plugin (or whatever your blog software is) and plug that in.  Done.

Feedburner will give you a couple of things, in the first 24 hours it will just give you some live stats it is keeping.

Then after the 24 hours it will start giving you a feed count which is the amount of users that checked your feed in the last 24 hours whether you posted anything or not (RSS Readers check several times a day; but, will only count as one person).

You can then log-in to FeedBurner.com and click on the publicize tab and put a Feed Counter on your website.

This is good for showing off your readers and is really good for selling to advertisers.

Also, Feedburner since its owned by Google is already plugged in with Google Adsense so you can just put your Adsense publisher ID in and have it show Google Ads in your feed.

Today was my first day at my new job. The walk to work was terrible! I had to get out of bed and walk less than 10 feet!

I am used to walking quite a few miles every week for work, the gym and whatever else I might need to travel to get accomplished. So today was quite a change of pace for me. It was a really strange feeling getting up and eating breakfast at work, then cranking away at the work for the day.

The first thing I realized is that I will be doing more things during the day than I usually did at an actual work office. Both good and bad.

• Frequent visits to the kitchen for oatmeal
• Frequent visits to the bathroom from drinking so much water and not feeling like I should hold it for another 15 minutes
• Leaving to run a quick errand
• Managing interruptions during the day so I can actually get work done
• Multitasking much more than usual

On first impression I was worried that I would have a hard time actually getting my work done. I have a pretty strong work ethic though and working on the computer is what I enjoy doing anyway. What I was surprised to find out was happening was more frequent visits to food central.

I was more surprised to find out how many more things I was working on than at an office. I thought that was very strange.

As expected though, there were many things I very much enjoyed about working from home

• I can listen to my music without headphones
• I don’t have to fix my hair in the morning or even shave
• I don’t have to put pants on before I head out for work
• I can eat at my desk without feeling uncomfortable and awkward
• I can work how I want to work without anyone telling me how it should be
• I don’t have to wear a shirt
• I don’t have to worry about the tech guys cracking down on me because I visited a potentially bad website either on accident or on purpose
• If I want to act like a retard I can do so without being judged

Now, for the bad things I wasn’t so fond of

• No human interaction during the whole day can lead to some form of psychosis
• When someone sees you acting like a retard because you had the window wide open it’s more embarrassing than your coworkers seeing you act like one
• You have a higher potential of turning into that creepy guy who never leaves his apartment
• You being a solo neighborhood watch and listen for kids so you can yell at them

Anyway, day 1 of my new job has thus far gone well. We’ll see how things are going by this friday.

About a week ago I ordered a small set of business cards from Overnightprints.com to replace the ones printed by PrintsMadeEasy.com. Well, they came in today (would have been friday if I was there).

Wow. I mean, WOW. It was a night & day difference between the two print jobs. I already mentioned how disappointed I was with the quality from PrintsMadeEasy.com but being able to compare the exact same card, side by side really shows the difference.

Overnightprints.com print job was a nice, thick & sturdy card stock, so it feels like it’s quality just holding it. Then the gloss was very smooth and glossy, quite well done. The edges were cut very smoothly, no rough edges, just clean and accurate.

Most importantly, the print quality was incredible in comparison to PrintsMadeEasy.com. I mean, the colors are vibrant & smooth. You can tell it was printed at well above 200dpi where as PrintsMadeEasy looked like it was printed out of an inkjet printer….wait I take that back.

I have seen better print jobs from standard desktop inkjet printers than from PrintsMadeEasy.

Lastly, the back has the same high quality gloss as the front, just as I requested! I am very happy with Overnightprints.com to say the least. Not to mention that they cost 1/3 what PrintsMadeEasy cost. If you’re planning on getting business cards (post cards, stationary, brochures, etc.), go with OverNightPrints.com

This is not a paid review for them, this is simply a very happy customer. Happy enough, in fact, that I may be ordering more print jobs than just my business cards from them.

About six months ago I designed my first business cards and was pretty happy with them. Sent the designs off to the printer and a few days later had my first set of real business cards. Printed on a sturdy 15pt stock, full color and glossy on both sides with a pretty accurate trim.

That was with OverNightPrints.com – I was happy with the service, the quality and the price. I paid about $20 with two discount codes. One for free shipping and one for $10 off the order. $20 for 250 nicely done business cards seemed good to me. read more…

It’s not all about the hard work ya know. As many people say, “Work smarter, not harder”. I always took that as don’t physically work harder when you can get it done better, faster and easier if you used your noggin more.

Luckily I managed to figure myself out pretty quick in life and know what I need to do to maximize most of my capabilities. Now I see all these college students pulling all nighters, sucking down more caffeine than should be legally allowed, spending hours upon hours studying and ultimately landing that less than acceptable grade.

So Wired magazine showed up today and as I began reading the feature story I realized that I had been doing the majority of the things the article mentioned, almost my whole life. No wonder why people think I’m “smart”.

So the feature story is “12 Hacks That Will Amp Up Your Brainpower“, which is definitely worth a read, especially for all you college students out there! Here are the things I’ve been doing but if you want the whole read, visit Wired.

1. Distract yourself. Say wha?! – Yeah, keep yourself entertained! Duh! Nobody likes being bored and reading that boring arse text book is going to make your brain as boring as a nun. So crank up some tunes or study for 15 minutes and bust out with some Xbox for a few minutes.

I don’t recommend tv as it doesn’t really engauge your brain. You’re trying to distract your brain with something engaging which is going to help you with the boring crap that you want in that brain too!

2. Slow on the Starbucks you caffeine addict! – Ok, I don’t even drink caffeine any more, nor do I soda pop (I save caffeine for the gym). If you need some extra go power though, don’t suck down that $10 Starbucks so fast, sip n’ go. Why?

Well, caffeine blocks your noggin’s adenosine receptors (the stuff that makes your brain tired), so if you keep a steady drip of caffeine to your brain you’ll keep things level and sharp. Lets take it to the next level shall we? Eat something with carbs (complex if possible) and that will help really fuel your thinker.

3. Learning is life long, believe it – As sick as I was of high school or college, I always knew I would be learning things my whole life. I just wanted to learn what I wanted to right then. If you think you only learn so much in life, you’re done for. If you give up easy on the problems in life that you run into, well, you are either lazy or you just don’t believe in yourself.

The world is your playground, go make somethin of it!

4. Stop, breath, relax and think – Tests suck (at least I think so), especially when you panic or get slammed with anxiety. Your brain freaks out and makes you as smart as a chimp….which isn’t going to help you pass Calc. 2. How to get pass that monkey business isn’t always easy but with some practice, it can be done.

Stop your brain from getting carried away with itself and force a mindset of confidence. You CAN do it and even if you do fail, so what. The brightest minds in history failed many times over in their lifetime. It’s part of life, relax and do your thing.

Control your breathing and control your brain. This one has taken me awhile to learn.

5. Make it memorable – If you have a reason to remember it, then you will. Make a joke of something boring or be clever with it and it’ll be easier to get in your thinker. Like when you had to memorize the 50 states in elementary. It was easier when you associated the shapes of the states with something.

In that case you used your visual senses to make it memorable. You can do the same with your other senses though as well as your humor. We can’t help but remember the funny stuff.

6. Move your lazy hind end! – It helps your brain A LOT to go for a jog or a walk. Get your body moving and your brain is going to follow suit. Don’t over-do it though. Getting your heart racing or your muscles pumped won’t really help you. You’ve got to keep things under control and thats when your brain will be at it’s best.

I usually buy domain names after a workout because I am most creative and clever on the walk home from my workout.

————————

Seriously give some of these tips a shot but since you probably won’t remember all of them grab a sheet of paper and jot some notes down or email the notes to yourself. Give ‘em a shot! They have helped me for a long time already.

This post was guest blogged by Simon Koldyk

Jarel just recently started on Twitter.com; but, I think we might of gotten him hooked. If you haven’t already go and sign-up on Twitter.com with your name even if you don’t think you want to Twitter just yet, your name might get taken later.

There are a couple of keys to Twitter

• Its always a lot more fun to be following a bunch of people
• Don’t worry about how many people are following you
• Post interesting stuff, I don’t care that you just went to the bathroom
• Twitter is for conversations remember to use the @ command.

The conversations that go on twitter are amazing, everything people are thinking about is brought up and interesting things turn into huge Twitter conversations that can span on to hundreds of people. In twitter you could type “@personsusername say something here” and Twitter will treat that as your talking to them.

There are a few people that I think you should be following.

• photomatt – Matt Mullenweg from Wordpress
• johnchowdotcom – John Chow from TheTechZone
• problogger – Darren Rowse from ProBlogger
  
• TechCrunch – Micheal Arrighton from TechCrunch
• Scobleizer – Robert Scoble from FastCompany
• JasonsCalacanis – Jason Calacanis from Mahalo
• factoryjoe – Chris Messina from Citizen Agency

Once you have a few people you like following you want to use Twubble, it’s this neat little website that finds you new friends that you will probably also want to follow. Twubble gets this information from who you are already following and who they follow.

So now you’ve a few people you’re following and hopefully a few people are now following you back, you can’t always be checking Twitter.com or you’ll waste your whole day away. Thankfully some really smart people have created desktop apps – the two big ones are Twitterific (Mac) and Twhirl (Windows & Mac). Tweets will not show up on your desktop as they appear, although I do warn you that you may need to turn this off time to time to actually get some work done. Twitter is the new place for fast information and connections.

You should also follow Jarel and myself on Twitter