On the 26th May the rules on the use of cookies changed for UK businesses. You now have to explicitly ask every visitor to your website if they want to opt-in to ‘non-essential’ cookies. This includes tracking and analytics cookies. The penalty for not doing so is a fine of up to £500,000. No, I’m [...] Continue reading →

For an industry at the cutting edge of science, the Startup Industry for too long has relied on myth, folklore and tribal tales to explain why some startups become Google and most die. Now, Hermann Björn (of Startup School), Prof. Steve Blank (one of the Lean Startup Amigos) and the rest of the Startup Genome Project have changed [...] Continue reading →

Choosing the right product to develop is crucial. Great execution is also very important. But if you develop a product that no-one wants or no-one is prepared to pay for, then you are going to fail, no matter how well you execute it. You can often tweak a product or its marketing to make it [...] Continue reading →

Last week we introduced the Product Ladder so that you could build a backend for your online business.

You may be thinking, “How the heck am I going to create a bunch of information products?”

That’s what this episode is all about — taking the content you create, whether written, audio or video and turning it into more products.

We cover webinars, teleseminars, virtual events and so much more that will give you a bunch of content in a short period of time that you can “slice and dice” to create all new products.

You’ll become inspired by all the ways you can create great content quickly — even if you’re not an expert.

Listen to the show and then go create some products.

Enjoy your Foolish Adventure,

Tim and Izzy

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The Stack Exchange network is already up to 51 sites on diverse topics, from math to cooking to science fiction. Each site is a community on its own, and each community has its own needs and values. Pouring a big fat algorithm in equal measures… Continue reading →

It was just two short months ago that I announced on my blog that I’m co-hosting a conference called MicroConf. Well, we’ve gone through the pre-sales process, and gone through the regular sales process. Now it’s time for the final push. If you’re interested in going to MicroConf, you still have time to get there. [...] Continue reading →

Ever notice how interesting things tend to happen in threes? Here’s my three things for the day, starting with that 170-year-old ebook. No, when Ralph Waldo Emerson pulled together his notes for Self-Reliance from meetups where he’d social networked with other thought leaders his time, the only things digital were at the ends of people’s [...] Continue reading →

One of the best things that came out of using EngineYard Cloud was learning about Chef. Chef has changed my world when it comes to managing servers, and I now wouldn’t do any amount of system administration without the kind of automation and scriptability Chef provides. Here are a couple of tips on the reasons for and the benefits of using Chef.

Tip #1: Chef keeps you honest

Yesterday I was reminded just how useful Chef can be when I updated the wordpress layout on a client’s server just by running ./config/chef/runchef.rb from my project folder. Not only did the files I changed get pushed out (as you would expect), but I also saw a note in the output about a config file changing. Curious about the unintended change, I did a diff of the just-updated config file with the backup file created by Chef. The diff reminded me that I had made an emergency manual change on the server that I hadn’t yet added to my Chef config (bad me). Since Chef told me about the change to the file, and gave me the location of the backup it made just before changing the file, it was easy for me to find the differences and add them to my build templates (and commit them to my git repo).

Tip #2: Use Vagrant for Chef recipe development

Recently I started working on a new slice configuration since I need to move slices away from slicehost. Since Linux distributions and software packages are always being updated (like Debian 6 and Passenger 3.0.7), I like to start with my stock set of Chef scripts and update them for those kinds of changes. I’ll start with a clean installation of a Linux distro, and fold in my recipes one by one, making sure each is using the best method of installation and configuration. Vagrant is a great tool for this kind of development for a few reasons:

1. It’s free: You aren’t spinning up an instance at EC2 or Rackspace Cloud to get a clean starting point.
2. It’s quick: Again, you aren’t depending on EC2 or RS load times, and bandwidth isn’t a problem.
3. Local filesystem: If you want to start a Chef template from, say, a package-installed config file like /etc/ssh/sshd_config, all you have to do is
   cp /etc/ssh/sshd_config /vagrant/cookbooks/ssh/templates/default/sshd_config.erb
   since Vagrant mounts your current working dir to /vagrant on the virtual machine.

Even if you aren’t managing a farm full of servers, Chef is still fantastic to use. I use chef-solo to manage all the servers for my clients, and it makes it easy to have repeatable, predictable deployments for all of them. If you haven’t used it yet, do grab Vagrant and give it a shot.

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Over the past several months, I’ve been diligently working on my new product called AuditShark. If you are new or haven’t been following my blog lately, the basic concept goes something like this. There are dozens of industry regulations which dictate specific settings that should be configured on computer in specific ways. They include things [...] Continue reading →