How to Get an Awesome Sales Page

I'm looking for a good landing / sales / conversion page right? And what do I find in the Googlez ? Not shit! 

So I just had an awesome idea. There are plenty of amazing wordpress templates out there that are free. Well you can "View Live Demos" … so scrape the ones you like, repurpose to your sales page needs and BAM !!! Awesome, free sales landing page. Of course this assumes you know how to code, but for a nerd out there this is perfect!

PS: I am still sweating my balls off from the workout in the previous post and it's been like 20 minutes.

If only …

If only Microsoft worried more about making useable software than being greedy little bastards … maybe then they wouldn't have posted their first loss recently. 

I have an MSDN subscription and this is what my copy of Windows 7 started to display for no reason.

Has OSX ever done this? NO!!!

I have also had my copy of Office die after an auto-update spewing out a similar error message. That thing lost the key or activation and wouldn't open until I went and fished that back off of the site. Now there is some kind of "super important" update and I'm afraid to apply it because I don't want to be offlined.

Shame Shame Shame !!! Microsoft… This will be your undoing, you are going the way of IBM.

They’re not even trying anymore….

These phishing scammers aren't even trying anymore…. I mean come on ! …

My Disorganized Organization System: Part 1 – Reading E-Mail

Be honest  … how much of the crap that crosses your Inbox in Outlook every single day is worth even one glance? How much? I can tell you … about 10 percent of it is worth even having contact with. Now you may not know this about me but I was at one point a Tim Ferris skeptic, however after trying his 4 Hour Body diet ( and it worked ! ), I went back and read The 4 Hour Work Week. This lead me to the simple conclusion that I need to operate different. So here goes…

I don't want to spend my whole day reading meaningless E-Mails, you know… the ones that everybody and their brother got copied on because someone abuses the Carbon Copy ( CC ) feature. Believe it or not, those people don't know that the boss and the rest of the team does not care about the size, color, shape, and smell of … well everything they do, and neither do you. 

Set Up An Important Inbox 

I had to come up with a solution to all of this and the solution is… The Important Inbox! Simply go into Outlook and create a Folder titled:

@____IMPORTANT_INBOX_____

Why the funky name? Well after reading David Allen's GTD I started putting a symbol in front of folders I want to pop above all others. The @ sign in front of the folder name will move it to the top. 

Here's my Important Inbox: 

(notice the 155 emails in one day, and only 1 that made it to Important, that's the start to a 4 Hour Workweek)

Creating Important Inbox Rules

Now that you have your Important Inbox, you need to set up rules. This is easy. As you monitor your Inbox over the next two weeks be a skeptic, and allow mail from only people that you specifically work with or with whom you need to have direct contact. 

• Right Click the E-Mail 
• Mouse Over Rules
• Click Always Move Messages From: [ name ]

Here is a screenshot of how:

Once you do this you're going to get a popup asking you where you want to move this persons E-Mails, so pick your Important Inbox. Like this:

Create Desktop Alerts For Your Important Inbox

.:: This is critical! ::.  You need to set up Desktop Alerts for your Important Mail. That means that when a sender that was White Listed sends you and E-Mail you will get a meeting style notification pop-up.

You can ignore it, but more importantly you are now "That guy or gal that's dependable and always responds right away" … At least you are that to the people you care about and work with. 

In Outlook 2010:

• Click Rules on the Home ribbon. 
• Click Manage Rules and Alerts.
• Find all the rules for your Imporant Peeps and Highlight them.
• Click Change Rule and then make sure that Display in the New Item Alert window option is checked.

That's it… Here's a screenshot:

Now when you get a new Important E-Mail you will see something like this come up:

Note: Make sure you Close the window whenever it pops up, othewise it will just aggregate E-Mail in the list and not pop up. So open the item, and then immediately close the popup.

Summary

So in the course of the next two weeks, when you get E-Mail from your direct co-workers that aren't spammy or from people you need to respond to because it DIRECTLY involves your job duties white-list that E-Mail by following this process.

A special note to all those content consumers out there. This technique is used to make you more productive by reducing noise. You should NEVER move mail into your Important Inbox from news sites, funny sites, Facebook, Twitter, that guy that sends fun chain letters, etc. DO NOT POLLUTE YOUR IMPORTANT INBOX WITH CRAP!

That's it! Get ready for junk free mail!

Cheers!

Part 2: The Rule of Three's ( Next part will follow in the coming days …  )
Part 3: How To Stop Losing Stuff 
Part 4: How To Stop Forgetting To Do Stuff
Part 5: How to Prioritize Tasks
Part 6: How to Archive Stuff
Part 7: How to Clean Up Your Desktop

I’m not supporting Internet Explorer anymore…

I have been working pretty hard on a new project which brings back some very old Internet functionality, but I am hoping to do it right. I plan to do this by not screwing people and by looking at the problem for what it truly is. Provide a great UI for something that everyone would love to have and use but has largely been ignored, and stay the f**k out of the way of the users. You know … help them!

However that is not what this blog post is about. This post is about why I will no longer support Internet Explorer older than IE9 or even consider what it does as it interprets CSS/HTML. So here goes …

IE has been losing market share at an alarming rate. If I worked for Microsoft I would seriously wonder about what I could do with that project since the numbers are very clearly showing that it is failing. Here are the latest numbers from W3 Schools a site I use quite a bit for how-to and other things

The numbers very clearly demonstrate that I will lose 16.7% of my potential clients. That is a total number of IE users. So I would hope a good deal of them are on IE9. However, let's just say that we split that percentage between 7/8/9, I would miss out on about 11%. I think that this is an acceptable loss, not to mention that I will attempt to steer them toward Chrome. So at the end of the day I may lose about 8% of clients due to this choice. Again this is acceptable. 

We also have to consider the IE drop rate. In one month IE lost 1.4% market share. THAT IS HUGE !! Chrome gained 2.4 … 

No I don't hate Microsoft…

All that being said someone reading this may wonder if I really despise Microsoft, love Apple and think the world should just hold hands and be friends. Well I don't fall into any of those stereotypes. I am writing this application using Visual Studio 2012, ASP.NET MVC 4 … I could write an entire post as to why Microsoft is beating the pants off of any other Dev tools provider out there, but that's for later.

So if I'm not an Apple fanboi or some kind of hippie, why am I hating on IE? The answer is simple…. IT'S UNSTABLE!

You're thinking I'm talking about it crashing, loading slow, having security flaws,etc. Well I am not. I am referring to it's poor backward compatibility, the obvious shortcomings when it comes to following industry standards and the list goes on. However the kicker for me is the gargantuan amount of effort I would have to put in to support older versions of this browser. It's not worth the trouble. 

Need it summed up?

IE versions older than 9 are not developer friendly. Period. 

I wish I could talk to Steve Balmer 1 on 1 … 

You're probably thinking I would give him an earful, and "let him have it" … well that's not the case. Microsoft is a great company, I would hate to seem them go the way of IBM ( I do HATE!!!! IBM with a deep dark burning passion of sheer red hot hate ! ) … ahem … 

I see Microsoft as the 75% company, they never finish anything. Many products that could have had amazing impact and continued to innovate were allowed to slowly die. Here's a small list:

• Zune
• Silverlight
• LINQ
• BizTalk Server

Those are in no particular order and off the top of my head. Let's examine one whose mishandling REALLY disappointed me… Silverlight.

I loved this idea! A small installable framework that could deliver rich apps to my users!?! That would be amazing! However it suffered from what I see as lack of interest. The whole company did not get behind the movement and provide the AMAZING dev platform that Visual Studio became. WHY!!? 

I know Silverlight 5 is coming out, but I have heard a great many people say that Silverlight is dead. That is really sad.

So what would I say to Steve Balmer? Believe in your company, your people and your products. Silverlight could have been great, heck it still could ( please don't drag up HTML5/JS assuming I'm not aware is ignorant ). Silverlight could be more than a video player. 

The point ?

Microsoft needs to believe in their products, stabilize them and follow industry standard or I believe more developers will follow in my footsteps.

Agree/Disaggree ?  Am I wrong ? Not seeing something ? … Leave a comment

Simple … Very Simple DIV vertical alignment

OH MY DEAR !! 

I have spent countless hours in the past trying to figure out how to vertically align the contents of a DIV element using CSS… I am a CSS noob of sorts. I know the syntax but I don't know all the hacks and tricks. 

So here's how:

HTML:

CSS:

Why Does This Work?

Simple explanation is that vertical-align:middle only works for <td> elements. There's a whole inline element discussion I could get into but you don't give a shit. 

Setting the inner div(s) to have a display:table-cell will make it so that vertical-align works since it will be treated as a table cell. 

The reason you need an inner div is because you don't want the container div behaving like a table cell. That screws all sorts of crap up. 

Cheers !

Disorganized Organization – Stay Disorganized but be Productive

As I write this I'm a bit jaded because I realize that posts need to rank, and even though I found a cool little system to keep my disorganized self roughly in check… I know that many people won't read this due to how Google actually does it's ranking/etc… but enough whining!

What am I writing about? I'm a very disorganized person. I would probably forget my head if it wasn't attached. I have read the Getting Things Done and a whole pile of other books that had promised to help me become more organized. Want to guess how many worked for me? None!

Part of me… most of me… does not want to get good at doing a ton of this non-fun work stuff efficiently. There's no point, but you do have to be productive at work, hopefully with minimal effort. You have to put so little work into it that it is to the point where you don't even notice that your disorganized organization is working. So what the hell am I gabbin on about?

Have you ever gotten all motivated and a bug up your hiney to become more organized? Be a better [insert job title] ? I'm sure you have otherwise you wouldn't have made it to the fourth paragraph… by the way, welcome to the fourth paragraph…. Anyway I know that have gotten the organization bug in the past. Spent money, spent time and effort to recategorize clean, etc. Then after a few days or weeks it all goes back to hell. Why is this happening????? 

This phenomenon is easily explained if you know yourself. I know that I can't for the life of me keep things into neat little categories and tasks and all that crap. So I have to circumvent that whole bit. One of the things I do is that  I resort to a rule of 3s. Maximum 3 categories, 3 folders, 3 things to do, etc. Here's a screenshot of my One-Note folders for a project: 

Notice the number of folders? That's right! 3

I'm feeling fairly motivated to share my whole system because I feel it could help a good deal of folks deal with life in the current information overload. So I think I'm going to put together a series of podcasts on how to stay disorganized but be productive… HA!

Sleep Oh Dear Sleep

I've never been one to get good sleep consistently. I've always wondered what it feels like to have sound sleep every night. How I would function at work? How great it would be to be awake and rested? The list goes on. 

During my battle with bad sleep I've found a few secrets to getting good sleep. So here's some of the things I ran into on my quest to a good nights rest:

1) Control temperature as much as you can. If you are overheated or cold you won't sleep well. You will have that very common feeling where you go to sleep early and wake up 8 hours later still tired. Why? Because you couldn't enter the deep stages of sleep due to your surroundings. Did you know that some Universities keep classrooms chilled to keep the students alert and engaged? So … not too hot, not too cold. I find a good temperature for me is 68* F – 70* F.

2) Watch what you eat and when you eat it… Lunch should be your largest meal for many, many reasons, but one of the biggest ones is that if you eat too late your body will spend all night digesting food instead of resting and repairing. So don't eat anything big after 5:00PM. If you do be prepared for hilarities. You can have reasonable meals and portions up to 7pm, but nothing like the traditional evening meal where people stuff themselves. 

3) Make sure that you don't have an issue breathing while you sleep. I had a deviated septum… like SERIOUSLY WONKY! One side of my nose was 60% blocked and the other was 80% blocked… Turns out much of the population suffers from this ailment for one reason or another. It usually develops in your teens and based on how bad it gets it can affect your sleep and other quality of life. So … go to an Ear Nose and Throat specialist if you think this is an issue. 

4) Go to bed and wake up at the same time every night. Your body goes through cycles, that's why when you fly to a different time zone in a far away country … say somewhere in Europe … you will be awake at night and want to sleep during the day. This type of impact to your sleep is not just for dramatic changes like changing time zones completely… even an hour or two can throw your whole cycle out of the window. 

5) Remove yourself from technology an hour before bed. Turn off the cell phone, turn off the computer, turn off your TV set and spend time with your family, read a book, play a board game, etc. Studies have shown that LCD displays can interfere with Melatonin production. So unplug yourself!

6) Try a white noise machine or a fan. I always thought I had to have it dead quiet to sleep… what I really sought was the same pattern of sound all the time. Your brain will tune out the fan and in a day or two you'll notice you're sleeping better since your brain doesn't have to listen for, and process all the little things that go bump in the night. I use a giant box fan set on level 2 of 3. 

7) I don't usually do this but you could try a sleep supplement. I use Valerian root. I take 2 about 30 minutes before I want to go to bed and execute step #5 . 

8) Avoid alcohol before bedtime. It may seem like a good idea but alcohol is a depressant and stimulant all at the same time. If you actually read what alcohol does to your body you'll avoid it for life… or maybe not… I still drink. HA!

9) No caffeine after 3pm. No tea, pop, coffee, energy drinks, vitamin water that makes you more alert, etc. This should include B Vitamin supplements as well. 

The list of things to try is virtually endless. The things that really worked for me are the things I have listed here. Good luck with your quest for sleep. :0)  

Yeah …

There’s Broken images now … deal with it … lmao

Visual Studio Designer Errors

Visual Studio is a great IDE and it sure has made me a lot of money, but sometimes I want to scream when I’m using it. One of the biggest complaints I have had is that to draw out the designer there are several methods that fire which shouldn’t the problem is that you can end up with errors like this and the designer breakes:

The variable ‘[ControlName]‘ is either undeclared or was never assigned.

The error ends up looking like this:

Mind you this is not the actual problem. The problem in this instance was some janky code on my part, which only runs right when the app is running… or maybe it’s Microsofts janky code. I’ve also seen this error when I had issues building in 32 vs 64 bit with certain DLLs throwing. So you can see this error for many reasons.

Here is how to debug it.

1) Spin up another version of Visual Studio:

2) I opened the same project in this other designer with some random codefile open.

3) Change when Visual Studio breaks on Errors and Exceptions. Hit Ctrl + Alt + E and you should see this screen and here is what I had checked:

4) Attach the debugger from your second instance of Visual Studio to the first instance of Visual Studio. The process name is DEVENV.EXE

Then pick the IDE Process:

5) You may get some warnings, I did but this still worked.

6) Go back to the original instance of Visual Studio and open up the designer file once again. If you did this right the error will be trapped in the second instance and displayed. That way you see the actual problem. Here is what I saw:

BAM!

So in this particular case I was Ok when the app ran because my MDI Form existed and I could add events to the instance, but at design time it was null… so it threw an error. All I had to do was check for null and my designer works again. This is a two part problem. 1) Msfts shoddy implementation and 2) My janky code.

Like I said you may not have the same problem I did, but this is how you figure out why the heck the designer is breaking. Another reason that I’ve had this happen was that the csproj file was busted and I had to fix that. I used the same method there too :0)

Enjoy !