[Literary Press Group of Canada] Responsive Retrofitting

By Christopher Schmitt
Slide from Responsively Retrofitting talk

On March 10th, I had the pleasure of speaking about responsive web design to members of the Literary Press Group of Canada, a professional membership of independent publishers.

Covering tips and tricks for WordPress, web performance, navigation, HTML tables, and more, the main framework was about retrofit an existing, fixed-width web site. 

For some organizations and companies, starting over does not make financially sense. Whereas responsively retrofitting is both a time and cost effective solution to get sites looking better on mobile devices until a time when starting fresh is possible.

Slides are also available on Slideshare.

Girl Develop It: Intro to Photoshop Web Design

By Christopher
Photo by @sophshepherd

In her Intro to Photoshop for the Web course at Girl Develop It Austin in November 2014, Sophie Shepherd shared her thoughts on creating digital mockups geared for multi-device delivery. Here are my notes from the course:

Basic Thoughts on Photoshop Web Design

  • There are a lot of ways to do the same thing in Photoshop
  • Developing your personal way of finding out how to do it is okay.
  • Become familiar with Photoshop through projects
  • Learn what the software can do and then slowly apply them to your workflow

Setting up Grids

  • Modern Photoshop version 
    • Select View > new Guide Layout… to bring up New Guide Layout dialog box.
    • In dialog box, enter your settings for your grid
  • Older versions of Photoshop 

Clipping or Shape Masking

  • Bring up Ellipse tool (U) in Photoshop
  • Hold down shift while dragging with mouse to create a perfect circle shape
  • Place photograph in a separate layer above circle shape.
  • Select Layer > Create Clipping Mask or press Command + Option + G to place image into the shape of the circle.
  • Image should be framed by circle shape.
  • To mask multiple images can be masked into one shape, select multiple layers above the target layer with the shape.

Typography

  • Create a typography box 
    • Press T to bring up the Type tool
    • Click and drag to create a type box
    • Start entering text
    • The dimensions of the box can be adjusted for improved editing.
  • Setup a baseline for typography for vertical rhythm 
    • Turn grid on by selecting View > Show > Grid
    • Select Preferences > Guides, Grid, & Slices to bring up Preferences dialog box
    • In Grid fieldset, set color to light grey
    • Select Dashed Lines for Style
    • Set Gridline Every 16 pixels

Photoshop File Organization

  • Duplicate existing Photoshop 
    • Select a Photoshop layer
    • Press ⌘ + J
    • Name layers with meaningful labels
  • Group layers in layer folders 
    • Select multple layers
    • Then press ⌘ + G
    • Name folders with meaningful labels
  • Read Photoshop Etiquette

Resources

[Refresh Austin] Website Performance and RWD Bloat

By Christopher
Dave Rupert talks about RWD Bloat
Photo by @flipstewart

In his RWD Bloat talk at Refresh Austin in November 2014, Dave Rupert shares his thoughts on website performance in responsive web design and his approach for reducing the problem. Here are my notes from his talk:

  • Attack of the Web Site 
    • Web page file sizes are going to go beyond 200MB 
      • 16% of page is made up of images
      • We are putting too many images onto our page
    • This isn’t a RWD problem, but a “web building” problem 
      • “Blame the implementation, not the technique.” — Tim Kadlec
    • Example: DaveRupert.com, personal site 
      • I’m experienced with RWD 
        • Care about performance
        • I have third party ads
        • I have third party comments
        • I have multiple web fonts
        • Including an icon font
        • and I use jQuery
      • Total weight: 174kb 
        • JavaScript and fonts make up most of the page weight
        • HTML makes the smallest
      • CSS:
        • 24kb file size
        • Media queries: 2.4kb
        • Vendor prefixes: 1.4kb
      • JS:
        • 41.2kb file size
        • jQuery: 33.1kb
      • Images
        • Total: 31k
      • Fonts
        • Total: 42.6kb
        • Open sans: 31kb
        • Symnbolset: 26kb
      • Total cost of web site: 4.4kb
        • The problem of bloat is not RWD
    • Speed Index is a statistic to quantify how fast page “feels” on: 
      • PageSpeed (Mobile)
      • PageSpeed (Desktop)
      • Start Render (3G)
      • DOMContentLoaded
      • Speed Index (3G)
    • How fast is fast enough? 
      • “Your site should be .5 to 1 second faster than your competitor” — Tim Kadlec
      • It’s fast enough to be a “perceived” change
      • “Speed Index under 1,000 — page loads about 1 second on a phone” — Paul Irish
    • Problems in DaveRupert.com
      • No text until 2.5 seconds
      • Webfonts blocking type rendering
      • Sub-optimal image spriting (172 icon font characters?)
      • Time to first-byte is 500ms in 3G connection speed, has no CSS in it.
    • Baseline
      • Home page: 1446 Speed Index
      • Article page:1749 Speed Index
      • At this point, your job becomes a video game with a goal to get Speed Index values under 1000
    • The steps Dave took: 
      • Removing Reset.css for Normalize.css resulted in: 
        • Home page: 1376 Speed Index
        • Article page: 1412 Speed Index
      • Unblock fonts with loadCSS()
        • Home page: 1327 Speed Index
        • Article page: 1284 Speed Index
      • Could not swap out jQuery for vanilla JavaScript: 
        • Guys, I did not get into this.
        • I rely on a lot of jQuery.
      • SVG Sprites
        • Remove icon fonts for SVG sprites
        • Home page: 1264 Speed Index
        • Article page: 1222 Speed Index
      • CSS Clean up 
        • Home page: 908 Speed Index
        • Article page: 1126 Speed Index
      • The need for perceived speed 
        • Critical CSS
          • Calcuate the style rules that appear “above the fold”
          • Print them in an inline style block in the head
          • Lazyload your stylesheet at the bottom of the page
        • Paint in the first packet 
          • The first packet is 14kb
          • How much of a web page can you put into that 14kb?
          • Just do your best
          • Took two Sass partials that styled the header and top portions of the page and put them in a separate CSS file and put them into the style element in the HTML head element.
        • The results from that effort: 
          • Home page: 728 Speed Index
          • Article page: 1065 Speed Index
      • Resources and thoughts in conclusion: 
        • PNGQuant is a color profile stripper
        • Designers, you’re job is not done till it ships.
        • Go the distance by stripping out frames of a GIF animation to reduce file size
        • Put your site through a WebPageTest
        • Performance is everyone’s job, not just developers.

Refresh Austin: Getting Paid What You’re Worth in Business Development

By Christopher
CSS Dev Conf 2014 Parade
@sugarfreejones

In a Getting Paid What You’re Worth panel at Refresh Austin in November 2014, Adam McCombs, Tim Hamilton, and Anthony Armendariz shared how to discuss negotiating, choosing the right rate, and crafting retainer agreements. Here are my notes from their panel:

  • How would you define “business development”? 
    • Business development is growing existing business.
    • Internal business development that your products you can create to sell, giveaway
    • External business development is work from new clients.
    • Business developments is about meaning mindful of client relationships
    • Business development is attracting new clients. 
      • Most of business development comes from the work and personalities of your designers and developers
  • What’s your current strategy? 
    • Take a look at your known network, i.e. the number of people have you emailed in the last 5 years, and turn those connections into seedlings and see if they grow into opportunities.
    • If we’re going to be successful on Google, you have to be focused, niched. 
      • We focused on “Drupal” because our target customer
        knows that term.
      • It’s limiting if you want to work on other projects,
        technologies beyond a “Drupal”, for example.
    • Referrals are the biggest ways to find new work. 
      • Finding, meeting other agency owners to find new or
        overflow work.
    • We depend on others to refer new clients to us. 
      • If their clients don’t fit them–too big, too small–they
        refer.
      • We spend a lot of money on coffee, beers–we don’t spend
        money on marketing.
    • Work well with the clients and employees that you have
      because they help bring in new business.
      • Follow through on referrals you are given.
  • Should you separate client manager, client executive from the
    person in charge of getting new business?
    • What we do is trial by error 
      • It’s hard for me to give up that role to someone else
        since I’ve done it for so long.
    • Yes, and you should find a partner outside of my industry that’s not rooted
      in the tech industry.
      • Establishing a connection outside of the tech is hard.
    • Project managers, product developers are more like
      farmers, introverts.
      • Sales lead developers are more like hunters.
  • How do you weed out inquiries? 
    • Grammar and punctuation is important in client communication. 
      • Are they not emailing from a gmail.com account?
      • Mostly it’s finding people, clients that you can relate with and be honest with
      • They don’t have to laugh at your jokes, but know it’s a long term relationship. They have to find you funny at some level.
    • You have a limited time to generate new revenue, so make that time most effective 
      • I’ve passed on work that’s been great for another agency.
      • And I’ve worked hard to get work that didn’t pan out.
    • We use core values: 
      • We do a project together with a client 
        • If client is not willing to go into tradeoff discussions when discussing scope creep, it’s probably best to end relationship.
        • Core purpose:
          1. Find work that pushes us beyond our current skillset.
          2. Potential to provide the client wonderment
        • If we don’t get to one of those two things from a potential project, then we won’t take the client.
      • When people work with us charge a fixed monthly fee and work agile 
        • We work on a retainer
        • We work on projects that do good for human beings
  • How do you get paid what your worth? 
    • If a client’s decision to work with us comes down to money then I have failed. 
      • We are don’t judged against offshore team
      • We are judged on our full solution capabilities 
        • We charge a flat rate
    • Continue to raise your rate till no one will pay you anymore.
    • Look at pricing calculator 
      • Your value is whatever it’s worth to pay it.
      • Price your rates to the market you are going after.
    • We started from 2 people to 10 in a year, so we had to figure out what company to be early on. 
      • We wanted to be a lifestyle company
      • In order to do that, we have to be flexible with our pricing structure
      • We shoot for 50% profit margin
      • We keep that cash on hand so that we can be picky about clients.
      • With money comes stress.
      • Never appear as a dollar sign to a client.
      • We don’t want to be thought of in terms as an hourly rate.
      • We aim for engagements that our 6–12 months and longer
  • How do you convince a client to work with you? 
    • Usually within 30 minutes of showing our work and apps, that usually helps lead to a deeper discussion.
    • A lot of it dependability. 
      • Who will they call when there are problems?
      • Support part of business is often overlooked
    • We are going to meet our customers’ expectations 
      • Then you are going to meet their desires
      • Then meet their unrecognized needs
      • Ask your clients able visualize the success of their project?
    • We position ourselves as a partner rather than an agency 
      • Agencies are still doing waterfall process
      • Once we think we can fit with the client, we do a three month trial to see if it will work.
  • What would happen if we published our rates on our web site? 
    • Probably nothing.
      • Put a lot of work into that thing, but clients don’t look at your web site.
      • Rates would collectively go down.
    • One of the approach as an agency or as a freelancer is to show little as possible. 
      • Get clients to have a conversation with you, get the facetime.
      • If you do show everything on your site, you get based on a client’s gut reaction to your site and not you or your team.
      • They will then hold what you say against what is written on your site rather than listening to what you have to say about their project.
  • What are the top issues your agency struggles with? 
    • Business development
    • Finding the right talent
    • How are we get our revenue to grow
    • Creating a rainy day fund
    • Finding office space, keeping overhead low

Alexis Ohanian’s Live AMA at Capital Factory

By Christopher

Alexis Ohanian, founder of Reddit and author of Without Their Permission, held a live AMA at Capital Factory.

  • How did Reddit start out? 
    • Things we have to remind people is that Reddit is that it started out by two guys who just got out of college who didn’t know what they were doing.
    • If anyone acts like they know what they are doing, they are probably lying.
    • Please, what you see at Reddit now is 8 years of decisions, bad decisions, and process.
  • How do you leverage an accelerator to raise money? 
    • Demo day brings people who are wealthy and are excited to invest in some great ideas, management teams.
    • Lot of work in getting funded is building hype.
    • Optimize the value when you working on closing with a potential investor.
    • Prioritize a list of investors that are best fit for you and your situation.
    • Just go down that list and work on building momentum.
  • Advice for starting up a company? 
    • Writing code or getting users to the point where it is a relentless pursuit.
    • It’s everything to the culture, to the work attitude.
    • During office hours, you want to not just get your questions answered, but be able to generate more guided questions.
    • The best thing to learn is to know which advice from smart investors or founders to ignore.
    • Until you learn the how to generate revenue, you have to be ego-less about the business.
    • Great founders are those that able to care to work on activities that don’t scale early on. They are willing to do little things that need to be done.
    • Anyone who is willing to be your first 1,000 customers are amazing. Find ways to delight them because I am never one of those people and I think they are amazing creatures.
  • Are you happy about the Reddit alien as a brand? What impact did it have over this many years? 
    • Branding comes second, the product comes first.
    • The best encounter we see where we see that there are humans behind this cold desktops and mobile devices.
    • A great brand will not save a mediocre company. See Pets.com sock puppet.
    • You can give a great service and then a good breand.
    • I’ve seen a half-dozen Reddit alien tattoos.
  • What’s your decision to not to make a mobile app? 
    • We built a good mobile app, not a great mobile app.
    • The focus hopefully is going to be on an API and letting developers build those mobile views.
    • Alien Blue is a better user experience since it exposes sub edits better.
    • I don’t think we will ever pull a Twitter in how we treat developers, but at this point we want to support the API and developers.
    • Unless you’re on someone’s home screen you are pretty much irrelevant and you have to do something amazing to be on someone’s homescreen.
  • What did you start Reddit in the early times to get traction? 
    • We just submitted links ourselves under different usernames since we wanted to let new users know how the system works.
    • We emailed our friends asking them to submit links.
    • A month later we added comments and people thought that would doom site.
    • A leaderboard feature was a great idea as it allowed people with just the top 5 users of the day was a key driver to get people on.
    • This movitated people to generate links, content.
    • We would know there was a problem with the leaderboard cause we got a lot of email from users letting us know.
  • How did you create the culture? 
    • The best thing we did was never put advertising above the user experience.
    • The day Digg put an ad for Egg McMuffin on half of their home page, we knew we were winning.
    • We would go above and beyond the users for weird stuff.
    • The memes of rMexico are animals and I have no idea what they mean.
    • We had to be the best party hosts we could, otherwise why would someone create rMexico?
  • What was your defining the moment when you realized you had traction? 
    • Reddit has doubled every year, there was never a moment we had traction.
    • If I had to say, it was a month in and the site was working.
    • We would show up in the morning and people had posted new items.
    • With Hipmunk, it’s mostly UX. We aren’t showing you results no human would want to take.
    • Hotels is where the money is because the margins are so high.
    • For every Instagram there are a hundreds or thousands of similar products that we will never hear from because they will never get enough traction.
  • How did you start our financially and raise capital? 
    • We got US$12k from ycombinator.
    • Then we raised US$70k from our seed round and we were thrilled. (It was 2005 after all.)
    • User experience matters when you expect people to create content.
    • We are making a push to Reddit gold.
    • We are using the same model to advertise online that we use to advertise in papers a 100 years ago. Why is that?
    • We’ve seen that subscription model can work, but we don’t want to load users down with ads.
  • As an investor, how does someone get you to invest in their money? 
    • If you go to someone that is investor, and ask for money you will get advice.
    • If you go to an investor and ask for advice, you will get money.
  • How did you get involved in this book? 
    • I gave a talk about a whale at TED and publishers wanted me to write a book about that, but felt it wasn’t the right fit.
    • The book is about how important the Internet is to everyone, not just job creators or web builders.
    • The resources are so much better now cause for people who are starting out now who want or would want to start a business.
    • Currently supporting the book on a 100+ city bus tour of college towns.
    • If you never see college students react to a t‑shirt cannon, you would think we are shooting money.
  • How did you get involved with HipMunk? 
    • If you got an itch or complaint and no one seems to be solving it, that’s a great place to build a startup around.
    • HipMunk was started because the founder was frustrated with Kayak and how it would list duplicate flights or flights no human would want to take.
    • Alex invested as the GUI was grafted onto the site and he could see how everything came together.
    • If the majority of Americans that take one trip, we need to be in their heads. That’s what fare alerts.
    • Twitter, Facebook, Groupon have made it okay to email the hell out of people.
    • We want to make content that helps people. That’s why we have city guides and actually give tips to people via social media on their trips.

RWDTXST: A New Toolbox: Secrets from Happy Cog

By Christopher

In their A New Toolbox: Secrets from Happy Cog presentation at Texas State University, presenters Kevin Sharon, Design Director at Happy Cog, and Sophie Shepherd, Designer at Happy Cog, reveal Happy Cog’s design process through their experience building a responsive site from beginning to end, including: kicking off the project, the collaborative design process, and the tools they tweaked along the way.

  • When kicking off a new web site project, talk to stake holders and the people at the front desk. They know where the weaknesses are in the company’s forward facing presence because they hear them every day from the customers calling in with questions.
  • Talk with client contact or liaison before kickoff meeting to get a feel for project and political landscape. This approach avoids walking into traps and reduces the chances of messing up the start of project.
  • Use survey tool like Ethnio to get site design feedback and generate leads for user testing later on.
  • Design involves a Character, Conflict, and a Resolution. The Character is the site users illustrated in a user profile. The Conflict is the problem with site or business. And the Resolution is the design solution you work with the client for the Character.
  • Give client 30 celebrity mugshots with goal to pick which ones fit business’s brand. Then use Style Tiles based on each celebrity.
  • Learn clients’ internal language and help them learn your design language.
  • No more wireframes. Build prototypes instead, but call them “HTML Wireframes” to avoid confusion that is how the site will look.
  • Tools to make quick HTML wireframes: Codepen for elemental pieces, grid systems, and roll your own for more customization
  • If you can’t click through it, it’s not a prototype. Prototypes are for user testing.
  • A sign of a good designer is that they do a lot of paper sketching as this is the quickest way to get the best idea.
  • Turn HTML wireframes into design modules.
  • Don’t just brush up an approved wireframe with type and be done. Go the extra step and design within that space.
  • Keynote resizes grouped elements in a way that Photoshop can’t, which makes it ideal for creating responsive design modules or element collages.
  • Involve developers’ input into the design process as they make a lot of decisions in the building responsive web sites.
  • Selling a design continues after you get the project. You have to get clients engaged, so don’t show design comps or other elements of the design process like you are showing an apartment.
  • Always have a reason for your design and each part of your process. Finding your reasons start with research.
  • Practice your writing skills to improve client communication as everyone on a team gets a direct channel to the client.
  • Realize that a good writer is someone who can organize their thoughts.
  • Add a small touch of humor when writing to clients. For example, tell them in passing on a deliverible, it’s National Margarita Day today. (Only works on February 22nd.)
  • Two things a designer has to get used is taking public criticism and realizing that clients will change a design after it’s handed over.
  • It’s not Responsive Web Design, it’s web design.
  • Every client needs to have a project manager to work with an agency. Projects that didn’t have a client liasion haven’t gone well.
  • Even if the client liaison or project manager is part-time, temporary employee for the client, it benefits the project as you need someone to filter email messages, be mindful of political landscape, work on deliveribles, etc.
  • Take sketches of HTML collages, scan them, and use them to compose different layouts that are then giving to client/design review
  • Use tool like GatherContent to, well, gather client content.
  • When working with clients on a project, expect: requirements, content, and feedback.

Analyzing Form Element and CSS Support in Web Browsers

By admin

Last week, Kimberly Blessing and I gave a presentaion on Designing Our Way Through Web Forms at Web Visions in Portland, OR. 

It was a bit more advanced talk in some ways than the one we gave at SXSW.

For this session, I dove into my research of the Web Form Elements to analyze which CSS properties and form elements are poorly supported in browsers. 

I looked at each of the Web form elements to see if CSS property was supported on the form element–assigning it a value of Y for yes, N for no, S for somewhat and N/A for the CSS properties that didn’t apply. 

You can look at the start of this reseach in the lookup tables for Appendix D of the CSS Cookbook. It’s available as a free download from the O’Reilly Web site.

To see which form elements and CSS properties did well, you can look into the presentation itself from my SlideShare account (see pages 33 and 37) or you skip down this blog post to read the lists. 

Web Form Design (Web Visions 2009)

Support for CSS Properties (Best to Worst)

  1. margin
  2. background-color
  3. width
  4. font-size
  5. border-style
  6. letter-spacing
  7. padding
  8. height
  9. color
  10. background-image
  11. border
  12. font-family
  13. border-width
  14. border-color
  15. font-weight
  16. word-spacing
  17. text-indent
  18. text-decoration
  19. text-align
  20. line-height

Support for Form Elements (Best to Worst)

  1. textarea
  2. input text
  3. submit buttons
  4. select (one item)
  5. select (multiple items)
  6. file uploads
  7. checkboxes
  8. radio buttons

Looking into HTML5

By admin

In talking with one of the Mikes at the Dayton Web Standards Meetup about what topics people would like to hear at an upcoming meeting, I shot off an email half-thinking, “well, I would like a talk on HTML5 and CSS3.” 

I’m not exactly sure what his response was, but at the next meetup I was standing in front of about twenty people wanting to hear what I found out about HTML5.

That Mike sure is a sly one. Well, one of them, at least.

To be honest, I wasn’t too thrilled about the prospect of HTML5. I’m a little weary of anything still in the larval stage of Web development after getting bitten badly by the poor Netscape Navigator 4 betas. 

But, as I dove into a little bit of HTML5 and what bleeding edge browsers that support the unfinsihed spec. Below are my slides from the presentation that can help other people who were as clueless as I was about HTML5. 

View more presentations from teleject. (tags: xhtml webdesign)

IZEAFest Keynote: Merlin Mann

By admin

Merlin Mann’s How to Blog keynote presentation in Orlando, FL at IZEAFest covered material he learned over the last four years related to blogging.

  • Just cause it’s easy to post, doesn’t mean you should. 
  • What’s a blog? Topic multiplied by voice. 
    • It’s hard to have a blog that’s all voice. 
    • And it’s hard a blog about all about a topic. 
  • You have to find the axis where you find a voice and your topic. 
    • Find out what place the blog has in your life. 
  • You want to have a blog to genereate a huge amount of traffic and/or money. 
    • It’s not the only reason. 
    • It means a lot to say things that are meaningful. 
    • If a blog is to get traffic, this talk isn’t for you. 
  • My concern:
    • I was worried that I wasn’t good fit for the conference. 
    • I can’t abuse my blog. 
    • It’s good idea to make money to blogs, but it’s not a high success rate 
  • We all wanna get better. 
    • Speak an authentic manner. 
  • Here’s you.
    • There is something you are obsessed about. 
    • Think of the first axis is your passion. 
    • A blog is can be a set of links or you can bring original content to the Web.
    • Let’s say you want money, success, recognition. 
    • One of the greatest honors is to have readers say “I wonder what you think about?” 
    • You don’t want to be liked, but you want to be known. 
  • Trying:
    • Share Passion.
    • Build Participation.
    • Generate Money.
    • Earn Respect.
    • Encourage Opinion.
    • Get Better.
  • When you try a lot, it means a lot. 
    • Trying also has business value. 
    • I don’t link to sites that are dumb. 
    • If you over-serve the right audience, and you are bound to do well.
  • What I know about blogging: 
    • “Find your obsession. Every day, explain it to one person you respect. Edit everything, skip shortcuts, and try not to be a dick. Get better.”
    • “Find your obsession.” 
      • Hit them from where there ain’t. 
      • Is there room for another site that reviews Social Media 2.0? Probably not.
    • “Every day,”
      • I didn’t say post everyday. 
      • If you want to be good everyday, you need to do it everyday. 
      • I don’t think you need to post everything that occurs to you. 
      • It’s okay to sit on posts on a while. 
      • Have about five posts going at once. 
      • When you give your brain permission to get better, you want to do it better. 
    • “explain it”
      • What is it that you have to say about that topic? 
      • Ann Coulter can be talking about anything, people will seek her out cause they love being angry at Ann Coulter. 
      • There is tons of content out there with ads around it, but why should people be excited about it. 
      • If you were going to start a new blog, then write the fifth blog post. 
    • “to one person” 
      • Recommends Stephen King book’s On Writing. It’s the second best book on creative writing. (The Creative Habit is the other book.)
      • Think of one person you are writing to that you really admire and write to that person. 
      • Imagine that person be really busy. 
    • “you respect.”
      • It helps that the person you are writing for is someone you respect. 
    • “Edit everything,”
      • At some point editing fell out of style. 
      • Getting rid of things that sucked become a waste of time at some point.
      • You should be throwing away a lot of what you make.
      • If the people are you reaching don’t care that you edit, are they people you want in your audience? 
    • “skip shortcuts,”
      • The Internet is a thing that works because it’s open. Openness makes it good. 
      • You need to show people where you were initially interested in what you are talking about. 
      • The Internet is good. 
    • “and try not to be a dick.” 
      • There’s a very short link between cognition and action. 
      • If you are constantly reacting to your emotions, you might regret a lot of things in your life. 
      • If you use your platform to spit on it, it’s not very respectful. 
    • “Get better.”
      • I try a little bit harder each time I do something. 
      • Low quality work is like a potato chip. it tastes good, but it’s short term benefits hurts people who work out. 
      • You only get so many years on the marble. 
    • Things Not to Sweat: 
      • Don’t worry about SEO. 
      • Traffic. It will come if you are good.
      • Ads.
      • Design.
      • Fame.
    • Things to Sweat. Now. 
      • Figure out what the Why am I doing this? Who do I want to overserve? When do you know when you are doing well? How? 
      • Good idea: to write, read, obsess and own your voice. 
      • What is the single most important thing that you and no one else can do, but you? 
    • It took me four years to figure out.