heisel.org

WordPress 2.3

Tuesday | October 9, 2007 | 9:40 pm  

So my human nature vs. good business sense post was the first I’ve written with WordPress 2.3.

Thought I’d share a couple of at-first-glance thoughts:

• I <heart> autosave - it removes one of the things that bugs me about writing “through the Web”

• I still don’t <heart> textareas, even with nice WYSIWYG editors wrapped around them.

• A fantastic little touch: A tag with the same name as a category become one and the same. I have a category called “Management” and when I created a tag called “management” it was renamed to “Management” to match the capitalization. The tag and category remaining separate entities, so a post can be in one or another or both.

• The Tiger Admin Theme is broke. I don’t mind the stock admin so much — it’s improved a little from 2.2.

• More admin themes would be nice

• It seems to run a little faster, but with Dreamhost I’ll never know if a slowdown is hosting or application related.

• With the introduction of tagging I really do have to finally get my act together and redesign this blog. I really like my type design on the post area itself, but the rest of the design blows chunks… maybe if I ask real nice, my fantastic wife who is a fantastic designer will help me make something that has a lower chunk velocity.

Permalink | Comments (0) | Categories: Technology

AJC development group mentioned at APME

Saturday | October 6, 2007 | 3:29 pm  

We’re in film!

Robin Henry, our Digital Managing Editor extraordinaire, spoke at a recent Associated Press Managing Editors conference and screened this Soundslides presentation that Emily Murphy and the AJC’s multimedia group put together.

I look and sound like a total dweeb, but wanted to take a chance to pimp the developers, designers, DBAs and sysadmins at work who make all the cool stuff we do possible!

Permalink | Comments (0) | Categories: Django, Journalism, Programming, Python, Technology

Human nature vs. good business sense

Tuesday | October 2, 2007 | 9:40 pm  

I was home sick the other day with an awful sinus headache and stomach flu.

About the only bright side was that I got to watch Battlestar Galactica on DVD.

I thought to myself, “Boy this is a really great show. It’s a shame they never put it on NBC in the summer as was rumored on the Internet.”

Then I caught myself. Here I am enjoying a fine, fine television show — the visual and dramatic equivalent of a fine bourbon) or scotch — and yet I somehow think it’s a shame it wasn’t put on an over-the-air network for mass consumption.

Which got me wondering — does human nature, at its very core, conflict with what is sometimes good business sense?

Humans are social animals. It’s one of the characteristics of our species the enables us to do so much good, and harm.

Allow me to list some common business idioms that fit within that framework:

• Grow a larger audience

• Add more employees

• Add more clients

• Attract more investors

And yet there are plenty of times and plenty of businesses that could probably have been better served by:

• Focusing on a tight, niche audience

• Keeping the same number of staff and enabling them to work smarter/harder

• Keeping the same number of clients and improving quality or revenue-per-client

• Stayed self-funded, or not gone public and avoided the associated detrimental market pressures that come with those “growth” routes.

Nothing terribly insightful here, I suppose.

Just got me wondering if that primal instinct to grow/expand our social network — even cloaked in a business setting — leads us to judge the first set of points as “sexy” and the others as “wimpy.”

Permalink | Comments (0) | Categories: Business, Management

Great quote on philosophy

Monday | October 1, 2007 | 5:49 pm  

Trust your passions less, your reasons more, and your limits most.

From Prof. Daniel Robinson, Oxford University, via an NPR podcast.

Permalink | Comments (0) | Categories: Management