PR Slugs

Anyone with a blog knows that there is a terrible place out there somewhere. A place that must be dark and horrible, where the inhabitants long to cry out in pain but can't muster the courage or energy.

That place, is of course, is the offices of PR firms. Judging by the volume of crappy suggestions I get from them, they must be filled with low-earning, life-hating people just begging for something useful to do. I have gotten emails from poor, helpless PR lackeys asking me to write posts about Trident gum, Clorox, and many other captivating products. All in exchange for.... NOTHING! Yes, Corporate America expects me to fill my website with garbage benefitting them for free. I wonder what the hit rate is. How many people really got so excited about that Trident flavor that they just had to share their feelings with the world? My guess: exactly zero*.

Which is why it is so important that cold emails do not come from PR people. Send them directly. You'll get a much better response.

For example, I got an email from Widgetbox asking me to sign up for their blog network. I didn't know they had one. I gave it a shot - the widget is in the bottom right of this blog right now. I don't know if it will work, but I appreciate the fact that they took the time to blast these emails out themselves rather than via some PR flack. I also appreciate that the offer somehow benefits me (in theory, at least).

Two lessons here:

1. Don't outsource your relationships.
   
2. If you're boring, you must also be helpful. Boring and useless gets you nowhere.
   

*I am well aware of the illogic of me writing about me not writing about Trident, et al. Consistency is overrated.

Financial Chaos

I don't write much about my day job here, but I can't let these days pass without at least a comment on what will turn out to be a remarkable time in the financial and political history of the US. If you don't pay attention to the financial markets, do yourself a favor and start now. You don't want to miss this.

As much fun as web apps have been to hack away on, commercial real estate investment is how I earn my real living. After watching the ups and downs of leveraged real estate, I've learned to respect to the wonder of leverage and the horrors it conjures when mistreated.

Here's the short version of what has come to pass:

• Everyone thought home ownership was good, no matter what.
• People borrowed lots of money to have those good homes, no matter what.
• Loan originators took those loans, packed 'em up and sold them as securities to ensure that they would profit, no matter what.
• Wall Street ate those securities up and leveraged them heavily. Surely the government could not let them fail, no matter what.
• 'What' happened and it mattered.
  

What happened is that the sheer size of the wad of shaky financial instruments is so massive that nobody can make it go away, not even Unlce Sam. Someone has to take some big losses. The way it's shaking out, those losses will be shared by pretty much everyone. That's life in the big city, I suppose.

I'll leave you with two dubious but often repeated quotations (if anyone can confirm these, it'd be much appreciated). I think that the entrepreneurs out there will appreciate the sentiment, and the timing seems appropriate.

"Bear markets return stocks to their rightful owners." - J.P. Morgan

"The way to make money is to buy when blood is running in the streets." - John D. Rockefeller

PS: We are looking to acquire retail properties in Austin. If you know of a good one for sale, let me know. 

Changing attachment_fu Thumbnail Sizes

One of my side project involves photo uploads. Users were giving me feedback that the pictures were too small. No big deal, I thought, I'll just make them bigger. That's easy with attachment_fu; you just set up another thumbnail size in the photo model.

But how do you deal with all the other photos that have already been uploaded? A quick google search turned up this technique on Curtis Edmond's blog. Curtis left out a good bit of the implementation, so I'll spell it out here.

First, you need to create a folder called "attachment_fu_thumbnails" in the vendor/plugins directory. It's important to start the name of the folder with attachment_fu so that you will remember that you were monkeying around with the attachment_fu code later on.  (I currently have four attachment_fu hacks in my vendor directory via this method).

Then create a file called init.rb in the new folder. It should contain the following code, which I adapted from Curtis's blog:

# in vendor/plugins/attachment_fu_thumbnails/init.rb
Technoweenie::AttachmentFu::InstanceMethods.module_eval do
  def create_thumbnail_size(target_size)
    actual_size = self.attachment_options[:thumbnails][target_size]
    raise "this class doesn't have a thubnail size for #{target_size}" if actual_size.nil?
    tmp = self.create_temp_file
    self.create_or_update_thumbnail(tmp, target_size.to_s, actual_size)
    FileUtils.rm_rf(Dir.glob(File.join(RAILS_ROOT, 'tmp', 'attachment_fu', '*')))
  end
end

That code allows you to call the method

create_thumbnail_size(:size) 

on any object which has attachment_fu attachments.

The easiest way to do that is via a rake task. This code goes in a file called thumbnails.rake, which should be placed in /lib/tasks (this version creates two new thumbnails per object - :medium and :bigger).

#in /lib/tasks/thumbnails.rake
namespace :utils do
  desc "Generates :medium and :bigger thumbnails for all Pictures"
  task (:thumb => :environment) do
    images = Picture.find(:all)
    images.each do |i|
      if i.parent_id == nil # only create thumbs for base images
        i.create_thumbnail_size(:medium)
        i.create_thumbnail_size(:bigger)
        puts "Generated thumbs for Picture.id == #{i.id}"
      end
    end
  end
end

To create your new thumbnails, add the geometry string(s) to your image model and run

rake utils:thumb

from your app's home directory. Presto - all your old photos now have new thumbnail objects with corresponding files.

WARNING: This code, while it worked for me, is basically untested. Make sure you test it thoroughly before using in a production environment.

Link Building Tactics

As I began this blog a couple months back, I was having a hard time coming up with concrete, useful techniques that I could use to help build links to my various web projects.

Thankfully, another Austin entrepreneur, Jeremy Bencken, has done this work for me. If you are in need of web promotion mojo, subscribe to his BuzzStream Blog. Two gems to check out right away:

Link Jujitsu - A technique that uses your competitors' success to find relevant conversations that are happening right now elsewhere on the web. It takes me about 5 minutes to do this each day, and it works. All you need is a close competitor to stalk.

Lazy Reporters - That's not what Jeremy calls this technique, but what he's describing is basically a way to make life easy for reporters. In a nutshell, you provide data in a format that's easily accessible and useful to reporters. They can then link to you or quote you without ever leaving their browser. This one is really only useful if you have user generated content and you can provide some sort of insight via the data you collect.

I can't wait for Jeremy's next idea. Good stuff.

Need To Get Out of the House? Try Conjunctured

The idea of coworking is starting to pop up a lot here in Austin. Basically, what the term means is that people can go to an office and rent space by the day in an environment that encourages interaction. For people like me who work out of their homes, the desire to get out of the house and actually see some people can be pretty appealing.

With that in mind, I took a trip over to Conjunctured, located on 7th street in east Austin. It's basically an old house that's been converted for use as an office. It's being run by a small group of young entrepreneurs who are pretty fired up about the concept. At first I was a little concerned that it would be a "startup frat house" complete with beer cans and dirty couches, but that fear turned out to be completely unfounded. The space in well-lit, clean and generally very usable. They have a coffee/espresso machine, kitchen area and a conference room. A stream of entrepreneurs and sole proprietors flows through the place at all times, which provides for a nice opportunity to get out and meet like-minded folks while also getting some work done.

Of course, as a real estate guy, I had to check it out just because it's such an off-the-wall business model. The jury's still out on how this trend plays out financially, but I think they've latched onto a good thing, and I hope it continues.

All in all, well done, guys. I anticipate stopping by now and then for a break from the home office blues.

Note: This post may sound like an advertisement, but I assure you, it's not. It's just my perspective after stopping by to work at Conjunctured for a day.

Directory Experiment: Not Entirely Worthless

Well, it's been a while since I began the directory submission experiment.  I sorted through a couple hundred potential blog and RSS directories, picked the best ones and submitted this blog to them. I wish I could say it was a smashing success, but that would make me a worthless liar.

Out of all of the directories that I screened and then took the time to submit to, only 2 have provided any traffic. And the traffic they did provide was a trickle.

www.blogcatalog.com was the clear winner, providing me with 14 new visits.
www.blogged.com came in 2nd with 4.

The rest?  A big fat zero, or maybe an employee verifying that my blog isn't spam.

Now, I don't have any way of verifying that I'm not getting SEO help just by having the links out there, but many of them are nofollow links, so I doubt it. I also have a sneaking suspicion that the search engines catalog these sites and devalue their links. (Although I did try to stick with human-edited sites to minimize this.)

Is it worth the time to submit? I don't think so. If I do it again, I'll do the two I mentioned above and forget about the rest. Commenting on blogs and leaving a link is an order of magnitude more effective - I have hundreds of visits from other blogs. Alltop is working out well, but I wonder if that will continue as it gets more crowded.