THE PENDING DRAFT

Adii Pienaar on Bootstrapping

May 22, 2015

Adii Pienaar writes about his views on bootstrapping a business and why he thinks it’s not just about the source of funding.

I learnt this the hard way, when I self-funded PublicBeta last year and whilst doing so again now with Receiptful. Self-funding essentially falls within the greater definition of what it means to bootstrap a business, but there’s a major disparity in practice.

I can summarize that disparity with one question: If Mark Zuckerberg were to sell Facebook and thereafter “invested” $1bn of his own money into a new startup, is that still bootstrapping?

I couldn’t agree more.

Adii Pienaar – The 5 Characteristics of Bootstrapping

Automattic acquires WooThemes

May 20, 2015

Today Automattic announced the acquisition of WooThemes. With a rumored price of $30 million in cash and stock and the integration of 55 employees into their existing teams this is by far the largest acquisition for Automattic as well as in the larger WordPress space. Yet for a company that dominates the e-commerce world like Woo does, with a quarter of all online-stores running on WooCommerce, this still seems like a reasonable price. I’m sure those two teams are a great fit and i’m looking forward to what they can build together.

WooThemes – Official Announcement
Some more words about the acquisition from Matt Mullenweg

Productivity

May 16, 2015

There are plenty of advices and techniques out there on how to be more productive and i’m sure you read most of what i write somewhere else before.

But anyway, i’d like to summarize what worked for me and what i changed over the last months to become way more productive than before.

1. Weekly Reviews

If you are a Freelancer and work on your own on most projects, it’s so damn easy to loose focus. Especially if working on side-projects with no direct monetary benefits or fixed deadlines it can be really hard to keep track. One really simple thing i started this year is writing a Weekly Review each Friday outlining which projects i worked on, the progress i made and what i plan for next week.

Even if you’re not going to keep your own word and have a To-Do in that “planned” list that you haven’t got done, i found that it puts a lot more pressure on me if i have to write it down again each week, rather than just moving an item in my Calendar.

2. Default your Calendar View to Weekly or Daily

Most of the time, i used iCal in Monthly View to plan ahead. This often led to unrealistically overbooked days because i just moved things around without really thinking about how long something will take. Of course, getting a birds-eye view from time to time is needed, but i default to the weekly view now and it helps a lot to plan things more realistic.

3. Publicly announce your side-project

As mentioned in the first paragraph, it’s hard to plan in enough time for side-projects, especially when a client with a paid job knocks on your door. Announcing your project publicly can help to put some pressure on yourself and to take a side-project more serious.

4. Blog daily (or do whatever, daily)

At the beginning of January, i basically just had the idea to relive this blog and felt that when i don’t post something daily i will soon loose traction again. So i kept to publish something daily for more than four months now. To be honest, i have no idea how that fits in with productivity and why it should be included in this list. It’s probably just that having any kind of daily routine, whatever it is, can help to train your overall discipline and that in the end will make you more productive.

There’s plenty more things i tried, but these are the most important one’s and even if they sound small and easy, they worked quite well for me.

What’s your secret productivity tipp?

Upon This Wrist

May 15, 2015

After all those “one week with the Apple Watch” reviews, this is probably the most brilliant piece i read so far. About this thing on your wrist.

Very few notice the thing on the wrist. That makes me happy. But some do see it. Once they see it they say, Oh is that the thing? And I say, Yes it is the thing. And they ask, Has it changed your life? And I shrug. And they are so disappointed. They want me to say, Yes. Yes it has changed my life. The wrist thing. It’s made me a better man, a stronger man, a more thoughtful man. But, no. This is what I say: I say, Look, it shows maps. And they Ooooo. And I show them the remote camera and they Ahhhhh. And I say, look — my heartbeat. And they say, Wow, you have a high resting heart rate. And I sigh and say, I know. Oh, how I know.

Upon This Wrist

Quotes on Design fetches Quotes using the WP-API

May 13, 2015

Quotes on Design is a page that serves quotes about design, curated by Chris Coyier. They just rebuilt it using the WP-API to fetch posts from WordPress.

Up to this point, Quotes on Design (QoD) used a bit of custom code to query the WordPress database and serve up quotes. This was used for the site itself, and for its API to allow use on external sites. With the excitement surrounding the upcoming WordPress JSON REST API, we thought it would be fun to rebuild the site to use the WP API instead of our own custom code.

It’s nice to see more and more real world examples using the WP-API popping up lately. In this post on CSS-Tricks, Andy Adams details exactly how they built it which makes it a perfect tutorial if you want to get familiar with the WP-API.

Using the WP-API to Fetch Posts