Nowhere Men - Science is the new rock 'n' roll

This isn't a very good picture but I made a new strap for my wife's new camera. Technically I found the idea on Instructables but none of those were exactly right so I made my own version. The real one is by a company called R-Strap and they cost like $60. This one I made from some nylon strap, a buckle, metal dog leash connector, and a screw that fits in the tripod attachment hole on the camera. $12.

This is my first drawing using the blended layer of pencil as a background. Looks pretty nice for this kind of drawing but getting the erasing of the grey to match the shadows on the real hand was a pain.

My next creative thing for the year is that I danced at my company's big yearly party. Kim and I have been taking couple's dancing lessons for awhile now but it hasn't really prepared me for the kind of dancefloor activities you find at these kind of parties, not to mention I didn't have anybody to dance with. But after an hour or so of my usual watching and willing myself not to be a wallflower, a great song came on and I broke away from my spot off to the side and joined the fun on the floor. Now, even with dance lessons I have almost no "moves" as such, but I did my best to move my feet and get into it and it ended up being really fun. As part of my ongoing program to get over myself and not be so self-conscious I count it as a success. And since I had to come up with ways of using what I had learned about how to move my feet in a different setting, I'm counting it as creative as well. :)

Strive to understand fully and completely the tool at hand. Explore exactly how it works and what it can do. In addition constantly learn how to build on what you and others have done before. Aim for clarity and comprehension, and mastery shall surely follow.

My resolution for the year is to make and document 100 creative things over the year. Drawing, electronics, Lego, etc.

And with that tweet, I sealed my fate for 2013. :) To expand, I'm going to try to do at least 100 creative things over the year. I'm going to write, build, sew, draw and who knows what else 100 Creative Things and document them, mostly on this blog. Obviously the first thing isn't to have come up with a better title for the "things". :)

I'm a big believer in just getting started and not waiting for perfection so in that spirit I'm starting now. I've always wanted to learn how to draw better and I've had a copy of the book Drawing On the Right Side Of The Brain for a long time. So my first creative thing is the first 3 drawings you're supposed to make as a "Before" for the exercises in the book. They're crap so hopefully this will relieve me of the burden of making my creative things any good before I post them. I did them in Sketchbook Pro on my iPad so I might redo them with regular pencil and see what the difference is, if any.

Being so close to the site and what it is, it's hard to explain to somebody who hasn't had the damn thing on their mind for 6 months. I made way too many assumptions about how the site worked. So my first stabs at copy for the homepage didn't really help, even to people who I had previously explained the site to. It was then I started reading about copywriting and how to write for an audience of potential customers.

The big turning point was when the great and powerful patio11 on HackerNews wrote about CopyHackers, a site by professional copywriter Joanna Wiebe. She has some really great stuff on there and her ebooks are chock full of must-have info if you're in the position I'm in. I haven't finished all of them but since I have to stop after reading each chapter and implement some of her advice it's well worth it. Honestly I was hesitant to spend the money at first but I'm so glad I finally bit the bullet. One of the pieces of advice that I remembered from reading people like Kathy Sierra was to stop saying things like 'We can do X, Y, Z' and replace that with 'You' messages about how the user will be better off using the site. Joanna also says this and it's a very helpful thing to always keep in mind.

Even after finding some wording for the homepage I thought was to the point, short, and powerful, it was a big dud. I got a couple of useful messages from people who basically said they still didn't know what the site did. Cue sad trombone. So I'm back at it. I've actually got a DebugMap going with a bunch of different versions of the text and all the changes I'm making. I'm also looking at other tool websites to see how they're doing things. I'm hoping that I'm not just putting off working on the site by reading and noodling under the guise of improving the copy. I'm trying everything I can to turn that homepage into something somebody new might read and say "Wow, I need this site!"

I wish I had some great ending to this post where I say "These words increased my conversions by 5000%!" But right now the site is so new I'm glad when I get a few hits a day and a signup a week. So I'm working away and trying not to get too distracted by Minecraft. :) One of these days I'll find the magic spell.

Thanks for reading!

I'm super proud to be launching my new website for developers, called DebugMap. It's a tool to help programmers remember what they find while debugging. Unfortunately for all of us, debugging is something we do a lot of. I noticed that I was using a lot of text files to keep things I was finding while looking for some problem. Snippets of code, SQL queries and results, answers from StackOverflow, all that stuff. One day I thought of a way to collect and display all that stuff and decided that might actually be something others could use too. So here it is.

It turns out there's a ton of little pieces to making something people might pay money for. I've launched a number of other sites and even had people give me money for some of them. But I wanted to do this "right". I wanted to host it somewhere better than my personal server so I learned about Heroku. I wanted to do a more modern interface so I found a good color scheme and learned more modern HTML and Javascript. I'm an armchair design fan so I've tried to make it well designed. I did a credit card form with Stripe because nuts to Paypal. But all of this stuff takes time. I did my best to launch an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) without too many features but it still took a crazy long time to get going. I've told my friends about it and now I'm telling my vast and influential group of readers about it. Pretty soon I'll tell more people and hopefully all those people will tell somebody else (hint) and in a few years I'll have an overnight success on my hands.

Anyway, DebugMap is my new thing and I like it. If you're a developer I hope you do too. Tell a friend! :)