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The 5 laws of entrepreneurs

October 21st, 2009

The term ‘entre­pre­neur’ is entic­ing and to many peo­ple implies, ‘doer of any­thing that makes money’ and in a large sense is a cor­rect impli­ca­tion. How­ever, what is often miss­ing from the gen­eral under­stand­ing of the term ‘entre­pre­neur’ is that each endeavor of an ‘entre­pre­neur’ requires con­tin­ual focus, noth­ing is ever truly on ‘auto-pilot’. I have seen too many entre­pre­neurs fail because they tried to be every­thing to every­one; they tried blog­ging, then on to mar­ket­ing, then on to affil­i­ate sales .… all within a few months!

To be a suc­cess­ful entre­pre­neur, you have to apply laser focus to your ven­ture to get it off the ground, then you have to con­tin­u­ally apply over­sight to keep it in the air. As you progress and advance inen­tre­pre­neuri­al­ism you can explore out­sourc­ing and Vir­tual Assis­tant options to help you man­age but in the early-stages of a ven­ture, it is all about you and your per­sonal drive.

We could spend hours upon hours of our time and pages upon pages of text that all talk about the do’s & dont’s of entre­pre­neurs and mar­ket­ing. While all of that would be valu­able infor­ma­tion I think that being ‘straight and to the point’ is always an effec­tive mean of com­mu­ni­ca­tion. In my own career I have come to find that if I adhere to the 5 laws of entre­pre­neurs I can assure my ven­ture the best pos­si­ble chance of success.

5 Laws of Entrepreneurs:

  • Law of Focus: In the early-stage devel­op­ment of your ven­ture, prod­uct or ser­vice you must remain focused and resist temp­ta­tions to become distracted.
    • Out­line spe­cific times dur­ing your day that you will ded­i­cate to work­ing on the ven­ture and noth­ing else.
    • Dur­ing the times you are work­ing with your ven­ture, turn off your phones, email, Twit­ter … etc. This is qual­ity time for you and your idea only.
  • Law of Goals: It is imper­a­tive that you doc­u­ment the goals and objec­tives of your ven­ture. You have to have some­thing to hold your­self account­able to.
    • If you do not have highly spe­cific goals and objec­tives you can eas­ily become dis­tracted and lose focus (a vio­la­tion of the first law!).
    • Hav­ing spe­cific goals allows you to mea­sure the pro­gres­sion of your ven­ture; with­out achiev­ing goals you have no way to deter­mine if your ven­ture is progressing.
  • Law of Moti­va­tion: In the early-stage of your ven­ture it is easy to stay moti­vated because of excite­ment and nov­elty. You must keep that enthu­si­asm because you can’t expect cus­tomers to be excited about your ven­ture if your not.
  • Law of Integrity: You must vow to never mis­rep­re­sent or over­state your venture’s value or ben­e­fit. Noth­ing will sink a ven­ture quicker than an over­state­ment or misrepresentation.
    • Do not ‘make’ your ven­ture fit into a mar­ket, find the mar­ket that fits your ven­ture by con­duct­ing focus groups and prod­uct research.
  • Law of Per­se­ver­ance: If suc­cess were easy then there wouldn’t be such a thing as fail­ure. Suc­cess is the 100th attempt of 99 failures.
    • You must com­mit to never giv­ing up on your ven­ture until you achieve your goals that you have out­lined. YOU CAN NEVER GIVE UP!

Being an entre­pre­neur is not easy, noth­ing worth hav­ing ever is. The dif­fer­ence between your venture’s suc­cess and being the next idea tossed to the way-side is you! You are the only respon­si­ble for your own suc­cess, so go make it hap­pen! Go be a success!

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Secur­ing Word­Press is not mis­sion impossible

October 19th, 2009

I hate to be the one to burst your bub­ble but the, ‘how to make Word­Press hack proof’ ebook that you just bought was a com­plete waste of money. Why do you ask — because you can’t make Word­Press (or any other web appli­ca­tion for that mat­ter) lit­er­ally ‘hack-proof’.

First, lets define the terms Hack and Hacker before we get started:

  • ‘Hacker’ — while the more appro­pri­ate term in this con­text would be cracker, we’ll use hacker instead because it’s inferred mean­ing is more socially under­stood (albeit a mis­un­der­stand­ing). Regard­ing Word­Press, a hacker would in sim­plest form, be some­one who causes your blog to do some­thing that it isn’t sup­posed to. Hack­ers may find a way to ‘spam’ your blog or cause your blog to make unin­tended posts/comments, they may find a way to over­write impor­tant sys­tem files in your blog soft­ware that ren­ders the blog unus­able and many other nasty activ­i­ties which can all be exam­ples of hacks (actu­ally the bet­ter term here would be cracks).
    • Out­side of a per­sonal vendetta, one com­mon rea­son for a hacker to attack your blog would be to spam it with the hack­ers own mes­sage (i.e. affil­i­ate links … etc).  By the time you real­ize the hack occurred, the hacker has already enjoyed some free click-thru traf­fic cour­tesy of you.

The World Wide Web is dri­ven by web servers, every blog that we use phys­i­cally resides some­where in the world on a real server that is acces­si­ble to the Inter­net. If you have a blog, that blog sits on a server some­where in the world and is prob­a­bly shared by many other peo­ple, blogs and var­i­ous Inter­net appli­ca­tions. The sad but true fact about web servers that you must embrace is, “the only 100% secure web server is the web server who’s power is turned off”. Unfor­tu­nately that isn’t very prac­ti­cal given that with­out power, your blogs couldn’t be found on the Internet.

So if we can’t secure the web server 100%, that means we can­not  secure the con­tents of the web server 100%. The only option left is to real­ize that the web server and the con­tents will be a tar­get of attack on the Inter­net and the best most prac­ti­cal way to secu­rity is to mit­i­gate threats and make the exposed areas (to the Inter­net) of the server as invalu­able as pos­si­ble. In most cases, there will be lit­tle that you can do for server-level secu­rity because in most cases you are not going to be the admin­is­tra­tor of the server (third party host­ing sit­u­a­tions). In third-party host­ing sit­u­a­tions, the best you can usu­ally do is exer­cise cau­tion when select­ing a server provider for your blog. At any rate you can always con­tact your server provider and ask them about their secu­rity pro­ce­dures and what secu­rity mea­sures are in place on the web server.

You can how­ever take sub­stan­tial secu­rity mea­sures on the blog soft­ware level that can dra­mat­i­cally improve secu­rity on your blog. In par­tic­u­lar I am talk­ing about self-hosted blogs;‘free blog ser­vices’ like blogger.com or wordpress.com won’t leave many options for secu­rity to the blog­ger indi­vid­u­ally and you will have to rely on the organization’s admin­is­tra­tion for security.

If you host your own blog you can employ plu­g­ins that may help secure your blog.  Bel­low, I have listed some of my favorite plugin’s for var­i­ous blog software:

b2Evolution | Plu­gin Site: http://plugins.b2evolution.net/

TextPat­tern | Plu­gin Site: http://textpattern.org/plugins

Mov­able Type | Plu­gin Site: http://plugins.movabletype.org/

Word­press | Plu­gin Site: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/

No mat­ter what soft­ware you choose as your blog­ging plat­form, no amount of plu­g­ins can match the effec­tive­ness of com­mon sense and prac­ti­cal­ity. This is a list of ‘good rules of thumb’ that extend beyond the use of plu­g­ins and when used in con­junc­tion with plu­g­ins can prove to be very effective.

  1. Less code = more secu­rity. The less code lying about on your blog the less poten­tial there is for code to be exploited. If your not using a plugin/theme/widget on your blog, deac­ti­vate it and then remove it. Do not leave it lying about wait­ing to be exploited. As plu­gin ver­sions change and updates are pub­lished you may for­get to update the ones your not using.
  2. Keep the core blog soft­ware updated.  I am not a fan of the ‘bleeding-edge’ so I wouldn’t nec­es­sar­ily rec­om­mend being on the lat­est ver­sion as soon as it is released. New releases can always have unfore­seen flaws. I rec­om­mend stay­ing 1 full ver­sion behind the lat­est sta­ble ver­sion.  Upgrade only when secu­rity patches are released or when a new sta­ble ver­sion is released and it makes your blog 2 full ver­sions behind the lat­est sta­ble version.
  3. Take advan­tage of the built-in mod­er­a­tion con­trols of the soft­ware. Don’t allow pub­lic com­ment­ing with­out some type of con­trol (i.e all com­ments are held for approval, only com­menters that have been approved can com­ment … etc)
  4. Log into your blog at least once per day just to give every­thing a glance, quickly scan new com­ments, look at the file-size of the blog on your server and note any changes, look at your post count and note any changes … etc

Happy Blog­ging!

Ryan Huff, C.E.O & Founder

RTH Con­sul­tants

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Posted in The CodeTree

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Apple’s iPhoto Makes It Way Too Easy To Delete Your Entire Flickr Library

October 15th, 2009

Apple has long been asso­ci­ated with the say­ing “it just works”. Well, some­times it appar­ently works a lit­tle too well, to the point of allow­ing users to delete their entire Flickr libraries in one fell swoop with­out really mean­ing to. Oops.

The prob­lem stems from the way Apple’s pop­u­lar iPhoto soft­ware is inte­grated with Flickr. Recent ver­sions of iPhoto allow users to sync spec­i­fied albums with Flickr, which means they can auto­mat­i­cally upload new pho­tos as soon as they import them into iPhoto from their cam­eras, and change their cap­tions for both at once. The prob­lem is that iPhoto treats this sync­ing very lit­er­ally: if you delete a photo from from of these synced albums on iPhoto, it doesn’t just remove it from the Set on Flickr  — it actu­ally deletes the photo from your Flickr account entirely.

iPhoto appar­ently informs users that when they stop shar­ing a photo album between iPhoto and Flickr, “The album no longer appears on Flickr, but the pho­tos remain in your [iPhoto] library.” The word­ing is both ambigu­ous (Apple could just mean it’s delet­ing the pho­tos from the Flickr set) and not nearly strong enough to sug­gest that it’s actu­ally delet­ing data. And plenty of peo­ple have made that mistake.

Over the last sev­eral weeks this has led to a num­ber of threads in Flickr’s help forum where some users are up in arms after acci­den­tally delet­ing hun­dreds of pho­tos at once.

Full story at: http://www.techcrunch.com/

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About That Chrome OS Event

October 15th, 2009

We’ve been report­ing a lot about Chrome OS the past few days. Pos­si­ble fea­tures, screen­shots, early builds — lots of good stuff. And tomor­row was promis­ing to bring even more as yes, there’s an event par­tially deal­ing with Chrome OS sched­uled to take place on Google’s Moun­tain View cam­pus. But sadly, we’ve been banned from the event.

Truth be told, all press is now banned from the event, we were told this evening. And that sucks because just yes­ter­day we were con­firmed as atten­dees and had planned to report on what we saw and heard. But then PC World and The Next Web spilled the beans on the event, and Google decided to ban the press.

How­ever, before they banned us and closed down reg­is­tra­tions, we did man­age to get the con­fir­ma­tion email about the event.

Full Story at: http://www.techcrunch.com/

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