026 : How to hire a coder without learning code

Dann Berg You have an idea for an app. Maybe you’ve even made some sketches or you have the full wireframes done. Now it’s time to hire a developer…but you don’t have any idea where to begin.

In this episode of the podcast, I share exactly what you need to do to get an app in the app store. We start with your mockups then move into finding a developer, communicating with that developer, and submitting your app. This is the entire process.

If you’re ready to finally get that app in the app store, listen in.

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Why massive web traffic is mostly worthless

The other day, I was browsing Reddit when I stumbled upon a question in r/blogging:

reddit-blogging-question

I got this! I got this! — I thought. I shared my story: how I managed to use my old personal blog to escape the retail world and get a staff writer job at Laptop Magazine.

I got a few upvotes out of it…but more importantly, there were a lot of great questions. One of the things I saw asked, time and time again, is how bloggers can get more traffic to their website.

The problem is: this is the wrong question to be asking. Continue reading →

025 : From Crash Bandicoot to a smarter inbox with Dave Baggett

How many unread emails do you have in your inbox? If you went all the way back to the very oldest unread email, do you think you’d actually need it? If not, why is it still there? When are you going to do something about it?

Email itself first came on the scene circa 1993, alongside Windows NT 3.1 and massive brick phones. Since then, our computers have evolved substantially — and just look at our smartphones — but our email inboxes remain mostly just a big dumb bucket.

Dave Baggett is using machine learning to bring your inbox up to speed. He’s the founder of Arcode, creator of Inky email client (iOS, OS X). Dave shares the interesting story of how Inky came to be, starting with working on the first two Crash Bandicoot games and then joining a travel startup that would end up taking over the industry (and eventually get acquired by Google).

He’s got an interesting story and a fresh take on email. It’ll make you think about your own projects differently.

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 55:58 — 45.0MB) | Embed

022 : Why you should have started a blog yesterday

Dann Berg by Michael Shane In this week’s podcast episode, I share how I escaped the retail world and got into tech journalism. It’s all because of a little personal website I started. I also explain how you, too, can benefit from starting your own website — even if you don’t want to get int journalism — and how to do it.

This is a special edition of the podcast because there’s no guest, it’s just me! I ended up getting so much feedback and so many questions about last week’s podcast that I wanted to tell my story in more depth.

If you don’t yet have your own website, you need to listen to this episode. When you’re ready to get going, I’ve embedded the first tutorial in my video course.

If you found this helpful, please use my Bluehost affiliate link to get your hosting and domain!

Check out the rest of the videos here!

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:01:26 — 49.3MB) | Embed

Why you should always use the alt attribute

I noticed something strange this week when I was looking at my blog stats: I was getting traffic through direct referral from BuzzFeed.

How odd, I thought. What on Novice No Longer could possibly be relevant to BuzzFeed?

It wasn’t my homepage that was linked, but a specific article: Getting a busy and being social for the socially awkward.

The link was from an article titled 28 Problems Every Type-A Person Will Understand. It wasn’t until I viewed the article and got to number 18 that I realized the relevance — they weren’t linking to my article exactly, but to an image that I used in the article. They just wanted a picture of a busy calendar, which I included in my post.

I headed over to Google (using incognito) and did an image search for the words “busy calendar.” The picture from my blog that BuzzFeed used in its post was the first result.

So how did I get a picture for my blog to be the top image search result for a fairly common phrase (which ultimately resulted in a link from BuzzFeed)?

The answer is simple: alt attributes. Continue reading →