Move Your Brain Online, Get A Bigger Hard Drive

I had a problem. I would constantly find an interesting or helpful article/website/bit of information but never had any good place to store it. I’d tried bookmarks, social bookmarking sites, Evernote, and every other tool that would pop onto my radar. While many of these tools are great, and work well for a large number of people, none of them ever worked for me.

Snippets of websites, tags, text recognition, all lacked one vital element for my needs: a greater sense of context. I didn’t want to just save a website; I wanted to put that website into a larger context. It needed to fit into a comfortable nook within my existent knowledge. It needed to be a flexible and robust encyclopedia for my brain.

That’s when it clicked. I needed my own personal Wikipedia.

Continue reading →

Programming, Rubik’s Cubes, and unconscious incompetence

The “conscious competence” learning model describes four stages of competence. The first stage is “unconscious incompetence,” which is the state of not even knowing what you don’t know. Not even Google can help because you don’t even know what to type into the search bar. Last year, when I made the decision to learn how to code, this is how I felt. I was an English major in college and had used it to rack up retail experience. My knowledge of computers, while passionate, came strictly from recreational experience. Continue reading →

5 things to learn before starting a personal blog

I was browsing my blog archives the other day and realized that I was nearing my two year anniversary of starting this website. As of March 10th, 2012, IAmDann.com will be two years old. I’ve got enough content to no longer feel like I’m just “faking it,” so to speak. It’s awesome. For anyone who doesn’t have a blog: start one. It’s extremely easy and it will teach you a lot about the internet and how it all works. Plus, you’ll have a place to post your thoughts and pictures that allows you to retain the rights—much better than turning those rights over to some social networking site.

Here are a five tips and tricks I’ve picked up over the past two years. Understand these and you’ll not only have your own blog but it’ll be better than most other websites out there.

Update: Check out my free video course for help setting getting a domain and hosting, and installing WordPress! Continue reading →

The early adopter’s guide to keeping your information safe

So, you’re an early adopter. I am too. For me, it may even be an addiction. I bounce from Hacker News to Tech Crunch to Tech Meetups like it’s no one’s business. I religiously listen to start-up and tech related podcasts on my daily commute. Sometimes I feel like I’m trying out a new website or business every day.

But with innovation happening so fast, it’s really easy to get lost in a sea of new accounts. And when you’re lost, it’s really easy to compromise important information. If you’re like me and you fall into the “early adopter” category of consumers, here’s a few tips to keep you organized and your information safe. Continue reading →

How I made my iPhone app: from idea to app store

UPDATE: When you’re done with this article, check out how I made (and got press on Lifehacker and Yahoo! for) my OS X app WorkBurst, two years later. I learned a lot in that time!

My first iPhone app, Reader Tracker, is officially available in the iPhone/iPad App Store! It’s been a long journey from idea to app store (much of which was spent distracted by other half-finished projects) so it’s very exciting to finally see a finished product available for sale.

Coming from a non-technical background, I wanted to show the work that got an app into the App Store. There are numerous articles imploring “idea” entrepreneurs to stop searching for a technical co-founder and to hire freelance. And this is another one of those articles. While building an iPhone app is a bit different than building a website/web application, the principals are the same. Continue reading →