How to Learn Programming in the First Decade of the New Century

If you're intimidated by tech gobbledygook, turn back now. If you've always wanted to join the ranks of the tech-speaking, app-spinning inner circle, then please cautiously continue. With this blog topic, we'll be diving real-deep, real-fast, and breaking this topic off from the HitTail blog real soon, so it doesn't weigh down the HitTail message of driving more traffic to your site for free.

With that preamble disclaimer done, here we go...

I plan on making the ultimate, free, portable, flexible rapid open source development platform possible, able to be understood and utilized by the largest population possible. I plan on sharing the experience witht he HitTail audience (for starters), and eventually the general Marketing/Programming world.

I'll be using it for professional and personal projects alike. It will replace what I currently use, and refer to as my "Generalized System 3" (GS3). And I'll explain my choice of PHP vs. Python vs. Ruby vs. Lisp vs. JavaScript vs. Java vs. .NET, etc.

But before you get too excited about a big programming language shoot-out, please know I'm probably going to use Ruby, and maybe even just extend Ruby on Rails (ROR) in an obsolescence-resistant fashion. What makes this endeavor different from every other ROR tutorial is the granularity with which I'll be documenting the process, and how the finished product will probably be able to be carried around on a keychain, or perhaps as a continuously running webserver on tomorrow's mobile phones. But it will definitely able to be run as a virtualized instance on any of today's mainstream hardware/OS platforms, making it of immediate use (PCs, Macs, Linux, etc.). It will be the killer, ultimate, free, be-anywhere, do-anything programming buddy—cool enough to let you spin scalable enterprise-class apps, and show-up the "take-six-months-to-write-a-spec" crowd.

This new generalized system and agile development framework is likely to be used on places in the HitTail site, as well as for Connors clients. In the spirit of David Heinemeier Hansson and 37Signals, I'll be sharing the process, and much of the code with the world, in the hopes of creating a lot of corollary excitement surrounding HitTail. In the spirit of Paul Graham (Lisp) and Hansson (Ruby), I believe strongly in the merits of a language and agile framework as being a source of extreme competitive advantage.

It's hard to say precisely where I'll go with this project, but the first baby-step starts out here (in describing the project), and I will tap the power of my existing GS3, which provides a baby-step documentation framework, and a minimum-model for what the new stuff should support.

So, this post starts a long and interesting journey, which is more of a side-project to HitTail than directly HitTail-related. While it's not precisely HitTail-related, this is currently the best soapbox I have, and therefore the place I'd like to get it started. And I plan on rolling out a tutorial style I hope will sweep the Internet, called "baby step tutorials". True baby-steps are possible on the Internet in a way they're not in other media like books, because to document every little step would kill too many trees with paper. But with .html files, it just pumps up page views and makes me more money if I run advertising. So, it's a double-win. I document with insanely granular detail.

This process should be of interest to programmer-wanna-be's of the sort that fill the ranks of Marketing departments around the world, who are generally intimidated by the choices, tools, and discussions that surround getting started with programming. Have you looked at the selection of books in the programming section of a Barnes and Noble or Borders lately? It's crazy! I'll explain along the way why this is, and what the "most right" choices for the "least-programmer-like" people are. The average citizen can be a programmer today, with minimum fuss. You're not on the bleeding edge anymore. Programming's easy stuff.

And unlike previous attempts I've made at doing this, I'll do it right this time. The reason that it will not be an aborted attempt this time (I've had false starts in the past) is that I'll be leveraging the power of my already created GS3 as a blue-print, plus the best of what's out there today, plus I have HitTail's momentum and celebrity to ride. I now know what it means to finish things and do them right.

The public will be able to observe, interact, push me forward, and tweak me in certain directions as I go.

While this blog post kicks it off, I will use the comment field underneath to link into the non-blog pages, where this will reside.

Marketing Gurus

This post is about sex and the city, small worlds, marketing gurus, and a new book promotion technique. Lately, I've noticed a trend of book authors referring to us prolific pontificators of marketing-speak in posts that are mostly about promoting new books. Bravo to David Meerman Scott of Web Ink Now with his brilliant book announcement that credits us contributors to the New Rules of Marketing & PR who now can't resist linking to him at every opportunity. It's nice that the PR firm and creators of HitTail, Connors Communications, are acknowledged leaders in writing the new rules.

But that's not what this post is about. It's about another book: Book Yourself Solid by Michael Port.

The latest book shows us that if actors can segue into politics, then they can also segue into marketing. Where better to tap a little bit of celebrity? But I didn't know this, until I got this email from a co-worker (published with permission):

What a small world. Michael Port used to be the manager at the Reebok Club and actually hired me there. When I met him he was an actor who had just been on a Sex and the City episode – the one where Mr. Big takes Carrie to the small, out of the way Chinese restaurant and she thinks it’s because he doesn’t want to be seen with her. Anyway – he then went to open the gym Clay on 14th Street (that Jackie belongs to) and now – marketing guru. Who knew!! Here’s his imdb page if you’re interested.

But even more interesting than the circumstances of this guy's marketing career is what he is saying. I'd love to pull a specific quote and show you. But his description of why HitTail is important, and "way better than anything like Overture or Wordtracker" is built up in a series of paragraphs that must be read in continuous context. As all HitTailers already know, and mainstream marketers are beginning to discover, it's not the keywords that give you bragging rights that matter. It's the conglomeration of "everything else" that counts. And lurking beneath the surface of "everything else" are tons of under utilized, most promising keywords that have the real potential of leading potential customers, clients and new audience to your site.

By the way, Michael Port's book is about sales lead generation, a topic dear to my heart, and the fire in which HitTail was actually forged. It is very possible to do exactly what Michael Port suggests--generate more sales leads than you know what do do with (or can handle). After I first used long tail keyword marketing techniques at a previous employer, I generated so many sales leads per day, that the "old school" marketing guys disbelieved that they were really potentially qualified leads, and tried to disqualify them on the grounds that they came in through the Web. They are no longer with the company.

Online Marketing Webinars Coming Soon to HitTail

This HitTail blog post sets the stage for weekly chats with Mike Levin on popular recurring issues. The first is one alluded to by John Battelle in the earliest days of HitTail, when he said:

But....something about it strikes me as...well...inorganic. I recall fondly
how editors would respond to surveys we'd do telling them what to write
about....What do you think?

So, what do you think? This and more, we'll be discussing at the new HitTail daily Webinars. These Webinars will be nice and informal at first, with a countdown clock revealing what hour they're going to be held. Everyone online at the time can participate. As they get more popular, we'll start scheduling topics and moderating more carefully. But to continue the "is HitTailing a good idea" theme, there's this very recent post from Jos Schuurmans that every HitTailer should read. What would you do in this dilema:

It might work, and it may even be worth trying. But the funny thing is, it would
disctract me from the conversations I'd otherwise rather engage in. I'm sure
many bloggers will feel the same dilemma.

So stay tuned for the HitTail Webinar feature to be rolled out sometime very soon.

Benevolent Design Confluence & My Life Straw Revelation

So, I haven't blogged for awhile, but it's not for lack of material. I sometimes think I could blog as a full-time job. So bear with my as I pack maybe a month's worth of thoughts and serendipity-packed experiences into one long, excessively rambling blog post. It MAY be worth it for about 1 in 10 of you.

My to-blog list on my phone has about 100 items, and just as I'm prioritizing them, a new item trumps the entire list, such as my weekend visit to the National Design Museum on Museum Row in New York City. I was walking along Fifth Ave. with my girlfriend, and noticed some cool billboard graphics of things like collapsible canoes, filtered life straws working off ground water, and a whole bunch of kooky huts and shelters in the garden behind a wrought iron fence.

After a moment of prodding from Rachel, as she identified this as "my thing", I was hooked, paid the price of admission, and rushed into the garden.

And I was delightfully rewarded when I discovered an actual OLPC (one laptop per child) in one of the global village huts. It's sort of like Etch-A-Sketch had a baby with the Sony VAIO, and had Al Gore for a nanny. The exhibit was called "Design for the Other 90%". I was like a hog in mud. I saw water tanks that unraveled like wallpaper from a spool (sooooo obvious, but no less cool). I saw tiny semi-permanent shelters with loft beds that could be constructed in a half-day. I saw a line of products from something called Moneymaker, which lets you make bricks from native mud plus tiny portions of concrete. And I saw a host of water-pumps and filtration devices to ensure that you both had your water, and that it was safe to drink.

Basically, I saw the future catching up with the present. It's not all about hybrid cars incrementally bringing out-of-control energy consumption of us privileged 10% under control. But it's about improving the lives and bringing happiness and the ability to bring upper-states of Maslow's hierarchy of human needs to the world--in my mind, maybe the noblest endeavor in human history!

So, this is my element. I'm a frustrated mechanical engineer who realized I should have gone into "applied engineering" who actually got into graphic design as a sort of cop-out. Drexel University's design arts program in Philadelphia was awesome, and I studied under one of the most talented people I ever met, but it was admittedly advertising-oriented graphic design--and not industrial design, applied engineering, and certainly not one of the super-noble branches of engineering, such as "closed systems" that will ensure the survival of the human race (by giving us viable ways to get off the planet). Alas, I am but a mere graphic designer, who managed to cobble together enough programming skills to make HitTail. And now, I'm seeing the whole world that I shut myself off from by taking the path of least resistance.

So, is this a lost dreams bellyaching post? Not at all! This is an "it's never too late" post--because HitTail is an interesting intermediary project between graphic design and tangible social good. HitTail allows people around the world to pursue their dreams, and work towards becoming the best in the world at their niche specialty. I'm currently going through the unique experience of clawing my way out of the ticky-tacky little box (watchers of Showtime's Weeds will get the reference), and into the society of people who get things done and make a difference.

I visited my old haunting grounds last week when I visited the opening of Seth Godin's book tour, for his new book, The Dip. Seth enthusiastically detailed how many of us should go the entrepreneurial route, and in doing so, try to be the best in the world at some particular thing. Seth made passing mention of Chris Anderson's book, The Long Tail, which cleared the way for HitTail's mainstream emergence. And I wanted to make the point about how the "best in the world" concept dovetailed perfectly well with the longtail concept, because first you choose a place in the long tail of underdeveloped businesses, then you become the best in the world at it, turning an otherwise pittance of profits into a plethora of perpetual proceeds.

So, I asked Seth a question when it opened for question and answers, and when it came my turn and I introduced myself, Seth proclaimed he was a fan of HitTail, and invited me to tell the room about the site.

Wow, what a kick!

To have Seth Godin, one of the biggest marketing gurus in the world, to publicly proclaim himself a fan of a site that nothing more than a good idea a year ago. On that merit alone, this is a blog post that needs to be written.

But wait, there's more!

While I was in Philadelphia on the Walnut Street Bridge at the World Cafe (Seth's venue in Philly), I decided to slip into Drexel's Nesbitt Design Arts building (now the Antoinette Westphal College of Media Arts & Design) and walk right into a few classrooms to see if I could drop in on some of my old college instructors. And low and behold, on my first attempt into the first room, I discovered a classroom of students wrapped up under the tutelage of John Langdon, the fellow getting his 15 minutes of fame (soon) from the ambigrams in Dan Brown's book, Angels and Demons. This was (shamefully) the first time I saw him in 15 years, but our repertoire was picked up instantly, as we had stayed casually in touch over email. I learned that I missed the premiere showing of the Helvitica documentary by one day. It was a big deal, and one piece of serendipity that I missed in this amazing few weeks.

Now keep in mind, this is against a backdrop of HitTail winning first place in a venture capitalist show-and-tell hosted by Alan Brody of iBreakfast, where we took first prize and won a chance to present at the next VC contest. Plus, we were short-listed onto the potential winners of an international innovation contest being held by one of our high profile clients. So, I'm flying pretty high right now.

My trip back from Philly to New York was ironically rushed to meet a Philadelphian in New York, Josh Kopelman. Now Josh, the founder of Half.com, subsequently bought by eBay, is something of a hero from where I come from. He's a Wharton Business School graduate who actually followed the dream on the fast path out of college. I saw his building go up by the side the PA Turpike, every time I drove on my way to Scala. I spent about 8 years of my life attempting to pursue the dream at Scala, while my contemporaries like Josh were actually doing it right. It's never too late to learn. And one success leads to the next, leads to the next. It's the first one that's the trick. And the details of what you do later in your life, don't have to have anything to do with the details of your first venture.

But in the case of HitTail, it's not a bad thing if they do.

Because my very first real successful venture is about helping people improve their own lives. And who would have thought that the end-result of a career in graphic design would have led to anything in the least-bit altruistic? Which is reinforced by the concept that the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum lays claim to applied engineering under the auspices of design! The world is slowly turning in my direction, and I'm slowly turning in the world's direction. And the confluence of design, engineering, and the all-around betterment of life for "most" of the people on the planet is a nice trend. And I see in my mind a nice continuous development of HitTail into the dream-machine. Today, HitTail tells you what to write about in order to increase your sphere of influence. Tomorrow, HitTail pairs you with your entrepreneurial partners to actually achieve your dreams and improve the world.

But it'll take a few years to get there. For now, I'll be happy issuing writing suggestions and increasing HitTailers' personal spheres of influence. But the message of this blog post which I still have to deliver in a clear fashion is the same as the message I delivered to Sandy Stewert's class (who I visited right after John Langdon's).

Design is everything. Humans design. It's what we do. And whether it's graphics, interiors, industry or chip layout, it's all pretty much the same. Design, combined with the willingness to cross disciplines, coupled with a sense of benevolence, appropriateness, and positive optimism can lead to a very appealing future-scenario. Such scenarios, I believe, are only being heralded by a select few, such as Nick Negroponte of the OLPC initiative, turning him into something of a hero to me. But there are others out there, doing the same from a much lower profile, and more "applied engineering" vantage point. These are people who really make a difference--such as the person who made the life straw--perhaps the ultimate example.

Want more of wacky ramblings like this? Hop onto the Asteroid.

HitTail Hits the Wall Street Journal

HitTail made the WSJ. Choose your words for the Web carefully.

Top 5 SEO Tools

eMom strikes again. Any friends of the HitTail cause know what to do.

HitTail Inside the Tornado? So Some Think.

If saying a thing and getting others to repeat it makes it true, then HitTail has a very bright future. Case-in-point: the new, but still fascinating Toshihiro Tova blog. In particular, on this post, one of my all-time-favorite topics of seminal or quintessential business books, such as Geoffrey Moore's Inside the Tornado, James Surowiecki's The Wisdom of Crowds, or Chris Anderson's The Long Tail. Interestingly, this post is about all three and more. I eat these books up like candy, and internalize their messages like sports-fans inexplicably memorizing stats.

It's a rather long blog post, but there is one sentence in particular that naturally caught my attention, because if true, holds very exciting days ahead for HitTail and all its users and customers:

Not every company finds themselves inside the tornado having to deal with hypergrowth. And since the bust, it’s even fewer. But still, it does happen, such as with MySpace. And Connors may have such a case in HitTail–only time will tell.

Well, HitTail is the perfect storm, is it not? All the pre-qualifying conditions are met, are they not? Marketers around the world are worn down trying to make sense of analytics, alternatively hiring specialists, trying to make sense of it for themselves, and writing the whole thing off as an exercise in information paralysis. They're tired of being beholden to one traffic arbitrage provider--Google via AdWords--and they're looking for alternatives. The AdWord budgets have grown so ridiculously large, that it's an easy matter to take, maybe 25% of that budget, and try new things.

And when you select those new things, there's two things you should be wary of.

The first thing is everything else that looks exactly like AdWords, but delivers that much less pre-qualified traffic. Don't get me wrong. Alternative PPC products may be awesome. But all you're doing is reallocating WHERE you're buying your PPC traffic. You still however have not truly diversified your online marketing strategy. You just moved numbers between columns.

The second thing to avoid is the big SEO gamble. You're going to pour countless amounts of money into an infrastructure tear-down and rebuild, which is more painful than the loss of traffic from not having the correct infrastructure in the first place. If an SEO consultant starts discussing scrap and rebuild on the first meeting, think "warning lights." And even if it's the pursuit of best practices through projects like the search friendly URLs (URL rewriting), it's still a gamble that they can work with your Tech Team and get it fully and successfully implemented.

So, where SHOULD you drop your diversification penny? (or about 25% of your overall AdWords budget). The answer is long tail targeting. Just select a blogging platform, preferably one that meets our HitTail qualifications, meaning SquareSpace, TypePad, Blogger or WordPress. Work it into your existing website. Write off the non-optimized portions for a couple of months. And revel in the free traffic that is low hanging fruit.

Stop me before I mix metaphors again. But the point is, natural search optimization, using a sane, proven and safe method, is EXACTLY the right place to diversify your online marketing campaign. Connors Communications has clients whose sites are about 1000x larger than they started out, where the original "dynamic" site is dwarfed many times over by the content that they deliberately wrote and added, knowing (thanks to HitTail's ancestors) that qualified traffic would follow.

This is a capability traditionally held in reserve for Connors' clients, which we're rolling out for free as an overture to the world. PR firms aren't such bad guys. In fact, a few of us are even some of the good guys, on all the right sides in the DRM war, Open Source war, Net Neutrality war, war against Spam, and ultimately, expanding the rights and capabilities of the individual.

And when you pick HitTail apart, isn't that what we're ultimately doing? Expanding the capabilities of the individual by giving them a much louder voice, and resultantly more influence, in the blogosphere--and the overall "InterWeb" in general?

We think so. And so far, the Wisdom of Crowds agrees.

So won't you join us on our journey inside the tornado?

Success in Google in 2007? HitTail Nearly Top Tool

Hey, this is something pretty cool that I just realized today.

First we made Larry Chase's list of top 50 sites for Search Engine Optimization. Then we made ProBlogger's Top-20 things to do in 2007 to market your blog. Then we made eMom's Entrepreneur.com Top-10 Free Website Tools and Services. As of mid-March, we made Search Marketing's Top 5 hot tips to turn the heat up on your AdWords campaign.

Notice a trend?

I guess we're working our way up to #1, and judging by the amazing response to our "charter member" promotion that lasted through April 30th, we're on our way.

So my question for the HitTailers of the world is this:

Does anyone want to step up and name us the single most innovative and important thing to do to your site in 2007? You'll be in good company, because BusinessWeek sort of already did. But we're looking for genuine, from the trenches quotes.

Comments welcome.

Thanks, and a Special Offer Coming

Thanks to everyone who participated in our introductory pricing, which ended on April 3oth. Stay tuned for an interesting follow-up opportunity to you folks who locked in your "charter membership" status!