Manager: BigBoss is putting even more pressure on us to complete the database project of doom. You need to work faster. I may get a metronome or whip for this very reason.
Me: I will bean you in the head with a metronome and the idea of you with a whip skeeves me. I will use it to trip you and make you fall down.
Manager: Oh. But we do need to work faster.
Me: No prob. I’ll just put the rest of my job on hold today, ‘kay?
Manager: Sounds good.
…you are your main source of uniqueness. If everything on your blog can be found everywhere else in your niche, why should someone choose to read you? (link)
More to the point, if everything on your blog can be found elsewhere, what the hell are you doing with a blog in the first place?
Things you don’t want to hear from a customer first thing in the morning upon asking for a color separated version of their? artwork:
I’ve heard #1 many times, but #2 was a new one. Thankfully, it was a relatively simple logo, and not too hard to rebuild in Illustrator. (And for a 10 year old, it was very good work!)
Dear customer -
We don’t have the font you want. We don’t even have something close to it. I cannot magic it out of thin air, and there is no freeware clone floating on teh interwebs. You really will have to send it to us if you want us to use it. Your very important rush job is GOING NOWHERE until you either send us the damn font, or choose a font that we do have. (Yes, our default font list is lame. I know.)
No, the .gif from your website WILL NOT work. It is tiny and will look like ten kinds of crap on press. No, saving the .gif as a .pdf will STILL not work. It’s still a tiny, crappy file. I’m sorry that your designer isn’t returning your calls, but that doesn’t change what I need from you.
I’ve asked you for a .ttf font file about five times now. I’ve been asking politely. Please understand that I’m not doing this for my health or my own amusement. I need that file in order to produce your job the way you want it. Really. My whole purpose here is to help you get what you ordered, but you have to work with me a little, or nothing is happening. At all.
I understand that you’re a struggling artist with a (very cool) niche webcomic. You’re just trying to get by, and many people have told you that the more eyeballs you can get to your site, the more attractive it will be to advertisers, and the more money you can make by selling ads on the site. That right? Did I miss anything?
Good, because you did. Depending on the tools you’re using, it’s anywhere from possible to disgustingly easy to enable the same “monetizing tools” you use on your website on a newsfeed. The part where said tools don’t do much for you unless you’re already getting a lot of traffic (like, say, Penny Arcade) is another post entirely.
Once upon a time, when teh internets were small, people would bookmark websites and visit them with regularity, hoping for new stuff. Then we got lots of websites that we wanted to keep up with, and manually checking different sites for new content got unwieldy.
Enter RSS, which lets you tell everyone when you have new content. You don’t *have* to put the content in the feed itself (though it’s nice if you do), you can just use it as an announcement service (like S*P). Without a newsfeed, you might get my eyeballs once every other month. With a newsfeed, you can get my eyeballs every time you post new work. That’s a good thing, right?
Finally, not running a newsfeed will in no way keep people from stealing, misappropriating, scraping, leeching, or otherwise doing things with your content that you’d prefer they not do. No, it really will not stop them. This is the internet and sometimes people just suck.