I saw Despicable Me over the weekend with Rachel, intuitively knowing it was the type of movie that was made specifically for me. There could not have been a better match in life for me than this movie. It has all the elements of what I absolutely love and need in a movie, sharing that characteristic of so many books that I have read in my life that for which the timing of the reading selection seemed to be timed for me through providence. We were a bit late walking in, but thankfully I was sitting down as Gru was walking around his neighborhood for some bad-ass exposition. The music seized me immediately, as the type of ego-boosting, adrenaline-rushing music that I have begun seeking out to help me focus at work.

I’m listening to the Despicable Me soundtrack right now, and went on a sort of music buying binge–at least by my standards–getting a bunch of classics I’ve loved all my life, and have only ever had in the past through less auspicious means. When you’re willing to pay for music, it takes on a whole new level of ease and good feeling. I wish I was supporting the artists directly–but a lot of them are old TV classics. At forty years old, I am finally starting to discover my taste in music, and it echo’s my taste in drugs–caffeine, that is. After Despicable Me, that uncannily refers to steamrolling–one of my all-time favorite metaphors–I’ll be listening to:

• Iko Iko
• A Boy Named Sue
• The Devil Came Down To Georgia
• Johnny B. Goode
• Underdog
• Knight Rider
• Fresh Prince Of Belair
• The A-Team
• Honk Kong Phooey
• Spider-Man
• The Sorcerer’s Apprentice
• Eye of The Tiger

The purpose of music for me seems to be to put me in a mindset of achieving great things, drowning out background noise, and getting and keeping my adrenaline pumping at a pretty consistent level.

This post is the next in the thoughts I began over here at my Tumblr site, MikeLevin.me where I was looking for feel-good caffeinated instrumental music to work as a practical alternative to white-noise. It seems that I am developing an ability to focus.

I’m a few days from forty, living in New York, with my first kid in the way, and just discovering the culture that surrounds Paul Graham’s Y-Combinator HackerNews. I was a typical suburbanite with too little gumption to have clawed my way to entreprenurialism on my own, but just enough to do so with the extra push and enablement that the Internet and a community like HackerNews provides. I’ve upgraded my existence and mentality to that of NYC, and am always now seeing out insider brilliance for a competitive edge.

I love HackerNews. I’m not sure how yet, but unlike the other feeds I subscribe to and have tested over the years, articles from people like me, developers with entrepreneurial spirit get into the feed.

I’ve been a Slashdot reader for years, and have cobbled together what I though to be the ideal ensemble of RSS feeds to capture all that I care about, with not too much redundancy. After Slashdot, Techmeme acts as a safety net, ensuring that the zeitgeist of the day doesn’t escape me. Everything else is filler, I might mark-read.

Reddit and Digg feeds never floated my boat either, but I always appreciated the rare awesome article from developers like Ted Dziuba or Graham Dumpleton. Problem is, it sucks to choose just a few, or get into the game of subscribing to them all, or even knowing who’s doing awesome writing NOT on the list of usual suspects. What feed captured those occasional eventful articles that come out of left field?

The first time I discovered HackerNews, I didn’t know I was looking at exactly that, because the first thing I do when discovering a new promising news feed is drop it into Google Reader, and let the RSS feed take over. And unfortunately, HackerNews’ RSS feed only contained headlines, and not article excerpts, like Slashdot. I believed article content in the RSS feed to be a deal-breaker necessity, because I do almost all of my article reading and headline-scanning on the NYC subway… offline!

Another thing that turned me off about HackerNews was that it had about 10x more articles than any other feed I subscribed to, so always made my “unread” counter dauntingly large. And, when went there to read, no matter how tantalizing the headline, there was no article content! I took to emailing myself the interesting article headline links, and going through them at the office–frustrating and inefficient, at best.

Therefore, I gave up on HackerNews for awhile, going back to my old-timer Slashdot/Techmeme approach, until a barrage of related articles convinced me I was missing the boat. You can just feel when more interesting things are going on in the industry than what the Slashdot gatekeepers and Techmeme algorithms are letting through. You can feel it in the condescending attitude towards the new kid on the block. In particular, I’ve been hungry for more information about NoSQL options, as I would like to cut my teeth on them. I’ve been leaning towards Berkley HDF5, due to its long-standing support, particularly in Python. But I know that both Cassandra and CouchDB are Apache projects. Plus, now there’s Membase–one that powers the silly Farmville app in Facebook, but which must surely be quite tempered by now. And there are others. It’s a huge career move to delve into one of these things on a new project, and its nice to get opinions from your peers. But the old brigade seems to have nothing but nastiness and an “I told you so” attitude when it comes to NoSQL. But I know there’s a lot of positives surrounding the NoSQL approach. Where were the people trying out this stuff and loving it? Where were THEIR articles? So, I went hunting…

…and re-discovered HackerNews. Now, I was determined to get it onto my iPhone, and started to suspect that maybe the problem was in my RSS reader.

I happened to be on the Reeder RSS app on the iPhone 4 (and still am) for its awesome interface to mark things as read with a single swoosh from the headline view. But I remembered my time with Byline, and how “Send to Instapaper” worked while offline. So, I went back to having two RSS readers on my iPhone–Byline just for HackerNews. It worked well for queuing interesting sounding articles for later reading. I was incrementally less frustrated.

If I remembered to sync–first Byline, then Instapaper, I could enjoy the articles from my last headline-browsing session on my next subway ride, making the subway a place for almost timely full-article-reading, in addition to headline scanning.

If only there were a better way… then it hit be like a bolt! A feature of Byline that I always seem to ignore was allowing me to do just that. For you see, Byline actually caches the full article content moments after it downloaded the RSS. And I was now using Byline dedicated for HackerNews anyway, for its ability to send to Instapaper while offline, but I was doing one better than that already, without even knowing it. I was getting the full cached articles on every sync–especially when I synced from WiFi before leaving the house. But even on AT&T 3G network in Manhattan, it’s not too shabby.

Why did I have this blind spot? Because when I tried using Byline as my MAIN RSS reader, with a dozen or so feeds, the caching feature felt like the kiss of death. I set the settings to only allow it when I had WiFi, and then I almost always ignored it, because I never synced when I had WiFi, so I was never getting a sampling of cached articles, and being exposed to this feature.

So now, I consider Byline my dedicated HackerNews reader. I have it set to cache articles whether on WiFi or 3G. And now I feel like I’m getting the insider entrepreneurial developer scoop on what’s going on in tech.

And yes, I maintain two RSS readers. It’s a bit of extra overhead, and I keep toying with the idea of consolidating all my RSS reading activity onto Byline, and giving Reeder’s awesome user interface the boot. But I keep coming back to… why ruin my HakerNews experience with stories from all those other sources whose agenda seems to be subtly misaligned with my own. I want to know why jQuery’s $(document).ready() might be slowing me down, and people’s experiences on how open the OpenStack cloud farm really is. HackerNews talks exactly about these types of things.

I just created a bio on myself for a sales pitch I’m going on. It provided me a unique opportunity to see my bio lined up against a number of others. Sheesh! It’s friggin’ time for me to stop being so modest, especially in light of this study that found out how much the odds are stacked against modest men. I guess that would explain a lot about my life. Ha ha!

When I write my bio, I get to say I have over 20 years experience in technology and marketing. This does count my co-op time with Commodore Computers, while I was a student at Drexel University, but I think it’s totally fair. I went with them on trade-shows, I visited college campuses, I did artwork and programming for official sales demos, and the like. It was completely valid work experience, and “dates me” back to the late 80’s. But, now I’m up to TWENTY years, counting my college co-op experience as only two. Technically, it all started in 88, but I subtract 2 years, due to the part-time nature of Commodore.

These days, when I describe my current job, I can no longer just say that I merely oversee SEO accounts as a director of strategy, because for awhile now, I’ve actually also been doing product development again, albeit in stealth mode–thank goodness–development is food for the soul in SEO, because it’s the only way I can have integrity anymore. Search engine optimization has always been a field of snake-oil salesmen and lack-of-accountability that drives me crazy. My entire career has been the gradual move away from all that is subjective, such as graphic design, to all that is objective, like… well, definitely NOT like SEO… but then, that is the reason I’m always led back to product development.

Without it in SEO, you’re firing blind, plain and simple. Sure there are best practices, and you can spend a lot of time teaching a client how to choose a keyword-per-page, and make sure that the chosen keyword evaluates to some traffic, and occurs in the title tag, headline and URL, and then is linked-to from a few other better established pages on the Internet you control. But that’s about all there is to the field of “white hat” SEO, and even that is subject to sudden disruption from the constant tweaks and changes to the search engines–especially now, with local and universal search. Without unique NON-best-practices, you’re just kind of stuck there pushing on a rope. This has always led me to creative solutions WHERE I CONTROL the tracking-gif, WHERE I CONTROL the site-crawl, WHERE I CONTROL the content management system. And so, I kept developing and kept inventing, because you’re rarely get the control, the insight, the nimbleness you need by becoming an expert on someone elses product, you don’t control.

It’s always interesting when it gets up to the point of listing my previous experience in these bios. Even though I never really “made it” in the sense of the Dotcom founders and cashed-out millionaires, I still can say that one of my tools made BusinessWeek’s best ideas of 2006 with one of those systems to prevent you from firing blind. That is HitTail, of course–an on-again/off-again endeavor of mine carried out for a previous employer, from which I can’t seem to escape. It’s one of those tracking systems like Google Analytics, but specifically for SEO. It’s a testament to how well I designed it, that it’s been mostly self-running for the better part of 4 years, needing only occasional server maintenance. I am currently thinking through how to handle it, and really only stay involved because my reputation has gotten wrapped up in it. I must either distance myself from it, or fully embrace it. This middle-ground is no good.

But thank goodness, my online reputation is NOT ONLY HitTail. For example, when you Google me, my LinkedIn account has risen above all the other MikeLevin websites I’ve created, due to the 50 recommendations I received during the one and only time in my adult life that I was unemployed in my career, and happened to reach out. Wow, did I have some karma built up. Thanks, everyone!

So now, here I am, agency-side in the field of search engine optimization in New York. My professional advantage comes from the actions I take in response to the very contempt I feel for many of the practices and characteristics of my field, that drives me to develop accountability-systems. I frequently run into people who think they know better, and tell me so. Modesty and giving the benefit of the doubt often encourages me to keep my mouth shut, but I always make a mental note to “test that”… and more often than not, I sort out the truth from the bullshit, extending my personal capabilities, and having a better idea about what to take with a grain of salt.

As I approach forty and fatherhood, I find myself contemplating how to keep my professional edge as my world changes around me. It occurs to me that my anchor in life has always been writing, in some form or another, be it hand-written journals, or some electronic format. And I made the determination to always be writing, whenever my attention doesn’t need to be on the real world. That writing keeps me focused and on-task.

This works out quite well in the information age for a knowledge worker. A rarely discussed fact is that it doesn’t matter precisely how you get your work done, so long as you do. If you were hired by a modern company, there is a good chance that no one knows more about your job than you do. The vision that the top-dog knows how to do the job of everyone beneath him or her is, and only needs employees for lack-of-time is dead wrong. You hire people because they know MORE than you do in their area of expertise, and they only need your company, in a sense, to outsource paperwork and payroll. As Drucker would say, they only need you because they can be more productive in your company than on their own.

Of course, fear–or shall I call it, risk aversion, is the other goblin keeping all truly skilled knowledge workers from striking out on their own as an entrepreneur, or at least a contractor. A steady paycheck and healthcare benefits are nice for folks establishing families. If you’re going to jump off a cliff and learn to fly, it’s best not to do it with your family in tow. So the risky entrepreneurial thing is a young man or woman’s game, and you get a new crop of these types from the Bay Area, New York or Boston culture. They’re tuned in and turned on, and the amount you can accomplish at a young age with the Internet, a good idea, and a tiny bit of funding is staggering and intoxicating.

But once you miss that window, your brain is rewired, and your opportunities dry up–right? Wrong! I’m a suburban Philly kid born in 1970, introduced to the mundane Brady Bunch suburban existence. Somehow, I missed the entrepreneurial winner-bug. I suspect it was in part from lack of exposure, and I never really “got” what it was like to be insanely more advanced than those around you, until I got my hands on the Amiga computer in my senior year in high school. By a phenomenal coincidence, Commodore, the company that acquired the Amiga, was in my back yard, and I managed to hook up with them.

I then proceeded to watch it disintegrate from an insider’s perspective–a secret fanboy living my dream, having been beamed up by the mothership, then having my heart broken as I witnessed it all fall apart. I saw how dropping a super-potent chunk of excellence into a vat of undiluted suburbia could dissolve away every last trace of what you loved. You would have thought this was my coming of age, and loss of innocence. But no! I was to stay innocent, but angry and strangely effective through the years–until I finally, with the help of New York, resolved the schism in my self-image this created.

I jumped the Commodore ship along with the rest of the rats during my senior year in college, as I had to take over a family check cashing business when my father died. In the course of running that business, I had to deal with an estranged sister moving back in on me, a mother’s decent into bona fide insanity, and finally an attempted robbery by way of hammer to the back of my head. I dealt with this the way I dealt with everything else in my life–appropriate force. So, I shot the guy.

Uh, yeah, so as you might imagine that my path through life has not followed exactly the entrepreneur-in-training path as others, even from my own very neighborhood that has produced dot-com millionaires. After suburbia dissolved away all that was exciting about Commodore, and I sold the check cashing company, I tried getting myself back on track by hitching my wagon to one of the few Commodore spin-off stars. The Commodore ship-jumpers longing for the Bay Area flocked to Trip Hawkin’s Amiga-like 3DO. The ones left over in Bumblefuck, PA–such as myself–flocked to a certain not-to-be-named software company, where I proceeded to have my heart broken YET again–but this time, by suburban mediocrats who still somehow still believed they were hot shit by association with Commodore.

I did great things, including creating a very Ruby-on-Rails-type joyful agile framework based on VBScript in 1999. With it, I subsequently created blogging software at about the same time as Pyra (now Blogger). I created a search-engine-friendly content management system based on generalized XSLT data transformations before Google’s ascension to fame. I created a manufacturing bill of materials system, a shipping system, an online order management system, and integrated all of them so you could effectively track a customer from their first search-hit. Oh yeah, did I mention I also created a Google Analytics-like tracking gif system.

Against this backdrop, I was actually earning a base salary plus commission–a cut of the gross profits, internationally. This is what motivated to basically rebuild the company’s business systems on my agile framework, for the purpose of “debugging” the company. It sounded like a sweet deal, and actually kept me from my flight to the West Coast and Silicon Valley during those days. Yet somehow, it never payed off. In addition to the income not being there, I was somehow picking up the vibe that I was thought of as a stupid “marketdroid” by my fellow Commodorians who also took verbal jabs at the customer-base through the public support forum of the very startup I worked for. Maybe it was the commission, but it hit me like a rock. This was damn insulting–not just to the customers–but also to me! My brain was re-wired!

Suddenly, it dawned on me. Maybe these Commodore ex-patriots were not merely as good as they made themselves out to be. Maybe all the excellence that I loved in the Amiga was really a result of it’s true inventors: RJ Mical, Jay Miner, Dale Luck and all the others who refused the suburban existence, and were themselves actually screwed by Commodore to the point of embedding the message: “We made the Amiga, they fucked it up” into the very operating system. Maybe I was working with the “they” that the inventors referred to in one of the most notorious Easter Eggs of all time, and that Commodore did not really fail due to poor marketing like the claim that my circle adhered to like a self-image-protecting dogma. Maybe it was this un-derserved ivory tower mentality and customer contempt that killed the Amiga, and the very same fate was destined for for my current gig, and it took the clarity of vision that only comes with commission to let me see.

I decided to investigate.

Interestingly, I had a direct view-port to whether customer sales inquiries were being followed up on at the time, because that aforementioned Ruby-on-Rails-like framework I mentioned was also the basis for a lead generation and customer relationship management system, based on a private continuous discussions that tracked from inquiry to recurring orders. Imagine being able to see the first search hit of interest, then the form being filled out, then an in-bin of inquiries, then subsequent discussions held in a private message-board like system (reminiscent of Facebook’s inbox), and all the communication that goes into solution selling difficult products with long sales cycles, and then seeing the order getting placed, and then all technical support follow-up issues, and then recurring orders being placed, and then their transition into a case study or success story to help with further content production that creates new search hits, and repeats the cycle.

Imagine this all in the year 2000–long before the Facebook/Salesforce connection started to dawn on people–long before anyone recognized Google as the king-maker of our age–long before content management meant anything other than multi-million dollar Documentum and Vignette systems. Within my hand, I had an entire next generation business framework that gave me direct insight to the sales pipeline, and unique understanding of where the bottlenecks were occurring. So, I looked.

Lo-and-behold, almost no prospective customers were receiving a return phone-call, email or post. The nature of the system made it easy to verify. Prospects themselves were posting back into my system questions about where the follow-up was. Solid-looking leads to all appearances were being wholesale ignored with a contempt that could only be equated to what was actually going on with verbal condescension in the public support forum. It was a deadly one-two punch of no follow-up to new customers, and chasing away old ones. It was outright embarrassing, and now thanks to my system, it was transparent and accountable within the company.

It didn’t help that at about this time, the same person responsible for the public condescension of customers in public also tried to disable my system through high tech trickery. By this time, my system was running like a reliable juggernaut of lead-generation, accountability, and condescension censorship–and the board of directors was starting to take notice and asking questions about why sales leads were not being followed-up. Unfortunately, my system was starting to slow down under the load. it was on an incredibly incapable Pentium-III generation computer, and I needed more raw power. I had to fend off uninformed and audits of my work claiming that I was programming inefficiently, and scream bloody murder to get a simple pair of new servers, which proceeded to be taken away from me on arrival. The plan of the mediocrats was to run VMWare Workstation as a virtual host (mind you, not ESX or Server–but WORKSTATION), and put SQL Server and IIS on VMWare sessions, which already proven to be incredibly unreliable under similar circumstances, and give me only a log-in to these sessions.

For anyone familiar with the issues, back in 2004, this amounted to a death-sentence for my reputation for juggernaught-like reliability and unstoppability. With each power-outage, you not only had to wait for the VMWare host to restart, but you manually had to terminal serve into the host, and manually restart each VMWare session. If this happened in the middle of the night, everything stayed down until being discovered in the morning. Yes, automation scripts and monitoring software could mitigate it a bit, but not without race conditions and down-time. It was a pitiful excuse for the company-turning force I was previously applying with just a Pentium-III class computer, and finally promised to exposed the chink in my armor that all the mediocrats were clamoring around looking for.

All the while, I was navigating these treacherous waters with writing. I wrote in my Webmaster Journal–another system written with that aforementioned agile framework. I wrote and I wrote and I wrote. To this day, it’s lurking their in their business systems. I thought out-loud. On my hour-long reverse commute from Philadelphia, out to the boondocks, I listened in my car to Peter Drucker and Sun Tzu on audio cassette to get strategy. I listened to Moby Dick to ensure I wasn’t casting myself into the role of Captain Ahab. I listened to every Sherlock Holmes on audio cassette that my local public liberary offered, to hone my powers of observation and deduction. And I did a bang-up job, effectively steamrolling the mediocrats, and with the help of the board of directors that finally stepped in to take charge, turned the company around to profitability.

I would have probably done quite well for myself financially had I stayed there, enjoying a low cost of living and a percentage of gross revenues as that industry continues to blossom. But I would have gone insane, as the tides of suburbia continued to wash up against my shore, gradually eroding away my character, and giving me the false impression that the whole world is that way, and that it always has to be that difficult. It’s like I trained on Mount Olympus in thin air, and then came down to where the air is richer, and everything suddenly becomes easier.

Peter Drucker’s opinion that a skilled modern knowledge worker only hooks up with a company because he or she can be MORE productive has echoed in my ears through the years. There’s no bemoaning it now, but it certainly would have been wise to go the entrepreneurial route while I was in Philadelphia, my living expenses were low, I had no family to worry about, had piles of ahead-of-its-time technology in my pocket, and could have self-funded. I saw the Google Guys and Mark Zuckerberg ascend. I saw dozens of other smaller players make it and flip–all the while, working for the man, spinning my wheels, never really building anything for myself long-term, and always trying to convince employers to take a risk that I personally wasn’t willing to.

Shame on me, and shame on me for doing it so long that now I have a family on the way, and have even more incentive to go the cautious route. But unlike the thankless, suburban employers of the past, I’m now working for an digital marketing firm in New York City that knows its very health is tied to the sort of inventing in which I specialize and have such a successful track record. Even though it didn’t make me rich, it certainly has left a trail of successes. At the Philly Commodore spin-off, they’re still using my system to this day. From my first job in New York, there’s a Web 2.0 site that continues to make profits while the parent company that incubated it is no longer around.

I basically leave a trail of successful endeavors that aren’t mine, and an even longer trail of writing that never got read by anyone other than myself. And that’s a shame–especially these days where precisely that sort of writing has value in public. With the rare exception, I say to hell with secrecy. Like Seth Godin says, you could write out your business plan and mail it to your compeitor, and it wouldn’t make a bit of difference, because it’s all in the details of day-to-day implementation and your passion and persistence that makes the difference. Its almost never words on a page.

And so it is with that spirit, that I make this blog post as sort of a public commitment to re-engage with online, similar as to I did with HitTail on my first Web 2.0 venture in 2006 when it was just starting to get interesting. But this re-engagement will belong to me, on properties I own and benefit from. It is time to start enjoying the benefits of compound returns over the years. I may be starting a little bit late at forty, and the time-crunch may be on like it never has before, with a little one on the way, but I write anyway.

I started writing in 1988, a year after my discovery of the Amiga computer, and I continue to write today. It’s amazing to me that so much writing has amounted to so little. And so, I shall write publicly now when I can, so at least it can perhaps be read by someone and amount to something, if even a few moments of entertainment. And my subject-matter will be dealing with missing the young man’s entrepreneurial window, and why even that doesn’t have to matter much, when you’re in New York City and you really still “got it”. It’s never too late, and you don’t always have to jump off a cliff to get yourself flying.

I read my custom tailored news every morning on Reeder on my iPhone, for its wonderful one-swoosh mark-as-read feature. I do this offline on the subway one-handedly, with my large Dunkin Donuts coffee in the other. Thanks to Friendfeed, I share my interesting articles as I go to Twitter with the app’s Google-share button, and curse Reeder for not letting me send items to Instapaper for later offline full article reading.

As a small consolation prize, I send the interesting article links to my work email address, since that feature works offline, and lament that I’m not using Byline anymore, which could send items to Instapaper while offline. Of course it just synced up when online–but that’s the exact right behavior. But I’m choosing Reeder’s one-swoosh mark-as-read feature over Byline’s offline Instapaper tagging.

( UPDATE: I discovered a seemingly undocumented “one-swoosh” mark-as-read feature in Byline, if you start your finger in exactly the right spot over the blue dot. There’s no visual feedback, except for the blue dot disappearing if you do it right. It’s nowhere near as nice as Reeder’s great visual feedback, but given Byline’s offline goodness, I just may be going back. )

Byline also has a wonderful right/left swooshing motion reminiscent of eBooks to flip between ARTICLES once you’ve drilled down into the article–but if you have hundreds of articles to catch up on, this is very tedious and inferior to Reeder’s swish convenience on the headline list.

So in other words, Byline is better if you’re offline a lot, have fewer articles to read, like the flipping-between-article experience, and are often interested in the full version of the article later on in Instapaper. This is all the more true because Byline by default caches the entire full version of the article. I rarely let it do that, unless I have WiFi. But bottom line is that Byline is better for getting at the full article, both from offline Instapaper tagging and built-in full article caching.

Reeder is better if you have hundreds of articles to read, but mostly only skim headlines, and are much less interested in the in-article experience, and are willing to jump through hoops for Instapaper. Despite all the wonderful advantages of Byline, I still fit into this later category, and Reeder is hitting my sweet spot. I simply have to scan a large set of headlines and mark them read as quickly as possible (without article drill-down). As much as I want to keep Byline, Reeder has the killer RSS feature for me. It was so much the case, that I had actually deleted Byline from my apps.

I should have prefaced this article with the fact that I started out with on the iPhone with NetNewsWire on day one, moved to NewsStand, then to Byline, and briefly tried out a host of others like MobileRSS, Feedler and Pulse (yes, I have an iPad too). I used to socially share my news merging my shared items from Google Reader and NewsGator with Yahoo Pipes and format it through a PHP proxy for widget-like integration on my website. I’ve been doing this since the Samsung i700 PDA phone, and later on the Sony Ericsson Headline app. So as you can see, I am a long-time hard-core addicted RSS news consumer.

But what inspired me to write this review this morning is actually a new situation that both pleases and frustrates me. And that is the discovery of HackerNews from Paul Graham’s YCombinator. I’ve heard about it for awhile, and finally gave it a chance in my RSS reader, and the good is that it covers dozens of articles of great interest to me that I usually miss. The bad is that the RSS feed only contains headlines, but no article content, and therefore requires ANYTHING you’re interested in to be processed for later reading.

That is EXACTLY the sore-spot of Reeder, which I have settled on. If I were on Byline still, this would be no problem, because I’d just tap the Send to Instapaper button that works offline. But in Reeder, it’s a pain in the ass, sending myself emails and emails, then having them waiting in my in-bin when I arrive to work for subsequent drill-down into a Web browser and then Instapaper bookmarklet clicking–while at work.

The solution is half-assed, but I’m doing it now anyway. I’m re-installing Byline on my iPhone, and filtering out everything but HackerNews. Now, whenever I go down into the subway, I have two RSS feeders that I have run to let grab and store the latest RSS feeds while I wait in line for coffee.

UPDATE: After having re-installed Byline on my iPhone 4, I have found that it has made HackerNews usable. HackerNews has THE BEST article headlines listed for my entrepreneur / developer demographic, but no article content. Having the offline Instapaper feature, plus caching of full-article content when broadband is available, is absolutely perfect with Byline, and I find myself once again cursing Reeder and Byline for not being the combined ultimate app. So for now, TWO RSS readers, it is.

Hello again. I’m on the subway, tapping this out one handed on my iPhone. I have to be careful about writing about writing. It’s what I tend to do when I sit down on the subway without a desktop or Internet connection to screenshot and fact-check. It’s certainly hard to do the writing for my new hard-nosed pragmatic ShankServer Linux site. I’m tempted to pontificate about Linux and development methodologies for that site during these sessions, but I must resist, for the sake of the hard-nosed pragmatic audience who just wants to get to the tutorials.

So lucky you, I will endlessly drone on here for MikeLev.in. It’s more for me to clarify my thoughts, anyway. The real (hopefully) interesting subject-matter stuff will be on ShankServer, and the soon-to-be-launched WhatsaMetaFor marketing site, which will replace the HitTail blog, now that Blogger shut down their FTP service.

A metaphor is the most powerful weapon in the communicator’s arsenal. I think I’ll use that as a self-referential tagline–ha ha ha. My field of SEO is pervaded by boty metaphors and meta tags, so I thought I’d combine the two–especially with the re-emergence of meta data as important, with HTML5 RDFa and other similar things.

But back to writing about writing. There is a think line between writing and doing in as a knowledge worker in the information age. I have talked about that previously, and a lot of the writing is just along the lines of “thinking out loud” so that when you finally get around to doing, it’s all the more effective. Your “doing” is more effective than the other guy’s “doing” because you did more and better thinking. It’s the whole visualization thing.

But the pitfalls here are many. First, if you get too wrapped up in the writing, it’s for its own sake. And if you can’t publish the writing because it’s too proprietary, all it did was help you run your think:do ratio. Consequently, I believe that you should endeavor to publish as much as you can, even if it’s proprietary, which leads to the next pitfall–where to publish.

I recently have set up two private password protected blogs I’m launching for those aspects of my work that should only be viewable by co-workers or our clients. As it turns out, I have a variety of projects that I’ll be launching with ShankServers, and some of them are just too competitive to start sharing yet, but I have to think out loud to aid in development and inform my internal audience, and I have to simultaneously create documentation so the clients can use the tools.

I doubt anyone will read these blog posts in-depth, and they are in great part for my own benefit–just like this one. But so what! They helped me, and they created the documentation trail that is so often valuable in the field of information technology. People know what I have been working on and when, even down to the thoughts that guided WHY I am doing the work. They just won’t get the whole picture, because it is compartmentalized in a mixture of public and private blogs.

But that’s a good thing, both for me and my audience. Each thing I write, although I won’t have time for much editing (forge on, soldier), I will have time to sort. And sorting means I can cater to my audience and make a better experience for them, at least a little bit. It’s just like this article, on a site branded Mike Levin. People curious about who I am, can delve into my very overriding umbrella thoughts guiding my career, personal life, and the rest. But I’m not giving out he actual proprietary knowledge of work, or over-sharing the journal-like details of my private life.

It’s easier now than ever to run such compartmentalized multiple blogs. First, settling on a single blogging platform is now easy. The whole open source, owning your own data thing has played out. It’s easy both to run your own blog, and own your own data with WordPress. It’s great for SEO, and any features it has left out, are filled in pretty readily with by the robust plugin community. Locking down a blog to be secure for example, even though it’s not a built-in feature, takes about 10 minutes to solve.

After many years of being a Blogger and Typepad guy, I’m finally moving over to WordPress. It just got much easier, with the combination of a Web host using the wonderful cPanel user interface, and SimpleScripts seamlessly taking care of administration and upgrades for me. WordPress seems like the perfect candidate for a Linux ShankServer, but I’m very cautious. First, cheap web hosts already do it so well. And second, I’m not anxious to let MySQL live on a bare-bones ShankServer this early on. I’m on a light-touch and vendor dependency busting mission. MySQL is neither. Maybe with the SQLLite adaptor, I’d consider it.

In the meantime, I’m cranking out WordPress instances on a cheap web host that charges me for one IP and let’s me host as many websites as I want there using virtual hosts. I’m tempted to use the new WordPress 3 multisite feature, but again, it’s just so easy to make and maintain new instances, that I’m not quite ready to go off the beaten trail.

So anyway, it’s time to “cut” this post off. When I’m doing this thinking out loud sort of writing, I’m not so much trying to make a smooth writing transition for you the reader, but rather just finding the appropriate stopping point to switch over to “do” so as to maintain a good think:do ratio.

Planning is important, but not in the fat business plan sense, but rather in the brief, memorizable one-page-plan sense. If you can’t make sense of a topic in one page, it’s too complicated. I learned this from Guy Kawasaki who learned this from John Scully who was a Pepsi executive running Apple during Job’s hiatus.

Kawasaki calls it an evangelizing plan, but I call it clear thinking. You can make a one-page-plan for almost anything–a single project, a startup company, or a life. It then can act as a quick gauge for any task you engage in to see if it’s “in plan”. They have the following structure:

MISSION STATEMENT

OBJECTIVES

1. Objective
2. Objective
3. Objective

STRATEGIES

1. Objective
   1. Strategy
   2. Strategy
   3. Strategy
2. Objective
   1. Strategy
   2. Strategy
   3. Strategy
3. Objective
   1. Strategy
   2. Strategy
   3. Strategy

Notice that the Objectives are indeed repeated in 2 places in the plan–a wasteful seeming thing with the limited real estate of one page, but a truly important aspect of the format.

One page plans are easy to write, revise and throw out if you were totally off the mark. Write them, test them out, and let them evolve. If you’re ever challenged on your thinking, you can rattle off your points in a way that can leave your audience stunned with your familiarity with your subject matter, even though quantitatively it would just fit on one page. It really does work this way–a real-life Jedi mind trick. Not only is it a great exercise in mental discipline, but it’s very satisfying to drop this figurative anvil on a rival’s head at the opportune moment.

A one-page-plan merely consists of a mission statement, with 3 to 5 objectives. Under each objective is 3 to 5 strategies or tactics. Call them what you will as appropriate to the plan, but this simple hierarchy lends itself to impressive memorization. If your mission statement is clear, precise and true, you will memorize it. And then, it’s not too difficult to memorize 4 bullet points. With that, you can brush out the broad strokes in a couple of breaths.

For example, a good starting point mission statement for any company is to get and keep customers. I learned this from Peter Drucker, and its another neat trick. Throw out that platitude, and see who tries to challenge it, then tear them apart. Technology licensing businesses follow this model. Oil companies follow this model. Banks and credit cards follow this model. Google follows this model. It’s not always clear cut, but they do.

Of course, you can make the mission statement a bit longer and customized to your needs, but if it becomes one of those nonsense sentences that sound like your chewing bubblegum and spewing bullshit, you’ve gone too far. A mission statement I made for myself professionally lately goes like this:

MISSION
To use all the knowledge, experience and know-how I have accumulated in my life so far to make the second half of it play out even more to my advantage.

This creates a bright blinking symbolic marker in my life, reinforcing the urgency of the first half of my professional career being essentially over. It also pats myself on the back for what I have done, acknowledging it is not all for naught. Just because I had ideas, actually DID implemented them, only to have them not amount to the empires that other identical ideas took off to become… so what!

I have accumulated the essential skills for the job that lies ahead and have a vision of achievement that eclipses accomplishments of the past. And I can tackle it with the wisdom and efficiency that comes with bearing many battle scars. Pick only the fights you know you can win, but challenge your abilities right up to their limits to keep it interesting. And then be okay losing some battles, so long as you win the war, which you can always keep sight of by re-gauging against your plan.

Objectives must balance generality with specifics is that together, they are complete, leaving no gaps–with only 3 to 5 points. So professionally for me, they might include:

OBJECTIVES

1. Choose tools that will minimize vendor dependencies while maximizing longevity of marketable skills.
2. Retrain yourself and master those tools in the course of your day-job in a justifiable fashion.
3. Take measures to prevent the giant “reset button” from ever being pressed on you again. Enjoy compounding returns!
4. Always LOVE what you do, and strive pave the way for others to do the same.
5. Enjoy life outside work as much as you enjoy work. Reap the rewards.

With five objectives, I’m stretching the bounds of memorizabiliy to the limits. But just distill it in your mind. There’s the “tools” and the “retraining” and the “safeguarding” objectives. Then there is the inside love, and the outside love objective. As you can see, love is doubly important to me, inside the workplace and out. If you don’t love what you do, try teaching it. Maybe you’ll love teaching. If you love what you do and live teaching, you may live a very long and fulfilling life. But even then, it shouldn’t be for it’s own sake… if you started a family and invited others into your life. Up until that point, it’s okay to be work obsessed, buy after that point, it’s not fair to them.

The last point is the individual strategies under each objective, but I hardly feel I need to cover that. They are the specific things you’re going to do to achieve each objective. You’re basically repeating the easily memorized mental exercise at the objective level, but 3 to 5 more times.

As I approach forty, I’m thinking through that one of the things I’m most dissatisfied with is the rate at which I get useful stuff done. I think that I spend too much time thinking, and not enough time doing. None-the-less, I see by looking around me that I tend to get larger, more impactful things done than people on average. So the only thing I’m dissatisfied with is the rate at which I which I think, do, think. It’s a question of rhythm–and this is all the more so as I’m trying to make more time for family.

There’s no way around it–thinking is necessary for doing. The better you think, the better you do. Existentialists and biocentrists might tell you that thinking is the same as doing in the ultimately subjective world, but I’m of the objectivity camp, believing we are a collection of like and equal beings, each having distinct separate experiences in a shared workspace. So the value of thinking without action is similar to running a computer simulation. It improves your odds of a success through virtual practice. A classic example is in baseball, imagining yourself hitting the ball. Your batting average improves merely by virtue of visualizing it.

So, the thing that to all appearances is accomplishing nothing (thinking) is actually an important component to successfully doing. This causes something of a dilemma to the modern knowledge worker who has to demonstrate him or herself as being productive. This “thinking” just doesn’t look productive–and worse still, the “writing” or public blogging that can stand in for that thinking can be interpreted as non-work-related, or goofing off, when in reality it is the essential tool.

Consequently, I am finding my justification for prolific blogging, and giving myself the mental green light to proceed with all the writing that I feel needs to be done. Each time I write, I do it with a public or semi-public audience in mind. I partition off all the areas of my work that doesn’t give out proprietary knowledge to my competitors, or that I wish to altruistically give out none-the-less, and that goes onto MikeLev.in, ShankServer.org or now… WhatsaMetaFor.com.

In the past, I’ve launched new sites quite frequently, and never followed through. So, what makes me think this time will be any different? I have enough buckets to drop any of my writing into whenever I feel inspired. I even have a site for the proprietary knowledge that is only to be shared with my co-workers at the digital marketing agency where I work. And the super-private stuff is to never be published even has a place. The idea is to write, do, write, do, and whenever you can write with a public audience in mind, do so. It’s much more valuable writing.

And keep up that think/do rhythm. Don’t sacrifice the do for the think. Do “pays for” thinking, right as thinking enables doing. And I must always be thinking or doing, because it’s that idle time that’s the enemy and lets the years slip by without the big stuff getting done. If you’ve gone too long on thinking without doing, there’s a penalty to pay. In the short-term, it may be disappointing your bosses or stakeholders. In the long term, it’s not achieving your goals.

Telling a good story is one of the most important skills in life, and I constantly fall into the pitfall of making it too complex. People like short, easy-to-understand stories. My resistance to simplification has held me back. I talk a lot about (and build) generalized systems or agile frameworks. This means that once you’ve solved a particular problem, you find a way to make your solution work on a larger set of similar problems. That’s all well and good, but it makes it difficult tell the story, because its so open ended.

My first large professional endeavor was such a generalized system system under VBScript, but it wasn’t until I extracted the simple HitTail keyword tracking system out of it that it took off. HitTail did one simple thing, and it did it well, turning it into one of the more popular sites back in 2006/07 for SEO. It’s still going strong, but I’ve been getting away from the Microsoft way of doing things–especially now with .NET, the way I did it with HitTail is no longer the Microsoft way. I’m itching to do more projects on Linux.

Recently, I’ve been repositioning myself onto Linux, and I went through a great deal of learning’s. As it turns out, those learning’s are currently the most interesting part of my story–or at least the part that I think are valuable to a broad audience right now. So, I spun off a site called ShankServer.org where I’m offering a formula for weaning off of Windows. It takes you from a virtual pendrive Linux to some real, albeit tiny, server hardware, and then onto the cloud. I think it’s a good story, and one of the simplest and most broadly applicable that I’ve told.

But I have so much more to say, and I like to take advantage of the motivation and the moment. So, I’ll be continuing to develop MikeLev.in as a sort of live journal to think out loud, and post things that don’t belong anywhere else. If it’s a clean part of the ShankServer story, it will go there. I’ll be launching a new site about high tech marketing, called whatsametafor.com. Anything about site development will go there.