Online Lessons Learned This Week

Whew boy, this past week has been a gut full and I have been forcibly taught some damned hard lessons. I'm a good learner, though.

The main thing that cropped up was that when you try to have an online business with many tentacles, NEVER, I mean NEVER, try to tie those things together to "make things easier." Especially if there is another person involved where the relationship can sour, no matter how solid and honest you believe that other person to be. If you are depending on someone else for a part of that business, isolate that part where it can never corrupt the other parts that are unaffected by that other person.

I'm warning you, you do not want to sit up half the night trying to figure out why you are getting weird messages from your server every two seconds. One more time, either you maintain complete, total control, or you are going to get screwed somehow, someway because you have what amounts to ZERO control. Understand, it does not matter WHO this person is, what role they play in your life, and what you think the future holds for that business relationship. When another person is involved, you cannot see inside their head or heart and bad things can blindside you. It is going to end poorly for your online experience if things are not isolated one from another. I learned this the hard way over the past twelve hours.

Luckily, I never lost my business e-mail despite repeated requests from the other part of the server to connect. Ouch. You can only listen to "DROID, DROID, DROID, DROID, DROID" for so long before you damned near lose your mind. I had to take the whole site down that was affected.

Around two AM is when the autoresponder caught up. With two different types of widgets, Blogger and Wordpress, involved, I had to take that down, too. Whatevs, by that time the site was completely offline anyway, so I killed the mailing list and the subsequent e-mails. But, again, "DROID, DROID, DROID, DROID" in the middle of the night is utterly terrifying.

Not to even mention the ongoing fallout with Google Places, Bing Business, Yelp, and other services. Paul made a bad mistake.

Let's recap. When trying to establish an online presence for your business, keep things separate, one arm from another. You'll thank me for that tip, when an appendage gets cut off. This morning, this is what the Posterous conglomerate looks like.

Not only that, I had to take down the business FAILbooks, because of the widgets going crazy. Understand, this whole mess occurred over ONE FREAKING PASSWORD!!! Who knew?

Well, here comes the good news!

I found Lucid Chart for the online construction of flow charts and graphics. Oddly enough, I was looking for this type of stuff for another project to help out my business partner. It works really well, too. I wish I could show you the diagram I made for Barry Obama's decision making process, but I deleted that in my haste to try to wrap things up last night.

Google Docs has added pivot tables this past week, too. This is going to certainly make data presentation easier.

Google has also added Google Advisor to help with financial decisions. I am still wondering how on Earth I am going to do without Google when the Depression starts in earnest at the end of June. I am not looking forward to that, y'all.

Well, that is about it, I got a dump truck load of work to do trying to get a snippet of code outta every site I currently manage. Pray for me...

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