I just read the sad news that Jef Raskin passed away on Saturday, apparently after a long illness. Jef led the team that developed the original Macintosh, though he left Apple long before the product shipped. He also wrote The Humane Interface, which I read about a year ago. Although Jef’s ideas had become rather odd of late, he has for years been one of my heroes for championing sensible computer interfaces. Along with folks like Don Norman, Jef was one of those people who helped to remind the computer industry that actual human beings—not just geeks—need to use their products.

I’d like to offer my sincere thanks to all those who responded to my request for feedback on the future of Interesting Thing of the Day (see Pondering Changes to ITotD). Besides the comments posted online, many people wrote to me privately to express their opinions. The comments, to which I’ve replied individually where possible, have been extremely helpful. I wanted to follow up with a few words of summary and some observations.

The opinions covered the entire gamut from “don’t change a thing” to “just walk away,” with many variations in between. There were, however, some strong trends.

• Virtually everyone agreed that it’s unnecessary to publish ITotD on weekends and holidays, and that most readers probably don’t expect that in the first place.
• Surprisingly (to me, at least), most respondents were quite insistent that articles remain at their current length rather than shrinking to a size similar to what you see on most blogs. (One person specifically mentioned my little personal intros as being an important feature, and another person said those should go.)
• A frequently expressed suggestion was that we include more articles by guest authors. I am 100 percent in favor of this, and I know of at least one author who’s currently preparing some new articles. But although I’ve publicized our willingness to accept guest articles with at least two different links on every single article page, very few people have expressed an interest in writing. So let me just reiterate: if you have good writing skills and interesting things you’d like to share with the world, please let me know.
• Several people suggested moving to a subscription-based model of one kind or another; others said they’d rather see more advertising than fewer articles. In both cases, I have to face the numerical reality of our current reader base. Recently we’ve been getting, on average, about 1,600 visits per day (though a “visit” often includes multiple pages). Given the small percentage of readers willing to pay for content on the Web or click on ads, neither advertising nor subscriptions would yield interesting levels of income unless the overall number of visitors went way up—but then, if it did, income from our current (voluntary) subscription program and AdSense ads would probably make the site self-supporting. The moral of the story: one way or another, it’s all about getting more visitors. (And just for the sake of reference, here are the current subscription stats: After 9 months, we have 327 subscribers, of whom 63 purchased the ($5) article subscriptions and 14 purchased the ($20) audio subscriptions; the rest get the free “link” email every day.)
• A printed book (or books) of Interesting Things is, as a few people mentioned, almost a no-brainer. We have the technology, and I have every intention of making this happen. I somehow doubt I’ll get to it before June, and I wonder how many copies I’ll be able to sell, but it’s certainly worth trying. I could also put together a multi-CD or -DVD collection of all the audio recordings—enough to fill an iPod (hmmm…)—but there’s been so little interest in them thus far that it barely seems worth doing.
• In the past week, the site has received a surprising number of (mostly anonymous) donations. I deeply appreciate these, though I wish I knew who was sending the money so I could thank them personally. Still…please don’t feel obligated to contribute out of a sense of guilt or anything. When all is said and done, it will be the overall number of readers, rather than the donations or the paid subscriptions, that makes or breaks the site.

So what now? Well, the next three months (March–May) are going to be outrageously busy for me, as I’ve got several new ebooks to finish, magazine articles I’ve agreed to write, and so on. It has always been, and continues to be, my intention to make good on my promise to deliver 365 consecutive daily articles before making any changes; that means 95 left to go! That, too, will keep me busy. I will continue to digest all the suggestions, though, and I hope to have made a decision about the site’s new direction by at least May 1, since whatever happens will require some coding and infrastructure changes before June 1.

And what if my health or sanity gives out before then? That’s a good question. I don’t know. It would be ethically problematic for me not to deliver something I’ve been paid to deliver, but I won’t kid you: it’s getting rough. I guess I’ll cross that bridge, if necessary, when the time comes.

New Your Mac Life interview: February 23, 2005

Part 2 of the two-part excerpt from Take Control of Mac OS X Backups is now available on the Macworld Web site. (Also see Part 1.)

When I re-launched Interesting Thing of the Day on June 1, 2004, I promised that there would be at least one full year of daily articles. Now that we’ve completed nearly 9 months of that year, I figure I have enough data to begin thinking about what happens next.

Originally, my hope (or perhaps fantasy) had been that by the end of that year, ITotD would produce enough income that I could make it my full-time job. But the site’s total revenue has averaged around $300 per month—a figure that has remained relatively consistent even though daily readership has increased markedly. Of that amount, the majority goes toward taxes and business expenses. What’s left is roughly enough to pay for the coffee that keeps me awake while I write the articles.

But it’s not really about money: ITotD has always been a labor of love. The real problem is one of time. The average article takes me about 3–4 hours to research and write. But since ITotD isn’t putting bread on the table, I have to spend my days doing work that does—writing books, ebooks, and articles about computing, and doing technical consulting. That means I usually end up working on ITotD in the evenings, when I’d rather be resting, spending time with my wife, reading, doing t’ai chi, or just having a normal life. To be candid, I’m getting burned out, and something’s got to give.

I think that if I could financially justify spending even half my normal business hours working on ITotD (scaling back my other work proportionately), it would make sense to continue the site in roughly its current form. Although there are undoubtedly some things I could do to increase the site’s readership and income, all these things would require even more of my nonexistent time or money to implement. So I’m not expecting to see such major financial improvements in the next few months that I can reasonably plan to keep spending so much time on this project. One way or another, I have to cut back the number of hours I spend on ITotD, which in turn means the site must change.

I see no point in turning it off altogether; if the content that’s already there is useful to readers, it might as well stay there. On the other hand, barring some miraculous occurrence in the near future, I’m equally certain I can’t continue doing what I’ve been doing, every single day. I’ve been thinking about options for changing the site. Read the rest of this post »

My standard morning ritual includes answering my email, reading a bunch of Web sites, and checking the statistics for things like the number of Take Control ebooks sold, visitors at Interesting Thing of the Day, AdSense revenues, sales from affiliate links, and that sort of thing. While going through my email this morning, I saw a message from an ITotD reader who had information pertaining to the article on Non-Human Farmers, which was written a couple of weeks ago by guest author Rajagopal Sukumar. The message basically said that in addition to the animals cited in the article, there was a type of jellyfish that also farms algae. Since I didn’t write the article, I said I’d forward the comment to the author in case he wanted to make any changes.

Moments later, when I checked today’s Web stats, my eyes popped out of their sockets when I saw how many visitors we’d had today. Even before noon we were just a few visits short of a record day. (Because of this increase, AdSense revenue is also way up for the day—always a nice bonus.) A quick glance at the referrers showed me that the spike was coming from BoingBoing, and all these folks were following a link to the article on Non-Human Farmers. I wrote the author a congratulatory note, but I couldn’t help being slightly chagrined that the site’s biggest day wasn’t due to one of the hundreds of articles I wrote myself!

Meanwhile, another faithful reader wrote to tell me she found today’s article on Cascading Style Sheets completely incomprehensible, and my Backups article on Macworld.com dropped down to a less prominent position on the page. So…good day for statistics, bad day for my ego. Ah well. As my mother would say whenever a minor misfortune befell me, “It couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.”

Last week Adam Engst sent me an email in which he mentioned that Macworld magazine was going to have an excerpt from my latest ebook, Take Control of Mac OS X Backups, on their Web site. Apparently there had been some discussion about putting it in the printed magazine, but for a variety of uninteresting reasons everyone agreed that it made more sense just to put it on the Web site. I was not part of those discussions, and I really didn’t think about it much. I’ve had articles published in the print edition of Macworld, and excerpts from all my ebooks have been made available in many different forms. This didn’t seem like that big of a deal. I didn’t even bother to visit the Macworld site or ask which portion of the ebook had been excerpted.

A few days ago, I began noticing that sales of the ebook were up significantly, and I also started getting email messages from folks who had read the article. These are both normal occurrences anytime I have something new published, so again, I didn’t really think about it. Then I got a message from a company whose software I’d referred to in passing; they felt that perhaps I’d given their product short shrift. Before I could reply I had to go over to the Macworld site to see exactly which portion of the text they’d published. And there, to my surprise, was my article at the very top of their home page—the equivalent of front-page news in the Macintosh world.

On the one hand, I was delighted: publicity is always good, and the extra sales don’t hurt. On the other hand, I was a bit embarrassed—I hadn’t updated this blog in a long time, and readers have been checking it out. D’oh! It’s like having company on a day your house is a mess. Oh well. I guess that’ll get me typing. It’s not as though I have a shortage of things to write about, only a shortage of time.

New Macworld article: A two-part excerpt from Take Control of Mac OS X Backups (Part 1, Part 2; February 10, 2005)

New from Take Control: Take Control of Email with Apple Mail (Version: 1.1.1, February 10, 2005; originally published July 29, 2004)