Topics in ‘writing’

The 24-Hour Book Challenge — A Six Month Update

On December 2nd, I sat down and started writing. 24 hours later, I launched the first (beta) version of my first biz book, Just Fucking Ship. After a couple more weeks of work, I shipped the final(ish) version. Then I put JFS on a shelf for a while in favor of more urgent/demanding things. Now,… Read more »

Don’t Write 1,000 Words a Day

“How do you motivate yourself to write 1,000 Words a Day when you don’t feel like it?” “I don’t.” — Chris Guillebeau, author How to Write 300,000 Words in 1 Year Apparently it was morning. 10…30? I patted down all the major parts: face, chest, thighs, upper arms. Man, my arms were freezing, though I’d… Read more »

The Wasp, the Caterpillar, and Cannibalizing Your Own Product from the Inside

This December, Freckle Time Tracking turns 6 years old. OMG! And 30×500 turns 5 years old… after a fashion. You see, the original 30×500 is dead. And the one before that. And the one before that. And the one before that, too. We killed them. Slowly. And we’re still killing them, even as I write… Read more

The Wasp, the Caterpillar, and Cannibalizing Your Own Product from the Inside

This December, Freckle Time Tracking turns 6 years old. OMG! And 30×500 turns 5 years old… after a fashion. You see, the original 30×500 is dead. And the one before that. And the one before that. And the one before that, too. We killed them. Slowly. And we’re still killing them, even as I write… Read more

Burn your intros: my editing rule of thumb

If there was one universal criticism of tech writing, it’s: Your intro sucks. Here’s an example I just put to paper, for the Year of Hustle course (now sold out!): On HackerNews, sub-Reddits and a million startup blogs, you’ll find people talking about “monetization.” This godawful malformation of a word means “to find a way […]

How to Write Your Sales Page

It’s Time to Redesign The Sales Page! Part 2 (Part 1) So, last time on “It’s Time to Redesign The Sales Page!” we talked about why I decided the Freckle Time Tracking sales page had to be totally redone. Namely: We weren’t proud of the design, so we didn’t promote it We didn’t believe it […]

Screw Interface Patterns

Allow me to begin by saying that this is an opinion piece. I’m not doing research into the matter, but rather boiling down trends—the good and bad—as I see ’em. And they’re mostly bad. Otherwise it’d be boring. A Pattern Language Pattern obsession has come to user interface design by way of software architecture, by […]

10 things I learned from screwing up my first ebook launch

… The Short Version. I promised short, and dammit, I’m gonna deliver. Very Brief Backstory JavaScript Performance Rocks! is my first ebook, written by me and my husband, Mr. Scriptaculous (legal alias: Thomas Fuchs). We launched the beta at the end of January, and the final version is going to drop in the next few […]

Felicity.

But some other writers seem to know that it takes more than [blamelessness] for a sentence to cohere and flourish as a work of art. They seem to know that the words inside the sentence must behave as if they were destined to belong together—as if their separation from each other would deprive the parent […]

Do "interesting details" really hurt learning?

Overcoming Bias has a little post that, for the most part, quotes the findings of a study on how “interesting details” affect learning. The researchers found that “interesting details” decreased the student’s understanding (transfer), while not affecting the student’s memory (retention) of what they read/watched. Case 1 was video trying to teach about how a […]

Hey, why not get a shiny
Freckle Time Tracking
account?