John Cox

Blogs · @wyome

Tagged business · everything

How I Sold a Blog for $20,000 in 8 Months | Blog Tyrant – Dominating the Blogosphere

This guide outlines the complete process of building and selling a profitable blog, from initial planning through transaction. It covers three main phases: pre-blogging preparation (choosing a believable niche with depth, selecting WordPress hosting, and planning monetization), blog development (creating valuable content, building email subscribers, engaging readers, and leveraging social media), and the actual sale (valuing the site using monthly revenue multiples, listing on Flippa.com, and using escrow services for secure payment). The author draws on personal experience selling a blog while at university and emphasizes that success requires genuine interest in the topic, consistent quality content, and strategic planning around both reader engagement and search engine visibility.

Permalink

Innovation begins when the system is stuck - Game Changer

Innovation emerges when someone recognizes that a system—company, industry, or market—has become rigid and frozen, unable to adapt to new opportunities or threats. The rigidity typically stems from mental constraints rather than physical limitations: systems get trapped in unquestioned beliefs that make change seem impossible, or in narratives that promote inaction. The article uses examples like BankSimple challenging traditional banking's outdated technology infrastructure and Apple challenging music industry assumptions to show how innovators succeed by questioning what competitors and customers have accepted as inevitable, and offering a fundamentally different approach.

Permalink

No age for Creativity! Quality changes on Ideas « jabaldaia

Contrary to the assumption that creativity peaks in youth, this piece argues that creativity is a universal capacity undiminished by age, instead evolving into "late creativity" characterized by synthesis, reflection, and wisdom as people accumulate experience and expertise. Organizations can foster creative thinking across all ages by providing time and resources, encouraging experimentation and risk-taking in a psychologically safe environment, and rewarding intrinsic motivation rather than controlling behavior—while avoiding traditional education approaches and surveillance practices that instill fear of failure. The author emphasizes that work need not be joyless to be serious and responsible, and that participating in creative activities provides both professional benefits and therapeutic value regardless of age.

Permalink

Crossing spaces and ideas « jabaldaia

The piece argues that innovation emerges from cross-pollination—connecting ideas across diverse disciplines, cultures, and backgrounds rather than developing them in isolation. It uses the metaphor of bees and gardeners to describe how organizations can become "idea pollinators" by hiring diverse talent, hosting interdisciplinary meetings, inviting external speakers, and working across varied projects, as exemplified by IDEO's systematic approach to sharing and combining knowledge from different fields.

Permalink

Intro to OLAP - MySQL Performance Blog

This post introduces business intelligence (BI) and OLAP (online analytical processing) tools, explaining how they analyze data to provide insights into business performance through multidimensional analysis that breaks down measures like sales totals across dimensions such as time, geography, and product. It contrasts MOLAP systems, which use specialized pre-computed data stores for speed but require lengthy processing times, with ROLAP systems like Mondrian that query relational databases structured as star schemas, trading some performance for flexibility and ease of use. The post establishes that this series will focus on open-source ROLAP tools using MySQL, covering how they generate queries and handle aggregation to improve performance on large datasets.

Permalink

10 Reasons Not to Copy Amazon | Get Elastic Ecommerce Blog

Copying Amazon's design and business practices is risky because Amazon operates under fundamentally different conditions—massive scale, diverse customer base, complex marketplace model, efficient logistics, and deep pockets for experimentation—that make its strategies unsuitable for most retailers. The article argues that Amazon's apparent success often masks poor user experience that only loyal customers tolerate, and that design decisions Amazon makes for business reasons (like removing reassuring text to free up page space) get mistakenly adopted as best practices. Rather than benchmarking against Amazon, retailers should test their own site elements against their specific customers and business model.

Permalink

Screenr - Create screencasts and screen recordings the easy way

This is a marketing page for Articulate 360, an AI-powered learning and development platform that helps organizations create, distribute, and measure workplace training at scale. The platform combines instructional design principles with AI tools to transform existing materials like decks and documents into interactive training experiences, supporting features like multi-language translation, custom AI avatars, and analytics to track training effectiveness. It's positioned as an all-in-one solution that consolidates fragmented training tools and integrates with existing business systems across HR, sales, support, and other departments.

Permalink

Easy server monitoring with e-mail, SMS, iPhone alerts - Server Density

Zarpra is a managed IT services company that takes over application support and infrastructure management for organizations with neglected or undocumented tech stacks, providing documentation, stabilization, and ongoing support rather than piecemeal fixes. The company emphasizes establishing clear ownership and responsibility for systems, managing access controls and user administration, and handling daily IT operations without downtime—positioning itself as the missing "foreman" for companies whose technical infrastructure has grown chaotic through lack of coordination.

Permalink

Make an Editable/Printable HTML Invoice | CSS-Tricks

The author describes creating a lightweight, browser-based editable HTML invoice template that mimics FreshBooks' interface using simple `<textarea>` elements. The approach requires no special software beyond a web browser, can be hosted on a website for access from any computer, and preserves user edits if the page is accidentally refreshed. The solution is deliberately minimal but practical for those with basic invoicing needs who want to print or save invoices as PDFs.

Permalink

Facebook Groups Vs Pages: The Definitive Guide

I don't have a specific article to summarize here. What you've provided is a navigation page or header section from Adweek showing newsletter signup options and general site information, not the actual content of a saved article. To write a summary, I would need the text of the article itself—its headline, body, and key arguments or findings. Could you share the actual article you'd like summarized?

Permalink

assertTrue( ): Nine Questions to Ask during a Job Interview

Job interviews are a two-way process where you should actively assess whether the employer is right for you, not just answer their questions passively. A hiring manager pays close attention to the quality of candidates' questions as a measure of their preparedness, enthusiasm, and research—and good candidates invariably ask good questions. The piece offers eight strategic questions to ask (about your team, success metrics, management style, career advancement, and your predecessor's fate) while warning against early inquiries about time off, work-from-home flexibility, or compensation that signal poor work ethic or entitlement.

Permalink

How To Rise Fast At Work: A True Story - Forbes.com

Mark succeeded by becoming indispensable to his organization as a whole rather than by competing with peers or self-promoting to management. He started by systematically learning how every part of the company operated—what people did, how they worked together, and where inefficiencies existed—then made unglamorous improvements like ordering lunches and organizing supplies that genuinely helped everyone do their jobs better. His colleague Ted, by contrast, worked frantically to outpace his peers and impressed senior managers with his speed and ambition, but because he never moved beyond excelling at his assigned tasks or understood how the broader organization functioned, he remained stuck as a top performer rather than advancing into management and leadership roles. The article argues that Mark's approach of building institutional knowledge and facilitating others' success is more effective for career advancement than the traditional school-tested formula of individual performance and self-promotion.

Permalink

How I Hire Programmers (Aaron Swartz's Raw Thought)

The author proposes an alternative hiring process for programmers that replaces traditional interviews with three main steps: evaluating past work through code samples and demos, assessing intelligence through casual conversation (not formal interviews), and checking compatibility through informal team activities, followed by a final sanity check of assigning a small project. He argues this approach reveals whether candidates are genuinely smart, can execute, and work well with others better than standard interview questions do, though he acknowledges it requires a small sanity-check project to verify candidates haven't misrepresented themselves.

Permalink

Sarbanes-Oxley IT Security Compliance Checklist from JasonKolb.com - The life of a technology entrepreneur.

Kolb provides a practical security checklist for Web 2.0 applications organized into front-end, back-end, and network layers, designed to help companies meet Sarbanes-Oxley compliance requirements without expensive consultants. The guide covers protecting sensitive user information through encryption, password policies, and secure authentication methods; preventing common attacks like SQL injection and man-in-the-middle exploitation; and restricting database access and logging security violations. While not exhaustive, the checklist aims to serve as a starting point for entrepreneurs building secure web applications and a cost-saving reference for companies navigating SOX audit requirements.

Permalink