In Basecamp’s early days “semantic HTML” was all the rage. It still is in some ways, but we were hitting the kool-aid a lot harder than we are today. One area where this has bitten us is in our default styles for the UL element.

When we started styling Basecamp we were mostly working with interface elements, not text documents. True to the semantic kool-aid we used UL tags mainly for tabs, category links, lists of project links, attached files etc. Everything but actual plain-jane bullet lists.

It all worked fine, but just now I wanted to include a bulleted list in some copy I’m sketching for a dialog. Check out how the unordered list looks in this draft using default styles:

That list in the middle is actually a UL. There are no bullets, the font size is wonky, the margins are different. This default must have made sense when all of our ULs followed a certain pattern for interface use. But here in the future, I wish we would’ve been more selective about those styles and left the default alone. Or better yet, we could’ve used DIVs in the first place for those tabs, attachments, and category links. I’ll surely keep this in mind the next time we start a fresh project.

Design Jobs
Dayforce is looking for a Senior UI Designer in Toronto, Canada.

Wesleyan University is looking for a Web Developer in Middletown, CT.

Diary.com is looking for a Lead Web Designer in London, UK.

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Wall Street On Demand is looking for a Junior Web Developer in Boulder, CO.

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View all of the jobs at the 37signals Job Board. (The Job Board now has internships too.)

Gizmodo ran a post saying ThinkGeek’s New Dreamcasts Aren’t Looking So New.

According to one Destructoid tipster, that new stock of $100 Dreamcasts offered by ThinkGeek may not be so new after all. His console was “roughed up — the barcode has been scratched, the console’s plastic has gunk on it.”

And here’s the thoughtful response ThinkGeek gave in the comments:

First, a little backstory: We came upon an amazing cache of new-in-box Dreamcasts not too long ago. We had a bunch of units shipped to us to inspect them, and indeed, though the boxes were a little worse for the wear on the outside, the consoles had nary a scratch and even the wire twists that bundled the cables had never been undone. It was like magic—magic that had been hiding in a warehouse, unknown, for years.

So we asked our source from whence these beautiful Dreamcasts came, and they didn’t know—could’ve been a liquidator, or a Circuit City that had closed shop. (Hear that? It’s the sound of a plot thickening.)

But we’d seen them with our own eyes and figured it was best to share our discovery with the world. Hundreds were snatched up quickly and squees were heard ‘round the internets.

So far we’ve had 2 instances of not-so-new-in-box Dreamcasts. The individual who received the one reported here contacted us via email (which never appeared in our inbox, for some reason) and Twitter (through which we’ve taken care of the situation) has already been issued a return shipping label. We’re more than happy to refund him for the Dreamcast as well as shipping.

We’re very sorry about the whole thing—we never meant to ship used Dreamcasts. We know our customers are smarty pants and could tell if they’d been duped with a stale Dreamcast; we’d never get away with taking advantage of you guys, so why would we try?

And now we have 3 options: 1. Stop sharing the gift of new Dreamcasts; 2. Have them all shipped to us and inspect each one individually and then ship back to the warehouse; and 3. Continue spreading the (mostly) untainted Dreamcast love and working with the very few customers who get lemons.

We hope you’ll understand why we’re continuing to offer them on our site (when we get our grubby little paws on more, of course). And again, we apologize to the 2 customers who ended up with what appears to be returned merchandise.

SvN reader Daniel Øhrgaard spotted the exchange and gives ThinkGeek high marks for its response:

ThinkGeek just handled some customer complaints perfectly over on Gizmodo...

My vote: Highest marks for ThinkGeek.

Granted, I’m not among those who bought a Dreamcast from them, so I didn’t harbor any ill will toward them before I read the apology. But even I felt like a (for real) “valued customer” when I read it.

I’ve read many other stories on Gizmodo that’d been updated carried had a link to some company’s response to a widespread issue, but they were just that: links to the apology. For most of those stories, I never bothered reading the company response, because I couldn’t be bothered to go to the company’s home turf to read it. So when I saw “ThinkGeek responds in the comments below” I had to see it; they came to the reader to apologize, giving up the control over content their own site would offer, and allowing the generally bawdy Gizmodo flock to judge them.

As one other commenter said: Respect.

A great resume will get you not-rejected, a great cover letter will get you hired. That’s the conclusion I’m left with after going through the applications for our junior support programmer position.

Most people can make their resume look reasonable which makes it a poor qualifier. We don’t believe in years of irrelevance, so you’re not going to beat out another candidate by having four instead of three years of experience. That means all you’re left with is just check marks: Yes, there’s Rails experience. Yup, there’s the sysadmin stuff.

Poor qualifiers filter out few candidates. When I’m saddled with 70 applications for a job, I have to make some rough cuts very quickly. I literally have to decimate the pool. With the resume only doing 20% of the job, the key is left with the cover letter.

This means that “If you like my resume, give me a call” doesn’t make the cut for a cover letter. I need more romance and originality than that to pick up the phone.

Strike a tone in tune with the company

It also means that you really have to tailor your tone to the company. Pulling out your Business Serious voice and addressing “Dear Hiring Manager” instantly kicks you down a few levels. Just like showing up in a suit would do when everyone else is wearing jeans and t-shirts (except of course if you have extreme pizazz to pull it off).

The gut reaction builds immediately. If the first paragraph is a strike, the second has to work that much harder. If there’s no hook in the first three, it’s highly unlikely that anything is going to come of it.

This advice is probably exactly the opposite of what you’ll if you’re aiming to get into a big shop with a formal HR department. In that scenario, it’s often last man standing in the numbers game and checklist requirements. Personality doesn’t matter to make it through the first cut.

But when you’re looking to get hired by managers who actually have to work with you, personality is almost all that matters to get to the interview. So beef up your cover letter and let your personality shine (Jason Zimdars who we recently hired set the gold standard).

Larry Cheng in “How Can We Double Down?”...

[During an MFG.com board meeting,] Jeff Bezos asked the question, “Is there anything big or small, that is working better than you expected? Is there any where we could double down?” Jeff’s point was that we spend a lot of time focusing on what’s not working in Board meetings (especially in times like these), and not enough time focusing on what is surpassing expectations and how we can “double down” on those areas. Often times the key levers in businesses are found in little things that are really outperforming whether by intention or not (often not, actually). Sometimes these are things that are either adjacent enough or small enough that they wouldn’t make a board presentation or be an obvious discussion point because they’re just seedlings that need to be watered. I appreciate how Jeff wanted to bring these seedlings to the forefront to see if they deserved some real investment.

Reminiscent of Jason’s recent post here about how failure is overrated. What’s working is where the gold is. Focus and learn from that instead of fixating on the negative.

FYI, if you’re not a big blackjack fan already, here’s “doubling down” explained.

Highrise is the best way to keep track of who you talked to, what was said, and what to do next. Twitter integration allows you to have an even better view of what’s on a person’s mind, what they’re saying right now, and what their current interests are.

Now you can check your previous communications history as well as what they are tweeting right now. Tweets are great conversation starters that show you’re paying attention to what’s going on in their world.

Here’s a video to show you how easy it is to add Twitter info for a contact:

We really hope you like this feature (and be sure to follow us on Twitter at twitter.com/37signals).

We’re looking to hire a support programmer who can work with Sarah and Michael on customer issues. This includes investigating reports of abnormal behavior and fixing bugs, but it also means building tools to automate the work.

See the full job posting on the 37signals Job Board for more details.

In an email exchange with Malcolm Gladwell, ESPN’s Bill Simmons wonders why NBA teams rarely, if ever, take chances — specifically: Why don’t more underdogs try full court pressing opponents? The conversation then extends to the NFL too.

Gladwell’s response:

Is there any other industry in the world (well, outside of Detroit) so terrified of innovation? I went to see a Lakers-Warriors game earlier this season, and it was abundantly clear after five minutes that the Warriors’ chances of winning were, oh, no better than 10 percent. Why wouldn’t you have a special squad of trained pressers come in for five minutes a half and press Kobe and Fisher? Worst-case scenario is that you exhaust Kobe, and make him a bit more vulnerable down the stretch. Best case is that you rattle the Lakers and force a half-dozen extra turnovers that turn out to be crucial. And if you lose, so what? You were going to lose anyway…

I feel the same way about the attitude of professional football teams toward the no-huddle offense. Right now, great teams (such as the Colts and Patriots) use the no-huddle selectively, as a way to maximize their dominance. But why don’t bad teams use it? If you were the Lions, why not run the no-huddle this season? Why not put together a lighter, better-conditioned offensive line and a radically simplified playbook and see what happens? It’s not as if you are risking a Super Bowl if it backfires. Your offensive line is lousy anyway, so there’s no harm in tearing it down, and your fans aren’t going to turn on you if you get killed while you work out the kinks. Last I checked, your fans have already turned on you. On the plus side, maybe the no-huddle exhausts the other team’s defense so much you slow down their pass rush in the second half. And maybe giving your quarterback a bit more autonomy helps develop his knowledge of the game, and his leadership skills.

The consistent failure of underdogs in professional sports to even try something new suggests, to me, that there is something fundamentally wrong with the incentive structure of the leagues.

Obvious parallels to the business world here too. (“No one ever got fired for buying IBM” anyone?) Sometimes the riskiest thing to do is not take any risks. If you’re outmatched by the competition, isn’t it silly not to take a chance? If you’re an underdog in your niche, the Warriors or the Lions of your industry, playing it safe and imitating the established players will probably doom you to failure.

One or two-person businesses that think they need to follow “common sense” advice that’s worked for the big guys are missing the point. When you’re small and risking less, you don’t need a business plan. You don’t need a board of directors. You don’t need to study the techniques of Fortune 500 CEOs. You don’t need to know Six Sigma ideas. The strategy that’s right for heavyweights has nothing to do with how welterweights should fight.

Related pieces on underdogs who use innovation to compete: “How David Beats Goliath” is Gladwell’s piece in the New Yorker about the topic. Michael Lewis wrote about the unorthodox success of Texas Tech’s football team in “Coach Leach Goes Deep, Very Deep” [NY Times]. When Texas Tech reached the No. 2 ranking in college football last year, Lewis followed up with a piece that discussed how Leach knew he had to be different to have a chance.

To appreciate what he’s done you have to appreciate how hard it is to get players—he gets third or fourth bite of apple down there. He’s working with everyone else’s rejects. Generally, he’s doing so much more with so much less.

Lewis also covered similar ground in Moneyball, which analyzed the Oakland A’s success despite its limited payroll.

How do you collaborate on a book when one author (DHH) is in San Francisco, one’s in Chicago (Jason), and one’s in NYC (me)? Last week, we did a joint writing session and pulled it off. Here’s how we did it:

We all log into iChat and start an audio chat. That way we can discuss what we’re doing.

Then we work on one essay from the book at a time and paste the current version into SubEthaEdit. While originally designed for coding together, its collaboration features work great for co-writing text too.

All you need to do is drag a person’s name from iChat into SubEthaEdit and then they’re collaborating on the document with you. Color coding lets you see who’s editing what. It works so well that you can have multiple people editing at the same time and it doesn’t get (too) confusing.

We even use this setup to collaborate on text when we’re all in the same room together. It’s a great way to let everyone take a crack at text without it leading to chaos.

The only downside is that tone can get a little inconsistent when different people are editing. After the session is wrapped, I go through the text again and make sure everything flows well and the tone is consistent.

A screenshot from the SubEthaEdit site.