(1) Windows 7 Explorer vs. (2) Dance Dance Revolution.
How Cook's Illustrated thrives while others are dying
Not all publications are on a financial deathwatch.
Cook’s Illustrated takes no ads and charges for access to its recipes online. According to “Let’s Invent an iTunes for News,” the publication has 900,000 print subscribers (and 100,000 newsstand buyers) and is thriving online with 260,000 digital subscribers at a cost of $35 a year, a group that grew by 30 percent in 2008.
Many companies would think this way: “We can’t charge for online recipes, they’re available for free all over the web!” So how does CI manage to swing it? By being the Consumer Reports of food. It offers blind comparison tests of kitchen products and recipes that are extremely thorough, each one made dozens of times to get every detail right.
The magazine hypes its perfectionism on its “Why Cook’s Illustrated is different than other cooking magazines” page: “There’s no more authoritative food magazine. When Cook’s Illustrated endorses a cheesecake, it’s because its editors made 45 of them.” Accessing the recipes online is valuable enough that half of the site’s subscribers are people who also subscribe to the print publication.
CI also succeeds because it focuses on what it’s good at and stays away from the food fashion covered at other publications. Jack Bishop, executive editor of Cook’s Illustrated, says:
Our magazine is timeless in many respects. We are not covering the latest greatest trends, we don’t do travel, we don’t have features on the hippest chefs in Los Angeles. It’s about the techniques, equipment and ingredients that go into good home cooking, and that doesn’t change much month to month or even year to year.Continued…
The office on a quiet Sunday morning
People think entrepreneurs are risk-loving. Really what you find is successful entrepreneurs hate risk, because the founding of the enterprise is already so risky that what they do is take their early resources, the small amounts of capital that they have, whatever assets they have, and they deploy those resources systematically, eliminating the largest risk first, the second-largest risk, and so on, and so on.
New in Backpack: Reorderable sidebar links
We’re excited to announce a new Backpack feature. Now you can reorder the pages linked in your sidebar. Sidebar links are no longer limited to alphabetical order. Our customers have been asking for this and we’re glad to deliver it today.
In the past, people have been using all kinds of tricks to keep their pages in a certain order. We’ve seen people numbering their pages or prepending them with funny symbols like * and # to force the pages to the top of the sidebar. Now all you have to do is hover over a page and drag to move it up or down.
Hover over a page link and you’ll see the drag icon on the right-hand side. Grab onto the icon and drag up and down to reorder the page. When you drop the page, the position is saved. It’s that easy.
We hope you enjoy taking control of your sidebar with this improvement to Backpack. Thanks for your continued support!
My first thought after looking at this DSLR collage is: Why hasn’t anyone made a white SLR? Why are all SLR’s black or dark grey? Seems like an opportunity for someone to stand out. [via df]
The financial crisis in America is really a moral crisis, caused by the series of proofs which the American public has received that the leading financiers who control banks, trust companies and industrial corporations are often imprudent, and not seldom dishonest. They have mismanaged trust funds and used them freely for speculative purposes. Hence the alarm of depositors, and a general collapse of credit.
—
The Economist, 1908
The Economist, 1908
How to do Basecamp-style subdomains in Rails
# 1) Point *.example.com in your DNS setup to your server.
#
# 2) Setup an Apache vhost to catch the star pointer:
#
# <VirtualHost *:80>
# ServerName example.com
# ServerAlias *.example.com
# </VirtualHost>
#
# 3) Set the current account from the subdomain
class ApplicationController < ActionController::Base
before_filter :set_current_account
private
def set_current_account
@current_account = Account.find_by_subdomain!(request.subdomains.first)
end
end
# 4) Tie all top-level requests off the current account
class CustomersController < ApplicationController
def index
@customers = @current_account.customers
end
endLeap before you look?
Gordon Segal, founder and CEO of Crate and Barrel, says lack of wisdom is the reason his store got off the ground.
“We didn’t know anything about retail,” Segal recalled. “I had grown up in the restaurant business, so I knew about service but not about retail. We didn’t know a market from a markdown. We didn’t know anything about importing. In fact, if we weren’t 23 and totally lacking wisdom, we would never have done this. You just go ahead with your passions, and you rush forward without a great deal of thought,” Segal reflected…
“We were truly a counter-culture story of the 1960s,” Segal said. “We literally turned over packing crates, stacked up the merchandise and went into business. We just thought that was nothing special. Of course, everyone walked in and was amazed that these two young kids were starting this business, that we could find French pottery and Swedish glass and Danish flatware and bring it to a small, little street in Chicago called Old Town. It was really crazy, when I think back, that we felt that we could import product into a little 1,700 sq. ft. store.”
Makes you wonder: How many others have succeeded because they didn’t know the rules? Because they didn’t realize that they were doing things they weren’t supposed to be doing?
We’re always taught to look before we leap, but it’s interesting to hear about the Segals of the world — those who succeed by rushing forward without thinking.
But doesn’t wisdom lead to success? Sure, it often does. But sometimes the winners are those who don’t have a lot of wisdom. Look at NFL quarterbacks. Routinely the best ones aren’t the brightest.
All quarterbacks drafted into the pros are required to take an I.Q. test—the Wonderlic Personnel Test…Of the five quarterbacks taken in round one of the 1999 draft, Donovan McNabb, the only one of the five with a shot at the Hall of Fame, had the lowest Wonderlic score. And who else had I.Q. scores in the same range as McNabb? Dan Marino and Terry Bradshaw, two of the greatest quarterbacks ever to play the game.
Maybe these quarterbacks succeed in part because they don’t have the highest IQs. Maybe they go with their gut instead of overanalyzing things.
Now, I don’t want to sound like I’m celebrating ignorance. Leaping before you look isn’t the best way to, say, invade a foreign country. But if you’re doing something with a little less downside — like starting a business — maybe you’re better off ignoring all the naysayers who tell you that you need to spend tons of time and money on planning, researching, testing, educating yourself, studying the competition, etc. Sometimes there’s real value in not worrying about what you don’t know and just putting something out into the world.
Peculiar error from QuickBooks Pro. You can’t enter a $ into an accounting app? Sure, the dollar may be invalid sometime in the near future, but…