review Archives | Ian M Rountree

Why Genesis Framework Rocks

May 27, 2011 by Ian Leave a Comment

I’ve used the Genesis Framework from StudioPress as the basis for my blog for a couple of months now, and am about to finish the fourth site I’ve developed on it. I need to say this: The framework rocks. Everything from the format, to the support from StudioPress, to helpful tools people have published have helped me cut down my modification and theme building time significantly.

Genesis is slick. Genesis is smooth. And, above all, it doesn’t always look the same – even when you’re using the same elements for design.

Here are the sites I’ve now got going, built on either Genesis itself, or one of its child themes.

The Dowager Shadow - Built on Genesis Framework — The Dowager Shadow

Ian M Rountree - Built on Genesis Framework — Ian M Rountree

Hard Refresh Blog - Built on Genesis Framework — Hard Refresh

Jazmine Rhomyk Gallery - Built on Genesis Framework — Jazmine Rhomyk

Yes. I like blue. Don’t judge me.

Why did I switch from Standard Theme to Genesis Framework?

SEO options – unless you’re using plugins, it’s the bee’s knees. Seriously – beyond just being able to designate title and meta descriptions, Genesis allows for built in redirects, which is great for link blogs.
Ease of design – Spending a lot of time building sites isn’t my goal – I want to get decent looking sites up quickly, so I can start filling them in with content.
Ease of modification – The above being said, I want to be able to iterate my work quickly. If there’s a feature I want to add, or a design change I want to make, I want to be able to make it on the fly. Genesis allows for that.
Updates and notifications – Really. What other theme tells you, on its own, when it’s ready to get upgraded?
The Showcase – totally for bragging rights. There are a lot of awesome examples in the SutioPress showcase of well-built Genesis framework powered websites. Two – and soon, I hope, three – of mine are there.

Genesis Framework can help wordpress become a proper CMS very swiftly.

Many of StudioPress’ turn-key themes make developing non-standard blogs a breeze. One of the troubles most people see with using WordPress in general is that so many WP-based websites look… Well, like WordPress websites. Getting away from the usual columned layout, and adding some flair is one of the many places where Genesis is a viking.

Check Genesis Framework out – it’s well worth it if you spend a lot of time working with wordpress.

John C Maxwell’s “The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership”

April 9, 2010 by Ian 2 Comments

[note: This was originally published at Why Read The Manual last year on August 28th – that site’s broken, so I’ve transposed this review here for preservation, because I still believe much of the information in this book is relevant. The text is dated – it’s eight months old, after all – but the review is still quality. I think. What do you think?]

When I was promoted last year and given my own store location to manage, I was given two books for my birthday (which happened to be two weeks after the promotion). One of them was John C. Maxwell‘s “The 21 Irrefutable Laws Of Leadership: Follow Them And People Will Follow You“. A year later, no longer with that position, I’m working on building my momentum and presense in the company, in order to get moved up again, so I figured it was time to finish reading the book.

For the sake of clarity, I failed in my position leading a store. I was unprepared to make the jump from being a friend-who-gave-orders to the guy that people go to when they have trouble, and expect to provide direction. I can’t in honesty say that, had I finished reading this book the week I took over the location I’d be there running it still, but having read the remainder of the book, I can with certainty say that the guidance Maxwell provides would have been of measurable benefit.

What is the message?

At its core this book delivers a simple lesson; if you’re going to be a leader, you’ve got to be on a mission. You have to be prepared not to seek privilege, but to seek challenge, to overcome adversity, and to be willing to sacrifice. The best leaders are there to support those they lead in service to a common goal. The worst are there to grab everything they can for themselves from salary to title to recognition. These messages are at once simple and complex, but this is where 21 Laws shines – Maxwell effectively breaks down the necessities for good leadership just far enough to address the complexity of the idea of leadership, and yet remains direct enough in the explanation and examples of each law to make the ideas transmittable to just about everyone.

One of the wonderful devices John Maxwell uses in this book are the stories. Tales of Lance Armstrong building a team around him because even though he’s the hero, heroes need support – this, from the Law of the Inner Circle. There are also stories about Steve Jobs in the Law of Intuition and, of course, the parable of Martin Luther King Jr. in the Law of Sacrifice. Each of these simple, memorable stories transmits the point Maxwell is shooting at very well, and does so in a manner that most people can idenfity with.

So for all its uses, who could make the best use of this book?

Well, for one, myself. I work retail. I deal with staff who I have no authority over, and customers who believe I’m an idiot drone out to steal their money. The approach this book teaches adds value to the way I work, and allows me to approach anyone on an even footing, and ensure that, assuming I follow all of these directions, even if I can’t help a customer with something directly, I’ll be able to provide some kind of value – any kind of value – and make their day better.

Anyone who has ever failed in a leadership position will find this book, and a number of others I’ll list at the end of this review, useful if they’re coming at reading it from a self-improvement perspective. When you have experience to base your questions on, the answering becomes easier. Those looking for a quick fix need not read; this book presents a process that must last the remainder of your leading days if you want it to work for you.

Managers, bosses, bossy people and anyone else now in, or looking for a leadership position absolutely must read this one. If you’re worried about your own leadership abilities before reading something like this, keep the following in mind: bad leaders do not make effort to study leadership! If anyone has ever told you you suck at your job being a leader, go out and read 21 Laws, or the QBQ (which I’ll be reviewing later) or anything by Seth Godin.

Some of this stuff can get fairly sublime, however, and of the books I’ve read so far, 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership is one of the most down-to-earth, straightforward books about how to influence people in positive ways. If you’re at all interested in either becoming a good leader, or recognising the differences between leadership styles for good or for bad, I’d say this is a winner.

Some Light Weekend Reading:

Anti-Curating the iPad Launch

January 27, 2010 by Ian 20 Comments

The bomb dropped this morning while I was out shopping for groceries. It’s not that I didn’t know apple was hosting an event today, I just didn’t care. With Robert Scoble on the scene to do what he does best and aggregate/contextualize and curate, nothing said of the countless blogs and other media outlets covering it as if it were, in Mitch Joel’s words, the MosesTablet, successor to the JesusPhone.

I’m not really down on the iPad, despite its stupid name, but I had better things to do today than play sheepdog with the rest of the blogging world. Instead, I’m going to tell you what I think of the iPad with only the input of my own gadget sense (Why, Read The Manual! style, that is) and armed only by the information available at Apple’s official page on its site for the iPad.

This is not a preview. This is what I’d tell you if you came to buy this from me when it launched, 60 days from now.

I don’t usually perform exegesis on my presentation style, but now’s a good time for a demonstration, because I think it’s the only fair way I can do this with the information I’ve got.

I asked for some non-news, non-curation related perspective about the iPad on twitter. @StevenHodson replied with “- it’s a nice toy .. nothing much more than that .. it definitely isn’t the savior of old media regardless of the hype.” I agree with that assessment, with a few provisos. I mentioned I expect to see a more than 10% return rate at the store for the iPad when it launches, @ChrisDca replied “Couldn’t agree more. People will take it home, play with it for a week and get bored quickly.” – A fair assessment.

I’ll have to explain first what I think the iPad is for, and what people probably think it’s for. This is always the difference between buying in, and returning a product.

We’re not seeing a reinvention of anything here; we’re seeing what Apple has proven themselves best at, which is a partial conversion between a number of devices. Obviously, the UI is designed with the iPhone and iPod Touch in mind, clearly well beefed up, and geared toward the app store. this is excellent because it’s a familiar platform, by now, and the concept is firmly set in people’s minds. Also, for those of us who are Windows junkies, the iPhone OS means we’re not really adopting Apple’s OS – this may seem trivial, but it’s a big deal. Not having to learn a new operating system accounts for nearly a third of the “don’t really want it” reactions for new computer buyers. We saw this with netbooks – now we have Windows 7 on them.

It’s possible for the iPad to win. Just less likely than the hype presupposes.

What the iPad is going to be great at is – you guessed it – exactly what the devices it emulates are. Like an iPod touch, it’ll have apps. Like a Netbook, it will be for portable internet. Like a Kindle, it will have eBooks, which may be the real killer app on the iPad. We’ll see.

The key here is that you have to actually be able to use the device. It’s not a netbook, and even with the keyboard attachment you can get, using it like a small laptop is a failing idea because there’s no current office app. Microsoft isn’t about to get OfficePod approved, and Google is likely focusing on its web-based If that changes, this application for the device changes.

It’s also not an iPod. As much as the possible top end of 64gb suggests that large amounts of music storage is possible, and matches the current iPod Touch and iPhone top end limits, the device itself is so multipurpose that using it exclusively as a music machine is broken. I ran into this when I bought my iPod Touch 8gb when they first launched. I swiftly had more apps and cache than music, which annoyed me. More memory is good, but people will have to be careful with their acquisition of junk apps. Until Apple works out expandable memory and partitioning, this will be a recurring issue for people less focused on curation of their libraries.

The iPad is also not strictly an eBook reader, though it will be easier to conquer this market than people expect. Where Apple has the real possibility to shine here is academia. Imagining a good iBook app is easy. Imagining the costs of college text books being replaced with the one-time cost of an iPad when you enroll to a high end school, and the further, far less drastic costs of textbooks as you take on courses is a stretch – but a very small one, assuming Apple jumps on the idea. Books are so thoroughly ubiquitous, even in today’s less-than-focused literacy culture, that really crushing the market is a simple prospect. People love to read. What they hate is cumbersome books and costly acquisition and maintainence. The iPad avoids both of these issues just like other eBook readers.

Not too many people will see the possibilities this way.

I’m betting a lot of the buying public will pick up an iPad and, as @ChrisDca’s tweet suggests, get bored within the week. Especially if they’re already exposed to iPod Touch and iPhones. It’s just a bigger screen for the same functions, with some new accessories, which are always a money suck. It’s also rather big for an iPod, which is how many people will see it, which makes jacking in your headphones and slapping this in a pocket a non-option.

It’s not a phone either. Perhaps the 3G model will have Skype, or somesuch, but that’s still not a universal fix. The iPad is not an all-around device. It’s not for gaming either. Much as I can imagine many rounds of Tap Tap Revenge being played, and racing games, and tower defense games on its massive screen being a huge upgrade from the iPhone experience of these games, there’s no inherent Flash support for now, and certainly no way to install non-App store programs. It’s a web productivity tool.

It’s also NOT a computer. Much as Apple hypes the micro-computer aspect of their portable devices, the iPad still runs on the iPhone OS. Local storage is not indicated, there are no USB plugs, card readers built in, or any other kind of file system accesses. This is a closed system running entirely on web access for its functionality.

But there’s potential here. Right? real potential.

Wait. You know what this reminds me of? A closed system, running entirely on the web. Could it be that Apple is going after ChromeOS with their own device? Now that could be an effective battle. Where Android is battling the iPhone in the smartphone market, the iPad seems, on its face, directed very much at the possibility of a web-computer culture.

I can see the productivity here. Bloggers, citizen journalists, any species of web native, will all see the potential here to become a very good access point. Not a toy, an access point to information, to the sites they follow, their own personal magazine daily, hourly, instantly. Both the iPad with its current iteration (because we all know this is only version one) and the promise of ChromeOS tablet and netbook computers foretell the possibilities that cloud-based operation holds. It’s a dream made of pipes, a series of tubes really – wait, that’s someone else’s analogy.

So what’s the bottom line?

No one is getting everything they wanted with this device. Few people are getting what they expected. If I had planned on buying one as it was hyped before the announcement, I would be disappointed with the run down I’ve seen so far, and likely begin to look elsewhere. However, enough people will get what they’re looking for that this will not fail as a product.

A caution, though, to people who have watched Apple’s trajectory in the past and are waiting until version two if the iPad. When not enough people adopt something early, companies like Apple don’t get enough feedback. Which means that version two will never come, or will not be enough improved over version one to merit the wait. If this looks at all like something that will do any version of what you want, go buy one. don’t be afraid to return it, just make sure you use the heck out of it (kindly) in the first week to know whether it really is worth your dollars.

You have 60 days to decide whether or not to camp out. I’m not getting out my sleeping bag, but if I get the opportunity to own one of these, I’m not liable to pass it up either. There’s no jury to be out or in.

I’m predicting a 15% return rate for the early adopters – high, considering between 8% and 10% returns on most consumer electronics.

Photo by d!zzy.

Why We All Win – Cellular Edition

November 25, 2009 by Ian Leave a Comment

Platform wars are stupid but necessary, because homogeneous doesn’t work in the market place. Simple as that.

There’s a lot of kerfuffle lately about the Droid, and Android in general, competing with the iPhone and its platform. Rightly so, but I think some people are missing the point of differentiation with this. At the end of the day, there are four platforms worth mentioning: iPhone, Android, BlackBerry, Symbian and Windows Mobile. Everything else is dumbphones masquerading as productivity tools.

We’ll start with Apple, because they wouldn’t have it any other way. Most of what you hear about the iPhone is how awesome it is, how many apps there are. This is a key to its success, but it also tends to blind people. So many choices makes decisions tougher, after all. But spend an hour in the app store, and what are you likely to find? A lot of communication toys, multimedia tools, games, virtual beer and assorted hodge podge. What does this make the iPhone, once you dig in? A toy. It’s a multimedia device, which is exactly what Apple wants. Thing is, not many people pay attention to this, or consider whether anything other than total malleability is what they need.

Enter Android. On any device, Android is a killer operating system; it’s light weight, handles well for the most part, and makes your phone feel like a small computer. The market has apps, granted, and lots of them, the number growing sometimes faster than Apple’s AppStore because of differences in developers and approval processes. Android is also open source, which means anyone with the chops can dig in and do whatever they feel like for it with no hindrances past their own skills. This is a big deal! It’s a bridge product, halfway between high computing power and the fun of the iPhone’s platform. There’s fun, but there’s also a smattering of productivity and communication.

Productivity. Something a lot of phones lack, which is only partly bad. Not many people want to type out a thousand-word blog post or a two thousand word article on a phone’s keyboard. Applications for this are, rightly so, limited. It would be nice to see one of the platforms stand up and address this in a straight-forward manner. Windows Mobile sort of tries, but with Microsoft’s lackadaisical attitude to development for WinMo, it’s no wonder no one gives a second thought to it. Device selection failure as well helps the slow execution of WinMo by the iPhone and Android. It’s barely a competitor.

What is? BlackBerry and Symbian. Nokia hasn’t done a lot with Symbian lately – we’ll see what comes up – but RIM has made some decidedly choice moves in the last year. AppWorld is great, there’s a decent suite of applications, but they’re heavily weighted in two directions: Communication and aggregation. Readers and messengers. This is, I think, a decent move for RIM to make because BlackBerry has always been about keeping in touch. I use a Berry myself, so I may be biased here, but it does everything I need it do – I usually have four instant messenger programs running, plus BBMessenger, UberTwitter (until Seesmic works – you’re on notice, Loic) and WordPress for on the fly blogging. RIM may be pushing themselves in toward a niche with pragmatists in mind, but that’s ok. It’s what they’ve proven they’re good at.

So where does this leave us? Winners. The communicators will have their BlackBerry phones. The developers and power users will filter to Android. Everyone who wants the internet in all its multimedia glory at their beck and call will find an iPhone waiting. Someone, somewhere, will love a Windows Mobile handset just enough to give it a happy home. I like having choice. Better still, I like having choices that are becoming increasingly clear.