More Valuable Content

We’ve added two new things:

1. Short daily posts on interesting news, creative ideas, new web tech and valuable links. These will be going into the main article feed. We will also still be posting quick news snippets to our Twitter-driven News Feed.
2. A new ‘Learn’ section. These will be articles based on videos and presentations from Carsonified events like FOWA and FOWD. We’re launching with three articles for you:
   1. Get Clients to say Yes! by Paul Boag
   2. Get Started with DNS by Chris Lea
   3. How to Make Money off Your By-Products by Jason Fried.

We’ve also uploaded two audio files from the Learn section (in podcast format), which you can grab and listen to on the way to work.

In case you’re one of our 33,000+ RSS subscribers who hasn’t seen the re-design, feel free to stop by the site and check it out.

We’re still going to be posting one long ‘feature’ article per week. These will continue to cover all the design, development and web entrepreneurship topics you’re interested in.

Merging the Carsonified Blog and ThinkVitamin

Carsonified has been running two blogs, and as a small company, we felt that we were spreading ourselves too thin. The best way to serve you guys, our awesome readers, is to combine our efforts into one blog – and really put 110% effort into it. Therefore, we’ve decided to combine ThinkVitamin and the Carsonified blog, into one valuable blog for web designers, developers and entrepreneuers.

The new site will live at carsonified.com/blog and anyone heading to thinkvitamin.com will be re-directed. All the old content from both Carsonified and ThinkVitamin will still work.

New Design

If you’re one of our faithful RSS subscribers, you won’t know this, but we’ve just re-designed the entire site (and the Carsonified site). ThinkVitamin hasn’t been properly re-designed since we launched it back in April 2006, so we felt it was time for a fresh re-design. Mike Kus, our amazing designer here at Carsonified, has added a bit of flair to the design, whilst also making it easier to navigate and read. We hope you like it!

Keep up-to-date

There are several ways you can subscribe to ThinkVitamin content:

• Article RSS – All the main posts and features
• News RSS – Our Twitter powered news feed
• Podcast – Audio recordings of talks from our events
• @carsonified – Focusing on news, thoughts and ideas for Web Professionals like you

Your Feedback

We’d love to hear your feedback and ideas, so please share in the comments below. Look forward to hearing from you!

I’ve been thinking recently about the relationship between clients and designers. And about how we get clients to the point of saying yes. Yes to what, you might ask? Well, that might be yes to the design, that might be yes to your wireframe, some feature or just your approach. But it’s the way that we present ourselves to clients and the way that we interact with them that I want to look at.

Let me first introduce you to the ‘man from Del Monte’. For those of you who don’t know, the man from Del Monte appeared in an advertising campaign in the UK for Del Monte, makers of fruit juice. The advert consisted of a man dressed in an immaculate white suit and a trilby. He had a very colonial look about him and would visit various fruit farms around South America. Each time there would be a groveling peasant farmer who would present his oranges with fear and trepidation to the man in the white suit. And then there would be this moment of hush. And the man from Del Monte would pronounce judgement on the quality of the oranges that were being presented to him. Then when the answer came – ‘the man from Del Monte, he says yes!’ – there would be immense celebration, cheering and dancing. The farmer was very happy that his oranges were good enough quality to be included in the Del Monte range.

Apart from the fact that it’s impractical to be wearing a white suit in an orchard, the point that I took away from the advert is this; That in the web industry our relationships with our clients are sometimes like that. We present something to them and then we wait on tenterhooks for their answer.

Wrong Relationship

At the heart of all of this is a wrong relationship between designer and client that is fundamentally flawed. It’s not something that we talk about very much but a big part of our job is our relationship with our client. So I want to concentrate on fixing that relationship.

In many ways we treat our clients like they are royalty. They’re the people who you have to bow and scrape to. Often we can blindly follow the client’s lead and we can end up being quite submissive in the relationship. We’re afraid to express our opinions, nor do we effectively communicate our opinion when we try to. What happens is we get so frustrated that we give up on projects and effectively kill them. We get to the, ‘yeah, yeah you can have whatever you want,’ stage and we give up.

Or, we swing to the other extreme and we become the person is constantly saying no to everything. We turn into the difficult and argumentative person.

Time to Change

It’s time for a revolution in the designer / client relationship. It’s time to go from a master / servant relationship to a peer / peer relationship. It’s time to change the relationship so that we, as designers, are the experts, providing an expert service and the client perceives us in that way.

How do we change it? Designers need to become the expert in the relationship. Designers also need to be more positive and move away from that negative mentality that ruins so many projects. Negativity can rear its head when we say no to clients but also in the way that we view our clients.

Become the Expert

1. Have a methodology. It puts you in control. It enables you to set expectations with your clients and let them know what’s coming. Nobody likes uncertainty and they certainly don’t like uncertainty when they’re paying a lot of money for something. Clients like to have a sense of what’s coming next and what they can expect from the project. Sit your client down at the beginning of the project and tell them what’s going to happen. Show them the stages that you’re going to work through before you end up at your final deliverable. Maybe even beyond that if you plan to evolve their site over time. By doing this you’re setting yourself up as the person who is in control of the relationship. You’re also reassuring the client and setting their expectations at a reasonable level.
2. Gather information. Everyone works differently and so your methodology may be different to mine. But whatever yours is like, make sure to include a big section on ‘information gathering’. So we’re talking about things like; success criteria, business objectives, competitive analysis, priorities, mood boards, user personas and user expectations. The reason why this information is so important is not only so that you can deliver a better solution but it’s immensely important when it comes to justifying why you have done something a certain way. This is a really important part of the process. It’s unfair of you to expect a client to accept it because you’re the expert. You need to prove that you’re the expert by justifying your decisions in a way that they can understand and associate with.
3. Use third party data. You don’t necessarily need to use the information that you gathered from the client to justify your decisions, you can use data from third parties if you like, such as research institutes etc.
4. Write down anything that’s agreed. Whatever you’re discussing with a client, either over the phone, on e-mail or IM, if something is agreed upon then you need to record that.

Be Positive

We need to take a leaf out of President Obama’s book and live by the mantra, ‘yes we can’. We need to stop blocking ideas that our clients have and stop being negative in our communication with them.

1. Say yes. As part of my quest to have my clients see me as the expert I try to say yes to them as much as possible. However, as part of saying yes I also explain the consequences to them at the same time. “Of course we can do that, but if we do then this, this and this will happen.”
2. Suggest an alternative. Instead of leaving the discussion on a negative note try to suggest an alternative. You can still say yes, present the consequences and when the consequences are not desirable then suggest an alternative.
3. Be enthusiastic and caring. When you suggest an alternative do it with enthusiasm for the project. Give the impression that you give a shit. Obviously, this has to be sincere.
4. Be positive about your relationship with your client. Clients are not stupid. I hear designers talking like their clients are stupid all the time and it annoys me so much. “They just don’t get it”, is a favorite phrase a lot of people use. Clients aren’t stupid, they’re clever, intelligent people. They just happen to be good at something other than design. And just because they don’t understand the Web doesn’t mean they’re not clever. There’s more to life than the Web. Your client will pick up your condescending, patronizing attitude and so we need to be very careful to keep that under control.
5. Give your clients credit for what they’re good at. They know their target audience, they know their business, they know their strategy. They might have trouble communicating that in a way that you can understand but they do have a lot of knowledge. Don’t forget that they have to live with the sites we build. So listen to them when they give you information.
6. Show your work little and often. As designers we don’t like to include clients in the design process if we can avoid it. We don’t like to show work that isn’t finished. Whether it be wireframes, sketches or designs you need to show it to the client as you work on it. By getting them involved they are becoming committed to the process. They’re a part of it and they feel valued. They’re much more likely to approve a design if they have seen it early on and been part of producing it.

Shape the Roll of the Client

1. Explain what’s required of the client. At the kick-off meeting you need to set out and explain what’s required of the client. You may have designed hundreds of websites, one after another, but they haven’t. This may be the first time for them. So it’s really important for them to know what their roll is not only to help them but to constrain them as well.
2. Focus the client on the problem, not the solution. If a client comes to you and says, ‘I really hate that blue, I want it be pink.’ You don’t know why he or she wants that, or what the background to the request is. If you just do it then you’re just a pixel pusher. What you need to do is to refocus them on the problem. Why do they dislike that blue? In this situation a more useful statement would be, ‘I’m unsure that the blue will appeal to my teenage girl demographic.’ Now, you know what the problem is and you can work on it.
3. Focus the client on the business. Try to get them to concentrate on the business objectives of the new site. So often clients get caught up with the detail. They worry about the names of sections or the white space on the design. What they should be concentrating on is the question, ‘does the new design help achieve their call to action?’. ‘Does the design communicate the unique selling points of this particular organization?’.
4. Focus the client on users. It’s no use to you if your client tells you what they don’t like and what they do like. What’s important is what the users like and don’t like. Never, never ask a client, ‘what do you think?’. Ask them, ‘how do you think your users will react to this?’.

Managing Feedback

Everything is fine when the designer is talking but once our clients start to give us feedback, that’s when the issues start. So we need to manage the way in which our clients give us feedback.

1. Talk to everyone involved in the decision. Clients consult other people. Even if you’re working with a very small business and your point of contact is the business owner himself, you can bet he’ll show his wife the design (or vice versa). If you’re dealing with a bigger client then there could be a whole group of people who will see your design. Try to talk directly to those people too if possible. If you can make them feel wanted and listened to then they are more likely to come on board.
2. Meet with people individually. Have you ever been in a meeting where one person says, ‘I think the blue is too dark.’ And someone else says, ‘I think the blue should be light.’ And what you end up with is a lighter shade of the existing blue. That’s design-on-the-fly. This can be avoided by meeting with each person separately. If needed, issue a questionnaire in order to really control the kind of feedback you’re getting.

So to recap. You need to turn your relationship with your client into a peer / peer relationship. You need to become the expert and be more positive. You also need to mould the roll of your client and manage feedback carefully.

Listen or Watch

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Photo credit: flickr.com/photos/jonchristopher

DNS is a big topic, and I’m certainly not going to try to cover all of it here. However, I think that by the end of this article, we should have covered the parts that developers should be aware of and understand properly. We’ll start by talking about the sequence of servers that may get consulted whenever a DNS lookup is performed.

Nameservers

The DNS system is in place to translate the representations of internet destinations from things that we humans care about (domain names) to things that computers can use (IP addresses). The system is naturally distributed as we’ll see, which keeps the servers that handle DNS requests from getting too overloaded. There are two distinct sorts of nameservers that we’ll discuss, and each is responsible for a different sort of task. They are:

• Authoritative nameservers
• Resolving nameservers

If you’ve ever moved a domain name between hosting providers, you’ve probably had to do something to “update the nameservers” for the domain. What you are doing there is changing the authoritative nameservers for that domain. Similarly, if you perform a whois query on a domain, it will tell you what the authoritative nameservers are for it. As the name suggests, the job of an authoritative nameserver is to know all the DNS information for the domains assigned to it.

What’s not understood as well is that whatever computer you are using to read this article is almost certainly not talking to an authoritative nameserver. It’s talking to a resolving nameserver, often referred to as just a “resolver”. The resolvers are typically provided to you by your ISP. Their job is to answer the requests of client computers for arbitrary DNS lookups.

When you surf to a website, say amazon.com, your computer asks the resolver what the corresponding IP address is (assuming it’s not stored already in a local cache somewhere on your computer). If the resolver knows, it just answers immediately. If it doesn’t know, the following sequence of things happen very, very quickly:

1. The resolver determines what nameservers are authoritative for the domain.
2. The resolver asks one of the authoritative nameservers for the needed info.
3. Upon getting the info, the resolver stores the information, and answers your computer.

So in this way, DNS info gets distributed around the internet. Typically lots of people will be using any particular group of resolvers from an ISP, and once the resolvers know the answers for any given lookup, they remember the answers for future use. This is why Google’s nameservers can stay up. It’s not as if they get queried every single time anybody goes to google.com, since the relevant resolvers have that information cached close to all the people surfing there.

Of course, eventually, a resolving nameserver will need to check back in with an authoritative one to see if anything has changed. Otherwise, no DNS information could ever update on the Internet. I’ll explain how this works next.

TTL

So in the last section, we noted how a resolver will ask an authoritative nameserver for information that it doesn’t already have. It will always get back a little more than just the information it asked for though. Specifically, it will get something called a TTL value for the lookup, which stands for “Time To Live”. The TTL is measured in seconds, and it tells the resolver how long it should assume the information it got back should be considered valid. After the amount of time specified in the TTL has passed, the resolver should check back in with the authoritative server even if it still has the information for the lookup stored.

This concept is important enough that it’s probably worth talking through an example. Let’s say that I have the TTL for chrislea.com set at four hours, and that a resolver asks my authoritative nameservers for the IP address at exactly 12:00pm. Let’s then assume that I change the IP address in the authoritative servers at exactly 12:01pm. In this scenario, any client computer talking to the resolver that checked in at noon won’t pick up the IP address change until 4:00pm. This is why it can take some time for an IP address change to propagate across the Internet. Had I been smarter, at 8:00am that morning, I would have lowered the TTL so some low value, say 300 seconds. That way, by the time I wanted to make the change at noon, all the resolvers that cared to check would have gotten the five minute TTL value. Therefore, in this case, the IP address change would only take five minutes to propagate across the Internet. After the propagation was finished, I would have updated the TTL again and put it back to a higher value to save strain on my authoritative nameservers.

There’s really no standard for what TTL values are supposed to be. Typical values might correspond to 12 or 24 hours, though they certainly can be longer in some cases. One important note though relates to the “lowering the TTL” trick I just described. I recommend never using a TTL lower than 300 seconds. This is because some resolvers are set up such that if they see a TTL value that’s considered “too low”, it’s assumed to be wrong, and the resolver will just use an internal default value. Said internal default will generally be something like 12 or 24 hours, so you would effectively have induced the exact opposite behavior of what you were shooting for.

We’ve now covered how the relevant servers talk to each other, and how DNS distributes information around. Now, we can dive into exactly what that information is and how it’s used. When a DNS query happens, it’s for a specific type of record. There are lots of different types of DNS records, and we’re not going to talk about all of them here, but we’re going to cover the most common ones that you should know about.

A Records

A lookup for an A record is what people are generally talking about when they generically say “DNS Lookup”. Your computer gives the resolver a domain name, gets an IP address back in response. It’s the sort of lookup that occurs when you are surfing around in a web browser, pinging something, or telnetting to a port.

An important point here is that every time you add a something ending in a dot character “.” to the left of a domain, then as far as DNS is concerned, it’s a differnet domain. For example, the following two domains are distinct:

• chrislea.com
• www.chrislea.com

In practice, basically everybody points the www. to the same IP address as just the base domain, but you don’t have to. They could point to completely different places. Conveniently, you can create a “star” record for subdomains if you want a catchall. For example, I have *.chrislea.com set up as a catchall for my personal domain, and the catchall is pointed to the same IP address as just chrislea.com. Therefore, if you try and ping the domain vogons.chrislea.com, which doesn’t have an explicit entry, it will match the *.chrislea.com entry and ping the same IP as if you had just pinged chrislea.com. However, if you ping debian01.chrislea.com, which does have an explicit entry, you will see the IP assigned to that domain directly. If a catchall doesn’t exist, and you query a subdomain with no entry, the nameserver will respond that there is no entry, and the behavior of the program you’re using in that case is dependent on the program itself.

Understanding how lookups for A records happen is quite straightforward as we’ve seen. There are more complex queries though that require multi stage lookups to complete. Let’s talk about one of these next.

MX Records

The MX part of the name stands for “Mail Exchanger”. As it turns out, email is so special that it has its own class of DNS entries. They aren’t too complex, though it is a bigger topic than the A records we just covered. To understand it, we first have to cover just the basics of how an email gets from your computer to wherever it’s supposed to go.

Many people use desktop email clients such as Outlook, Thunderbird, Mail.app, or (if you’re lucky) Evolution. When you send an email out using one of these programs, it’s not this client software that’s actually responsible for getting that email to its final destination. What happens is that your client program forwards the mail on to a server running Mail Transport Angent (MTA) software such as postfix. This MTA program is what actually sends the mail for you. When it gets an email message, the MTA looks up the domain to the right of the @ symbol in the email address, and then checks DNS for the MX record(s) for that domain. The response should be one or more domain names. Again, just to be clear, it gets domain names in the form of A records in response. It then looks up the IP address for one of the A records, just as discussed in the previous section, and sends the mail to that IP address.

As an example, let’s assume you’re sending an email to my GMail account. When the MTA you’re using gets the email message, it will check the MX records for gmail.com. The response it gets back will (currently) include:

• gmail.com mail is handled by 40 alt4.gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com.
• gmail.com mail is handled by 10 alt1.gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com.
• gmail.com mail is handled by 20 alt2.gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com.
• gmail.com mail is handled by 5 gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com.
• gmail.com mail is handled by 30 alt3.gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com.

Don’t worry about the syntax here. The important points to note are that

1. There are multiple domains returned in the response.
2. These domains are A records.
3. There is a number, used for priority, attached to each domain.

The priority number tells the MTA in what order to try the different domains to send the message to. It will try from lowest to highest. So in this case, the MTA will first try to deliver the message to gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com since that has a priority of 5. If it can’t deliver it to the IP that corresponds to that domain, it will try alt1.gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com next, with a priority of 10, and so on.

There are a variety of reasons for this infrastructure to be in place. First, it allows for some resiliency in email sending, since the receiving entity can have more than one place that mail can be delivered to. If a server goes down, then there may be another one still up that can handle getting the message. Second, it means that the place where your mail goes can be a completely different server, or group of servers, than where your website’s IP address is. And, it can do this without having to have really annoying domains to the right of the @ symbol in your email address. This is frequently done to use third party mail services for your mail, such as a hosted Exchange service or GMail.

Next, let’s cover another two stage lookup type of record. This one is actually a bit simpler.

CNAME Records

A CNAME, which stands for Canonical Name, is best thought of as an alias. The “Canonical Name” name is very poorly worded, and I recommend just always referring to it as a CNAME. The way a CNAME works is that you have a domain you control, and you assign it to be an alias of some other domain name. For example, I currently have the domain thechris.org CNAME’d to the domain virb.com. There is no A record set up for thechris.org, so if you surf there in your browser, the CNAME value is what’s returned by DNS. Much like with MX records, the domain virb.com is returned, and then a second lookup happens to determine what IP that is. Then, your browser knows to go to that IP address. However, it will still show thechris.org in the URL bar.

Now, I could have simply pointed the domain thechris.org to the virb.com IP address using an A record. Virb would not know any difference if I did. The problem with that approach is that if, in the future, we ever change the IP address for virb.com, I would have to go and explicitly update my A record for thechris.org to whatever the new IP address was in order for things to keep working. Using a CNAME alias like this, things just keep working automagically as we’d like them to.

Okay, enough with these fancy double lookup records. Let’s move on to our next topic which will bring us back to a straightforward lookup mechanism, albeit a good one to understand.

TXT Records

The TXT record is really boring, at least in terms of how it’s defined in the RFC. Essentially, this field is supposed to be a “comments” area, where you can put whatever you want, but it’s not supposed to contain important or machine readable information. So why am I mentioning it? Well, as it turns out, even though you’re not supposed to put imporant stuff in there, people do it all the time. The most common reason currently is to provide SPF data. Really covering SPF is outside of the scope of this article, but in a nutshell, it’s a way to specify via DNS what IP address are allowed to send mail out for a certain domain. For example, here is the TXT record currently in place for chrislea.com:


v=spf1 a mx ip4:70.32.89.79 ip4:76.87.248.247 ip4:64.207.133.104 ip4:72.10.46.46 ~all


This says that the four IPs listed there are “blessed” by me as being allowed to send email from the domain chrislea.com. The information is used to help in determining if a message is SPAM or not. For example, if I send a message to my GMail account from my chrislea.com domain, and I look at the headers in GMail by selecting “show original” from the actions, one of the things I see is this.


Received-SPF: pass (google.com: domain of chl@chrislea.com designates 64.207.133.104 as permitted sender) client-ip=64.207.133.104;
Authentication-Results: mx.google.com; spf=pass (google.com: domain of chl@chrislea.com designates 64.207.133.104 as permitted sender) smtp.mail=chl@chrislea.com


So Google checked that I had an SPF record set up, and that the sending IP address from my MTA was in fact permitted. This contributed to a “not spammy” score and the message made it to my Inbox.

It’s important to note again that this technique is really sort of a hack. The DNS specification clearly states that useful information such as this isn’t supposed to go into TXT records. It’s done though because it led to people being able to adopt SPF very quickly, since all the nameserver software has supported TXT records forever. In 2005, IANA introduced a new record, specifically called an SPF record, to get around this. The syntax is identical to what people are putting into the TXT records. However, due to how recently it was introduced, not all nameserver software supports this new record type yet. Therefore most people are still putting SPF information into TXT records.

There is one more record type that I’m going to go over, and as it turns out, it’s also relevant to you largely because of the implications with SPAM.

PTR Records

A PTR record, or “pointer record”, is generally used to set up what’s called a reverse DNS lookup. Basically, the idea is that if there is a server associated with a given IP address, you should be able to ask DNS about that IP address and get some indication that there’s a server there, in the form of a domain name. This is important because many MTA programs that recieve mail are set up to flatly reject any message from an IP address that does not have reverse DNS set up. The idea here is that bad people doing spammy things aren’t going to properly set up reverse DNS, and thus any message coming from such an IP address is considered untrustworthy.

As an example, my personal mail server at mail.chrislea.com has the IP address 64.207.133.104 currently. If I check reverse DNS, for this, I will see that the reverse entry is for debian01.chrislea.com, as this is the name of the server that I handle my mail on. Note that it’s not critical for the domain names to match here. The forward lookup is for the “mail” subdomain and the reverse lookup returns the “debian01″ subdomain. Some SPAM calssifying software might use the fact that the base domains match in part of their scoring, but it’s generally not that critical. What is critical is the fact that the reverse DNS entry exists and is a valid domain name that itself has a forward DNS entry. Because of this (and the fact I don’t send spammy looking emails), my mail typically doesn’t get rejected when I send out to other people. It is a good idea to make sure that whoever you are using to send mail through has reverse DNS set up properly for their sending servers. That said, if you haven’t experienced massive problems with your mail going into SPAM folders, they almost certainly already have.

Using host to check DNS Entries

There is a command line program available on every *NIX type system I know of called host which can be used to check DNS entries directly from nameservers. If you are using Microsoft Windows, you won’t have the host program. I’d recommend scrapping Windows, installing Ubuntu or Fedora on your computer and using that. But since that may not be practical for you, you might want to just skip to the next section. :)

Using host is not hard. First you’ll need to open up a Terminal. If you are using OS X, the Terminal program is in the Applications -> Utilities folder. If you are using Linux or some other *NIX, I’ll assume you already know how to open up a Terminal. :)

It’s easiest to learn by example, so now that you have the terminal open, type in the following:


host chrislea.com


The output you get should look like this:


chrislea.com has address 70.32.89.79
chrislea.com mail is handled by 10 mail.chrislea.com.


You just looked up the A record for chrislea.com, and found that the IP is currently 70.32.89.79. By default, host also looks up the MX records for a domain when you do this sort of lookup. That’s what you see in the second line there. I only have one MX record for my personal email. If I had more, as discussed before, they would all show up here.

A very important thing to be aware of here is that with the above command, you just queried the resolving nameservers that your computer is currently using. If you want to query a different nameserver, you put that in as a final argument like so.


host chrislea.com ns2.mediatemple.net


This should return essentially the same information since the (mt) Media Temple nameservers are authoritative for chrislea.com. If it doesn’t, then it probably means that the authoritative nameserver has been updated with new information, like a new IP address, but that this hasn’t propagated to the resolver you are using yet.

If you want to look at a record that’s not an A record, you can accomplish this with the -t flag using host. Let’s say you want to check on the TXT record for my domain. The command and results on my Linux machine look like this.


chl@melian:~$ host -t txt chrislea.com
chrislea.com descriptive text "v=spf1 a mx ip4:70.32.89.79 ip4:76.87.248.247 ip4:64.207.133.104 ip4:72.10.46.46 ~all"


Here, you can see that it returned the same SPF information that we talked about before, becuase I have that set up in the TXT record for chrislea.com. As another example, let’s look at the MX records for carsonified.com.


chl@melian:~$ host -t mx carsonified.com
carsonified.com mail is handled by 0 ASPMX4.GOOGLEMAIL.com.
carsonified.com mail is handled by 0 ASPMX5.GOOGLEMAIL.com.
carsonified.com mail is handled by 5 ALT1.ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.com.
carsonified.com mail is handled by 5 ALT2.ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.com.
carsonified.com mail is handled by 10 ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.com.
carsonified.com mail is handled by 0 ASPMX2.GOOGLEMAIL.com.
carsonified.com mail is handled by 0 ASPMX3.GOOGLEMAIL.com.


As you can probably guess, Ryan and crew are using GMail to handle their mail needs.

Finally, if you want to look up a PTR record to see the reverse DNS for an IP, just feed that IP address to host like you’d expect to.


chl@melian:~$ host 64.207.133.104
104.133.207.64.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer debian01.chrislea.com.


You can put a different nameserver in as the final argument for any of those last examples if you want to query something other than your resolvers. And, of course, if you’d like to learn about all the other fun options the host command has, you should consult the man page.

Using nslookup to check DNS Entries

If you are using Microsoft Windows, I’m sorry (seriously… Ubuntu will almost certainly install painlessly on your hardware, and it’s much prettier). But, if that’s the boat you are in, the tool they provide to query nameservers directly is called nslookup. I should point out that I’ve basically never used Windows Vista, so I am assuming it works the same on there as it does in Windows XP. If I’m wrong and there’s an astute reader out there who uses Vista and can correct me, please do so.

You’ll first need to open up a DOS shell, which is sort of the same as opening up a Terminal on a *NIX type system. In Windows XP, this can be accomplished by clicking Start, clicking Run, typing “cmd” with no quotes into the dialog and pressing Enter. I’m told that in Vista, you simply click Start, type “cmd” with no quotes, and press Enter.

The nslookup command has a non-interactive mode, and a shell mode. I find the shell mode much more useful so that’s what I’m going to explain. In the DOS prompt, simply type nslookup in order to enter the shell. Once you’re in the shell, type the domain name you are interested in followed by a period to do a lookup of the A record for that domain. If you don’t remember the trailing period, you won’t get the expected results. As an example:


> chrislea.com.
Server: mjolnir.chrislea.com
Address: 192.168.0.1

Non-authoritative answer:
Name: chrislea.com
Address: 70.32.89.79

If you’d like to do a different type of query, you use the syntax set query=<type>. So, if I’d like to check on the TXT record for chrislea.com, the commands would look like this.


> set query=txt
> chrislea.com.
Server: mjolnir.chrislea.com
Address: 192.168.0.1

Non-authoritative answer:
chrislea.com    text =

“v=spf1 a mx ip4:70.32.89.79 ip4:76.87.248.247 ip4:64.207.133.104 ip4:72.10.46.46 ~all”

This should look familiar to you from the examples that used the host command (assuming you read those). Now, you’ll note in these results that the first lines indicate that the Server referenced is called mjolnir.chrislea.com at address 192.168.0.1. This device is my local router which happens to be running a resolver. As you might expect, by default, nslookup uses whatever resolving nameservers your Windows installation is itself using by default. If you want to change this, you use the syntax server <IP address of nameserver> to tell nslookup to use something different. Unfortunately, you can’t just use the hostname of the nameserver as far as I know. You can see what the IP address is for a nameserver by just pinging whatever that server’s hostname is from the DOS shell. For example:


C:\Documents and Settings\Chris Lea>ping ns1.mediatemple.net

Pinging ns1.mediatemple.net [64.207.129.18] with 32 bytes of data:

Control-C
^C
C:\Documents and Settings\Chris Lea>nslookup
Default Server:  mjolnir.chrislea.com
Address:  192.168.0.1

> server 64.207.129.18
Default Server:  ns1.mediatemple.net
Address:  64.207.129.18

> chrislea.com.
Server:  ns1.mediatemple.net
Address:  64.207.129.18

Name:    chrislea.com
Address:  70.32.89.79

Once you’ve used the server directive to change which nameserver nslookup is querying, it stays with that nameserver until you change it back or you exit the program.

I think this basically covers the same functionality as what I went over with the host command. You should now be able to query arbitrary nameservers for all the sorts of DNS records that we’ve talked about here.

Concluding Information

There are just a few last things that I feel I should mention that didn’t fit in so well elsewhere.

The first is that many of the routers commonly in use today run their own, local, resolving nameservers. As I pointed out in my nslookup examples above, the standard “Default Server” read mjolnir.chrislea.com with IP address 192.180.0.1. That is the name and IP address of my local Linksys router. The Tomato firmware I’m using runs a local resolver. If the resolver on the router doesn’t know some answer that is requested, it will then ask my ISPs resolvers. If they don’t know, they find authoritative nameservers to ask. This is relevant, because sometimes it may be necessary to reboot your local router to flush DNS entries in order to get the most accurate data. I’ve found this to be particularly true with Apple’s Airport routers.

Another thing I’d like to mention is that authoritative nameservers are, generally, “open”. By this I mean that they will answer a DNS request from any IP address that queries it. They basically have to, since they by definition have authoritative information that other random systems may need to know. However, resolving nameservers do not share this concern. Therefore, typically, ISPs will limit connectivity to their resolving nameservers to their own IP space. For example, the resolving nameservers we run at (mt) Media Temple will only respond to queries from the (mt) IP space. This is something that is wise to keep in mind, but that practically will not cause much trouble for you in my experince.

Lastly, as I said at the beginning, DNS is a big topic. This should have given you a pretty solid grounding, but there is certainly a lot more to know about it if you’re trying to be comprehensive. If this applies to you, the standard first place to start reading is the book DNS and BIND from O’Reilly press. It’s commonly just known as “the bugs book” among systems administrators due to its ubiquity. A great deal of the book focuses on administering the BIND software package, which you will hopefully never have to deal with. That said it’s still the standard reference for learning DNS.

With those final notes, I will conclude. I hope you’ve found this article informative. If you have any questions or (cough) corrections, please comment below or contact me.

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I think the future of web apps is more about business models then it is about technology or design. It’s not that those things aren’t important, but I feel that we’ve figured out a lot of that already. I believe the area where we need a lot of work is on the business side of things.

I want to start out by talking about the lumber industry. When saw mills were first created, they didn’t use their waste products such as sawdust. However, after a period of time, they realized they could package this waste into products and sell them at a profit. Things like mulch for gardens, fuel pellets and kindling turned out to be big business.

The lesson we can learn from the lumber industry is this: Whenever you make something, you create valuable by-products that you can sell.

So what by-products are we creating in the web industry?

Wisdom, Experience and Information

We didn’t even realize we were writing a book when we wrote Getting Real. All the material came from ideas we were blogging about that were the result of simply doing business. Just like cutting wood produces sawdust, for us, building software and a company produced information and experience.

We just started blogging about the experience and information we gained and it was only after a year that we realized we had created valuable content we could sell. We launched a book, a conference and a workshop off the back of this information, and in just a few years, it generated over $1,000,000 in revenue for us. Another example of this is Ruby on Rails, which came out of building Basecamp.

The crazy thing is that we were creating all this valuable ‘wastage’ on the side, without even knowing it.

Design Screencasts

I think a great opportunity for designers to generate revenue off of ‘waste products’ is to record their screen while they design. Whenever they’re in Photoshop, just hit the record button, and at the end, package up the video and sell it to other designers. That, I’m telling you, is a by-product that is worth money.

Looking to @garyvee

Gary Vaynerchuk is great example of packaging and selling by-products of your business. As the owner of a shop that sells wine, he has to do a certain amount of wine tasting to expand his palate.

He just decided to turn the camera onto himself as he did this tasting and the product, WineLibrary.tv has rocketed him to fame and success.

“Whatever you’re doing, you’re creating valuable by-products that you could be selling.”

Learning from Chefs

I think successful chefs do a great job of harnessing by-products and generating revenue off of them. They write cook books, host cooking TV programs and create their own line of cookware.

What they figured out is that instead of keeping these things to themselves, they should share as much as they possibly can.

Chefs with large business empires share more and more as they grow. Most business are the exact opposite of this. Instead of sharing more and more as they grow, they become increasingly closed and secretive. They’re robbing themselves of the value of their own by-products – all because they’re afraid of the competition.

Free is the Future of Failure

The next subject I’d like to talk about is the idea of “Free”. I’m not a big fan of free. It’s the wrong direction for this industry.

I think that Chris Anderson’s new book Free: The Future of a Radical Price contains bad advice. I think we should be focusing on how we can charge for our products, not give them away for free.

“Free isn’t the future of business, it’s the future of failure.”

Why is our industry so obsessed with free? The food industry charges for meals, hotels charge for their rooms and cab drivers charge for giving you a ride. People are used to paying for things they find valuable, and every time we release something for free, we’re hurting ourselves.

“The bulk of our paying customers, started out on a paying plan.”

I’ve noticed that quite a few of the web apps that have gone under are the ones that weren’t charging for their product. Of course this isn’t always the case, and charging for your product doesn’t mean you’ll survive, but there seems to be a correlation with web apps that have gone out of business and those that are giving away things for free.

As it becomes more common for web apps to go out of business, it causes a lack of trust in new applications. People are afraid to commit to a web app that may be gone tomorrow.

I Want Sandy is a great example of this. A lot of folks trusted them with their data and then they were bought by Twitter and shut down. If they charged for the product, they probably wouldn’t have shut down as they have revenue to support the business and an obligation to customers.

“When your users aren’t paying for the product, you don’t have an obligation to them. I think that’s bad.”

I’ve noticed that even Google, a company with billions of dollars in cash, has begun to pull back on their free products. If one of the most valuable companies in the world, with some of the brightest minds in the industry, has decided that some things aren’t worth giving away for free, then I’m not sure how smaller companies are going to make that model work.

Failure Isn’t Cool

One of the things that has really been bothering me lately is how it’s become cool to fail. In a lot of entrepreneurial circles there has been talk about “failing early and failing often.” It’s as if everyone thinks that failure is a good thing – a way to get better at business. What is that?

Can you imagine someone walking up to a farmer and say “You should fail often. I hope your crops die every year”? It just doesn’t make any sense.

“No. We should be focusing on succeeding early and succeeding often.”

Another quote that’s thrown around a lot is “Nine out of ten business fail.” That may be true, but what the hell does that have to do with you? Just because someone else doesn’t know how to market or price their products, or how to lead their team, doesn’t mean you should focus on failure. Don’t be intimidated by all this talk about failure.

Learn from Your Successes

I think we should all make a concerted effort to not focus on learning from failure, but instead, learning from our successes.

When you learn from your mistakes, all your learn is what not to do next time. What is this? A process of elimination where you’ve got to get a million things wrong, until there’s nothing else that can go wrong before you know what to do right? That’s what it means when you learn from your mistakes.

I’d rather learn from the things that I’m doing right, and do those again.

In Summary …

Here’s a quick list of the things we’ve covered today:

1. Look for your by-products. Identify what you’re already creating that you can sell.
2. Stop focusing on failure and identify what is working.
3. Please start charging for your products.

Listen or Watch

You can listen to the audio of the talk, or subscribe to the podcast.

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Carson Workshops are a more intimate setting, with only 40 seats available in each one. This way you are able to interact, learn and be inspired by the biggest names in the web world.

Coming up….

Design Secrets of digg.com’s User Interface – Daniel Burka
Learn the secrets of engaging users and encouraging participation in your web app
Tuesday 8th September 2009 – more information

How to Win Pitches, Charm Clients and Get Signoff – Paul Boag
The secret to streamlining your client/designer relationship
Friday 23rd October 2009 – more information

Handcrafted Bulletproof CSS – Dan Cederholm
Learn how craftsmanship can apply to the intangibility of web design
Monday 23rd November 2009 – more information

There are still a few early passes left for these workshops, so be quick to scoop one up!

If you have any questions please contact natasha at carsonified dot com

This is an image that’s going on the homepage of the new site. It’s a sketch by Mike, which is one of many that will be on the new site. Points goes to the first person that can figure out why we’re using heart imagery.

View full size.

Treasure Hunt baby!

To celebrate, we thought we’d organize a crazy treasure hunt. The treasure is an all expenses paid trip to any Carsonified event, so the hunt isn’t going to be easy :)

Here’s some more info for you:

WHEN: We’ll release the first clue Thursday on this blog

HOW: As you find each clue, you will be lead to another clue. You’ll need a bit of dedication and good ol’ fashion detective work to figure it out. Should be fun :)

PRIZE: An all expense paid trip to one of our events (FOWA London, FOWD Tour, FOWD NYC or Stack Overflow Dev Days).

It’s a race so the first person to find the treasure will win the trip. Be ready and keep your eyes peeled on Thursday :)

What websites do you usually go to for design news, inspirational, or tutorials?

I’d have to say probably my favorite place right now for inspiration is ffffound.com. It’s not really web design exactly but it’s a lot of really cool imagery, a lot of cool colors, shapes and stuff like that.

As far as design news, I don’t know if there’s anything so interesting out there that I’m really watching for, but there’s new great design in all directions, coming from all different places all the time. Things like poster design, new typography ideas, etc.

Is there a particular web designer that you’re looking up to right now?

You know, I’m seeing more and more good design actually all the time. However, I can’t say that I have a favorite right now.

Generally I’m seeing just a lot of cool stuff and stylistically, style continues to advance. But the copy and the clarity isn’t necessarily getting better. I’m not seeing very many sites where I think, “Wow this was really well thought out and well written. I still don’t see a lot of that.

Why is there a lack of copywriting skills among web designers?

Nobody seems to be talking about it. Where are all the blog posts about how to make really super-clear content?

The thing that’s really easy to look at and copy are pixels, color combinations and type. I think it’s really hard to look at a website as a writing project because as a designer, we have all these magic tricks we can do with our CSS and our HTML and everything and we kind of have to put that in the back and make that take a back seat to, “do I really have anything to say here?”

Last week I posted to our blog about Jacob Neilsen’s site, praising the the Alertbox articles. Each one is completely crafted as a piece of writing. Something to be read and understood and digested. I love the way certain points are bolded and the way the whole thing is structured is really well thought out. I think it’s a really inspiring example of great copy.

If you’re a designer who doesn’t do any writing, you’re going to hit a brick wall in your career at some point.

What books can designers read to get better at copywriting?

One of my favorite books is by a guy, William Zinsser, it’s called, On Writing Well. That was an inspiration for me and I remember reading that and feeling like it really helped me a lot.

What’s the one skill that new designers focus on?

You gotta start handcoding! It’s the number one basic craft of web design, if you don’t handcode then you’re not going to be able to move into doing web app interfaces, which is really what I’m doing now.

You’re not going to able to work on applications or collaborate on code or make apps, websites that really have a lot of behavior unless you get into handcoding, so I think that’s like the barebones thing that for sure everybody should be doing.

What software do you use for coding?

I happen to use Vim, which is a little bit of a nerdy tool, but a lot of my coworkers use Textmate and love it. A lot of people say that BBedit is great and I also hear that Coda is really nice. There are all kinds of options out there.

As a designer, do you need to understand frontend development?

The more you understand about frontend development, the better designer you’ll be. If you are really familiar with handcoding and you understand basic HTML markup and you know how CSS selectors work then you’re really well prepared, for example, to use the fact that jQuery and Prototype both have a way to refer to pieces of your mark-up using CSS selectors even though your not using CSS.

If you’re designing web app user interfaces, then I think it’s important to get into understanding how an MVC framework works like Rails or Django. If you can understand how your templates fit in to the view, as the “V” in MVC then that’s a huge leap. You can really start doing work with programmers and you can have ideas and you can make them into reality instead of just making designs and handing them off to somebody and hoping that someone else can plug them in.

How do you learn about MVC?

It depends on your situation. If you’re a designer and you work with programmers already (who are friendly) then just ask them questions. They can really get you started on the right path. Don’t be afraid to ask dumb questions – they’ll appreciate the fact that you’re trying to learn.

If you are a little more programming minded and you’re on your own, there’s all kinds of stuff you could read, a basic primer on Rails would help a lot.

Getting into programming in general is quite useful. Before I did web design I setup Access databases and Filemaker databases and stuff like that. Jason Fried did the same thing actually – he started with Filemaker databases, and I think that basic understanding about how does a database work, just what are the pieces and trying to visualize, how could I display that or how could I manipulate that data, is a really good kind of foundation level.

What is a typical day in the life of Ryan Singer?

Ugh, it’s pretty busy lately. We are a small team and we try to do a lot with a few people. We actually just brought on a new designer, so we’re up to three designers now which is going to help. I spend a fair amount of time designing UI for new features. We always design the interface first, before building anything.

So part of my day is actually designing new features, another part of my day, because I’m also working as a product manager here, is to figure out what we should be doing next and who’s going to be doing it.

Also I love, I just love, getting into Rails and making things work too, so I do a fair bit of programming everyday. As much as I can plug stuff in, I do it.

Do you think being a product manager has helped you become a better designer?

No, not at all. I think that it’s the opposite actually. When you’re wearing your ‘Manager Hat’ you start to create a barrier between you and the designers and developers that are actually implementing the app.

It’s really harmful to the product because anytime you have a separation from the one whose coming up with the ideas and the ones who are doing the work, it’s a bad thing.

As a designer, is it important to be interested in the business side of things?

No. Either you’re interested in the business side or you’re not. However, if you have an understanding of what compels people to make buying decisions and how marketing works, you can feed it into your design work.

Okay, well with that, I think that our time is up, thanks so much for your time.

Yeah sure thing, thanks for chatting.

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Summer Camp will take place right at the Carsonified campground (office) in Bath, England and the two day event is structured like the good ‘ole summer camp you went to as a kid with sessions such as “Orienteering” with Ryan Carson (navigating your way through marketing your start-up), “Sailing” with Jonathan Howell from Huddle (sail through building your app with agile software development), “Arts and Crafts” with Mike Kus (learn how to put together good design), and several others, plus s’mores, some fun outdoor activities, “bonfire” (movie night), and new friends!

Carsonified Summer Camp is FREE, but only has eight spaces (due to the small size of our “campground”) that will be open to fully enrolled students and founders of web start-ups who have yet to launch their site or web app or who have their app in the private beta stage only. Our aim is to host a fun and unique event, that also is valuable and accessible to our community of young web-preneurs and students who can’t always afford to travel and attend our other conferences. Summer Camp will be a small group that can support lots of chatter and questions between attendees and speakers and will cover the basics to help young web-preneurs feel inspired and ready to go out and kick-ass :)

Of course, in the interest of having some good old fashioned fun we won’t be cooped up inside all day- we’ll be heading out after lunch for Wiffle Ball or Ultimate Frisbee and getting together for s’more desserts, a movie night, and grabbing a few drinks out on the town.

You can apply online for Summer Camp until Tuesday July 7th at 12pm GMT and we will choose and announce the eight people who have been selected by Friday, July 10th. The application is easy, just some basic information and then either in a brief write-up or in a brief video (2 minutes max please) tell us why you’d like to participate in Summer Camp, what you want out of your experience, and what you feel you can contribute to the environment and discussions. When considering attendance keep in mind that although Summer Camp is FREE and we will be providing breakfast, lunch, and snacks; accommodations for your stay in Bath and travel are not included although we have some great (and cheap) recommendations for those who will be joining us and could use some suggestions.

Summer Camp will also be working alongside BathCamp (Bath’s chapter of BarCamp) and Summer Camp participants are invited and encouraged to attend BathCamp after Summer Camp on the 21st. It will be a new BathCamp layout that is set up with a “rapid fire” agenda in which there will be about 10 slots for 3 minute presentations on the topic of “What’s the one technology that has blown you away more than any other in the last year, and why?” In five minutes a presentation should cover: why it has changed your life, the way you work or how it has improved the world. A panel will then assess presentations on the level of enthusiasm, originality of suggestion and the merit of the suggestion itself; how much real world penetration, profit (financial or social) or benefit the technology brings. The winner will receive a prize!

So, grab your trainers, pack your knapsacks and come sit around the campfire with us at our two day Carsonified Summer Camp!

If you have any questions about Summer Camp, please feel free to contact trista[at]carsonified.com or twitter.com/tristamyers :)

Future of Web Apps 2009 Summer Sale

To celebrate summer finally hitting the UK shores we are having a Future of Web Apps 2009 summer bonanza on 2 day conference passes.

• 10 seats at 50% off (save £167.50)
• 20 seats at 25% off (save £83.75)
• 30 seats at 10% off (save £33.50)

If you’re not quick enough to grab one of the first 10 there is still a chance to save some pennies as the sale will continue with the further 50 discounted passes.

Details of the summer sale will be announced via Twitter (http://twitter.com/carsonified/).

Stack Overflow

In May we announced “Stack Overflow Dev Days“, a series of 1-day conferences in five different US cities for programmers for only $99. The original five cities of San Francisco, Seattle, Toronto, Washington DC and London UK have now been joined by new dates in Boston, Austin, Los Angeles, Cambridge UK and Amsterdam. Five cities (San Francisco, Seattle, Toronto, Washington DC and London UK) are entirely sold out and tickets are selling fast for the remaining five. As Joel Spolsky (Co-founder of Stack Overflow) says:

“The conference is for programmers. The conversation is going to be hard core. Speakers are going to be writing code.”

Topics include:

• Android
• Objective C and iPhone development
• Google App Engine
• Python
• jQuery
• ASP.NET MVC
• FogBugz 7.0
• Mercurial and Distributed Version Control

Further info and booking here: http://stackoverflow.carsonified.com/

Future of Web Apps London – New Speakers and Workshop Venue

Over the last few weeks we have completed the line up of speakers and workshop presenters for the Future of Web Apps London. Recently announced speakers include Bruce Lawson (Opera), Lynne D Johnson (Fast Company magazine), David Prager (Revision3) and our amiable business track host from last years event Simon Wardley (Canonical).

We are also pleased to announce that we will be hosting this years workshops at Wallace Space St. Pancras. It’s right up our street, centrally located and has an endless supply on Innocent Smoothies, cookies, snacks, coffee and wi-fi for all workshop attendees.

• Copywriting Fundamentals for the Web (Relly Annett-Baker – Poppy Copy)
• Kick-ass Online Marketing Techniques (Alex Hunter – Virgin)
• How to Build a Web App from A-Z (Mike McDerment – Freshbooks)
• How to build Facebook Connect + openID into your Site (Dave Morin – Facebook)
• Building Web Apps Using Atlas (Francisco Tolmasky – 280 North)
• Setting up Your Web App – Powerful Alternatives to LAMP (Chris Lea – Virb)
• Site Building with Drupal (Addison Berry – Lullabot)
• How to Build Accessible Web Apps (Philip Strain – Ecliptic)

Further info and booking here: http://events.carsonified.com/fowa/2009/london/

Future of Web Design Tour Call for Speakers

Following on from our recent FOWA Tour we are back on the road in September with the Future of Web Design Tour. During September the FOWD Tour 2009 will hit four UK cities to bring you 2 FREE hour long web design tutorials per event, an afternoon of great talks from some of the UK’s best known web designers as well as a quick fire speed networking session. Tickets are only £59 (+VAT), student tickets for £19 (+VAT) are also available.

Who, where and when:

Belfast – 2nd Sept 2009

• Andy Clarke (AM: Extreme Typography Makeover: Malarkey Edition – PM: Method In My Modness)
• Drew McLellan (AM: Making Your Content Discoverable with Microformats – PM: Cost Effective Web Development)
• Chris Murphy and Niklas Persson (PM: A picture is worth a thousand words)

Bristol – 9th Sept 2009

• Elliot Jay Stocks (AM: The Perfect Portfolio – PM: The Importance of Beauty in Absolutely Everything)
• Bruce Lawson (AM: How to build a HTML5 Web site – PM: The Future of HMTL5)
• Paul Boag (PM: The Battlefield of Design – Designers vs Clients)

Glasgow – 14th Sept 2009

• Drew McLellan (AM: Making Your Content Discoverable with Microformats – PM: Cost Effective Web Development)
• Andy Allan (AM: Getting Started with Adobe Air)
• Patrick Lauke (PM: Keyboard Access Essentials)
• Steve Pearce (PM: TBC)

Leeds – 16th Sept 2009

• Paul Annett (AM: Oooh, That’s Clever! (Unnatural Experiments in Web Design) – PM: Top 50 Rookie Mistakes and How to Avoid Them)
• Simon Collison (AM: Developing Your Ultimate Package – PM: Bauhaus Ideology and the Future of Web Design)
• Brendan Dawes (PM: Useless. Pointless. Beautiful.)

Like the FOWA Tour we would like to give you the opportunity to join us on the FOWD stage. We have kept open one afternoon session in each city, if you have a great idea for a talk about the “Future of Web Design” head on over to our online “Call for Speakers” form (http://bit.ly/YuGHA) and let us know. We will be announcing the chosen talks in the first week of August.

Further info and booking here: http://events.carsonified.com/fowd/2009/tour/

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/peterjlambert/97671748/

Feel free to share your answers to these questions in the comments below. We’d love to hear your perspective.

What advice can you give new web entrepreneurs?

1. A great way to gain traction and get coverage for a new web app is approach a well known person and offer them something valuable in return for trying out your service.Example: Tumblr asked Gary Vaynerchuk if he would use their service if they gave him a spot on their home page.
2. Have your 30-second pitch perfected so when you get a chance to meet an influential blogger or member of the press, you can communicate the purpose of your app succinctly.
3. Attend conferences and throw little parties around the conference. Do it on the cheap and just get people mentioning your app like: “Hey, I’m heading to the YourAmazingApp party. Are you going?” This is much easier because of Twitter as news of small ‘lighting-parties’ can spread quickly.

You’ve managed to raise your profile in the industry. How did you do this?

At digg we didn’t focus on getting press coverage. We just focussed on making an amazing product and believing people would talk about it if it was truly great.

When we started getting press enquiries, we focused on telling a bigger ‘human-interest’ story to the publications, which were much more likely to get front-page coverage, instead of a simple mention in a small column.

The lesson is this: figure out what makes your app interesting as a news story.

Should start-ups create a videocast like you’ve done with diggnation?

Absolutely. Every company needs a spokesperson who is willing to be the public face of the company and participate in the community.

As the diggnation podcast started to grow, digg fans began to make it their goal to get a story mentioned in the podcast. This increased the prestige of the site and also fan loyalty.

How do you balance marketing with working on the product?

That’s an interesting question. Earlier today I was running off to another interview and Daniel Burka (the lead designer at digg) showed me a couple designs as I was walking out of the door. I didn’t have time to properly sit down to discuss them and Daniel said “Kevin, can we please just get you in the office a bit more to discuss these kind of things?”

It’s a tough problem and I still battle with it at digg. I’m not sure I’ve gotten the balance 100% right yet.

What do you want to be remembered for when you die?

I want to be remembered for being a part of the web revolution that really changed the way that humans consume media and news.

I’m also hoping to launch my own tea range and be known as a connoisseur :)

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The video interview