Meron

The end of should

Banks should close at 4, books should be 200 pages long, CEOs should go to college, blogs should have comments, businessmen should be men, big deals should be done by lawyers, good food should be processed, surgeons should never advertise, hit musicians should be Americans, good employees should work at the same company for years…

Find your should and make it go away.

via Seth’s Blog The end of should

Absolutely spot on. Should is irrelevant. So is ‘norm’, ‘expected’, ‘recommended’, ‘would’ and ‘had’.

“If no one else did it, you can be the first. If someone already did it, you can do it too!”

Stop Making Excuses

Wow, it’s been a while. So much happened during the last 90 days.

After being disconnected from the Internet for some long time, I knew it’s time to get back writing. But you know that feeling. You must do something, but you can’t find the time? Ever?

Now, I have a million reasons to not write this post. My To-Do list is exploding, this is my day off, and more than anything – I don’t feel like writing.

BUT, as I was watching this video by my good friend Ralph Quintero, I realised that I’m just making excuses.

So what If I just finished travelling 60,000km in a month and a half, moving from GMT-11 to GMT+7? Is that a reason to procrastinate? Plans change (I’ll update you on that!), timings aren’t always great – so?? Just put the ass on the chair, and get the stuff done. Now! not later!

P.S. Ralph, if this is any consolation for you, some good few years ago I was pacing towards the bus station on my way home from college. I was distracted, and just SLAMMED into a an electric pole. In slammed, I mean the noise was so bad that people walking the street stopped and pointed.

I had a huge bump for some good time afterwards. The silver lining though, was that because I was living in Israel at the time, I just told everybody that a sleepy soldier accidentally turned around and hit me in the head with his M-16 gun. Few months later, this is exactly what happened. Lesson – be careful with what you wish for 🙂

Cute T-shirt I saw in Sydney saying I'm Smiling - Because I have NO IDEA What's going on — Cute T-shirt I saw in Sydney, but very applicable to the minutes after getting hit in the head 🙂

Have a great weekend everybody!

Get Your Amp Of Liquid Luck

On the last issue of Inspiring Innovation Magazine (get it at http://bit.ly/InMagApp), I discussed how bold actions scored me 4 days and a dinner with Internet Marketing guru – Ed Dale.

This post, that my good friend Ralph Quintero found and shared, gives you the ultimate method, system or recipe for luck. Much like the Liquid Luck potion in Harry Potter:

What It Takes To Be Lucky

Professor Wiseman find that optimistic people are luckier and sets out four principles that can help any of us become ‘luckier’ in our lives. All we need is to:

maximise our opportunities

listen to our hunches and grab the ‘right’ ones as they come along

expect good fortune

turn our bad luck into good luck

http://cathypresland.com/blog/mindset/whats-luck-got-to-do-with-it/ (via Instapaper)

You can become luckier. It’s easy. Start taking massive actions, and KNOW that success, happiness and fortune will follow

Meron

Sent from my iPad, who might not have Google Maps on, but sure as hell is kicking ass.

How To Secure WordPress – Common Mistakse

I’ve been seeing tons of posts recently covering the (important) subject of securing your WordPress blog. There are many blogs that are currently sharing their top 5, 10 or 20 security tips.

Why am I writing about this? Because I don’t like the fact that most of these blog posts ignore the elephant in the room, rendering their advice into…rubbish.

Garbage can in Melbourne australia with the label 'Rubbish'

Here’s the last one I encountered, on Copyblogger

Last week, in preparation for an interview about my work at Copyblogger’s managed WordPress hosting division, I chicken-scratched a top 10 list of tips for keeping your WordPress website(s) secure.

10 Steps to a Secure WordPress Website

Now, in that link you will find a checklist of ten (mostly valid and important) actions to take to secure your blog (and up-sell some services). So why am I not satisfied?

The Elephant In The Room

Everybody’s talking about security and importance of having “good” passwords. You’ll see tons of debating on how to choose a hard-to-hack password, but zero discussion on who can read your password???

Here’s the elephant: If you have a self-hosted WordPress blog, there’s a VERY good chance that you don’t have a secure way to log in to it . What does this mean?

If you don’t use a secure connection when you log in to your WordPress blog (and in a second I’ll show you exactly how to check if you are using one), then anyone on your local network can see your password when you click that Log In button.

Let me emphasize this again

Anyone can see your password when you log in to your WordPress blog using a non-secure connection.

This means that it doesn’t matter what-so-ever how complicated your password is. If you update your blog, approve comments or even just log in to check stats while you’re at a caffe, shopping mall or airport – congratulations, you’ve just given your password to all the other people that are using the same network like you.

How do you know if you’re using a secure connection?

When you log in to your admin panel, check if the URL (the address at the top) starts with HTTP:// (insecure) or HTTPS:// (secure). If it’s an HTTPS, this is a secure connection, and your password will not be up for grabs by your surrounding. If it says HTTP, you’re in trouble for two reasons:

When you log in, you send your admin password as plain text over to the server, and any other computer on your network can read it
Even if you log in at home, and select “remember me” and then access the blog from a public location, anyone can hack your account. The reason for this is that although you have logged in from your home, the server saves a special mark on your device that will allow it to be remembered. This marked is called cookie, and when you access your blog again in a public network, everyone can steal your cookie, and that will make your blog crumble!!

How To Fix This

Unfortunately, showing how to set up SSL certificates (this is what it takes to have a secure connection to your WordPress) is a subject for an entire blog, not just a post, and is definitely out of the scope for this blog.

Being a complicated setup that it is, it also completely negates the point of easy actions to improve security, like all the blog posts I mentioned advocate for.

What you should do, is contact your hosting provider and ask them to help you set up SSL connection for your blog. Notice that a shared-SSL certificate, like Hostgator (for instance) offers for free, will only allow you partial management of the blog (for instance, will allow to edit posts in HTML mode, but not in the WYSIWYG editor – which is what most people would prefer). Also take into consideration that a private SSL will cost money (few tens of dollars per year on average). If you host more than one blog on your account, take into account that you might end up being able to install SSL only on one of your blogs.

How To Fix This – The Quick & Easy Way

Don’t choose a simple & cheap shared-hosting package. Choose a Managed WordPress Hosting provider. Syntesis [this is NOT an affiliate link] is one that I heared some good stuff about, but haven’t checked them out myself. Make sure to pick a package that DOES includes SSL (their basic one doesn’t).

If you have any recommendations for managed WordPress hosting or at least one that makes it dead easy to enable SSL for WordPress on it, write me a comment!

To fit, or not to fit?

I want to put you in a category

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2012/09/i-want-to-put-you-in-a-category.html

When I meet you or your company or your product or your restaurant or your website, I desperately need to put it into an existing category, because the mental cost of inventing a new category for every new thing I see is too high.

(via Instapaper)

No one wants to be categorized. No one wants to be considered “like anyone else”, and rightly so. We’re all different. But as Seth puts it, people can’t afford the mental cost of not categorizing people.

This is something I struggled through badly in most of my years. Ever since I was 10, I was never a good fit for any common category. You might think it’s good, but it has a hidden cost. For I was not left alone in a category bearing my own name. Instead, I was constantly placed in the wrong category, the wrong checkbox and the wrong line.

You can refuse to be categorized. You can insist that it’s unfair that people judge you like this, that the categories available to you are too constricting and that your organization and your offering are too unique to be categorized.

If you make this choice, the odds are you will be categorized anyway. But since you didn’t participate, you will be miscategorized, which is far worse than being categorized.

Now that I know myself better, I also know which categories I fit. There are many of them, but I learned to cater the most relevant one for me on each encounter I have. The effect? People understand me better, and can relate to me better. And I’m not fighting so hard anymore.

Sent from my iPad