Entrepreneur Geek

If you are coming here after my talk at Prerna – Entrepreneurship Seminar at SFIMAR today, welcome to a budding entrepreneur! What follows is a collection of my best articles on entrepreneurship from last 4 years.

My Best Blogs Posts for Entrepreneurs and Startups

• How to pick a co-founder?
• Are you a ‘scale-first’ or ‘money-first’ entrepreneur?
• Entrepreneur’s Lesson: Be Frugal, Avoid Temptations
• 5 Things That Changed My Life, and Could Change Yours
• Avoid these customers – five warning signs to say no to customers, plus three signs to die for
• 8 Traits To Be Great
• What’s the formula for Genius?
• Apple’s Marketing Secrets
• Life is about personal leadership
• Startup School 2008: Key Takeaways, from OnStartups
• The Art of Speed
• 10 Resolutions to boost your business
• Seven ways to avoid the growth traps
• Personal Brand – steps in creating a powerful personal brand
• Deliver Authentic Leadership – Robin Sharma
• HP’s Rules of Garage

Remember, there is equal risk in jobs and business

You will be concerned about four things when you consider starting on your own:

• Entrepreneurship is too risky
• It takes too much time
• Business requires significant skills and confidence
• (and best of all) Starting your own business needs lot of money

Consider that first three concerns apply to doing a job as well. As for money, it’s really about cashflows – both for individuals and businesses. If you have an urge, don’t wait, start something of your own. You can do it over weekends, you can do it on a small scale, but just do it!

And yes, you don’t need to be the poster boy of entrepreneurs, you don’t need huge successes

Most people talk about dreaming big and huge successes and the glamor around entrepreneurship. The truth is, you don’t need to be hugely successful. What matters is whether you are happier being on your own and making more than what you would have made in a job. You don’t need to grow to be the biggest company. You just need to follow your passion.

Go out, start something!

Do you dream of writing a book? A technical one? Three years ago, I was creating my future plan and writing 6 books was one of the top items in the list. 

Today, I have two books already in print and have learned a lot on the way. One of the lessons is to get the right publisher. I am fortunate to have Packt as the publisher of both my books – Mobile Web Development and Open Source Content Management Systems: Beginners Guide. 

A wannabe author will have a lot of questions. They may include:

• How is the overall experience of writing a book?
• During the writing process, what issues/ difficulties I may expect? And how to deal with them?
• Does writing a book overshadow personal life?
• I have a full time job, how do I manage my time?
• What benefits can writing a book bring to my specialist area?

Want to hear my story? Go ahead, and read my answers to these questions! At the end, I have valuable tips from my own experiences too!

Choosing an Open Source CMS

My latest book – Choosing an Open Source CMS: Beginner’s Guide – is now available from PactPub, Amazon and others.

I have also created a special website for the book – www.cmsbook.info. The website is dedicated to readers of the book. I will be writing about choosing a CMS, tips, book excerpts and useful resources there.

• Subscribe to CMS Book’s RSS feed to get notified when it updates.
• Follow me on Twitter!
• Purchase it from PacktPub

Did you read the book? If so, post a comment! I would love to hear your feedback!

We shifted servers a few days back, but we seem to have some interesting problems. Right now, I see a two different versions of this blog in Firefox and Safari. Both point to same IP. Safari shows old version, Firefox shows new version.

Puzzled!

Solved it!

This took much longer to figure out, but it was a very interesting catch! Here are some notes.

• We were checking the site from same network, same internet connection, same DNS servers. Firefox and Safari on my machine showed different versions of the blog.
• Cleared browser cache – did not work.
• Checked DNS – no problem. Everything was pointing to the new server correctly. This ruled out the possibility of DNS cache causing the problem.
• Removed all site content from the old server and put up a blank index page. Interestingly, that did not show up. We continued to see the site. This confirmed that it is not really a DNS cache problem.
• Checked Apache access logs – all requests were going through the new server. But still showing different designs.
• We started thinking where else could the cache be? Now that the problem is on the server.
• And Eureka! WordPress Super Cache was the culprit. I did clear the cache after setting up new design – as I suspected it first – but somehow the cache was not cleared. I should have manually deleted all cache files, rather than relying on the plugin to do it.
• Deleted all WP Super Cache files and folders and everything started working!

Thanks to everyone who helped. Sujeet reported the problem first, Akshay suggested a solution, Aamod commented on the design, Kunal reported a problem with comment posting and Alan from my systems team found the real cause. I am touched by your support.

And what more? R. Bhavesh even offered to redesign the template! Thank you!

These are the things on my mind right now!

• Finished writing Open Source CMS book. Submitted revisions to first drafts. Pre finals will be ready soon and book will be out in April.
• PlannerX is getting some good reviews. Especially ActiveCollab community (where it’s not yet launched) “loved it” – and I heard it from many people!
• Financial year end is coming near (31st March for India). And we are all pushing to close deals and get cash in at Magnet!

Exciting times!