Are you looking to donate to assistance groups to help with the recovery from today’s horrible tornado? Several links are below. Please let me know if you would like some added, or if there is reason to remove any links.

Please choose one donation organization below and make a small contribution. Anything helps. I know there’s a lot of organizations so it’s a little overwhelming, but please choose one.

[1] If you would like to copy the source of this to another reddit thread, you can copy the text with links easily from here.

[2] Additional information is available in OSUTechie’s submission to /r/oklahoma.

If you are applying to volunteer or donate local goods, [3] please click here. h/t to [4] /u/lifehacked.

DONATION LINKS:

RED CROSS

• Text REDCROSS to 90999 ($10)
• [5] This website donation link.
• 1-800-RED CROSS (1-800-733-2767); for Spanish speakers, 1-800-257-7575; for TDD, 1-800-220-4095.

CATHOLIC CHARITIES

• [6] Tornado relief donations link. Details about Catholic Charities Disaster Recovery Services [7] is available here.

SALVATION ARMY

• Text “STORM” to 80888 ($10)
• [8] Website donation link here
• Call 1-800-SAL-ARMY (1-800-725-2769)
• Mail check to The Salvation Army PO Box 12600 Oklahoma City, OK 73157 (note: you must write “Oklahoma Tornado Relief” on the memo line of the check if you donate this way)

REGIONAL FOOD BANK OF OKLAHOMA

• Text “FOOD” to 32333 ($10)
• [9] Website donation link here. Note: seems to be nonspecific to this particular disaster, but it seems likely most/all current funds from the group are headed that way.

UNITED WAY

• [10] Website donation link here
• Send check by mail to United Way of Central Oklahoma, P.O. Box 837, Oklahoma City, OK 73101 (note: you must write “May Tornado Relief” on the memo line of the check if you donate in this fashion)

FEEDING AMERICA

Through its network of more than 200 food banks, Feeding America, whose mission is to “feed America’s hungry through a nationwide network of member food banks,” says it will deliver truckloads of food, water and supplies to communities in need, in Oklahoma, and will also “set up additional emergency food and supply distribution sites as they are needed.” * They do not have a donation link specific to Oklahoma tornado relief, but you [11] can donate here.

OPERATION USA

The international relief group, based in Los Angeles, says it is “readying essential material aid — emergency, shelter and cleaning supplies” to help Oklahoma’s community health organizations and schools recover. * They do not seem to have a donation link specific to Oklahoma tornado relief. You can [12] donate through their website here. * Text the word AID to 50555 (Note: this is not necessarily specific to Oklahoma tornado victim relief) * Send check to: Operation USA, 7421 Beverly Blvd., PH, Los Angeles, CA 90036.

Oklahoma Baptist Disaster Relief

• [13] Website donation link
• Send checks to BGCO, Attn: Disaster Relief, 3800 N. May Ave., Oklahoma City, OK 73112

TEAM RUBICON

• [14] Website donation link
• [15] Information about the organization can be found here.

Unless you are personally affected by this disaster, please do not go to the following link so that server loads can be reserved for individuals who need to use the website: Please spread this Red Cross website where people can list themselves as safe and well -

https://safeandwell.communityos.org/cms/index.php

Oh, and a lot of people wanted their money back (for jumping in the ship and being early adopters),  which created a huge mess for all trying to get  the refund.

My head is spinning with so much crazy stuff going on.

Anyway, a few months ago I had this conversation about the iPad in  which I said that nobody wants tablets because they are not necessary. They wanted the iPad because they are (want to be) cool.

Since then, I have seeing a lot of articles saying that people prefer the iPad which  confirms that there isn’t a tablet market, there is an iPad market.

Ipad vs. HP Touchpad vs. The rest

The only way to compete with the ipad is in the price. Apple is the creator, they are the cool company, they have a gazillion apps, and the basic version of the iPad is $500. Why will you buy anything else for that price?

The competitors should have done something drastic with the price and in that case I thought HP was the only company capable of doing that. They are the only competitor who controls the apps and the hardware à la Apple.

This allows them to play in the long whole and while they are making no money when it comes to the hardware they will hopefully recover the money by  the apps and in other services like subscription and eventually licensing.

Now, with the all the frenzy about the cheap tablet we can say that HP is the living  proof of that. It may not be the best business model, but it’s probably the only way of beating Apple in sales numbers.

This certainly cannot be done by Android vendors. The other competitor I’m seeing that could do that is Amazon, but their tablet isn’t even for sale yet or right now, unless HTC wants to buy webOS from HP.

If HP had done that from the beginning, the story of the HP Touchpad could have been different. Who knows?

Right now the only certainty is that HP  lost a lot of money in this mess. The costs to build each HP Touchpad is huge and they are losing a lot in each sale, although it’s way less than not selling it at all.

User base

Building that initial user base was a great step to attract the developers. Now if that happens and the apps grow, then the users will (probably) come to if there is a hardware for sale. Only assumptions since we don’t know what will happen to webOS or to the HP Touchpad.

Long live webOS… or not

The future of webOS is doomed, but there’s still a light at the end of the tunnel. The HP touchpad is sold out on in every online website and there is a huge waiting list already.

Knowing that HP has ordered 500 to a million initial HP touchpad units, it’s a good sign that webOS may still live for a while. They built a reasonable initial market which  didn’t exist only a week ago. Hopefully, the developers will finally start creating more apps and some vendors will create exited about it.

Conclusion

With all of this, here are the questions that will be answered during the next few months:

• Would HP license the webOS?
• If yes, would any other company try to create a webOS tablet?
• Will the developers jump in?

We are going to get some answers soon. In the mean time, I’ll take advantage of the offer  and test this hyped tablet out by doing basic online stuff with it.  I just hope HP continues supporting the OS and there are some more new apps coming in soon!

Did you saw the Dallas and Miami the other day? What a game.

In case you didn’t. The Mavericks came back from a 15 point deficit in the last quarter. They put an awesome run to win the game.

Dirk did his part like he has been doing in the playoff, but what was memorable was the mindset that they had to pull that up — It was memorable.

I’m waiting right now for the third game to start and since it’s been a while since I wrote my first basketball post and I though in writing another one.

The Mindset of Success

Having the right mindset is extremely necessary to accomplish things in life. For the Mavs, if they have lost that game, it was over. No more Finals. They have the right goals in mind, and the goal of winning a championship. They have come back in games the whole playoff long, because they know that they have to.  People know the goals, know what they have to do, but in the end they just sink and fail because they don’t have the right mindset.

Focus

Dirk has been an unbelievable free throw shooter all this career, but to maintain his streak in this playoff, it has been amazing the way he keeps his cool in clutch time. Focus in what you are doing and the results are going to be much there.

Do what you have to do

Sometimes you have to do shitty moves (like Lebron moving his talents to South Beach). You will make a lot of people angry, but if you know what you want and you have the right mindset, you know that you have to do what you have to do to make things happens. whether it is to firing somebody or moving to a different place. Make it happen.

Hard Work

It’s fundamental to know what you want and have clear in your mind that it will take pain, will take sacrifice to reach whatever you want. You have to do shitty thing and all that together it takes a lot of work. It’s not going to be easy, but hey the rewards are going to taste sweeter.

I hope the Mavs win. I think Dirk, Kidd and company deserve a title and I think Lebron and company still have time to win.

Picture by rmtip21 (CC)

The other day I made a video with Screenr. How to automate twitter with Buffer (bufferapp.com).

The video is little less than four minutes. It shows how easy is to use the tool to automate twitter by scheduling tweets.

Using this tool give your some advantage like to tweet in different times zones and tweet in hours that there’s more people in twitter. Like in the morning or at night.

I hope you enjoy the video. Let me know what do you think

Screenr video

A good example of hiring people to scale the business (jk). If you want to college these days, you really have to start working early.

One of the things I noticed when I moved to Florida was that there are a lot of lawn care companies here. There are probably more lawn care companies than lawns. I’m exaggerating now, but I’m telling you, there are thousands. Maybe because the majority of the population is retired and doesn’t lawn their yard themselves.

I started to analyze why this business model attracts so many people and came out with an idea for this post, a list of most of the components that make this a good and attractive business model to follow. It is useful for everyone to look at some of these components to find other solid business models.

Easy to start
It doesn’t require a master degree or a lot of knowledge. Some networking and a little marketing should be enough to get you off the ground.

Low cost to start
To get you started a lawn mower and a vehicle large enough to fit it in or a trailer should be enough to get you going.

Easy to scale
It’s easy to scale:Hiring people is not that difficult because it doesn’t require specialized employees. The training should be fairly quick and getting more lawn mower, trailers and trucks depends on how good the business is doing.

Market
There are many companies because the market here is HUGE and before the crisis it was constantly growing.

Revenue Model
I think the main appeal of this business is the revenue. You have recurring revenue, which is great. During the summer people have to mow their lawns at least four times a month. You get into a contract and you have your fixed income for at least 8 months of the year. There’s also commercial work which should be done all year and also municipalities.

Not everything is pretty though
Some negative aspects  about this business models remain though. The biggest downside might be the huge competition. The same way the market is big here, the competition is ridiculous. Like I said before there are more lawn care businesses than lawns. Also, the change of seasons make it difficult.In Florida the season doesn’t affect this type of work as much as in other places, but still there’s not so much work to do in the winter. At least here in North Florida.

What are the components that I’ll look for in any good business model?

To sum it up, there are some basic components to every great business model that are essential keys to success. And the top 3 in my opinion are: a big market for your service or product, scalability and recurring revenue. One thing I learnt is that there’s nothing better than recurring revenue. Although it doesn’t work in all businesses like that,  I think that it is an advantage to have it in any business model.

Take the WordPress plugin and themes market for example.The market is huge, there’s always room for another company, it’s easy to scale, and there are many ways to earn recurring revenue.

What do you think about it  and which  components of a good business model do you think are a must have?

Picture By Robbie Wagner

One of my favorite bloggers wrote a post a couple of weeks ago about the WordPress plugins he is using. I decided to share the plugins I’m using myself. Some of these plugins are must have WordPress plugins you should use to get the best out of your blog.  I’m always testing different plugins, the same way I always look for ideas to develop plugins for my own use.

Here’s the list of must have WordPress plugins:

Akismet

A must have. Like everybody else, since I started my blog I receive tons of spam. Akismet has been my spam fighter. It does the job and I haven’t received any complaints so far.

All in One SEO Pack

This is a must have plugin for SEO. All the blogs and websites that I create have this plugin. It’s easy to use, allows me to change SEO settings for all the pages and post individually.

Contact Form 7

I like this contact form, it’s simple to use and other people have added extra functionality with other plugins. I was getting some spam messages, but it was easy to solve that issue by using a captcha.

Disqus Comment System

The famous comment system. I’ve been thinking in adding comment luv because it adds the most recent post of the commentator to my comment section, but I don’t know if or when I ‘m going to make the switch.

FD Feedburner Plugin

This plugin redirects all the subscriber to a feedburner feed. I do this to have more precise stats of my subscribers. Redirect http://ricnunez.com/feed/ to http://feeds.feedburner.com/RicardoNunez

Google Analyticator

I used to use Ultimate Google Analytics but that plugin doesn’t get the support from the developer anymore and Analyticator also has some options that allow me to add functionality without it being necessary to edit the source.

Google XML Sitemap

Another must have for SEO. A sitemap is a list of all the pages of the website available for bots like Google to crawl. XML is the file format that is used to create the sitemap.

Pretty Link Lite

This is a very handy plugin to shorten affiliate links. For example, I use it for Amazon by only using http://ricnunez.com/amazonlink . It works quite well.

Really Simple Captcha

After getting so much spam, I added this plugin that works together with Contact Form 7. It’s simple and effective.

Sharebar

This plugin adds the Social media links in the left side of the page and it moves while the reader is scrolling down. I was looking to build a similar plugin but why reinvent the wheel?

Tweetmeme

This is a very well known plugin in the blogosphere with its green retweet box. This is the first retweet box I started to use. I’m still using it at the bottom of each post, but now I’m also using the official tweet button in the sharebar plugin. I removed the official retweet button, I’m sticking with tweetmeme for now.

W3 Total Cache

I’m only using this plugin for a week now and itpromises to easily optimize website speed and user experience. I only saved half a second on the loading time which is not amazing, but I’m sure for a large website that can be a lot.

WP greet BOX

This plugin is used to greet new readers of the website and asks them to subscribe. There are several alternatives to this plugin, but I choose this one because it has the ability to recognize if the reader comes from a search engines, the rss or from the social networking websites ( I think this is cool).

WP-paginate

This plugin is used to create numbers for the pagination of the page. Instead of using “older and newer post” in the homepage; I add numbers at the bottom of the pages.

I’m always trying out new plugins, some of them don’t do exactly what I’m looking for, but that’s nothing what a few tweaks in the code cannot solve.

What must have WordPress plugins are you using? Which ones do you recommend?

I was checking the daily post at wordpress (In case you don’t know, wordpress is posting ideas to motivate people to write daily or weekly) to find a topic to write about. With so many topics to choose, I picked randomly:

“What is the smallest thing near you? Write a paragraph about it.”

The smallest thing I had in my hand was a paperclip. So I just look to the paperclip and I thought what’s so great about a paper clip that I can get an idea to write a post about it? It took me a bit to come up with it.

“Paper clip was a really simple and brilliant idea made by somebody many years ago”

Can I write something about this?

Well, that reminded me of an old draft I started writing months ago.
Even the tiniest idea can have a huge impact in the lives of millions of people. Heck, if you have an idea and it makes an impact even on a handful of people I think it worth the effort to pursue it.
All the ideas have a chance to be really great. The problem is, that people don’t follow through the process of making it happen.
Most of people never do anything about the ideas they have. They blame something like lack of funds or knowledge or time to do it. When the only problem is the lack of belief in themselves and the lack of execution of ideas.
(Just by writing this I get pumped about some things I want to work on).
How an idea should be approached:

Put it on paper

I have new ideas all the time, so I take notes about everything. If you prefer something more modern than taking notes on paper, use Evernote instead.

Google is your friend

Search online about it. A little research will tell you if there’s anything online about it already.

Don’t get discouraged

Somebody will already have thought of the idea before (more than you think). Don’t get discouraged by that, you only need to find where your idea can fit in and if you can tweak or improve what is already there.

Take one step at a time

Doing many things at the same time just makes you feel overwhelmed.
It is better to divide your project into smaller parts and do them one at a time. Keep track of the necessary steps in form of a to-do list.

Keep moving

If you stop working on it, you will lose interest. So keep moving, continue reading, writing, researching. This way you will avoid losing interest, also keep track more easily and don’t forget about your main idea.

Cut the crap and take some action

Let’s be honest, if you are already putting excuses, you really don’t care enough about it. If you really want to make things happen, you don’t need to be reading this post, you can take action any time and make your idea come true.
I’m sure right now you are saying: “Not everybody can make their ideas happen”. This is simply nonsense. Everybody struggles to make things happen, the difference is that some people don’t give up that easily.

I read a post this week about AngelList in which the founder said that this was the third or fourth attempt to make his dream happen.
How many times have you tried to make something happen and gave up in the first try?
Keep going and work hard. Success doesn’t come easy or over night, you have to work for it. Instead of simply waiting for your success, make it happen.

I started playing around with WordPress in 2008. I’ve tried WordPress once before that time, but I thought  that it was still missing some key features to make it a reliable back end for a website. Also, I was more involved in web application development instead of only web design or blog design.

After developing my first couple of themes, I thought that it was time to be more serious and offer some solutions to my long-time clients. They were from my college days so if I made an offer they will accepted. I was doing it in my spare time, getting the feedback I was looking and everybody was happy.  I continued using it and learning a lot about it. Now I can say that I’m quite savvy and to be honest I wish I had jumped earlier.

Anyway, that’s was a little about my WordPress background. The reason I decided to write this post was to show some of the features of this new theme and some of the cool things I’ve been doing in the lab.

Why should you learn about these WordPress theme features?

Because if you have an online business you eventually want to go shopping  for a website/theme. By that time, knowing a little technical aspects will help you make your best decision when it comes to what to buy.

Some features and benefits of my new theme.

• I made it with as few images as possible (the website, twitter and rss logos). The rest of the design is pure code. This doesn’t necessarily apply to all the websites I do for clients, but at least this one is like that.
• The background gradients effects are all coded in CSS3 and HTML. I’m adding that option to the framework.
• The headings are SEO optimized.
• I load external files like fronts from Google. I also have that options to be changed in the back office.
• Not all the effects are available in Internet Explorer (IE), but the website looks presentable.
• and many more coming soon.

The Framework

The final idea of the framework is to be easy to customize in the back office. Colors, fonts, backgrounds, etc.

Website Speed

My major concern building does features was the website speed. I always care about the website speed (you should too) and try to cut the loading time. Remember that Google takes the website loading time in consideration when it comes to SEO.  Also people don’t like to wait for a website to load.

Some clients don’t care about that and ask for huge pictures and backgrounds making their websites really slow, but I really gave up on trying to convince anybody about it. In the end what matters is that the clients are happy.

To speed up the loading time, I cut off most of the images and I try to use only images when necessary. That’s why I use CSS and HTML to create the design and all the effects. Finally, that’s why I load files from Google. Using different hosts for your files help browsers loading your page faster and that’s why you should use Youtube or other websites to host your videos.

Thinking in the future

I’ll update this post with more information about the framework and all the changes I perform in the theme.

Do you have any thought, questions or feedback? Leave a comment below and if you things this post has value, help me spread it in twitter and Facebook. Thank you.

Have you received a call from the yellow pages to sign-up with them?

Yesterday my dad received a call from the yellow pages. The guy who called said that he just wanted to confirm that all the data in his listing was correct, and if so they will send me an invoice to “renew” his business listing subscription for another year. Also, they had an special offer for my dad just because he is awesome.

I told him, he’s a lucky man, what a great opportunity to waste money, he shouldn’t think twice…. to say no.

To start he doesn’t have a subscription in the yellow pages and he never had one.

Second, do people still uses yellow pages?

Rethink the strategy

I think their tactics is just plain stupid.  I think calling people and trying to be that sneaky to tell them to renew their subscription when they don’t have a subscription is just idiotic. People will complain, they will end up with bad a review like this post.

It’s just bad marketing practice of them. Is that the best they can do?

This guy was probably a subcontractor or an affiliate who wanted to do a sale no matter what, but if that’s the case they need to do a better job.

I have few tips for them:

• They should have some guidelines for their marketers to follow.
• Our phones are in the National Do Not Call list, so they should update their listing monthly.
• They have to stop using sneaky tactics, that will not benefit them and people eventually will complain.
• They should have tried to promote YP.com instead the paper version that is slowly dying.

I hope they rethink their strategy and stop their dubious marketing tactics. What about you? Have you received this type of calls?

Photo by Frank Hebbert

Following the tradition from last year. I normally do a post a week, but the black Friday post was written couple of days ago and only today I had time to finish it.

What I’m grateful?

Like last year, I’m always grateful that I’m with my family. Isn’t easy to be alone in a holiday. Although my girlfriend isn’t here today, I know that will change soon. Also, although this was a tough year, with a lot of down moments, we are all healthy (this is official, just got the exam results from the doctor).

What are you grateful?

Picture by Josh Wedin