Edward Tufte hates you.

I have been getting harassed for months by Sirius satellite radio since canceling my subscription. Telling them to stop calling doesn’t work.

BUT this does: 1-888-440-6342

You call that number, press 7, and these idiots never call again.

I am not a User Interface designer by any means, but when I was confronted with this order page I immediately popped a blood vessel in my brain and stalled on what to do next.

If you have an e-commerce site, and your order page looks like this, STOP.  Do not do ONE MORE THING until you fix it.

Click to see a bigger version:

Here is a rudimentary solution that allows you to split test all metrics on your Wordpress blog.  If there is legitimate usage of this, I will make changes and improvements but at this point I am just throwing together a 15 minute SOLUTION not a complete idiot-proof package.  Please, give me feedback, I appreciate it.  This was created in response to this, so you can go there to read about why Google Website Optimizer is not the right solution for testing metrics across an entire site.

Download plugin.

First thing you need to do is create 2 theme folders.

theme1 is your original theme

theme2 contains the same theme, but with the changes you want to test

Set up 2 Google Analytics accounts.  This seems easiest to do with 2 different email addresses, and 2 browsers so that you can load both at the same time, and it doesn’t complain about the URL being the same.

1. Open theme1/footer.php and insert the GA code from one account into the footer before the </body> tag.
2. Open theme2/footer.php and insert the GA code from one account into the footer before the </body> tag.

That’s about it.  The plugin will drop a cookie on the user telling them which theme file to load.  If you want to completely change the themes, you can edit the plugin and change the cookie name to something new.  The cookie lasts for 30 days by default.

PS. I’m gonna admit right now that I almost always make mistakes the first time around.  If this doesn’t work for you – let me know.  If this doesn’t work for you and you figure out why – PLEASE hit me up and let me know so I can update this post.

P.P.S This could be pretty easily made so much better, easier to install, easier to use, and more flexible.  We’ll see if the demand warrants it.

You should go to Elite Retreat if you already have a business, with a working model, that has real revenue.

You should not go to Elite Retreat if you have “ideas” that you haven’t started on because you think you need one or more things before you get going.

You should go to Elite Retreat if you’re good at absoring diverse information and synthesizing it into something you can use for yourself or your business.

You should not go to Elite Retreat if you are hoping that someone is going to reveal a pearl that will change your business overnight.

You should go to Elite Retreat if you enjoy meeting other entrepreneurs and hearing and seeing what other people are out there doing.

You should not go to Elite Retreat if you think that your business exists in isolation (revenue or not) and that relationships don’t matter in the web 2.0 world.

You should go to Elite Retreat if you would even consider hiring one of the experts to do some consulting for your business.  If you can recognize the value that an expert consultant can immediately deliver, and you would consider paying money to have one of these guys examine your business and provide feedback then the Elite Retreat is more than a bargain.

You should not go to Elite Retreat if you think you are smarter than everyone else and have nothing to learn.

You should go to Elite Retreat if your business could benefit from the relationships you have the opportunity to cultivate with other like-minded entrepreneurs.

You should not go to Elite Retreat if your idea of working is the 4 Hour Work Week or doing as little as possible related to your business in a given day.

You should also not go to Elite Retreat if NYC is your favorite city in the world and you love going to conferences there so you can partake in all the different things NYC has to offer.  Unless you come early or stay late, you’re not going to see much of NYC because you’re going to be spending 2.2 full days with some of the brightest people you will ever get a chance to meet.

The more you learn about where your food comes from, the more skeptical you become.  Once your eyes are open, even at a farmer’s market you start to wonder if people aren’t using unsustainable techniques to improve their bottom line.  Even if you think you know what you want, you and I probably aren’t farmers and it can be intimidating trying to ask questions about someone else’s profession.

Fortunately, I found a great resource that provides a lot of simple questions you can ask to make sure you’re getting the best, most nutritious food there is available.  They even have specific one-page guides on what to ask beef farmers, pork farmers, and others.  The first time you find yourself standing in front of a farmer and you ask “is your pork raised naturally?” and he looks at you like you just shot his dog, you’ll wish you had read through one of their guides!

It doesn’t work.

Yes, the new Virgin Mobile Broadband in the United States using the Novatel MC760 USB EVDO dongle..doesn’t work.

Their web site says you have to activate on a PC but then you can use it on a Mac.  This is false.  Once installed on your Mac, the drivers DO NOT recognize the MC760 and therefore it is unusable.

What a massive total failure by Virgin Mobile.

Last night Sheena and I stayed at the Elephant Walk B&B in Stillwater, MN. I’m not a hotel reviewer so I’ll keep it short and sweet. I highly, highly, recommend this B&B to anyone, especially people in Minneapolis or St. Paul who need to get away from noise for a little while. Stillwater is only 30 minutes from Minneapolis, but as long as you shut your cell phones off (like we did) you feel like you’re much farther away. The Elephant walk was clean, comfortable, and quiet. Having eaten our faces off the day before we almost skipped breakfast, but when I told Rita, the owner, that we were going to skip breakfast she convinced me to stay. Had we skipped it, we would have missed out on the best part of the whole stay. First fresh pineapple, then stuffed french toast with fresh fruit and a fantastic spinach and asiago cheese sausage, then a baked pear in a carmelized sort of creme anglaise. The breakfast was absolutely fantastic. We also got to spend some time with Rita and another interesting couple and have some good conversation before heading out.

The house is beautiful and is chock full of treasures mainly from southeast Asia but other parts of the world as well. I will confess that from the web site I thought the house and the rooms would be very “kitchy”. I was actually completely wrong, everything is beautiful and unique.

From Minneapolis you could easily leave around 3 to beat the traffic, enjoy dinner in Stillwater, stay at the Elephant Walk, have a fantastic breakfast and be back the next day by noon at the latest. Life is short, if you’re not taking time to do things like this you’re Doing It Wrong.

Just in time for Sunday morning. Pancakes are one of the most deceptively complex things to get right. These are phenomenal.

2 cups all-purpose flour
2 tablespoons sugar
1/2 teaspoon table salt
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
2 cups buttermilk
1/4 cup sour cream
2 eggs
3 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract

1. Whisk the flour, sugar, salt, baking powder and baking soda together in a medium bowl.

2. In another medium bowl, whisk together the buttermilk, eggs, sour cream, butter, and vanilla extract.

3. Pour the wet ingredients into the dry ingredients. Mix them just enough to combine completely, but not too much, and don’t whisk out all the lumps.

4. Let batter sit for 10-12 minutes before cooking.

5. Grill on a lightly oiled skillet for about 1 minute per side, flipping once.

You are stupid. And this is an open letter to you and all the stupid people on twitter who don’t understand the most fundamental aspect of it: you choose who you follow and don’t follow.

The other day, Heidi Golff (your picture is so witty and cute with your golff clubs), when you used TwitThis to tweet about an article, you elected to follow me because I was the suggested user at the time. You specifically chose to put a check mark next to my avatar to follow me.

The today, much to my suprise, I see this tweet from you:

@ddn I am so sick and tired of your spamming me; I can’t wait to unfollow you. What a pain!!

And going to your Twitter page I see:

ddn is a royal pain in the you-know-what. if you follow him you get spammed like crazy in your cell phone.

So let me get this straight. You follow me by choice. Then I go on my merry way tweeting about things that are interesting to me or going on in my life, and suddenly I am a spammer pain in your ass?

• You followed me.
• You can unfollow at ANY time. You don’t have to “wait”.
• I’m very real, and don’t spam anything.
• You choose to have your tweets sent to your cell phone.

What in your right mind possessed you to take the time out of your day to write TWO tweets about what a pain I am, when it would take you less than a click to unfollow me.

Congratulations on being incredibly stupid. Shouldn’t surprise me you’re in real estate.