I wanted to do some interviews with people at a distance but was struggling with a lot of technical issues — bad audio and video quality, cumbersome and unreliable recording process. I asked Andrew Warner, who does great interviews on Mixergy, if he would help me out. Despite a super busy schedule, he consented to talk to me and just cut through so many of the problems I had. Here’s some of the advice he gave me.

So do testimonials help with credibility? Not this one! I’m sure that’s a real quote from a real family, right?

Aardvark is a relatively new service launched by some heavy hitters. But everything about the signup process sets off my spidey sense. Danger! Danger!

There’s no stupider way to hitchhike than to stand by the side of the road with your thumb out hoping someone will stop. And yet do you see people do it any other way? Which way are you living your life?

Like a lot of old saws, this one is wrong. Here’s why.

My mom taught me as a child, it’s really hard to unyell once you’ve yelled. If you want to get what you want, start soft. You can always yell once that fails, but you once you’ve yelled, it’s too late for the soft approach.

I have been tearing my hair out a bit trying to figure out how to save a whole taxonomy lineage in Drupal, so that everything tagged with a child term would be tagged with a parent term. In other words, given a taxonomy like:

1. United States

3. California
4. Vermont

2. Canada

5. Alberta

I want it so that if [...]

Validation, fixed width, fixed fonts, javascript OH MY! What matters when evaluating a theme for my Wordpress or Drupal site?

Always looking for a better way to synch my laptop and desktop, so I tried Live Mesh. After many computer crashes, narrowly escaped with my data intact. So I’m back to Allway Synch, which has, in over a year of intense daily use, put my data at risk.

Bottom line: Paypal Buyer Protection on Ebay is pretty much useless if you have to make a claim and can actually be a smokescreen for scammers. And more to the point, don’t buy software on EBay. I should have known better.