Early retirement is a false idol
From 37Signals, Justin Bell writes that you shouldn’t sacrifice your entire life now for a shot at an early retirement. Enjoy life now, as you’re living it.

Dropping bombs in the newsroom
The newspaper industry really has to reinvent itself. More on this later.

Mom-and-Pop Multinationals
Interesting article from Business Week on how small business owners are taking advantage of global outsourcing. Many good ideas.

I’m thought about using some of these services since reading The Four-Hour Workweek. I’ll see if I can use any of them this fall as I’m going all-out towards launch.

How to analyze and improve the bounce rate for your website
Very good article on a very important topic. I’m trying to build a model for one of my clients on this.

25 reasons users stop using your product
Andrew Chen writes up some notes on why people give up on games and websites. I’m spending a lot of time working on Serendeputy’s out-of-the-box experience and customer lifecycle. I don’t have a ton of marketing dollars, so I need to make sure the product is keeping the customers engaged.

I’ll likely write a longer piece later about how I’m trying to incorporate the best ideas from game design to apply to more conventional websites.

Dissecting today’s Internet traffic spikes
Scaling doesn’t mean the same thing today that it did a few years ago. If I ever get to a point that this is a problem for me, I’ll likely have someone smarter than me thinking about it; still, this is really interesting information to know.

Nine steps to achieving flow
I love working from home now. It’s so much easier to get in the state of flow.

Programmer Competency Matrix
This is a smart grouping of competencies you want your programmers to have. Boy, do I have a long way to go before I’m even vaguely competent at programming.

15 questions to ask during a Ruby inteview
On the other hand, I aced this test, so I’m feeling a little bit better about my meager skills.