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In keeping with one of the FASO core manifesto beliefs of "Useful Now is Better than Perfect Later", I've decided to make any FASO customers on my personal mailing list aware that we've quietly released the ArtfulMail product that I've been working on into a very early FASO labs status.   This means you can use it now, but it's a bit of "use at your own risk."  [1]   If you're willing to eat the dogfood with me, maybe we can push the development along a bit quicker.   The problem that ArtfulMail is aiming to solve is this:  html renders VERY differently in email programs than it [...]

    Like just about every guitar player my age, I grew up worshiping at the altar of Eddie Van Halen.  When Eddie first arrived on the scene, none of us had ever heard anything like it.  Rumours flew that Eddie has some sort of little magic "black box" of effects that made his guitar have that amazing signature Van Halen sound.   At one point, Van Halen went on tour opening for Ted Nugent.  Apparently, Ted also thought Eddie had a little black box and wanted to play through Eddie's gear, so he could sound like Eddie.  Here's how Eddie remembers the encounter, in [...]

  Our motley group arrived in Florence the day before our "first class" train ride.  So, naturally, we decided to go have some great local Italian food.   Your editor and his wife ended up at a local joint called La Congrega Osteria Del Tempo Perso.  It's not in the tourist area, and, in fact, the area looked a bit rough, but we had been assured by locals and guidebooks alike that this place had some of the best fare in town.  We knew, if nothing else, they were sure to have decent Italian wine.  Your editor made a mental note to enjoy copious amounts [...]

    Microsoft, in the 1990s, became the dominate force in personal computing.  Windows NT, first developed as a server product, was an advanced, modern, secure and stable operating system that eventually found it's way into consumer-grade Windows with the Windows XP release....an operating system that many people still use today more than 10 years after its debut.   In fact, much of NT's code is still in use in modern versions of Windows.     Question:  Just why was Windows NT so great compared to earlier iterations of Windows?  And how did Microsoft develop, in the early 90's, an operating system that was so advanced for [...]

    During the web's young "dark ages", we didn't have social media websites, but we did have social networks.  We shared stories, photos and links with our "social network" via email [1]         Then Came Facebook   Facebook has now become so monstrous it's almost synonymous with the term "social network." [2]   So it's only natural for artists to market art on Facebook.  If you pay attention to "the numbers", particularly the numbers that track referral traffic to websites, it often seems like Facebook is the biggest, badest mabajamba on the planet.   However, there's a problem with the numbers:  Because Facebook website referrals are public data, [...]

You can't harvest the crop before you sow the seeds.   For years, I've been the guy whose been standing mostly alone, in the wilderness, telling artists that, for the most part, SEO efforts are not a good use of artists' marketing time and budget.   I get a lot of flack for this position.  There are many people out there selling courses, doing webinars, and pushing products that teach artists how to do SEO.  Many artists see it as a path to the promised land of "traffic" and sales.  I can see why:  for those of us who did business in a world before [...]