I haven’t posted in a while, but I have been dabbling in a bunch of new technologies both at work and personally. My brother and sister-in-law have been writing original recipes and taking lots of beautiful photos, so I helped them set up a blog: FoodieLawyer.com. It’s a real pleasure to work with people who already have tons of great ideas, enthusiasm, and most importantly, tons of quality original content.

After trying our Tumbler, Blogger, WordPress.com, and Typepad, we went with WordPress hosted at Dreamhost. That option provides them with automatic security updates, but also allows custom plugins and flexibility. To get them started, I added a custom theme, Google Analytics, Google Website Tools, SEO optimization, Feedburner, a Facebook widget, Askimet comment spam prevention, Google AdSense for Content, Amazon affiliate program, and a nice plugin for integrating Picasa photos and albums. To be honest, because of so many available tools, it only took one line of custom CSS and two lines of PHP to get them going with a feature rich site. Well, it also takes tons and tons of content production by them, but at least they aren’t bogged down with the How.

Lessons learned from 13 failed software products

It seems like the main take aways are to listen to the users and that, yes, we do need marketing.