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Have you ever seen that Shakespeare play "As You Like It"?  Did you know that Kenneth Branagh made a version of it a few years ago set in Japan?  Well, he did.  It's pretty good, but there's that part in the middle where Oliver and Orlando are attacked by a lion...  and he didn't bother to change it.  I think I might have yelled at the screen, "A LION???  YOU MOVED THE WHOLE PLAY TO JAPAN, BUT YOU KEPT THE LION?."

Well, my friends, today's post is like a great big lion in the middle of Japan.  Which is to say, incongruous.  When we moved the whole site to solar hosting a few weeks back, we also changed blogging software, from LifeType to Movable Type.  Obviously, I didn't want to lose all the entries we had written before, so I set out to move them over to our new Movable Type installation.  Well, Google as I might, I was not able to find one bit of help out there in the wild interwebs.

Fortunately, I am apparently some sort of "programmer"!  So I wrote my own script that takes a LifeType database and converts all of the information into a format that Movable Type can digest.  I am posting it here for all the world to see, so that the next person who wants to make the same move won't have to reinvent the wheel.

Right-click and save this file.  There are instructions in it; you'll need to be a little familiar with PHP and your LifeType database to make this work, but at least you won't have to start from scratch.

Sorry for the interruption; I now return you to your regularly-scheduled duck-watching.

#31 in our ongoing series, "Reasons You Don't Want a Website"

You know what the best part about having a business is?  Answering the same questions over and over again.  What are your hours?  What's your address?  Do you take credit cards?  And the more esoteric ones:  what does your company do, exactly?  How can I do X with product Z?  What is the meaning of life?

Sure, it might take hours out of your day to answer these types of calls and questions, and they may pop up at the least opportune moments.  But really, nothing is more fun than saying, "We close at 5pm weekdays, and we're closed on Sundays" 4 or 5 times a day.  Because how often do you get to deal with questions you actually know the answers to, right off the top of your head?  (You could answer these in your sleep!)

Apparently if you have one of those new-fangled "websites", you could put all of that information up there, and then your customers could find the answers without your help.  They could find them when you're busy or closed.  They would even find your phone number right next to the answers, in case they had follow up questions.  That could free up a lot of time in your day, but what exactly would you do with all that extra time?  Relax?  Land a new sales account? 

I'd rather answer more repetitive questions, thank you.