Have a question for Ask The Geek? Send it to me.
Dear Ask the Geek,
I see you are moving your blogs over to wp.com: does it work like an hosting service? I mean, if I move everything there I can stop using [hosting service]? What are the pros & cons of using WordPress.com?
Sincerely,
Platform-challenged
Dear Platform-challenged,
I usually love giving people help – heck, it’s really how this site, When I Have Time, got started. I was helping friends with tech questions over email and Skype and I thought that if the same information helped just one other person, I was doubling my reach. The “Ask the Geek” questions are some of my favorite things to answer and are actual questions sent to me mainly by people I know.
On my food & travel site, Ms. Adventures in Italy, I also answered questions about moving to & living in Italy. I’ve since stopped; I’m not an immigration lawyer and most of the questions I was able to answer, I already have – which is what leads me to writing this post.
I get a lot of vague, long-winded, ridiculous, and desperate requests for help (across a variety of subjects) which lead me to believe the person has no idea who I really am and is probably spamming several people at once looking for those “magic beans” in the form of any answer which will magically save them.
Here’s an example of a request I find vague, inappropriate, and looking for magic beans:
I have found your website and blogs, very interesting. I am trying to promote our business more in the States / Canada. Do you have any suggestions or ideas for me? Hope to hear from you!
Sure! Let me set aside an hour or two of my time to craft a well-thought-out answer for you. Or not. So this post isn’t for those people. I can’t help you find the magic beans.
But what about you? You’re a normal, hard-working, thoughtful person and you have a valid question which you’d like to ask someone to answer for you.
Here’s how to ask for help, and get an answer.
Start by doing your homework. And I don’t mean the homework on your actual question – by the time you approach someone for help you should have put your question through the wringer and know it backwards and forwards. You should have definitely tried Google.com first.
What I really mean is to do your homework on the information the person you’re asking for help has already made available to you.
Here’s a crib sheet for you to help you do that homework on a helpful site:
While I love hearing the stories behind a question that comes to me, if I see an email which goes “past the fold” (beyond the viewable part of my screen) and is peppered liberally with question marks, I can assume that the person hasn’t done some homework in #1, they are asking me to take on the majority of the homework part, or they don’t really know what their question is.
Limit your questions. One is best. Two or three is pushing it depending on the context, and any more than that is probably asking too much. Limit your questions, so you can be respectful of the other person’s time. If they want to continue helping, they’ll ask their own questions, or ask you to give them more information.
Since you did your homework in #1, you know what information this person has already shared publicly with you via their site. You’ve narrowed down your question and your introduction/background in #2 and now you need to do a reality check – is my question specific enough this person can answer it, and am I being realistic by asking them to answer it?
This is #4, but it might as well be #1 in order of importance. Why are you writing ME? Why do you think I’m the best person to answer your question?
If someone is going to help you, they’d like to think they’re not one of the many people you’re spamming in the hopes of getting a response. Why not let them know? Was it something you read on their site, in their biography, or was it even somewhere where they wrote they’re open to these sorts of requests?
And secondly, in choosing this person, how sure are you they are the correct person to answer this question for you, out of all the resources available to you?
Hopefully in the process of answering this for yourself, you’ll realize that the person really is the right person to ask, and make sure you let them know you’ve done your homework. But if not, think about not sending that email.
If the person never answers you, they might not be interested in answering you. It’s probably not personal (they most likely don’t know you!) They also may be super busy, they may not have seen your email, or your email may have gone into spam (it does happen).
Depending on the urgency and content of your email, I would say you should wait at least a week before writing them again. And write them only once more, with the contents of the first mail and a short 1-sentence note introducing the mail which might have gotten lost. No more than that. Don’t rewrite your entire story in hopes that it will be more appealing (wasting the person’s time as they try to remember where they just read a similar story like this), don’t email them multiple times, don’t bug them via other social networks if you send that second message.
If the person still doesn’t answer, move on.
This last step isn’t a last resort. Rather, it’s a reminder that other people’s time is valuable, too. Make sure you take advantage of any free resources available, and also utilize those paid resources when you really need some good answers.
Hopefully in step 1 you’ve discovered if the person offers consultation on a paid basis, and what that entails. If they do offer paid consultations, seriously consider working with them. If they are the best person to answer your question, why not pay them for their time? If the answer is valuable to you, then the time spent putting together the information is valuable, too.
Not everyone can answer questions for free, or their free answers may seem short because they are purposely limiting their time allowed to respond for free advice. Again, don’t take it personally, and respect their time, too.
What about you? Can you share some tips about what makes you actually want to answer a request for help?
Here are three other articles on email etiquette and asking for help which I found inspiring:
Have a question for Ask The Geek? Send it to me.
Dear Ask The Geek,
I’ve been blogging for seven years and I have a lot of popular content I’d like to republish in an ebook. Should I do this? Are there any tips you can give me for preparing my content?
Thanks,
Budding eAuthor
Hi Budding eAuthor, Continue reading
photo by Peter Kaminsky
If you’re new here, you should probably read my biography just to give you a better sense of who I am. In short: I do a lot of stuff. I’m curious. I love learning. I take risks. I speak my mind. I dare.
The risks I take are reinforced by a belief that I owe it to myself to at least try. I’ve always seen myself as a bit of a Jack of all trades, rather than an expert in one subject, but I’ve come to believe that’s a blessing rather than a curse. Releasing myself from the aim of being an expert or being perfect at something means that I have the complete and utter freedom to try. And fail. Hell yes, fail. Even often!
But trying, definitely.
I’ve spent a lot of time talking with (girl)friends about what’s next for them. I mentioned that I wanted to have a Vision Board workshop for this reason (which had to be postponed due to crazy November travel for me) because I want to help them start to think about “what’s next?” without hearing “not until I...” or “maybe when I...” or “I’m not ready” or “after...” or the worst: “I don’t know.”
Friends, and strangers reading this, listen to me: Continue reading
Have a question for Ask The Geek? Send it to me.
Dear Ask the Geek,
I have a question for the photo geek. What book or resource do you recommend to learn tips on using a DSLR? Want to increase my knowledge before my trip to Lucca this April.
Thanks,
Kristen
Dear Kristen, Continue reading
I created this presentation for entrepreneurs who need online tools to make their ideas happen (I gave it earlier this year at the Professional Women’s Association in Milan).
The presentation “Tools for Entrepreneurs: Create. Collaborate. Communicate.“ started out as a way to explain very technical things to non-technical people, but I quickly realized that most people when approaching technology get intimidated by the “What’s DNS? Do I need a dedicated server?” kind of questions and therefore feel they can’t understand technology.
I feel that this technology intimidation is really due to the fact that they don’t really own their idea, and better understanding it will guide any decisions they have to make with their idea moving forward. Continue reading
I spent some time reformatting a post of mine (on my food & travel site) about How to Order an Italian Coffee to be ready for the Amazon Kindle platform. In addition to formatting it for publication, I spent some time adding & expanding content and updating & adding new photos.
It was a great experiment and I’m really pleased with the results. Soon I’ll share what I learned on the technology side, but for now I’m just enjoying seeing it for sale online.
If you want to check it out, you don’t need to have a Kindle to read it! Here are links to the (free) Amazon Kindle App software for Android phone, Blackberry, iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad, or Mac or a PC. After you download and install the Kindle App software, you can buy the book and read it on your device!
Buy How to Order an Italian Coffee in Italy in your Amazon store! (note: the content is in English regardless of the Amazon store you buy it from):
If you follow me on Twitter (@rosso), you might have seen my Tweet today:
This week has convinced me I'm doing a Vision Board & Workshop in November, in Italian here in Milan. If you're interested, let me know.—
Sara Rosso (@rosso) September 22, 2011
After speaking with several friends who are struggling to see the next evolution of themselves, I decided to hold a Vision Board and Planning Workshop in Milan, Italy. It will probably be in Italian unless a majority of the participants desire English.
I’m working on the agenda and logistics as you read this, and I’ve already gotten enough interest to start picking a date. If you’re interested, feel free to contact me or leave a message on this post and I’ll get back to you with more details.
I’ve been fortunate to do a lot of speaking lately, and I’ll be slowly getting those presentations online, but I wanted to share this one presentation I did for the Stampa all’Estera, the Foreign Press in Milan.
They specifically asked me to speak about using WordPress as a website, instead of a blog, as many journalists are now interested in maintaining personal websites as well as continuing to create all the content they do for external publications.
I really only needed one slide to explain how to do that – it’s very easy! I’ll let you discover how via the slides.
The presentation is geared at those very new to WordPress – so new, in fact, that I included a little bit about WordPress’ history and its community which I think are strong points in choosing to use it (awesome people are making an awesome product).
We spent a lot of time in questions after the presentation, many of which would have been answered by articles I’ve already written on this site, like:
The slides aren’t actually meant to be self-explanatory – I went in-depth into most of the concepts and screenshots in person, and don’t like to put much content in my slides, so if you have questions, be sure to let me know!
In English:
In Italian:
I’m proud to present an interview with a former colleague who I respect quite a bit: Davide Casali, a hybrid interaction designer from Italy who now works in London with Headshift and is one of the co-founders of the open source Baker ebook framework. He blogs at Intense Minimalism and is @Folletto on Twitter.
SARA: What is the Baker framework?
DAVIDE: Baker Framework is a very simple idea: use HTML5 for books and magazines. In many ways, it’s like the missing piece between the book and the web: it allows the creation of enhanced, multimedia books with web technologies. Even if you can tweak a lot current standards like epub2 and mobi (and the upcoming epub3 is even more interesting) you can’t really create a rich, interactive and high quality book or magazine with these. That’s exactly what Baker is for.
The good part is that the Hpub format we are defining alongside Baker is just a set of HTML files zipped, so it’s also ready out of the box for the web.
SARA: Why were you inspired to create it?
DAVIDE: When I saw the iPad for the first time I almost immediately hoped for a new platform and format for digital books. I know I probably read too much science fiction, but I almost felt what could be possible in terms of the reading experience. Unfortunately since April 2010 nothing new has appeared: we’re still stuck to epubs, or we are forced to use Adobe tools and build complex – even if rich – magazine applications.
So by then the months were passing and I kept thinking: “It’s so obvious, HTML5 and ebooks on the iPad, why is nobody doing that?” Then with Marco and Alessandro we started building it alongside the first book, 5×15 in Tokyo, and every time we read a title about ebooks we were worried to see our idea built by someone else. Up until now, we are still the only one out there.
SARA: Who is the Baker framework intended for? (How) can a non-techie use it?
DAVIDE: The framework has a quite broad audience, from developers to authors to publishers. You can use it standalone or integrate it with your own application – like someone already did and successfully released on the App Store.
It’s possible for a non techie to use it: we’ve received good feedback from authors that are using iWeb to build the visuals and then they follow the step-by-step instruction we provide to build the app.
However this is one of the parts I’m not truly satisfied with, even if it’s already quite simple compared to similar solutions. I’d love to provide a really simple publishing experience to anybody, it’s something that we planned in some way, but as of today it isn’t there: it requires a lot of work, and that might come from the community itself, we’ll see. 
SARA: Can you point us to some interesting projects already using the framework?
DAVIDE: Sure! There are two recent releases that I find very interesting, both for concept and the result. One of them is Forgotten Colours by Play Creatividad from Spain, a great conversion of a successful book that’s a collection of inspiring short stories about colors, with interactive elements. Another one is Timbuktu, an Italian interactive magazine specifically designed for kids. Both of them were very well received with great online coverage.
SARA: What’s next for Baker framework? What about you?
DAVIDE: We have already a few big features in place for the next version, that is probably going to be 2.0: orientation support (portrait, landscape or both) and iPhone support, two top-requested features. We are still working out a few things, so I can’t give you a precise date, but it should be somewhere in the next couple of months.
For me Baker is a really interesting experience because it’s probably the most successful open source project I’ve ever done and I’m learning a lot from it. The response we are receiving from both authors and developers is very energizing and we keep getting confirmations that it’s a good thing. I think we are also moving forward quite fast: if you think about it, the first release was in November, just 5 months ago and we already managed to push out the 1.1 version a couple of months ago. So there’s no next for me now… unless you count a few other side projects, but for these only time will tell.
SARA: Some resources to get started with the Baker framework:
DAVIDE: Even if the framework itself is quite simple and our official page is very clear, that’s something we are working on to improve. As of today the biggest resource is Google and our lively community on GitHub, but we are planning some more tutorial-like content published directly on the website in order to help less tech-savvy people.
Visit the Baker Framework site.
More information on the Baker framework:
