A friend’s young son had just used the toilet and wiped himself for the first time.

She congratulated him on being a big boy.

To which he replied:

“Mother. Surely you don’t expect me to do this for the rest of my life.”

I dreamed that my friend R__ turned into a giant, invisible duck.

His only hope lay with a mystical lady doctor.

While she worked on a magical cure, he stayed hidden in a small safe house. A matched group of wooden advertising collectibles from the 1930s—curly-haired girls and kittens with bows in their fur—decorated the front parlor. The figurines had once been bright red, but the red had faded to pink over the decades, and the paint was peeling.

The giant, invisible duck waited and waited for the mystical lady doctor to effect a cure.

One day, the invisible duck left the safe house and found himself waddling toward a grand part of town that seemed oddly familiar.

His mind was going, becoming a duck-brain.

As he waddled, he thought, I put my foot here, I put my foot there, I put my foot here, I put my foot there.

Meanwhile, not far from where the duck found himself heading, the mystical lady doctor was inside one of R___’s beautiful houses, exploring the place with the pleased attitude of a potential inheritor.

Her male assistant was with her. He wore Operating Room scrubs and an expression of gravest concern.

“What are we doing here?” said the assistant. “We shouldn’t be here, this is R__’s house. We should be back in the lab, working on that cure.”

“Oh, there is no cure,” said the mystical lady doctor. “He’s going to stay a duck. Eventually he’ll become visible, and he’ll forget that he was a man.”

“What? How long have you known this?”

“I’ve always known it,” said the doctor, examining the china.

“Then why are we taking his money? Why are we leading him on?”

“We’re not leading him on,” she said. “We’re giving him hope.”

And she began quietly counting the spoons.

A few blocks away, the throng of pedestrians had come to a standstill, awed by the rich neighborhood’s architecture. Here tall apartment buildings rose nearly to the sun. They were made of red brick and the giant Roman arches at their bases were carefully matched, creating the effect of a planned environment.

A standing crowd was bad news for a giant, invisible duck, so R__ left the mobbed crossroads and waddled down a small side street that soon became a garden path. There was something familiar about the path, something he ought to remember, but his man-mind was fading. I put my foot here, I put my foot there, I put my foot here, I put my foot there.

Suddenly, around the corner of a large, beautiful house, two human beings appeared and bumped into him.

Everyone, including the duck, screamed in terror and surprise.

The duck recovered first.

“Doctor,” he said, “it’s me, R__. What are you doing here?”

“Oh, you gave me such a start! It’s dangerous for you to be out of the safe house. Come back with me.”

“But, where are we? What are you doing here?”

“Nowhere, nothing, come.”

The duck looked at the assistant, whose face was a mask of poorly concealed guilt. And suddenly he knew where he was.

“This is his house,” the duck said. “My house,” he corrected himself. “This is my house.”

“Your house? Of course it’s your house. We were watering the plants and checking your mail,” the doctor said, recovering. “We’ve been paying your bills, so when you resume your human life, you won’t have angry creditors at the door.” And she smiled with brilliant kindness.

Her words made the duck feel warm and safe, but then he looked again at the assistant, and suddenly he knew everything.

“You’ve been lying to me,” the duck said. “You’re not even trying to help me. You want my property! I won’t stand for this.”

But it came out quack, quack, quack.

It’s hard to listen to this recording and realize it came from a human throat.

How sick am I today? This sick.

The deaths of Leslie Harpold and Brad Graham, in addition to being tragic and horrible and sad, have highlighted the questionable long-term viability of blogs, personal sites, and web magazines as legitimate artistic and literary expressions. (Read this, by Rogers Cadenhead.)

Cool URIs don’t change, they just fade away. When you die, nobody pays your hosting company, and your work disappears. Like that.

Now, not every blog post or “Top 10 Ways to Make Money on the Internet” piece deserves to live forever. But there’s gold among the dross, and there are web publications that we would do well to preserve for historical purposes. We are not clairvoyants, so we cannot say which fledgling, presently little-read web publications will matter to future historians. Thus logic and the cultural imperative urge us to preserve them all. But how?

The death of the good in the jaws of time is not limited to internet publications, of course. Film decays, books (even really good ones) constantly go out of print, digital formats perish. Recorded music that does not immediately find an audience disappears from the earth.

Digital subscriptions were supposed to replace microfilm, but American libraries, which knew we were racing toward recession years before the actual global crisis came, stopped being able to pay for digital newspaper and magazine descriptions nearly a decade ago. Many also (even fancy, famous ones) can no longer collect—or can only collect in a limited fashion. Historians and scholars have access to every issue of every newspaper and journal written during the civil rights struggle of the 1960s, but can access only a comparative handful of papers covering the election of Barack Obama.

Thanks to budget shortfalls and format wars, our traditional media, literature, and arts are perishing faster than ever before. Nothing conceived by the human mind, except Heaven and nuclear winter, is eternal.

Still, when it comes to instant disposability, web stuff is in a category all its own.

Unlike with other digital expressions, format is not the problem: HTML, CSS, and backward-compatible web browsers will be with us forever. The problem is, authors pay for their own hosting.

(There are other problems: the total creative output of someone I follow is likely distributed across multiple social networks as well as a personal site and Twitter feed. How to connect those dots when the person has passed on? But let’s leave that to the side for the moment.)

A suggestion for a business. Sooner or later, some hosting company is going to figure out that it can provide a service and make a killing (as it were) by offering ten-, twenty-, and hundred-year packets of posthumous hosting.

A hundred years is not eternity, but you are not Shakespeare, and it’s a start.

Jeffrey Zeldman onstage at Galapagos Art Space, Brooklyn, New York. Photo by Onno de Jong from last night’s AIGA/NY talk and birthday celebration, curated by Jason Santa Maria.

The change you experienced last night at midnight is available to you every moment of every day.

Dan Benjamin,
1 January 2010

Ten years ago, my girlfriend flew home to celebrate new year’s eve in San Francisco, but I had to stay in New York to work, so we spent the turn of the millennium apart.

A friend of a friend threw a party. I attended, grumpily, as shown here.

Ten years ago, but it may as well have been a thousand. Everything is different now. Everything except that I am once again separated from those with whom I would most wish to mark the falling away of old things and the luminous beauty of new beginnings.

My marriage resulted in a daughter, Ava, and a dog, Emile. My daughter, thank God, is fine. But Emile has become ill, first with pneumonia, which he survived, and now with pulmonary hypertension, which is going to kill him.

The pneumonia manifested as coughing, fainting, dramatic weight loss, and lack of energy. A week in a veterinary hospital’s intensive care unit saved his life. And, for a few weeks afterward, although still underweight, he seemed to be recovering.

Then he began fainting again, often falling into his own urine and feces, sometimes while emitting what sounded like a scream of terror. The light would go out of his eyes. Grabbing his feet, patting his side, I’d lie on the floor, coaxing him back from the other world. Then it was back to the veterinarian, or, as two days ago, to the veterinary hospital’s ICU.

At the hospital, they prescribed a new medicine, which he starts today. They also told me, in doctor language, that he won’t be with us much longer.

It’s too soon to give up hope, too soon to pull the plug, but the day of horrible choices is approaching.

Someone could write a study on how moving and changes in marital status can cause a domain to lapse, and that someone could be me.

Sent from: The Palace Hotel. Short URL: zeldman.com/?p=3178. Tweet reference: 6372740541. Why are you reading this?

I am sad that my five-year-old wrote on our door in permanent marker. She knows better. I’m proud that she is learning to write. And that she chose to write these two words—her name and mine.

When she showed me her work, I had a choice: reprimand her for writing on the door. Or tell her proud I am of her.

I think you can guess which I chose.

Happy Thanksgiving, Americanos!

Short URL: zeldman.com/?p=3096

You are a shameless self promoter!” he said.

I can’t speak to the “shame” part, but for the rest: guilty as charged.

Self-promotion may appear revolting, but it’s the only promotion that’s guaranteed in this business. Do it right, and only haters will hate you for it. To get, you must give.

Love your work

If you write or design, you must believe in what you do. If you don’t believe you have something to express, there are plenty of other jobs out there. If you believe in what you do, and if you’re doing it for real, you must find ways to let people know about it.

Sometimes this takes the direct form of a case study. The assumption in publishing such a study is that someone out there might be interested in the service your team provided, the thinking you brought to the problem, and so on.

There is a difference between being arrogant about yourself as a person and being confident that your work has some value. The first is unattractive, the second is healthy and natural. Some people respond to the one as if it were the other. Don’t confuse them. Marketing is not bragging, and touting one’s wares is not evil. The baker in the medieval town square must holler “fresh rolls” if he hopes to feed the townfolk.

The love you make

But direct self-promotion is ineffective and will go unnoticed unless it is backed by a more indirect (and more valuable) form of marketing: namely, sharing information and promoting others.

Is your Twitter feed mostly about your own work, or do you mainly link to interesting work by others? Link blogs with occasional opinions (or occasional techniques, or both) get read. The more you find and promote other people’s good work, the more in-the-know and “expert” you are perceived to be—and the more you (or your brand, if you must) are liked.

You can’t fake this. If you’re linking to other people’s work as a ploy to make others link back, it’s obvious, and you’ll fail. If you’re sharing half-baked information half-heartedly, nobody will stick around.

This may sound Jedi-mind-trick-ish, but never create a blog or a Twitter feed with the explicit idea of promoting yourself. Create for the joy of creating. Share for the joy of the sharing, and because the information you’re sharing genuinely excites you. Do that, and the rest will follow.

zeldman.com/?p=3061

Shot by Mr Greg Storey.

A longing for love and approval. That’s the dirty little secret of success.

Yes, you must make something people want. Of course, you must improve and extend it. Certainly, you must give 110% where customer satisfaction is concerned. Definitely, you must convert your customers to evangelists. All of that is true, always has been and will be.

BUT.

But you won’t be able to do those things, not really, not all the way, not as they must be done, unless there is a brokenness in you that continually craves attention and affection you somehow missed out on.

You have to have been abandoned, betrayed, ridiculed, unsupported at some point when you needed it most.

This sounds terrible and it is. But it’s the facts.

A contented person with a whole heart, who has never doubted for a moment that she is loved by God and the universe, should not bother trying to succeed as a creative entrepreneur. She should get a job working for someone else, turn it off at 6:00 PM, and come home to the people who love her.

Only a restless, broken heart can drive you to do what is necessary.

And that’s how to succeed in business without really crying.