Lou Mintzer

October 05 2011 Steve Jobs, You’ll Be Missed
The brief essay below was written in January 2005 as part of my application to the University of Maryland School of Business (Smith). I am posting it verbatim in honor of Steve Jobs, who passed away today at age 56.

You are planning the course schedule for next year's curriculum. You have the opportunity to choose any individual (living or deceased) to teach one course in any subject matter during your first semester. Which individual would you choose? What would be the subject matter? Why? Please limit to one page.

After tossing and turning all night, I can distinctly remember running downstairs on Christmas morning in 1986. As I reached the bottom step my eyes immediately locked onto the coolest thing that I had ever seen: a brand-new Apple II in my living room! It was my family’s first personal computer and it completely blew my mind. So much has changed about consumer technology since then, yet today I use my Apple iPod today just as much as I used that Apple II. Certainly the staying power of Apple has a lot to do with its leader and while I’m sure it’s exceedingly difficult to pry him away from his role as CEO, I would love the opportunity enroll in a Smith course taught by Steve Jobs.

While most CEOs are focused on achieving their financial and operational goals, and on executing a strategy, it is clear that Jobs believes his company's ultimate advantage comes from its ability to make unique, or as he calls them, "insanely great" products. Moreover, he has repeatedly led Apple in the quest to create such products and has demonstrated just how wildly successful this strategy can be. I admire his drive for greatness and the innovation and business savvy that he brings along with it. In turn, I think it would be incredible to learn more about his business and design tactics firsthand.

In addition to Apple, Jobs has co-founded two other successful businesses, NeXT and Pixar. Despite stiff competition and high barriers to entry he was able to make successful inroads into both the software design and film production industries. In each case Jobs proved that he is a rare leader that can not only weave together form, function and performance with style but can also focus an entire company on that task. Evidently, he believes that communication and the ability to get groups of people working together to bring a new idea to life are keys to success. I would definitely jump at the opportunity to personally hear more about his leadership philosophies.

I have come to admire Jobs for a variety of reasons and I would particularly value a course in which he would explicate his strategic vision and leadership philosophy. As a technology worker and nascent entrepreneur I believe that there is a lot I could learn from him. In addition, I believe that I would genuinely enjoy his teaching style. Jobs is a renowned public speaker with a lot of charisma and I bet he would put on a great show.
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January 14 2010 SpriteMe Makes Life So Much Easier
Every once in awhile you come across a web development tool that you can't believe you were living without. Think Firebug or CSSEdit, tools that work great and make building websites so much easier. Today I found the perfect tool for combining background images into CSS sprites. SpriteMe is awesome.

Background images have always been a quintessential aspect of website design. The problem is that each background image used on the page is an extra HTTP request, even if the images are just tiny rounded corners. Minimizing HTTP requests is Rule #1 when it comes to speeding up your website. Combining background images into a CSS sprite is the preferred method for reducing the number of image requests but creating sprites has traditionally been hard and usually requires lots of trial and error.

SpriteMe is awesome because it does all of the hard parts automatically. Specifically, SpriteMe will:
1. Identify all of the background images on the current page
2. Automatically group the images into a suggested sprite
3. Generate the sprite
4. Recompute CSS background-positions
5. Inject the sprite into the current page so you can make sure its pretty!

Once SpriteMe has done its magic, its up to the developer to save the sprite image and integrate the CSS changes back into code. The effort has basically been reduced to cutting and pasting. I love it! Finally free to reap the benefits of sprites without having to obsess about them along the way. Try it yourself, follow along with the SpriteMe demo.
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January 08 2010 Million Dollar Dream Links
Strategic link acquisition is a vital aspect of Search Engine Optimization. To rank in the top echelon of search results, you must garner links from the highest ranked and most trusted websites in the world. It is no secret, links from some websites count much more than links from others. Here is my list of million dollar dream links (worth it, if you can get them).

1. Wikipedia
A Wikipedia article with a link to your site can be a huge boost to your overall popularity. The reward for taking the time and effort to come up with an angle to make the story stick will be worth it.

2. Mozilla Firefox
Mozilla.org has millions of backlinks resulting from browser download links, its affiliate program and overall good will. You can build a Firefox Add-on and submit it here.

3. Photoshop
Building a Photoshop plug-in will generate a link from adobe.com, which is very well linked domain. Don't forget, Adobe has millions of backlinks from flash and PDF plug-in download links.

4. iPhone Web Apps
Probably the only way you'll be able to get a link from Apple is to build a quality web app. Don't bother submitting something shoddy, only the best web apps are listed on Apple.com.

5. Yahoo Directory
Directory submission costs $299 per year for commercial websites. The is one quality link that you are, in fact, allowed to buy without penalty.

6. Open Directory Project
Submission is completely free but there is a major catch: you have to be patient. DMOZ is run by volunteers and its almost guaranteed that your site will not get listed for months, maybe years. You will need to contact them every 2-3 months until it gets listed.
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December 15 2009 7 Steps To Make Your Website Fast
The speed of your website is important because people's time is important. Nobody wants to sit around and wait for your website to load! In fact, page speed and page abandonment have a direct relationship. The 7 step program below is a set of guiding principles that outline a course of action to make your website load faster.

1. Admit it, your website is slower than your competition's website! What, you need proof? Go to WebPageTest and make a visual comparison video to assess your page speed against your competitor's page speed. Here is a classic example of Facebook vs. MySpace, who do you think wins?

2. Yeah, you have a problem. No worries, it can be fixed. Exactly what you need to do to make your website faster has already been documented. Check out Google's Web Performance Best Practices or Yahoo's Performance Rules and believe.

3. Now you must decide that making your website load faster will improve your business! It will improve your traffic, retain your visitors and boost your clicks. The evidence speaks for itself. Do your homework and check out some of the presenter presentations from Velocity 2009. Speed matters and its not just lip service.

4. You're in, time to get started. First step, you must take fearless inventory of your website's performance issues. If you use Firefox as a browser, you can install Firebug and then use YSlow or Page Speed to grade the performance of your website and generate a list of things that you can fix. Use WebPageTest to view a performance waterfall generated by Internet Explorer.

5. You are now completely aware of the exact nature your performance wrongs. Now you need to come up with a plan to methodically fix each defect. Fortunately, most performance improvement tasks are small and lend themselves nicely to being tracked via a ticketing system like Jira or project management software like Basecamp.

6. Dole out the work. If you are a web designer, time to roll up your sleeves. If you have a team of designers and developers, make sure you clearly prioritize the optimization work in relation to new development. Sow the seeds of speed and reap the benefits!

7. Finally, now that you've had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, it is your duty to carry this message onward. You must instill the Web Performance Best Practices into all of your future website development projects. As you'll learn, its faster and more efficient to have your development team code it right the first time. Good luck!
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December 11 2009 So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish

It has been an exciting ride but my time at AOL has come to an end. I spent six years at AOL and I will look back upon those years with fond memories. At AOL I worked with many smart, driven people and I wish them all the best. Under Tim Armstrong’s leadership, AOL is transforming itself into a low-cost content machine and if online ad rates come back, it might just work.

At AOL, I had the opportunity to work on a ton of interesting projects and build a wide array of websites. One of the very first projects that I helped build was AOL Call Alert and I just chuckled when I realized that it actually still exists! Recently, my focus has been on building in-house performance tools to measure, analyze and improve the speed and availability of AOL websites like AOL, TMZ, Fanhouse, Engadget and Politics Daily.

I learned many things at AOL, including the realization that I enjoy conceiving, designing and building websites. Now that I’m a free agent, I’m excited to apply everything that I have learned about building world-class websites to new opportunities. Building and growing a personal blog is something that I finally have time to do.

The focus of this blog will be about building websites, making them faster and getting people to visit them. I hope you’ll come back to read more.

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December 05 2009 ExpressionEngine 2.0
Congrats to Ellis Labs for launching a huge upgrade to ExpressionEngine. The new version is a robust publishing system and an impressive leap forward. Once you get the hang of setting up channels and templates, publishing dynamic content becomes a breeze.

Built on CodeIgniter, my favorite PHP framework, ExpressionEngine 2.0 is bound to do great things. With its support for add-on modules, plugins and extensions, I see the basis for a strong developer ecosystem. As I tweak, customize and optimize my installation I will continue to post my findings.
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