Some people seem to believe that you shouldn’t go in business for yourself until you’ve acquired all of the requisite knowledge. They may expect you to have intimate expertise of all the details involved with legal matters, accounting practices, marketing strategies, and all the other things that go along with running a successful business While it is certainly helpful to have this kind of background experience and knowledge, you can never expect to be a complete expert in everything that you do.

Yes, read some guides online and pick up a couple of helpful books at the bookstore, but you simply cannot wait around until you have explored each and every aspect of running a successful business. You have to remember that a lot of the learning involved comes from experience, trial and error, and a little bit of on-the-job training too. In this way, if you’re thinking about starting a business of your own, don’t be afraid to just in and take a chance. Learn along the way.

Yes, you will probably make mistakes, but you will learn from them. You can develop your expertise as you go through the trials and tribulations of running a successful business. For example, you may have a strong background in marketing, but you don’t know the first thing about direct sales. Only after you’ve attempted a few cold calls of your own that you will really learn what you need to do, what you should do, and what you shouldn’t do. A book can help, but nothing teaches better than experience.

“WordPress would work so much better if it just had this one plugin…”

We have built several WordPress plugins either by scratch, modifying another plugin or with the help of other designers. As we have a large community of WordPress users on this blog I thought it might be interesting to create a weekly call out for WordPress Plugin Requests.

Do you have any WordPress plugin requests?

Broken Plugins that needs to be fixed…

• The recurring post plugin does not work for 2.6 and higher versions of WordPress.

Plugins still in the queue to be built…

• A single sign on between WordPress and laconica.
• A plugin to change the background of each post based on the author.
• A summary above the content so readers can scan plugin.
• A compare 2 blogs plugins plugin.
• RSS Digest to Post plugin.

I am still working on the background for each post based on the author. If you would like to build or fix a plugin then leave a comment so we know you are working on it.

Did you know that the Asus Eee PC isn’t the only netbook in town? The smaller subnotebook form factor is quickly rising in popularity, so a number of different manufacturers have started offering netbooks of their own. You can turn to big names like HP and Dell for their netbooks, but a certain Taiwanese company has a pretty sweet offering in the works as well.

The first MSI Wind was already a pretty good device, because it came with a larger 10-inch display and a larger hard drive for storage, but your connectivity options were largely restricted to WiFi. Just as you can be offered high-speed Internet access on the go with the iPhone 3G, the same can be said about the all-new MSI Wind U120. This netbook looks to be much the same as the older model, but it has high-speed HSPA as well. The integrated 3.5G WWAN connectivity means that you can have broadband-like speeds anywhere you have 3G access.

Other features include the same 10-inch LCD and Atom processor, as well as 1GB of RAM, 802.11n Wi-Fi, and a 120GB hard drive. MSI plans on producing a WiMAX model that will work with Sprint’s XOHM network in the near future too.

Congratulations to this weeks geek Rinko. This weeks questions are…

1.  What does ASCII stand for?

2.  What was the first commercial use of ASCII?

3.  How many ASCII character are there in total?

4.  What is the difference between ASCII and PETSCII?

5.  What universal code replaced ASCII?

Have you ever thought of running your own Radio Station? It is not as hard as one might think. This weekends project is to setup a streaming radio station. Here are the steps involved in getting started.

1. Come up with a station idea. I suggest you find a niche and a target market. Also choose music you love listen to and an audience you enjoy being around. Streaming Radio stations are not big money makers so this will become a labour of love.
2. Purchase and own your content. You will need to buy music to play on your Radio Station. Not only will you need to buy the music you will need to pay for the royalties. You can do that by becoming a SOCAN member and paying 43.3 cents per user to your station. This buys you a blanket license to the music.
3. Setup a streaming server. You could do this at your house and have people connect to your home machine. We will not go in to how to set that up as most ISP’s in Canada do not allow it. I also believe that it is smarter to have a hosted streaming server.
4. Setup your radio DJ’s. There are various software’s both free and paid to do this. Each DJ can stream live from there own computers to the server.
5. Purchase Radio Sweepers. Make your station feel more professional with a few Sweepers. For less then $50 you can get 3 done professionally.

From here your goals would be to setup a site and start pushing traffic to your station. To earn money you can sell radio station ads or embed your player into a page and display ads.

If you get stuck let me know in the comments.

A cartoon created by artist Rob Cottingham.

If you have an idea for a future comic or would like to submit your own BlueFur cartoon let us know in a comment.