RWDevCon Inspiration Talk – NSBrief by Saul Mora
Hear first hand from Saul Mora how the popular podcast NSBrief got started and some lessons he’s learned along the way. By Saul Mora.
Lesson Learned #2: Website Readability Is Important
Another mistake that I made was putting the original site on Tumblr. Anybody here ever used Tumblr? Yeah see that’s why it was a big mistake. Tumblr was okay for a while. At the time it actually went down a lot, like everyday it went down. It was really horrible.
It was easy to use and it looked decent. Here’s our very first episode page on Tumblr. You can actually go see this if you go to NSBrief.tumblr.com. It’s still up there. I have not taken it down.
You can see:
- My cubed logo is there.
- I have this “Ask Me Anything” section (I have no idea what that does).
- You can subscribe in iTunes.
- There’s a lot of words.
- It’s very busy.
It’s a Tumblr site. We don’t really have a whole lot of control.
Moving on I thought, “Well I got to find a better way to host these things. This site has to stay up a little bit more.” Posterous, that was kind of like Tumblr, but well we know what happened to Posterous. That got bought out and closed, but luckily the internet saved me for this talk because I have a screen shot of my site.
It turns out that back in the early days, I found this guy who was living in his mother-in-law’s basement. He actually knew stuff about Cocos2D. We had an interview, I actually remembered this interview because we were talking about Cocos2D. I was still really curious about it at the time.
I remember half way through the interview I was like, “Hey Ray I don’t have any other questions. Tell me what to ask you because I don’t know.” Basically I didn’t do my homework. The interview turned out well. It was very useful, but it was one of those things that was kind of odd.
Moving on, we moved over to Amazon and have a decent website for a developer. I don’t have the design chops that Ray does and all that. I had this put together from a template.
It’s a little better, but there’s room for improvement. You can also see this, if you like, it’s on Amazon S3.
Now everything is hosted on the Mac mini in Las Vegas. I just figured I would bite the bullet, host it myself, do all of that, just take care of that. That has its pros and cons, but what it let’s me do is I can do my own thing with the website and have it posted here. What’s nice about this website is that it’s obviously a lot cleaner. It’s much more easy to read, and it’s mobile friendly!
I thought it was very ironic that I was doing an iOS focused podcast and the website had not been very mobile friendly. Tumblr and Posterous and that template that I had were very had to read on iOS devices. This site was easy to read on iOS
The site was actually contributed by somebody from the community. Community has always been a big part of NSBrief. I put a call out to say, “Hey is there anybody out there that wants to redesign the website.” It turns out that Tom Diggle wanted to do that. He did a really good job of putting together a really good website that I still use all the time.
Meeting Awesome Peeps
It turns out over the time of meeting people and talking to people about their talks at conferences like this one with Jay Trash.
I made a lot of friends. I met a lot of people this way. It’s really nice to talk and converse and just make a lot of new friends this way. It’s an interesting way to have people remember you because if there’s anything that they’re going to remember is that you interviewed them for a podcast.
I also made a few enemies. Some of you out there know that Ash Furrow is my Twitter nemesis. He’s been on the podcast for a couple of times and we did have a battle in Amsterdam.
I think I won. Go America!
You can check out those episodes:
The last one is actually the Swift grudge match, so you want to check that one out.
I’ve had my share of early exclusives as a podcaster. Eloy Duran I met up with out at second conference in Chicago when he announced CocoaPods. I interviewed him, he was a core team of member on the MacRuby Project that was running at the time and I wanted to talk about that, but he was also announcing CocoaPods. It’s the last thing. I thought at the time MacRuby was much more important than this CocoaPods thing; who cares about CocoaPods! That podcast is on there. It’s interesting:
I also got to meet Laurent Sansonetti the developer of MacRuby at the time, but now he does RubyMotion. I met up with him in Belgium and got a little exclusive and sneak peek before that was announced.
I also talked to the Appsterdam guys before hand and got the down low on what was going on in Amsterdam and what they were trying to build out there.
It just had a really big affect on my life and that I took inspiration from this and went out to Amsterdam for a couple of months and met a lot of people there and made a lot of great friends. It changed the trajectory of my career a bit.
While I was out there, I was able to meet Scotty, the guy from Late Night Cocoa. I went to visit him at his place in Tetbury, England. If there’s any place that’s out in the middle of nowhere in England, it’s Tetbury, but the curry is really good. That’s a plus.
Scotty has been a regular in the podcast and he’s a really good friend of the show.
I do a lot of interviews of just people from the community. Here’s one with Ariel Michaeli.
He’s based in New York and he runs appFigures. He’s another one of these guys that started up as a one man shop. I think his was actually two men, him and his brother. They started building not an app agency, but just an app analytics agency where they would analyze all of your iTunes connect data.
I’ve talked to a lot of fun people; they have all been really great. But I have to say that out of all the interviews I have done, one that I remember the most is the one I did on an airplane.
I met Jaime Newbury out at WWC on the way back and we just did an interview there. We talked about her work, her design work. We also talked about women in tech, since that’s a really big issue. That’s the interview you’re not going to forget any time soon.