“I had an interest in writing from a very early age. I loved to read as a little kid, even in elementary school,” Owen said. “I was always fascinated: ‘Where do these stories come from?'”

Among those stories was the lore of Middle Earth.

“I first read ‘The Lord of the Rings’ by Tolkien and that just floored me. I’d never read anything like it, and I just knew at that point I wanted to make up stories like that,” he said. Despite his initial attempts at writing, which he humbly dismisses as “terrible,” these early experiences sowed the seeds for his future in writing.

He’d caught the writing fever and gladly kept it burning into his later school years. In high school, he took an elective creative writing class that he said was beneficial, thanks to an inspiring teacher who provided a nurturing environment that gave him the confidence to pursue his passion. When he entered university, he majored in English.

“I don’t know if that was good or bad for a writer, but it got me closer to where I was going,” he said. “I loved English. It was fun to study, and it’s a useful degree for no matter what you do.”

But it was when he got engaged to be married that he realized that making up stories might not pay the bills. He knew he had to earn a secure living.

A New Career Takes Flight

That living turned out to come from a fairly unlikely direction for a university English major. Then, the course Owen was charting turned skyward.

“I got sidetracked in a career completely different from writing,” he said. “I became an air traffic controller because a friend of mine got into it, and it just kind of fell into my lap, too. I figured I’d do it for a few years, and I ended up doing it for 25.”

During his more than two decades of monitoring and managing the movement of aircraft, he invested little forward movement in his writing ambitions. Other than periodically jotting down ideas, a future as a writer wasn’t at the forefront of his plans.

However, his years as an air traffic controller afforded him the opportunity to travel the world, which gave him experiences that motivated him to keep a spark alive for writing.

“When I retired, I said, ‘Well, if I’m ever going to write, I’d better do it now.’ So I started pursuing it seriously  — writing short stories — because that was the conventional wisdom back in the day,” Owen said.

Fulfilling a Destiny

As he delved more deeply into his stories — mainly science fiction and fantasy — Owen experienced the publisher rejections that many writers often run into.

“You break into writing with short stories and sell them to the magazines,” he said. “My first few rejections were crushing, but I realized I needed to learn more about the craft of fiction writing.”

He discovered the Odyssey Writing Workshop, an intensive six-week program geared toward writers of fantasy fiction. Odyssey — located at Saint Anselm College in Goffstown, New Hampshire — is one of two, along with Clarion West, major science fiction and fantasy writing workshops in the United States.

Owen enrolled in the Odyssey workshop with 15 other aspiring writers. The workshop’s instructor took students through the paces of all things writing, and Owen said it changed his world.

At about the same time, Owen received what he’d been pining for ever since embarking on his writing journey: an acceptance letter for one of his short stories. His thrill at the honor motivated him to keep going.

“I would say this was around 2010. So, until about 2013, I was writing short stories — just cranking them out and sending them off,” he said. “I ended up getting about 40 published out of probably several hundred that I submitted. And some of them, I submitted multiple times.”

Inspired by his success with short stories, Owen wanted to take the logical next step.

“I decided I wanted to take a crack at writing a novel. I’d taken a crack at it back when I was in college. I wrote sort of a Tolkien fantasy knockoff. I got about halfway through it, thought it was terrible, and abandoned it,” he said. “But then I started working on some ideas for novels that I’d had over the years, and eventually those morphed into some completed works.”

Branching Out from the Fantastic

So, how does he approach writing in such disparate genres while maintaining richness and integrity in the quality of his prose?

“The way I work and the way my mind thinks, I almost don’t have any other choice,” he said. “I got my feet wet in science fiction and fantasy because that’s what I grew up reading. But when I got into college and started studying English and reading writers like Faulkner and Hemingway and Toni Morrison, I started to love literary writing. I started to love mainstream writing, even genres like the thriller and Michael Crichton.”

Owen sees the value in a writer having the ability to traverse genres, so he’s not content to pigeonhole himself. He relishes the literary forays he’s made into science fiction, relationships, and thrillers and admits that he’d “get bored after that and want to move on to something else.”

“That’s kind of to my detriment because most writers — if you write a science fiction book and people buy it, you write more science fiction because that’s what [readers] are expecting from that person whose book they read,” he said. “You develop a following in a particular genre.”

Owen points to the “Harry Potter” and “Game of Thrones” novels series as examples of those with characters that are carried through multiple books by a single author each. He’s quick to point out that he doesn’t work that way, and he said that ethos keeps him from being bored. He also said such a decision to stay diverse hasn’t been an obstacle in his creative process because he reads a wide variety of genres.

“A lot of writing instructors and authors will tell you even if you write science fiction, don’t just read science fiction. Read stuff in every genre. Read some Westerns, read some romance,” he said. “So I do that, and it makes me want to write in those genres.”

The Creative Process

For Owen, effective world-building involves just enough detail to make the setting believable, without overwhelming the reader with unnecessary information. He avoids what readers call “info dumps,” striving instead to integrate details naturally into the narrative. 

In his latest novel, the futuristic and dystopian “Behavior,” Owen tackles the intricate and ethically charged concept of controlling antisocial and even criminal behavior through microchips implanted in the brain. This premise allowed him to explore not only futuristic technology but also deeper philosophical and moral questions. He strives to balance these heavy themes with compelling storytelling. 

“The main goal is to compel the reader to keep turning pages,” Owen explained. By integrating intense scenarios that prompt readers to think critically about societal norms and personal autonomy, he keeps his narratives engaging and thought-provoking.

“The idea for ‘Behavior’ is over 20 years old. I used to have a little Moleskine notebook where I wrote ideas down as they would come to me.”

His approach to world-building is story-centric. “It all starts with the story,” Owen asserted.

His writing process is dynamic; he may work on a novel for a while, set it aside, and then return to it with fresh eyes. This method allows his ideas to mature, and his narratives to develop depth and coherence over time, allowing him to introduce complex ideas gradually, avoiding overwhelming the reader, while still enriching the story with depth and intrigue.

Integrating Life Into Fiction

Owen’s novels often draw directly from his tapestry of life experiences. For instance, “Euro Spree” is inspired by his youthful adventures across Europe, distilled into what he calls a “beachery” — a lighthearted, engaging novel perfect for leisure reading on the beach. 

Unlike “Euro Spree,” another one of his novels, “Faith,” took a decade to refine. The novel’s premise sprouted from an overheard conversation and evolved into a story exploring the dynamics between an atheist filmmaker and a Christian singer, capturing the complex interplay of belief systems in personal relationships.

Owen’s personal journey from a religious upbringing to a more secular adulthood provided a nuanced backdrop for the characters in “Faith,” reflecting his deep understanding of both perspectives. This personal authenticity brings a compelling realism to his work, making his characters relatable and their conflicts resonant. 

Leveraging Technology To Connect With Readers

When Owen decided to transition from a personal blog to a professional website, he sought a reliable web hosting service that could meet his needs without compromising performance. Dissatisfied with his first hosting provider, Owen switched to DreamHost on a fellow writer’s recommendation. The move proved pivotal, offering him the speedy, seamless, efficient, and supportive environment he needed to manage his online presence effectively. 

“Tech support, on the rare occasions I need it, it has been flawless,” he said.

Christopherowenwriter.com is more than just a platform for promoting his books; it’s a gateway for engaging with his readers worldwide. By utilizing DreamHost’s robust features, including suggested WordPress plugins and a responsive customer support team, he created a website that not only showcases his work but also facilitates meaningful interactions with his audience. The contact form on his site, for instance, has enabled readers from as far away as the Netherlands to reach out with feedback, which Owen values greatly. 

For Owen, DreamHost has not just been a service provider, but a partner in his storytelling journey. The ease of updating content, the reliability of the hosting service, and the access to effective communication tools through his website have allowed him to focus more on what he loves — writing and interacting with his readers — without worrying about the technical aspects of managing an online presence. 

Owen’s experience highlights the importance of accessible technology in supporting independent creators in their professional ventures. By leveraging open-source solutions he has been able to focus on his writing and reader engagement without being bogged down by technical difficulties or limitations.

At DreamHost, flexibility is one of our core values and it’s a trait that many of our customers, like Owen, greatly appreciate. He needed a web host that could accommodate his creative vision, despite having little prior website design experience.

“I learned the hard way that flexibility in a host is imperative,” he said.

Owen was pleasantly surprised to find that DreamHost offered a variety of tools to facilitate website design and layout. The intuitive interface and the plethora of help files and tutorials enabled him to design a professional website that he’s proud of.

“Almost every aspect of DreamHost’s user interface has help files and tutorials that allowed me to design a professional website that I’m quite proud of,” he said.

What’s more, DreamHost’s passion for our work is reflected in our engagements with our customers, and Owen experienced that firsthand when he needed additional help with his website construction.

“DreamHost’s helpful staff was merely a click away to answer my questions or to fix whatever issue I couldn’t on my own,” he said. He added that he was impressed by the quick response times and the friendly and courteous service, which signaled to him that the staff was passionate about their work.

The post Christopher Owen’s Journey from Air Traffic Controller to Celebrated Author appeared first on DreamHost.

“We didn’t have a computer at home, but every time I had the opportunity to use one it blew my mind,” remembers Velasco, who grew up in Guadalajara, Mexico. In elementary school computer classes, Velasco learned to program a pixelated turtle — with Logo, a language developed for children — to draw shapes, change colors, and more.

Putting technology within his control was mesmerizing, and Velasco was hooked. “From the age of 10 I liked to make computers work for me,” he says.

He never stopped making tech work for him — today, Velasco is a WordPress web developer working for himself. He’s a huge proponent of open source technology, harnessing it to make his clients’ dream websites a reality both as a freelancer and as part of Monday Lovers, a small agency he co-founded with a graphic designer in 2014.

“We create websites that look and perform well, that are easy to edit by our clients and by ourselves,” Velasco explains. Along the way, he’s relied on DreamHost — initially recommended to him by a client — to power his websites, including both professional and personal projects.

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The Simple Life

The Guadalajara neighborhood Velasco grew up in was a peaceful place. “Literally the neighborhood where I grew up is called ‘La Calma,’” he says. “As a child I used to play in the street with my neighbors without having to be monitored by my parents; we played soccer all day and in summer had water balloon wars.”

The passion for tech Velasco discovered at school only escalated when his sister’s then-boyfriend brought over “games like Doom, the Prince of Persia, and some classic racing games on floppy disks.”

When beginning college at ITESO, what he would study wasn’t really that much of a question: “I studied computer systems engineering because I like working with computers and I am very visual,” Velasco remembers. “I was torn between studying graphic design and programming and I realized it would probably help me more to know how to program in the future.”

Related: The Best Online Resources to Learn How to Code

Nowadays, Velasco doesn’t do much programming; his passion is in the visual design of a website. However, the problem-solving skills he picked up from studying programming did help him throughout his career, first working in various advertising agencies and for small to mid-size businesses.

But working in an office, for one company, never suited Velasco. He’s since found his place as a freelance web developer, working from home — once again in a quiet Guadalajara neighborhood — now living a simple life with his wife, Diana Martin. She’s an artist and was one of his first web design clients.

“Part of our peace of mind has to do with the fact that we don’t own many things, we decided not to buy a car or go into debt with a house,” Velasco says. “A simple life gives us the possibility, for now, to vacation whenever we can in Japan.” They’re hoping to return soon to exhibit Martin’s artwork, but with the pandemic limiting travel, they’re content watching “walkTuber” tours of Tokyo (here’s one of their favorite tours, if you’re curious).

Related: Honoring Japanese Tea with the Urasenke Tankokai L.A. Association

Monday Goals

Monday’s a great day to start fresh with new dreams and new ideas, says Velasco. That’s also the day clients tend to reach out with new goals.

So when he and a graphic designer teamed up in 2014 to provide complete website services, including branding, SEO, design, web development, and content creation, they decided to name their agency Monday Lovers.

Monday Lovers has six team members — including a photographer and a journalist — all working from home, each “committed, hard working, and reliable.”

Related: 16 Ways to Stay Focused When You’re Working from Home

Every day of the week — including Monday — they show up to provide their clients with everything they need for a quality website.

“We work with any client regardless of their size or business, from a professional to a multinational or the government,” Velasco says. “Our goal is to match together the best, most suitable available technology for our clients needs according to each individual project. We create websites that look and perform well; that are easy to edit by our clients and by ourselves.”

For Velasco, an easy-to-edit website means one thing: WordPress. He’s a huge fan of the CMS (DreamHost is too, for the record) and even started a Guadalajara WordPress group.

WordPress’s Gutenberg editor has made his life easier as a developer: “I no longer have the need to use layout plugins; with Gutenberg I can achieve most of my goals.” Velasco is looking forward to future features such as real-time collaboration and multi-language support.

“Thanks to open source software like WordPress, it is possible to access state-of-the-art technology without having to shell out large amounts of money,” Velasco says. “It is democratic. It is a way of ensuring that the work built between all can have continuity and does not fall into a few hands. Open source is noble and human.”

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Building Dreams

After more than a decade in the business, Velasco finds clients through reputation and word of mouth. These days he retains a few trusty clients he knows well, so he can focus his attention on providing customized service over ongoing projects.

“I love finding people who want to start a project but whose ideas are just a dream and have the pretext of not knowing how to program to make it come true,” Velasco explains. “I really like to remove that pretext, that technical barrier and make it as easy as possible for people to publish as soon as possible.”

Velasco’s favorite projects involve reimagining print publications for the web. Creating the web version of his university’s magazine is a recent example. To replicate the distinct feeling that comes with an individual print issue while maintaining the overall unity of the publication, the site changes colors with each edition (find examples here and here).

“I also had the honor of bringing to the digital world a printed magazine, Replicante, which continues to be a cultural reference in Mexico,” Velasco says. “Best of all, in my opinion, it showed that few skilled people can run a renowned publishing project over the years.”

In the end, though, Velasco adds, websites are not printed media — they change and evolve constantly and need to keep being reimagined to keep up with new trends and incorporate new technology and processes. So Velasco seeks out new functionalities he can introduce to his clients and implement them on current websites. Sometimes he introduces clients to new and new-to-them processes by creating a custom “show and tell” they can refer to asynchronously, such as this Gutenberg demo he created.

Related: What Is WordPress Full-Site Editing? And How Will It Affect Your Site?

“A good website is one that is good for something,” Velasco says. “The purpose of each project can vary incredibly, but if it has good content and meets a specific objective and is enjoyable for me, you have won. In addition, if you take into account basic principles of usability and accessibility, it can make the difference between wanting to close it as soon as possible or get engaged and connect.”

In building websites and pitching ideas to clients, Velasco focuses on the big picture. A good design, he says, won’t impress if it doesn’t have the content or serve the purpose the client intends. “I think that you can save a lot of headaches,” he says, “by not forgetting that you are making a website — you can always edit the details.”

A Heart-Winning Host

One client that sought Velasco out was a web designer for a film festival in Brazil. She found him on Google while looking for help keeping the WordPress website up and running the whole week of the festival. Velasco was happy to take the job — especially after the festival organizers agreed to fly him and his girlfriend (now wife) down to Rio de Janeiro.

Related: Bogotá Marketers Inspire Local Entrepreneurs with Focus on Brand and Sustainability

Another perk of the gig: discovering an awesome web host. “Above all, it was clear to me that DreamHost had never disappointed her,” Velasco remembers. “She spoke highly of the DreamHost support.”

After that experience, “DreamHost gained my heart,” says Velasco. He was converted.

The best part about working with DreamHost? “That I hardly ever need to contact them,” Velasco says. And when he does, he knows he can count on a quick, competent solution.

“I really like the independence and speed with which the sites load, their scalability and security,” he says. “DreamHost is really the only hosting service that I would recommend — and I have known many of them.”

DreamHost is home to Velasco’s client and professional sites and to his personal projects.

Phrases to Remember

One of these personal web projects is a Spanish-language movie quote website, Frases de la Película.

“I wanted to keep a record of the movies I watched because I have a very visual memory but tend to forget the phrases,” Velasco says. Plus, when he got started, there wasn’t much similar content available on the internet in Spanish. So the website became a personal laboratory as he practiced building, managing, and growing websites.

“I have total control of decisions,” he says, a freedom he doesn’t have with paid client projects. “It is important to have your own projects because you can verify your true ideas beyond what the clients ask of you. You can afford to turn the ads on and off, move everything around, mess up the code, and more.”

He says he got his first job with an advertising agency because of personal projects like Frases de la Película. “They figured, ‘Jos must really like to make websites if he also makes his own in addition to those of his clients.’”

Velasco still keeps the site updated while appreciating that he doesn’t have deadlines. His wife collaborates with him on the project. The site’s homepage relies on images to identify the films in the database — a strategy that mirrors Velasco’s visual memory.

“We include the quotes that we consider most relevant, so chronologically reading them is like watching the movie again very quickly,” Velasco says. “It also creates a unique product because by having the sentences out of their context, you can appreciate how good the script is.”

And it’s an excuse to stay up-to-date on films. Some of his recent favorites include Another Round (“I really like the theme of freedom and playing with reality”), The Broken Circle Breakdown (“Romantic, depressive, impossible-not-to-cry drama”), and The Secret In Her Eyes (“An Argentinian crime drama with an excellent script”).

Related: Longhand Pencils Creator Uses a DreamHost Site to Push Pencils and Pop Culture

Hobbies and what’s next

In his work-from-home life of simplicity, Velasco is never short on passion projects. Along with working for Monday Lovers clients and running this movie quotes website, Velasco loves taking and sharing photos of food his wife prepares (and eating it too, he adds) — plus producing a live video podcast called “Juego de Pomos.”

“The name comes from the Game of Thrones series,” he explains. “A pomo in some regions of Mexico is a bottle that contains alcohol. In ‘Juego de Pomos,’ women talk and drink while analyzing series and movies. Sometimes they burp and swear, the content is very good as their team is composed of an all-female ensemble of writers and visual artists.”

Related: How to Start a Podcast With WordPress

While waiting for their next chance to visit Japan, Velasco and his wife enjoy life with their two rescue dogs. “They are a very important part of our life and we love them,” he says. “We work for them. One of their advantages is that they are portable because they are small and they remind us every day of going out for a walk, to live in the present and enjoy ourselves, we often say that they are the ones that walk us.” Life is just better, he adds, with dogs around.

“If you want to learn and join a community of wonderful people, I highly recommend the WordPress community,” Velasco says. The active WordPress community and popularity of the platform means that if you come across a problem, more likely than not, someone has already solved it. “The best way to learn how to use WordPress,” he adds, “is to make your own sites.”

The post To Guadalajara Web Developer and WordPress Fan, the Simple Life is Everything appeared first on DreamHost.

After earning a degree in finance, Looney realized she wasn’t happy in her career in the healthcare industry. So, she decided to make a change and went to culinary school instead. She enrolled in Norwalk Community College, where her professors knew her passion for cakes, so they tailored her education to it.

“I took all the pastry courses,” Looney says. “When it came to presentation projects, I was able to just use cakes, instead of having to make croissants and bread.”

Baking a Better Future

Yet after she earned her culinary certificate, Looney was frustrated that she couldn’t find a job at a bakery. She needed healthcare and ended up working as a software trainer.

“Originally, I hoped to open up a bakery in California — that’s where I went to college.”

A year later, however, in February of 2007, an opportunity came up. It was true kismet: JCakes, a bakery in North Branford, Connecticut (where she was raised) was for sale.

“This is a bakery that I had grown up with as a kid,” Looney says. “We got all our cakes from it. I kept in contact with the owner while I was in culinary school, and then she decided she wanted to sell it. The bakery I idolized as a kid growing up was even more exciting for us. We didn’t want to let the bakery close either, because that’s probably what would have happened. I had never really worked in a bakery before. I did stuff on my own, but it was never in that environment, so it was a fast learning curve.”

Ready for the challenge, Looney bought JCakes and dove right in. The first hurdle to cross: How to retain the bakery’s loyal customers while putting her spin on the business?

“I basically kept the same menu, formulas, and recipes,” Looney recalls. “I added new cakes to the menu one at a time, along with cupcakes. But I didn’t want to veer too far off from what she was doing.”

The prior owner was a one-woman show, so Looney grew production and brought on staff. She’s now up to 12 employees. “It’s rewarding supplying jobs to people in the community,” she says.

Love at First Site

But growing the team wasn’t the way Looney chose to grow the business. She knew the bakery needed a digital presence too. So in 2007, she launched JCakes.com, and a Facebook page followed in 2008.

“It started out as a one-page website,” Looney says. “Slowly, we would add to it, piece by piece. It was definitely a work in progress. We’ve changed things, and we’ve upgraded. We’ve probably redone the site five times now.”

To spearhead the technical aspects of the website, Looney enlisted her good friend, Pete Kuhn.

“When Hope needed something quickly, I naturally recommended DreamHost,” he says. “We started on their affordable-yet-reliable shared hosting and in time moved on to a higher-level DreamPress plan seamlessly. DreamHost offers honest, quality hosting. They never try to upsell, yet offer great perks and top-notch support. I cannot say enough about DreamHost support.”

Today, JCakes.com primarily uses WordPress as its CMS. “We employ a variety of customizations and plugins and extended this further during the pandemic,” Kuhn says. “The need for online ordering became urgent, and the WordPress platform offered the most cost-effective solution in WooCommerce.”

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Since the wedding industry is so competitive, it’s crucial to have a website that gives you an edge. “JCakes.com is the virtual store front and lead generation engine for the shop,” Kuhn says. “We showcase products and can share exciting press, news, and seasonal releases. Online ordering streamlines some of the back and forth of custom orders.”

Like the menu, the JCakes website has evolved over the years.

“JCakes started with a single page, non-interactive website,” Kuhn says. “Over time, as content and imagery was accumulated, we were able to move into a more catalog-type site. Soon after, powerful forms were employed to allow for easier conversation and custom orders. The latest evolution was the deployment of true online ordering.”

Related: How to Set up Curbside Pickup and Delivery Through Your Website

Spreading the Word

To grow brand awareness for JCakes, Kuhn is always pushing for better search engine optimization.

“Google’s suite of tools helps keep this all in line,” he says. “Google has been a key partner, in fact, as the photos, reviews, and local information features of search results have been critical to success. It helps power those ‘cake near me’ type searches, as well as creating a virtual ‘word of mouth’ type recognition. We also employ Google’s suite of productivity tools, so our email is cleanly integrated and from the correct domain.”

Having a functional and mobile-friendly website obviously helps drive growth, Kuhn notes.

“This requires steady maintenance and considerations for improvement,” he says. “Does our theme still do what we want? Are the forms reporting properly? Are the galleries dragging down our site speed? There are many things to be on top of! Without vigilance, websites can break down — or worse, fall behind the times.”

When it comes to marketing the site, Looney admits she doesn’t have a formal social media strategy. “I wish I did; unfortunately that gets put on the backburner,” Looney says. “The biggest thing is posting pictures — that’s what draws attention and keeps everyone engaged.” She posts about new flavors or holiday treats, for example.

“For the pandemic, I focused heavily on cupcake sales. That certainly kept us busy, when people could order online and pick up right away, because I would keep the inventory in real time so you could always see what we had at the store.”

This year, however, there has been a huge uptick in wedding cake orders, so Looney is scaling back her of-the-moment cupcake offerings.

Living the Sweet Life

With a huge surge in wedding cake orders this year, business is booming, so Looney is focused on refining systems and processes at the bakery.

“Especially since the pandemic, everything just got jumbled,” she says. “My goals have been recovering from all of that, rebuilding and retraining the staff, and getting things to operate more efficiently.”

About half of JCakes’ orders are for wedding cakes, while the rest are other special celebrations: birthdays, bridal showers, baby showers, anniversaries, graduations, and communions. But whatever the occasion, each scrumptious cake is made from scratch.

“We make a butter cream that is European style; it’s not as sweet as an American-style butter cream, so that sets us apart from the rest,” Looney explains. “We are known for our hand-whipped fillings, such as our chocolate mousse and our white chocolate mousse. And our cannoli filling is really, really yummy. We’re lucky that we have good sources for ricotta cheese around here with the local Italian cheese factory. Our fresh fruit fillings are also really popular. Nothing is out of the tub or pre-made.”

Running the bakery is a culinary dream realized. But for Looney, ensuring that JCakes continues delighting the community with over-the-top confections is the real cherry on top.

“There are some people who have been having JCakes for close to 30 years,” she says. “Their kid turns 30, and they’re like, ‘You did their first birthday cake.’ They kept it up every year, which is amazing. The feeling you get when a customer sees their cake and they start crying over it because it brings up this emotion of the time in their life, that’s really rewarding.”

The post JCakes Bakery: How a Longtime Connecticut Staple Flourished over the Pandemic appeared first on DreamHost.

After three decades of starting and stopping his efforts at becoming a writer, and with help from his mentor, writer James Scott Bell, Russo realized there was no point waiting on the universe to bestow him with words. He knew he had the power to nurture the skill himself.

“Talent certainly helps, but almost 100% of a writer’s success is related to how hard they’re willing to work to learn the craft and market their stories,” Russo says. “As in most cases, hard work will trump talent nearly all of the time.”

A software programmer by day, Russo decided to take his writing hobby seriously in his 40s. Perfecting his craft and leveraging his own talent and hard work, he built the world of Erindor, self-publishing three fantasy novels set there and landing in Amazon’s bestseller lists for Metaphysical and Visionary Fantasy, Fantasy, Dark Fantasy, and Horror.

He’s still got more of Erindor to explore, words to pen, books to sell, and novels to publish. And, along the way, he’s creating a resource that both shares tricks of the trade with aspiring independent authors while promoting his own novels — a blog hosted by DreamHost.

“The single biggest lesson I hope aspiring authors take from my blog is this: the ability to write engaging stories and characters is not a gift from the universe,” Russo says. “It’s a craft that can be learned like any other craft. You just have to put in the work. Practice what you’re bad at, not what you’re good at. Get outside of your comfort zone, because that’s where growth happens.”

The Constants

When Russo was 10 years old, he learned two things that would shape his future: He taught himself how to program and grew a love for reading fantasy novels. And he never stopped doing either.

Reading became a lifelong hobby that later inspired his own writing. “My love for computers and everything related to them” also became a constant in Russo’s life — the programming skills he practiced since childhood eventually led to a career in software engineering.

The other constant he could always count on while growing up? Change.

“My dad was 53 years old when I was born, so he was able to retire when I was very young,” says Russo. “My parents had a bit of wanderlust, which made us move around a lot.”

That kind of childhood built a resilience for change in him that carried over into adulthood, as Russo embraced change across careers and locations. For proof of his adaptability, just take a quick look at Russo’s Amazon author bio:

“Nat Russo was born in New York, raised in Arizona, and has lived just about everywhere in-between. He’s gone from pizza maker, to radio DJ, to Catholic seminarian (in a Benedictine monastery, of all places), to police officer, to software engineer. His career has taken him from central Texas to central Germany, where he worked as a defense contractor for Northrop Grumman.”

The four years he spent in the 1990s studying to be a priest led to a degree in philosophy. But unfortunately, his experience was far from what he hoped it would be.

“I was witness to and victim of much psychological abuse,” Russo says. “It took decades, and a lot of therapy, for me to untangle all of those knots. That period of time, and some subsequent experiences in the heart of the church, feeds most of what I write.”

Abuse of power, specifically religious authority — “which can lead to a particularly insidious form of abuse when wielded by unethical people,” he adds — permeates Russo’s written works.

“Through my writing, I hope to guide others to see the early warning signs of this abuse, and also to see the consequences of turning over our faculty of critical thought to someone else for no other reason than they have religious authority over us.”

Building a World

To make the world a little better, Russo crafted a world of his own, bringing readers to a place called Erindor in each of his three published novels: the Mukhtaar Chronicles, which include Necromancer Awakening and Necromancer Falling (with a third novel in the works), and The Road to Dar Rodon.

“I created the world of Erindor, which can be thought of as an Earth-sized planet full of a diverse set of cultures, religions, and creatures,” Russo explains. “I tend to shy away from traditional fantasy races (elves, dwarves, etc.) and instead make my stories all deal with human relationships.”

Setting these human relationships against the backdrop of a fantasy world lets Russo explore our own societal issues, “without smacking the reader in the face with them,” he says. “Instead of addressing issues of race, religion, politics, etc., directly, I can paint an analogous picture in a fantasy world and allow the reader to draw their own conclusions from what they see.”

Erindor is his personal sandbox — “a living, breathing world in my imagination that I can build and tweak however I like.” Many fantasy authors finalize the landscape of their worlds by publishing a map to accompany their stories. But Russo’s found that keeping his map a work in progress works to his advantage: “If a new story warrants a new culture or continent, I can simply create one and continue with the story!”

Russo’s Mukhtaar Chronicles — published both in e-book and paperback — centers on Nicholas Murray, a Texas college student. He ends up in Erindor, where he discovers and masters powers of necromancy. The Road To Dar Rodon, an e-book-only novelette also taking place in Erindor, is a story about Mujahid Mukhtaar — a character from the Mukhtaar Chronicles that has been a part of Russo’s life for years.

“Mujahid is near-and-dear to my heart because I created him for a fantasy game back in the late ‘90s,” says Russo. Mujahid became Russo’s main character in the game EverQuest, which he still plays to this day, and his alter ego in online forums.

“In my books, Mujahid is a necromancer lord, which is an exalted position that most are incapable of achieving due to magical/mystical limitations,” Russo explains. “He’s usually my voice of reason. Mujahid struggles with the battle between his dark side and light side, as do we all, I think. And though he usually ends up on the side of light, he stumbles and falls like the rest of us. It’s how he stands up and carries on that impresses me.”

Declaring Independence

Russo’s novels have topped bestseller lists on Amazon — but you won’t find them at Barnes and Noble. So after debating whether to seek an agent and query publishers, like many writers in recent years, Russo decided to self-publish.

“Whether or not a writer is represented by an agent has very little to do with the writer’s ability,” Russo says. “It’s more about marketing and what an agent believes they can currently sell. I’ve seen more than my fair share of traditionally published books that needed serious editing, and more than my fair share of independent books that aren’t given the reception and recognition they deserve.”

Self-publishing feels like a 2000s, age-of-Amazon phenomenon, but Russo points out that historically, publishing houses are the more modern innovation. “Independent authors used to be the standard of the day until the Industrial Revolution came along and savvy capitalists saw there was money to be made in publishing,” Russo says.

Because we’re all so accustomed to what Russo terms the “traditional middleman model of publishing,” independent authors face a huge obstacle: imposter syndrome.

“The challenge all new authors need to overcome is their sense of authority,” he says. “Embracing one’s personal authority as a writer is a difficult process. We just have to keep repeating the positive message to ourselves that we have authority over our words, and our words deserve a hearing.”

The independent life works well for Russo. Instead of chasing someone else’s deadline, he can write at his own pace, balance a day job, and keep most of his royalties.

“There are some amazingly talented independent authors out there nowadays,” says Russo. His favorites list is long, topped by The Night Traveler author Fiona Skye and Robert Pruneda, author of Devil’s Nightmare.

Related: Herald and Sons Publishing: The Ultimate Father-Son DIY Project

Note to Self

As Russo took to honing his writing craft, he jotted down lessons learned about writing along the way. The list grew longer, and he shared these tips of the trade on his Twitter account.

“In truth, they were more reminders to myself than anything else,” Russo says. “But, before long, I discovered there was an audience for these writing tips.”

Russo went into software engineer mode to reach that audience: He wrote a program that would keep his Twitter feed active throughout the day. Each time he discovers something new about the craft of writing, he composes a “note to self” in the form of a tweet. His software randomly selects a list of tweets to cycle through and a paid service keeps the tweets coming to a global audience. This keeps his worldwide audience supplied with plenty of writing tips — plus marketing plugs for his novels. “The tweet train has been running 24/7 for nearly 10 years now,” Russo says.

Much like online reviews for restaurants and services, Russo says social media offers readers social proof of the legitimacy of a writer:  “It’s in the form of likes and shares, and the more followers a person has, the more influential they are in evoking this social proof.” And with 91.6K followers on Twitter, Russo has plenty of proof to offer.

Related: How to Create a Social Media Marketing Strategy for Your Website

Many of his tweets link to Russo’s blog, A Writer’s Journey. This website has become a platform to mentor aspiring writers and includes a homepage for promoting and sharing updates about his own writing. The role of mentor feels natural to Russo after years of leading ministries, working with Boy Scouts, and training junior software engineers.

“The primary audience of my website and social media platforms are up-and-coming authors who are in the process of writing or publishing their first book,” Russo says. “I try to offer a baseline level of knowledge that new writers can adopt and build upon to suit their own unique voices.”

One of the most important lessons in promoting a self-published book lies in establishing an online presence — Russo calls it an “author platform,” and offers a primer on how to build one. Russo’s own platform is grounded in his website, hosted by DreamHost. When searching for a trustworthy host, he found that DreamHost offered up plenty of its own social proof:

“I heard nothing but good words from folks who are actual DreamHost customers,” Russo says. “That drew me to DreamHost. But, what keeps me at DreamHost is how amazingly helpful and friendly the technical support is. I’ve had some issues crop up, and the tech support team has always been there to get my site back up and running as quickly as possible.”

That kind of stability, he says, helps him keep connected with readers and an audience that spans the globe.

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Full Circle

In addition to landing on bestseller lists, Russo’s work has drawn positive feedback from readers and reviewers alike.

“Some of the quotes from review organizations have truly blown me away,” Russo says. For example, one reviewer compared him to George R.R. Martin and Neil Gaiman, and another to Brandon Sanderson. “Those men are absolute giants of the industry, and to be named in the same breath as them is indescribable.”

Perhaps more meaningful has been messages from readers who, thanks to Russo’s writing, recognized psychological abuse in their own lives and got themselves out.

“I’m just so glad my work is actually helping,” he says. “If I can get just one person out of an abusive situation, my work would be complete.”

It’s that determination to affect change in the world that keeps Russo coming back to the keyboard, even while undergoing chemotherapy after a recent cancer diagnosis. “My current focus is on just getting better,” he says. “That takes more time than I thought it would! But, beyond that, my work and writing take up the lion’s share of my time.”

He’s got several outlines for more stories in the works, mostly fantasy, with some literary fiction mixed in. And he’s on the verge of completing the Mukhtaar Chronicles trilogy, which he started a decade ago.

“I’m hoping to have it in readers’ hands sometime in 2022.”

The post Bestselling Independent Fantasy Author Helps Aspiring Writers Find A Voice appeared first on DreamHost.

Inspiration is also what struck her while working for a big-name branding agency in Bogotá, Colombia. She loved her work as a manager, guiding the strategic vision to bring marketing services to clients throughout the country looking to grow businesses and increase profits.

The only problem? The big agencies Rodriguez spent her career working for only took clients with big budgets — at least $4,000. Which got her thinking: Is there room in the market for a different approach?

“Many businesses were left out for not having this type of budget,” says Rodriguez. “So, I decided to bet on creating a business model that would be effective for small to medium enterprises.”

She took that inspiration and ran with it, launching her own small business that specializes in giving fellow small business owners the chance they need to grow by offering networking, social media, and marketing services, combined with financial planning to sustain that growth. Channeling her favorite word and her favorite industry, Rodriguez named her business Inspiramark — short for inspiration marketing.

“I am convinced that implementing comprehensive marketing strategies will allow any brand to increase its positioning,” she says.

Rodriguez believes in dreams, working to make them come true for herself and her clients. Using a simple DreamHost shared hosting plan, Inspiramark meets its revenue goals quarter after quarter, employs six people, and positions new Bogotá brands for real, long-term growth.

You’ve got to admit — that’s pretty inspiring.

Growing and Sustaining Dreams

Rodriguez grew up in Bogotá, Colombia’s capital, in a family that always valued education.

“Fortunately, I was able to graduate from college and I’ve had different learning opportunities thanks to my parents who have supported me throughout all this time,” she says. “They’ve been a great support” throughout her career, as has her husband, Jair Pineda, who works with Rodriguez as Inspiramark’s CFO.

In August 2018, Rodriguez made the leap from agency marketing work to owning her own business.

“Our mission is to inspire brands that dare to believe growth is possible,” she says, “and make those dreams come true.”

Drawing on her education and background, Rodriguez built Inspiramark to provide marketing strategies to increase brand exposure. She believed strongly that, no matter a business’s budget, entrepreneurs deserved a fair shot — and that depended on how well they attracted new customers through smart marketing. Soon it became clear to Rodriguez that, along with marketing and PR, the scrappy small-business owners she worked with could also benefit from help with their finances.

“We noticed that high impact entrepreneurs have big financial problems that we had the chance to tackle,” she says. Growth and profitability are the main outcomes she offers her clients, and adding on financial planning services, Rodriguez says, makes sure that these new brands can be sustainable over time.

“Our main focus is marketing strategies based on the clients’ financial plans,” she says. “Therefore, we always ensure that implemented strategies are profitable and sustainable.” Along with financial advice, Inpiramark offers communication and sales training.

In Rodriguez’s work with her clients, brand exposure and long-term sustainability is the goal. Inspiramark’s specialty is working with entrepreneurs and small/midsize businesses — “those are decisive, have a clear vision of their business and want to grow,” Rodriguez says. “They are aware that investing in marketing allows them to be ahead of the curve to get more recognition and that good financial management will push them to increase their sales and be sustainable.”

Related: 12 Marketing Strategies to Promote Your Local Business

Going Viral

For Rodriquez, creating the perfect marketing plan is everything.

“Marketing wise, what I am most passionate about is having the opportunity to create, to think of different strategies to reach our client’s targeted audience,” she says.

Rodriquez was surprised to find plenty of work for Inspiramark creating marketing strategies in the music business — definitely not a straightforward industry, she says.

“Working in the music industry has been one of the most spectacular challenges,” she says. “Within this industry you have to be disruptive, non-traditional.”

Take, for example, one of her current clients — a record label called M Records. She’s focused the marketing strategy around pushing artists’ new releases, primarily through social media and navigating relationships with distributors. Along with creating press kits and unconventional graphics, Rodriquez has seen promotional TikTok videos for the label’s artists go viral, and she’s helped them connect with Spotify and Deezer Latin America. Another helpful strategy, she says, is launching teaser campaigns on social media and interacting directly with fans through private chats.

It’s all in the name of increasing brand exposure and telling the business’s story in a way that connects with audiences emotionally.

“The best marketing strategies are the ones that build loyalty and connect to the audience’s heart,” she says. “They help their potential customers recognize them as a brand. When implementing Inbound Marketing strategies using content that tells stories, we generate more sales and it almost always happens that they are motivated by an emotional purchase.”

Related: RetroSupply Co. Creates Vintage Tools for Modern Designers

Taking the Lead

“I think inspiration should be implicit in all areas of life,” says Rodriguez. “Especially when it comes to leading.”

Inspiramark, she says, needs to take the lead for its clients by “being an example of what we offer,” she says. She wants her business to provide inspiration and leadership for other small and midsize businesses, especially her clients. She’s found this means that, in addition to investing time and resources heavily in those clients and their brands, she’s got to do the same for Inspiramark.

“On different occasions Inspiramark became our last priority as a brand, and while we kept very well the social networks or the positioning of our clients, our brand was left behind and this cannot happen,” she says. “Our brand needs to also be our priority.”

Another lesson she’s learned in running Inspiramark: Keep marketing. Even when her team is stretched meeting the needs of current clients, they’ve got to keep eyes on growth and the future — again, just like the brands they work with.

“Our work often consumes us,” she says. “But we can never stop looking for businesses. We learned that we cannot trust that the clients we have now will be around forever. The business seeding process can often take three months. So we can’t stop.”

She’s found three reliable ways to always keep potential clients in the pipeline. The first ( and most reliable) is referrals. “What’s worked the most for me,” says Rodriguez, “is customer referrals, or people I’ve met over the years reaching out to me and we start working together.”

Connections made through LinkedIn bring in business too: “I currently have almost 9 thousand contacts and about 70% come from marketing or communications managers,” she adds. Using these tools, combined with targeted Instagram marketing campaigns, Rodriguez has managed to keep herself very busy at Inspiramark.

Related: 17 Ways to Build a Massive Following on Instagram for Your Website

In fact, it’s grown from just Rodriguez and her husband to employing a talented team that includes social media managers, writers, and a public relations specialist. Finding the right people to help, she says, has been a big part of her success in building and growing Inspiramark. Some of these employees, Rodriguez says, grew their skills right along with the business.

“A perfect combination of experience and good attitude is sometimes difficult to find,” she says.
“So, we have chosen to train some people we see have great potential. It hasn’t been easy, but we can now see wonderful results.”

Making connections with people has been one of the most enjoyable parts of running her business, Rodriguez says. She’s had the chance to network with journalists, social media influencers, unions, government workers, and more. She uses these networks to help her clients make important connections — and she just honestly likes knowing more people.

“I really enjoy socializing and meeting people, over the years you can build important alliances,” she says.

Finding a Home Online

The most important tool for any business — especially one specializing in telling digital stories and building brands online — is their very own home on the internet. Inspiramark’s website is simple and to the point, making it as clear as possible what they can offer to potential clients.

“I like that our website is easy to navigate and the information is concrete,” says Rodriguez. “It still needs some improvement, but I think it is functional. My hope is that whomever visits the site fully understands the most crucial information about us — what we do and how we can help them.”

Inspiramark.com puts these crucial details right at the top, with large text announcing what Inspiramark can do for small and mid-size businesses.

“This is a very simple website; it doesn’t require much work,” says Rodriguez. The credit for the simple functionality and maintenance, she adds, goes to her host. She chose to work with DreamHost when she started her business because she appreciated the simplicity and clarity in DreamHost’s own branding.

“The provided hosting information seemed clear to me: DreamHost would be able to support what I was looking for in terms of accessibility and communication,” she says.

Her shared hosting plan and the WordPress website she built on it have been reliable since day one, leaving Rodriguez and her team free to focus on the work they love. “I’ve liked the fact that I haven’t had any issues with my hosting,” she says. “As of this moment, I only have a shared hosting plan, and that has been more than enough.”

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Following the Numbers

Rodriguez is a people person — necessary in her line of work — and she’s a numbers person. When it comes to growing her own business, and advising her clients in growing theirs, she’s all about the numbers.

“It has always been clear to us that numbers are the basis for any decisions we make,” she says.“Every quarter we make projections of expenses and sales in order to set goals to reach. We almost always reach them.”

Right now, she’s working hard on reaching her current numbers-based goal: doubling Inspiramark’s billing income by the third quarter this year. “This will allow us to grow our work team and hire more people that would help me with the operations,” she says. As founder and CEO of Inspiramark, her focus is always on the future, looking for new clients to serve and new ways to serve them.

“The most common feedback we get from clients is that we have helped them change their business perspective,” Rodriguez says. “We’ve shown them everything must be focused on profitability and sustainability.” Many have thanked her for helping them write, stick to, and update a business plan.

She’s got plenty to keep her busy at work — and doesn’t really slow down at home either. With her husband and cousin she’s developing a brand of pajamas that they plan to launch this summer.

Another place she keeps busy? The kitchen: “Something I love doing is cooking, it’s satisfying. Being able to cook for someone I care for and appreciate is a delight and I’m constantly looking for new recipes I can try out.”

For Rodriguez, there’s no shortage of inspiration.

The post Bogotá Marketer Inspires Local Entrepreneurs with Focus on Brand and Sustainability appeared first on DreamHost.

“I wrote mad and edited more calmly,” she says. The book, published in 2016, topped the Amazon bestseller lists in Career Guides, Women & Business, and technology nonfiction.

Based in Seattle, Wheeler is an information security researcher and social scientist. She is a New America international security fellow, a cybersecurity fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, and a Fulbright scholar in cybersecurity.

Given her CV, it’s not that shocking that she hid a cryptographic puzzle in her Women in Tech book that took people four years to solve. “It was a callout to the gaming and puzzle culture I grew up in from the time,” Wheeler says. “I started playing HeroQuest when I was little, then Shadowrun on tabletop, then Earthdawn and D&D, and just kept going. I love cryptographic puzzles.”

With that in mind, it makes sense that one of Wheeler’s early positions was working at Halo.

“That role working on Halo’s web applications was my first role in web app security, even if I didn’t realize it at the time,” she says. “I was the person fixing all the holes in the community management software’s interface, from moving single pixels in CSS to changing sprocs to sanitizing db [database] inputs. Being a cocktail waitress taught me an awful lot about cybersecurity, as well.”

Previously, Wheeler was the cybersecurity czar at Symantec, a globally renowned cybersecurity firm, and the Head of Offensive Security & Technical Data Privacy at Splunk.

Wheeler has always been drawn to the field. “Technology and cybersecurity are simply different words to describe some of the tools people use to connect with one another in cooperative or adversarial ways,” she says. “Both those things interest me.”

High Card

So how did Wheeler carve out a career path to become one of the top cybersecurity experts in the country?

“I am barely an acceptable student yet, much less any kind of expert,” she says. “I strove for aggressive mediocrity at a lot of different topics and became someone who could explain a lot of different fundamental tech and security concepts to people outside the industry. I’m not an expert in much other than knowing exactly how to script cronjobs to look very much like an actual human is monitoring the network while I was playing Knights of the Old Republic. Here are two hints on how to do that: 1) randomly run scripts in a Fibonacci sequence to do things like check for updates on packages, and 2) use natural numbers and normal distributions when randomizing to look like human behavior. I was using some of the principles of creating a Turing test-passing avatar of myself to skive off. It makes you able to see when other people are doing the same kinds of things.”

Aside from gaming, another skill that has paid off for Wheeler is being a Texas Hold ’em poker player. There’s a key thing poker and cybersecurity have in common, she says: They’re both risk management as a high art form. In fact, her poker skills enabled her to acquire startup funds.

“My dad taught me with jelly beans starting when I was four,” Wheeler says. “He’s a poker pro. When we sit down at tables together in Vegas, we always tell people that I’m his daughter, and once or twice, someone’s made a remark like ‘how do we know you’re not colluding?’ And I say ‘Are you kidding me? That man took all my jelly beans at the poker table when I was four and I’m never going to be done trying to get them back. Collude with him? I’ll *murder* him at this table if I can.’ And then everyone looks at my face and realizes that I mean every word of it. And that’s how I learned poker. Cash to pay for cloud hosting was just a side benefit to my Hero’s Journey of trying to always outdo my father!”

Continuing Ed

Much like a poker game, one thing Wheeler relishes about her career is that every day is different — there’s no such thing as a typical day. “I can tell you that half my day is spent talking to people and figuring out how to use a two-syllable word for something that other people are using a five-syllable word to describe,” she says. “The next half of my day is spent listening to people. The last half of my day is learning things.”

In fact, Wheeler says the most rewarding aspect of her career so far is that she is now paid to learn.

For starters, she conducted research at Oxford University to define cyberwar crimes and reduce the consequences for civilians. “I just completed my Fulbright award in cybersecurity through the US-UK Fulbright Commission,” she says. “I focused on listening to the incident responders from WannaCry, the 2017 global cyberattack that took down the UK’s National Health Service.”

Currently, Wheeler is an Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) advisory board member, an inaugural contributing cybersecurity expert for the Washington Post, and a Foreign Policy contributor on cyberwarfare. She is also a Cyber Project Fellow, leading an international cybersecurity capacity building project at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government.

Her work there entails “in general, convincing people who aren’t usually listened to in international security policy that their voices matter,” she says. “There’s a huge call for diverse perspectives on the global stage for people who understand security from all perspectives. Countries and intergovernmental organizations like the OECD know they need to be listening, but their networks are often thin when it comes to women and people of color. I often translate the expertise of women and people of color into a bio that senior conference and workshop organizers can understand and would want on panels and in speaking roles. This is my public service.”

Speaking of public service, Wheeler has an interesting philosophy when it comes to mentoring, requesting that potential mentees help others first before approaching her.

“I am sorting for a couple of personality traits, and there are two sides to my request,” Wheeler explains. “One: People who have little self-confidence and think they have nothing to offer someone don’t need me to help them professionally; they need to do other work on themselves first. Two: People confident in themselves who know who they are and what they can offer will already be mentoring people and already be looking for a good person to learn from themselves, and I want to be around that energy. Ideally, people I’m helping professionally turn into friends, colleagues, and peers. One day I want to be hired by someone I’ve sponsored — I think that means I won at sponsoring people.”

Sage Advice

It’s clear that Wheeler has paved the way for women to work in tech. For those who aren’t lucky enough to be her mentee, her advice for other women in the tech industry is straightforward:

“Don’t put fuzzy, cute mentorship energy out into the universe,” she says. “Choose three people underrepresented in tech who are one step behind you on the career ladder and deliberately sponsor them. Write them recommendations; find them jobs; when you can’t do talks, hand them off; make time; and publicly advocate for them.”

Ultimately, Wheeler’s words of wisdom are to fail more. “If you’re not failing at seven out of 10 things you try for, jobs you apply for, schools you try to get into, promotions you reach for, games you challenge yourself with, you’re not pushing yourself hard enough and using the law of averages to get big breaks,” she says. “Long term, if you’re trying to make the world a better place, no one cares about your failures but you anyway.”

DreamHost History

To take a deep dive into Wheeler’s work, visit her portfolio site, Tarah.org, which she hosts with DreamHost. Wheeler has two takes on why she uses DreamHost.

First, there’s the “nerdy version,” as she describes it: “My WordPress install on a different cloud provider’s Ubuntu LTS servers wasn’t as LT as I’d hoped. After I stopped coding PHP as my daily driver in maybe 2014 or 2015 and really started moving to Python, I didn’t have the time to keep up with WordPress vulns, and IIRC one of my sites got popped through a vulnerable plugin I’d forgotten to update or add to my cronjobs for reminders. DreamPress has automagical WP plugin updates!”

But there’s also a longer history to it. “In reality, it’s a bit of a sad story,” Wheeler says. “I had gotten one site popped, as I said, but the truth was that a dear friend passed away unexpectedly in 2017. He had a beloved blog and a big digital presence, and I was the person the family and friends handed his laptop to in order to bypass his security measures to ensure control of his accounts and his site. I did it the day before his funeral in November 2017, and I’ve never cried so much while hacking. It brings a new meaning to ‘digital forensics.’ I now own that domain name and I keep his blog up on DreamHost, and I’ve never had to worry that someone would take advantage of any momentary lapse on my part with web security to mess with his legacy.”

Another element that keeps Wheeler loyal to DreamHost is the customer service. “The chat support is courteous and rapid,” she says. “I just say ‘shibboleet’ and they instantly just give me the code or reboot my server or fix the perms. I love those folks. They’re diverse and helpful and funny.”

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Currently, the technologies and products she uses for her site include WordPress, so she uses DreamPress.

“I like simple UI with clean interfaces,” Wheeler says. Ultimately, she hopes to accomplish more with Tarah.org than she does now, eventually expanding beyond a portfolio site. “I’ve started really coming back to the idea of blogging, but I also love to collaborate a lot,” Wheeler says.

It’s not just her website that Wheeler has big future plans for. “I optimize to prevent several poor outcomes and I maintain three or four skill sets that can pay the bills, and then I just ride this planet on whatever streak I can catch,” she says. “The last year and a half has taught me that I need to make time for joy every day, and that 10 minutes a day spent learning something puts me massively out in front of a pack of people in 10 years who try to catch up then. I will never stop learning.”

Images courtesy of Tarah.org.

The post How Tarah Wheeler Uses Her Cybersecurity Skills to Help Others Hack Their Way to Success appeared first on DreamHost.

Not L.A. Taco.

The independent online news outlet for the Los Angeles metropolitan area is by the people and for the people.

“Our site focuses on food at the heart of the city and the people who make it,” says Memo Torres, Director of Partnerships at L.A. Taco. “Other publications may romanticize the French training and fine ingredients that go into a dish that most people in L.A. will never try. We focus on the people making that dish, the history of that meal, the conditions that led to the many different types of food vendors, and why it’s unique.”

Of course, L.A. Taco takes a deep dive into local food coverage, but it goes far beyond that.

“Our site also prides itself on finding new voices in the community to speak about their neighborhoods,” Torres says. “We strive to cultivate new writers to help tell the real story of Los Angeles through not just food but art, culture, and local news. L.A. Taco is not afraid to hold people of power accountable, and we strive to not just talk about communities but to give them a voice. L.A. Taco is also not scared to have fun through our writing, videos, and events. Our motto is to ‘Celebrate the Taco Lifestyle,’ and we celebrate with our readers and subscribers.”

Raw Reporting with a Side of Barbacoa Tacos

Independently owned and operated, L.A. Taco is all about authentic, raw reporting and journalism. “We joke around in our newsroom that we’re the news source for the major news networks because, when we write a story, you’ll see the large networks cover it as their own that same night or next day,” Torres says. “But everyone knows L.A. Taco has the finger on the pulse of Los Angeles.”

Where else would you see stories like: “How a DACA Recipient From East L.A. Hustled His Way to Growing and Owning his Own Fruit Stand at the Original Farmers Market,” “More Than Your Favorite Peruvian Dish: Exploring the Dark History of Lomo Saltado’s Cross-Cultural Roots,” or “Photo Essay: The People and Murals of L.A.’s Little Bangladesh.”

Reporting beyond food, L.A. Taco’s coverage touches on immigration, social issues, and other subjects. But the publication sees all those rubrics falling within grub.

“The street vendor selling barbacoa tacos from their hometown in Mexico could be doing it because their immigration status makes finding employment difficult,” Torres explains. “They may not have access to proper healthcare, and police and county officials will criminalize them for just trying to feed their families and the public — that’s a social issue. A restaurant owner of 30 years in Highland Park could lose their livelihood overnight because [of a] council member’s vote. At L.A. Taco, we don’t see these issues as being separate or beyond. Everything is interconnected.”

Related: We Like L.A. — Your Guide on What to Do, Eat, and See in Los Angeles

That’s why L.A. Taco won an Emerging Voice Award from the James Beard Foundation last year for the way their journalism connects food with social justice, representation, and immigration. For Torres and the L.A. Taco editorial team, that was true validation, he says.

“Our tiny newsroom is filled with people who love this city,” Torres explains. “And while our readership always reminded us how proud they are of the vital work, it was nice to be seen by the James Beard Foundation. They understood the uniqueness of what we are doing as a publication. Other publications are finally showing us respect, and it not only validates us but every community and person we cover.”

L.A. Taco has an impressive roster of writers, supporting many journalists and contributors who’ve written for other publications such as VICE, The Los Angeles Times, LAist, LA Weekly, KCRW, and more. Some of the contributors were involved in the Netflix docuseries “Taco Chronicles,” which explores the taco’s historical and cultural significance, taking viewers on culinary adventures all over.

A Full Menu of Community Coverage

So, what makes a story L.A. Taco-worthy for coverage? True to its name, obviously any story with an exciting taco angle.

“For example, one recent viral story was Laker Anthony Davis coming home from winning the NBA championship; the first thing he did was celebrate with his favorite tacos,” Torres says. “We’re also not afraid to tackle complex and sensitive problems in our communities about racial tensions. Our articles have to speak to and for the larger population of Los Angeles and the issues that corporate publications may glance over. When it comes to our food coverage, we also look for a unique story, either rooted in tradition, struggle, or endurance. We also look for levels of creativity and innovation in food.”

Despite often covering heavy subject matter, L.A. Taco is still known as a fun publication. A lot of that has to do with the events that they host.

“Events are at the core of celebrating the taco lifestyle,” Torres says. “It allows a space for our readers to come together as a community and feel like they are a part of not just this huge metropolis, but of L.A. Taco and everything we stand for. It gives us a space to mingle with our followers and, of course, eat tacos with them. Our staff is spread out around the entire city, literally every corner, so events help bring us together as well as the larger community.”

One of their most beloved events is Taco Madness, their biggest one that has been going strong for 12 years. “Think of it as March Madness but with tacos,” Torres says.

They create a bracket, fill it with the city’s 32 most popular taqueros (someone who makes/sells tacos), and week by week, thousands of Angelenos cast votes for their favorite one. Once the competition is down to the final two, L.A. Taco holds a live event filled with music, art, drinks, merchandise, and of course, the city’s best taqueros dishing out everyone’s favorite food. That night, the winner is crowned on stage, and a group of guest celebrity judges awards the best in show.

“We center all our events around bringing the community together in celebration of L.A. with each other,” Torres says. “Through our member tastings, loyal readers meet each other and feel part of our growing community. Building a true community and celebrating around tacos is essentially what our events are all about.”

A Dash of DreamHost

Just as the L.A. community is loyal to L.A. Taco, L.A. Taco is loyal to DreamHost. They’ve been using DreamHost ever since the site launched in 2005.

“One factor was that DreamHost was a local company, and one of our co-founders used to work with someone at the company,” Torres says. “Also, DreamHost was early to the WordPress platform, and that made getting set up back then, in the stone age of the internet, a lot easier than it might have been with a different host.”

The L.A. Taco team’s favorite thing about DreamHost is the support.

“We’ve been through many ups and downs with our own technology, especially as the site has grown, and DreamHost has always had people on the other end who actually care about our business and our company,” Torres says. “We don’t have any full-time technical staff, so having a reliable host that is attentive to our needs is essential.”

Like any digital publication, L.A. Taco relies on technology and products to keep its site running. L.A. Taco was built on WordPress from day one, and it’s been on there ever since. They use several different plugins, their favorite being the Google Maps plugin, which allows them to make custom maps for their readers. They also use Cloudflare, which has been great for speeding up the site through caching.

Related: The Beginner’s Guide to WordPress Plugins

The biggest new launches L.A. Taco will introduce this year are its Android and iOS apps.

“The apps will allow people to view our latest stories and city guides, but the core will be a huge map of all of our favorite taco spots in L.A.,” Torres says. “The apps also allow our members to get discounts and free items at our network of partner restaurants, which should be a game-changer for us! We’re extremely excited to release the apps, which should happen just as L.A. starts to emerge from the pandemic.”

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The Real Flavor of Los Angeles

Technology lets L.A. Taco keep telling important stories and giving a voice to so many who may not have one otherwise. For example, Torres says his favorite story he’s ever worked on was about a person born in East L.A. who was sent back to his grandparents in Mexico after hanging out with the wrong crowd.

“He learned he was a descendant of Yucatan’s first Mayans, learned to make the food of his culture, and brought that back to Los Angeles,” Torres says. “He now makes authentic cochinita pibil out of his home in Montebello with a combination of techniques he learned from his Mayan-speaking grandmother and Miriam Peraza, who was featured in Netflix’s ’Taco Chronicles.’ It allowed me to delve into the history of his dishes, including one which has Dutch influences. It’s probably the closest I’ll ever get to a real cochinita pibil taco without getting on a plane.”

It’s telling those kinds of stories that keep the L.A. Taco staff ticking.

“The most rewarding aspect of working for L.A. Taco, for me, is the positive effect our publication is having on the city,” Torres says. “The work has brought me closer to the city I love, to the people that make it what it is, and all over a plate of tacos. Getting those messages of gratitude, tears of appreciation, and the comfort we’ve provided to those struggling is very impactful and has given me a sense of purpose and fulfillment in my life I’ve never felt before.”

The post L.A. Taco Shines a Light on the People Behind the City’s Best Eats appeared first on DreamHost.

David Newell experienced this firsthand. Based in Dallas, Texas, his parents became eligible to receive the vaccine as part of phase 1B at the end of December. “The challenge began of finding a way to get my parents vaccinated,” he says.

Thanks to the Texas Department of State Health Services, Newell knew which local pharmacies would receive doses of the vaccine. However, the local pharmacy chain didn’t have one website where they could search for appointments at multiple locations at once. Instead, he had to check each location individually.

“That would mean we had to do 30 searches every time we were looking for appointments,” Newell explains. “I started building a toolset to search all of these locations automatically so that as soon as it became available then we could make an appointment. As I was figuring out how to make that work, I realized a lot of people are going to need this for several weeks or several months.”

That’s why Newell created FindAShot.org to help people easily find an appointment to get vaccinated.

Leave No Appointment Behind

Launched on January 6, Find A Shot regularly checks pharmacy COVID-19 vaccine appointment websites and shows the appointment availability status. The results can be found by searching by state, zip code, or using a user’s location.

Newell, who is currently a part-time student enrolled in the Wharton School’s MBA for Executives program and employed full-time at McAfee, is certainly earning his community service hours, as the project is completely led by volunteers. Find A Shot is funded through donations via their Buy Me A Coffee page, which has raised more than $3k to keep the site running, with the typical donation at just $6.

The goal for Find A Shot is simple. “The big thing was to reduce frustration throughout the process, ensuring that people who want to find an appointment can find an appointment,” Newell says.

He has been spreading the word of Find A Shot with #LeaveNoAppointmentBehind on social media. Of any vaccine finder, Find A Shot has the widest appointment availability coverage of pharmacies, currently covering 19,000 locations owned by CVS, H-E-B, Hy-Vee, Rite Aid, and Walgreens. They have listed appointments available in 47 states, along with Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico (New Hampshire, North Dakota, and Oklahoma are the exceptions.) In most cases, they get updates on availability every few minutes to an hour.

One of the biggest challenges for Find A Shot is that most pharmacies have designed their appointment finders based on their flu shot scheduler and adapted them to COVID-19 vaccines.

“They are designed in such a way to be very local store centric, which is great for flu vaccines and tetanus shots or measles shots that have high supply relative to demand, but the challenge with the COVID-19 vaccine is supply is very constrained,” Newell says. “The closest store won’t have availability, which makes it challenging to search others. With Albertsons, for example, if I search my zip code, it will never return more than the six closest stores, even if there isn’t availability. Either you need to figure out the closest zip codes in your area or you give up, essentially.”

Another benefit of Find A Shot is that it will cut down on vaccines that go to waste since it helps try to fill all appointment slots.

“A bigger concern from a logistics standpoint is taking appointments so you can line up people to thaw and open one vial of the vaccine — there are typically 10 doses for Moderna,” Newell says. “Hopefully there will be zero no-shows so there won’t be any wasted doses. When 10 appointments open up, as soon as you book an appointment, the dose is allocated to you. If an appointment goes unfilled, then that could mean the dose goes unused unless they can find a standby list. People want to get it, so we need to find a matchmaker to help them get to where there are appointments. In extreme cases, an unused dose could lead to costing lives.”

Related: How to Set up Curbside Pickup and Delivery Through Your Website

Using DreamHost to Power the Backend

Newell has been a loyal DreamHost customer since 2007, so using DreamHost for Find A Shot was a no-brainer. “I have a fantastic hosting plan and experience with DreamHost and I already have all of my personal projects on DreamHost, so naturally it’s the first place I would go for adding another personal project.”

He’s a fan of DreamHost for the simplicity of setting up a new website, particularly registering it, as his plan includes five free domain names, one of which is Find A Shot. Another point of appreciation is the flexibility, specifically with the types of websites or web applications you can host.

“I’m using Python Flask and having that flexibility of not just a static website is really nice,” he says. “Additionally, in a few clicks I’ve got a database set up and can tie the Flask app directly into it, which accelerates the time it took to deploy — I was able to get it out really quickly.” It only took a few business days for Newell to completely build Find A Shot.

Another benefit of DreamHost that Newell appreciates is that there isn’t a separate bill for bandwidth. “Not having to worry about other charges and the fact that it’s all-inclusive with the plan rate means that the costs are predictable, so I’m not going to have any surprises on the bill,” he says. The scalability is another plus, as Find A Shot recently hit 65,000 unique visitors without breaking the memory limit. Finally, DreamHost’s support team is another element that makes Newell a loyal customer. “The support team has been phenomenal with getting back to me with details,” he says. “They are on top of it, incredibly professional and easy to work with.”

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Newell has volunteered countless hours to keep Find A Shot running, and the feedback from users makes it all worth it.

“All the heartwarming messages of support that we’ve gotten is so rewarding,” he says. “People are appreciative — the frustration [of trying to book an appointment] can border on desperation.”

Newell has received loads of positive feedback. For example, one user said, “Thanks for this site!! I scheduled a lot of my parents’ elderly friends that had no access or knowledge how. Thank you!”

For some people, Find A Shot has been lifesaving. One user said, “I live in NY and tried for weeks to get my 69 year old mom w/chronic illness a shot in MA to no avail. I used your site once and had an appointment for her within 20 minutes. Thank you!!!!!!!!!”

Newell has always had one thing in mind for Find A Shot. “Ultimately the goal is to make the site obsolete because everyone has been able to get vaccinated,” he says. Thanks to Find A Shot, that target gets a little closer every day.

The post DreamHost User Makes It Easier to Get COVID-19 Vaccines with FindaShot.org appeared first on DreamHost.

“I’d love to give a shout-out to my fellow old-school bloggers — those of us who have been at it since the early days and who got into blogging long before it was something that was monetized or sponsored,” Dorfman says. “As much as I strongly believe that people should be paid for their work, there’s something special about writing just for the sake of sharing ideas and observations with the world. My favorite blogs are the ones that aren’t optimized for SEO, and where the writing is truly coming from the blogger’s heart. To those of you who are still blogging (and loving it) after a decade or two, cheers.”

As one of the OG bloggers, Dorfman and her blog from 2007, Door Sixteen, are still going strong.

“When I started Door Sixteen, I intended for it to solely cover house renovation projects, but I’ve never been able to hold that kind of focus for long,” she says. “I really just write about whatever I think is worth sharing in a format that’s longer than makes sense on social media.”

The name of her blog came from her initial inspiration to spotlight her home projects. Sixteen was the street number of the Victorian row house in Newburgh, New York that she was renovating when she launched the blog.

Taking Door Sixteen on the Road

Though Dorfman has stuck with the Door Sixteen brand, her residences have changed over the years, with her blog following her to eight different homes, ranging from the Hudson Valley to Manhattan, Brooklyn, and her relocation across the country to New Mexico.

“I moved into a mid-century pueblo revival-style house in Santa Fe, New Mexico, about three years ago, and for the time being, my focus is really on documenting the renovation of the house,” Dorfman says. “This type of architecture (and the relative “newness” of a house built in 1950 versus 1890) has presented a real learning curve for me after spending my entire life in New York, and that’s translated into a totally different set of projects for my readers to (hopefully!) enjoy. Beyond that? Who knows! I have fantasies of renovating a trailer or RV to use as a vacation home, but that’s a far-off dream. The good/bad news is that houses never run out of projects! There’s always something to do and always something to share.”

Dorfman has documented her home makeovers every step of the way, sharing how to DIY a floating banquette, building cabinet cubbies for extra storage, and painting and stenciling the kitchen floor, to name a few.

What makes Door Sixteen a true standout? Unlike aspirational home blogs that follow the lives of the rich and famous, Dorfman is a real person with a real home, making everything delightfully accessible. You don’t have to be a contractor or have an architecture degree to pull off her projects.

“Beyond maintaining some kind of loose timeline of my life and homes for my own future reference, the only thing I’ve ever wanted to accomplish with Door Sixteen is making regular people with regular skill sets and regular budgets feel empowered to make their homes feel like their own,” Dorfman says.

“I don’t think it matters whether you own or rent, or whether you can only afford a few basic supplies,” she says. “Television reality shows — and now sponsored social media posts — have gone a long way toward making people feel like ‘luxurious’ living is the dream, and that comfort in your surroundings and a sense of place and permanence are goals we may never be able to achieve. Even if it’s something as simple as re-caulking the bathtub in a rental apartment, I want people to know that they deserve to feel happy about where they live and to know that they are capable of doing all kinds of renovations and repairs all by themselves.”

But Door Sixteen isn’t just renovation projects for those eager to use their tool kit.

Dorfman has expanded her blog to encompass that very wide lifestyle rubric, with her musings on food and drink, health, movies, books, music, pets (her dog Fritz, a long-haired chihuahua, is a frequent guest star), and travel.

Are you looking for jewelry organization ideas? Wondering how to remove a gel manicure at home? Or where to find a fun yet functional pill organizer? Dorfman has tips and tricks for those, too.

That’s just one of the ways Door Sixteen has grown and evolved over the years.

“The biggest change has really come about because of the advent of social media,” Dorfman says. “My blog posts have gotten longer on average as a result, because brief things that would have previously made it to my blog now take the form of an Instagram post (or even just a Tweet). I don’t know whether this is good or bad, but it’s definitely an evolution. I struggle with this shift sometimes, because there’s a transient quality to social media that, over time, stands to minimize the value of things that are shared. That said, I think I personally have become a better writer and photographer as a result of working with a longer post format. It certainly takes a lot longer to create a blog post in 2021 than it did in 2007!”

Her Day Job? Book Cover Design

Despite the bounty of content and pretty presentation of Door Sixteen, blogging isn’t Dorfman’s full-time job. That would be a book cover designer, which has been her career since 1998.

“For a couple of decades I worked in-house at Simon & Schuster, and now I work on a freelance basis for a number of publishing companies,” she says. “I also have a bunch of side gigs going at any given time, which is where my blog enters the picture.”

You shouldn’t expect to see her work as a book cover designer on Door Sixteen, though. “I don’t share my book cover design work on my blog very often because it’s not something that I feel compelled to write about,” Dorfman says. “My work mostly stays within the confines of my portfolio site and occasionally social media.”

Though she has clearly mastered multitasking, Dorfman approaches her work much like her blog: honest, accessible, and realistic.

“I focus very little on big goals and eventual achievements and mostly on what tasks need to be addressed in the moment,” she says. “I really just want to do the best job I can with what’s on my plate on any given day. That’s probably not the key to success, but it’s who I am. Beyond that, I think keeping your desk tidy, wearing comfortable clothes that make you feel good, and backing up your computer every day are pretty good suggestions.”

Related: Need an Online Portfolio? Get Yours Up and Running in Just 10 Minutes

Partnering with DreamHost Online

Another arsenal in her toolbox is DreamHost, which is Dorfman’s go-to for all her websites, and they go way back.

“I became a happy DreamHost customer way back in 1999 when I started my first blog, Absolutely Vile,” she says. “A friend of mine was using DreamHost to host her personal website, and I liked the low-key, friendly attitude the company projected. It’s been 22 years now, and I’ve never looked back!”

In addition to Door Sixteen, Dorfman also has a book cover design portfolio site at annadorfman.com hosted by DreamHost. “My prints are currently only available through my drop-ship shops at Society6 and Fy, but at some point in the future I may also sell them directly from a self-hosted website — that depends whether I can find the time to manage another endeavor,” she says.

Dorfman’s favorite thing about DreamHost is the scalability. “No matter how many websites I host for myself or family members, and no matter how much (or how little) traffic those sites generate, I’m able to adjust my plan in a way that matches my changing needs,” she says.

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Door Sixteen runs on WordPress and Dorfman uses Adobe Creative Suite for any graphics or photos. For Door Sixteen’s design, she customized a version of the Florence theme from Solo Pine. And like everyone else with a blog, she uses social media to direct her followers there.

“It’s very rare that I consciously promote my blog, but I do always post links to my blog posts on social media,” Dorfman says. “I think that’s how most people keep up with their favorite bloggers these days!”

While Door Sixteen has grown and evolved over time, its mission hasn’t changed much in its 15-year existence, which is impressive in itself.

“There is nothing more rewarding than hearing from a reader that they’ve taken on some kind of task because they felt empowered by something I wrote,” Dorfman says. “It could be anything from painting a room to embarking on the restoration of an entire historic property — I love knowing that people are trusting themselves to do things that might have seemed impossible otherwise.”

The post Door Sixteen: An Old-School Blog With a DIY Heart appeared first on DreamHost.

Even when Dennis started a blog and Instagram to share the modern quilts she crafted, carefully cultivating a following, she couldn’t quite admit to herself that she was building the foundation of a small business.

“I have a habit of turning hobbies into businesses,” Dennis says.

Her sewing and quilt hobby was just a few years old. She started with making a simple T-shirt quilt and soon became captivated by modern quilting, drawn in by bold colors coupled with designs rooted in tradition.

“I wanted to enjoy it as a hobby,” Dennis says. “I was afraid I would lose my love of sewing if I made it a job.”

Still, the tempting pull of building a business was tenacious — she’s always loved the challenge of creating something from scratch.

In March of 2015, Dennis gave in, and her love for all things business and quilting is still going strong. Quilty Love has gained serious traction over the years on Instagram and Pinterest. The heart of her business is the Quilty Love blog, where Dennis offers free tutorials and business tips and sells quilting patterns she designed.

“Quilty Love is a modern quilting brand that offers quilt patterns, inspiration, and business advice for crafty creatives,” Dennis says. She’s published almost 40 quilt patterns — on sale both in her online shop and in quilt shops throughout the U.S. — which have been sewn by quilters worldwide.

Her blog and online shop are powered by DreamHost, and she’s become a fan of the solid service she’s enjoyed while building different projects with her host over the past decade.

Related: DreamHost’s Ultimate Small Business Resource Guide

Business Patterns

Before Dennis became a quilter, she was a photographer.

“I was at a point in my life where I needed a new challenge, so I bought a camera and learned how to use it,” Dennis says. “Learning photography was such a fulfilling thing for me. When I’m passionate about something, I’ll spend hours and hours Googling everything you can imagine about it. I learned photography the same way I learned quilting — from Google!”

Soon enough, her love of photography grew into a business venture: a boutique photography studio specializing in weddings and high school senior portraits. Dennis started by taking prom pictures for her husband’s students; soon more people requested portraits, and her business bloomed.

Her photography business is still up and running, and her experience running it provided a valuable training ground that she’s built upon with Quilty Love.

“Those years taught me so much about running a business and provided skills that became invaluable when I started Quilty Love,” Dennis says. “Quilty Love happened so easily and was so enjoyable to build because of the experience I gained from my photography business.”

Before making her first quilt in 2012 — a request from a family member — Dennis owned a sewing machine but had never used it for traditional sewing. “I had only sewn paper with it,” she says, as part of creating decorations for scrapbooks, another of her crafty hobbies turned business venture.

“I didn’t love the process of making that first quilt, but I went on to make quilts for each of my kids over the next few years,” Dennis says. “I started coming up with my own designs and sewing them up.”

As she grew to love the creativity of quilting, the first thoughts of creating a quilting-related business started edging in. And she chose to ignore those thoughts at first, wanting to keep her new hobby a passion project.

But as the blog and Instagram she made for sharing her creations gained an audience, she started getting requests from followers to access the patterns she designed for her quilts.

“After a few requests, I decided to jump in and give it a go,” Dennis says, and she launched her first modern quilt pattern for sale. “[My quilts] started to create interest and an audience. That is when everything changed, and I became completely obsessed.”

Fortunately, her fears about monetizing her hobby proved unfounded as Dennis discovered a love for sharing patterns, tutorials, and business tips.

“Quilty Love became the perfect combination of photography, creativity, and business building,” she says.  “All the things I am super passionate about.”

Not Your Grandma’s Quilts

When most people think of quilting, says Dennis, they might envision dark colors and traditional patterns. Modern quilting, she says, draws on these patterns and brings in colorful fabrics.

“I had no idea bright, modern quilts even existed,” she says. “I was immediately drawn to the modern colors and couldn’t wait to quilt.”

Dennis took up quilting while living in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, infamous for its long, snowy winters.

“I finally stopped dreading the winters because they meant more time for quilting,” she says. “Quilting definitely helped get me through those long, brutal winters. There is so much to love about quilting. The process of cutting up fabric and putting them together to create something beautiful and useful is so satisfying.”

In creating her own patterns, Dennis pays attention to shapes and patterns she sees in her daily life. Much of her inspiration comes from traditional quilting.

“I love putting a modern spin on traditional quilt designs and quilt blocks,” she says. “I love finding new ways to use traditional shapes like stars or plus signs.”

Quilty Love patterns also feature fun, modern shapes like trees, hearts, and triangles. One of her favorite patterns to design is a new take on the traditional log cabin block, recently released on her blog as Lucky Log Cabins. The modern spin on a traditional design resonates with her audience, she says — it has a fresh look, it’s easy to make, and helps quilters sew their way through their built-up stash of favorite fabrics.

“The process of making that quilt was so enjoyable and so organic,” she says. “I allowed myself to slow down and just create. The end result turned out to be a super versatile, super fun, and easy quilt to make. It has been a popular pattern with my audience and one that I myself want to keep making again and again. I love this quilt pattern so much, which made it so easy to share and promote.”

Many Quilty Love patterns are beginner-friendly, and the blog is filled with free tutorials and tips and tricks. Dennis’s biggest advice for new or aspiring quilters? Go small and simple.

“Something like a simple patchwork baby-sized quilt is a great place to start,” she says.

Related: 10 Easy Social Media Tips for Your Hard-Working Small Business

Building Blocks

Along with quilting patterns and best practices, Quilty Love serves up tips on her blog and Instagram for other creatives looking to build and promote their businesses, like using SEO to boost blog posts and building a following on Pinterest.

With more than a decade of business-building under her belt — plus a passion for the process and challenge of building one — Dennis has a lot to say to help other creative small business owners. She’s been self-employed her entire adult life, working as an independent contractor along with starting her crafty hustles.

A small business, she says, is one big experiment — you try new things to see if they work and make adjustments as you go along.

“One of the things I’ve learned over the years is to not force things,” Dennis says. “Allow time for creativity to flow and trust that you are better off in the long run when you allow things to marinate properly. I’ve also learned over the years that small business building is promotion. When I look back at launches that were successful vs. ones that were just OK, it always comes back to how well I promoted that launch.”

Dennis has found it helpful to think of “promotion” as “sharing.” When she’s launching a new product or post, she focuses on sharing something new that she’s excited about with her followers.

“It’s helped me do a better job promoting myself, my business, and my launches when I think of it as sharing,” Dennis says. “Simply sharing what I’m working on, what is coming up, and what is available.”

Dennis relies on Instagram to promote Quilty Love, using it to build her brand and connect with her audience. Her blog — proudly hosted by DreamHost — shares quilts she’s made with her pattern designs and has proved a valuable tool for promoting products. Posting on her blog lets her circulate her work on Pinterest, which has also proved helpful in building an audience for her work.

“My blog is where I draw new people into my audience, and Instagram and my newsletter are where I continue to build a relationship with them,” she says.

Building that relationship means Dennis can easily connect with the people who sew her quilts.

Related: Facebook, Twitter, or Pinterest? Choose the Best Social Media Platform for Your Business

“It’s always the best when you hear from quilters who have made your quilt patterns,” she says. “My favorite is when they share photos of the quilts they have made. I’ve gotten such great responses to my quilt patterns. Quilters love how easy to follow they are and they appreciate the modern designs.”

One of Dennis’s proudest accomplishments in building her business was, along with getting paper versions of her patterns sold in stores, is writing and publishing a book: Modern Quilts Block By Block.

“It’s very surreal and pretty cool to see a book you created sold in bookstores.”

Business Partner

Through her decade-long journey of turning creative hobbies into small businesses, Dennis has trusted DreamHost to provide the online home for her ventures. She built and hosted her photography website with DreamHost — initially choosing it because it was a recommended WordPress host — and naturally continued the relationship into her Quilty Love blog and shop.

“I love how easy my website is to maintain and update, she says. “I try to keep it super simple and visually pleasing.  My hope is that visitors are inspired by the quilts they see and click on through to my shop to find a quilt pattern for themselves.”

Because one project has never been enough for Dennis, she appreciates that she can easily run multiple websites from the same DreamHost account without paying more or upgrading to start another site. Along with Quilty Love and her photography site, Dennis has a website in the works to host her products and tools for creatives building their businesses.

“DreamHost has provided a solid service over the years,” she says. “They have always been responsive to my customer support needs. I don’t worry about my website not being available or being down. My website plays such an important role in my business so knowing that it’s always online is important.”

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Seamless Fit

Along with quilting, Dennis has a lot going on. She and her husband are raising four kids — three teens, plus a 2-year-old who keeps them busy. They love to take road trips together, with the goal of visiting every MLB baseball stadium and all 50 states. Along with her business-building habit, Dennis also admits a pattern of moving and renovating.

“We seem to always have home improvement projects we are working on,” she says. “Currently we are updating a ranch house from 1999.”

Running a small business fits seamlessly into her life, jiving easily with her proclivity for good challenges and creative projects, plus the flexibility required in raising a family.

“I am so grateful for this business I have built that allows me to be creative every day,” Dennis says. “It allows me to have complete control and flexibility in my schedule. I’m proud of the fact that I built this business and still enjoy it every single day.”

Like most small business owners balancing life with work, she’s learned her limits. Dennis spends a few hours on Quilty Love every day, limiting those hours as she needs to, and takes off December and one summer month every year.

Right now she’s content with the progress Quilty Love has made, especially considering she balances it with raising a toddler. She’s focused on beefing up the business resources side of Quilty Love, along with creating new patterns and growing an audience to share them with.

“I’ve realized that I am a lifelong learner,” Dennis says. “I didn’t go to college, but I consider Google my education. I’m a very motivated self-learner, and you will never run out of new things to learn when it comes to running a business. I get so much fulfillment out of learning new things, implementing them, and seeing results.”

The post From Blog to Biz: Quilty Love Crafts Bright, Modern Quilt Designs appeared first on DreamHost.

The list of the industry’s environmental offenses goes on: Discarded clothing contributes to microplastics polluting the ocean. Creating fast fashion produces more carbon emissions than international flights and maritime shipping combined. It takes 2,000 gallons of water to produce one pair of jeans.

Enough is enough, says Claudia Martinez Puerto.

“Fashion is a part of the life of every single person, and it is one the most contaminating industries in the world,” Martinez says. “One of the problems of the industry is the amount of waste it generates.”

In 2015, Martinez founded Les Common People, a Colombian clothing brand styled as “an indie clothing brand for indie women.” As Martinez became more familiar with the fashion industry — including its notorious waste and, at times, dubious supply chains, riddled with low pay and poor working conditions — she decided to make some changes.

“In 2018 we decided to change the concept of the brand and focus on environmental sustainability and the development of products with textile waste,” Martinez says. Les Common People uses discarded textiles, including waste from clothing manufacturers, to upcycle and stitch together one-of-a-kind garments from jackets to pants. And all the stitching is done by in-country locals, giving Les Common People control over the working conditions.

Martinez has relied on DreamHost to support her entrance into the world of e-commerce — and her goal of a more sustainable future. “By upcycling, we can begin to be part of the change that humanity is looking for: people who care about the environmental and social impact it generates,” she says.

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Style and Sustainability

Martinez was born and raised in Bogota, Colombia, and today runs Les Common People in her hometown.

“This country is full of inspiration,” she says. “Its landscapes are like no other; its people are quite unique and even though Bogota is kind of a messy city, it has some really beautiful places and you can find all kinds of things.”

Martinez began her career as a freelance advertiser, designing and sewing her own clothes as a hobby, before building Les Common People. She works with other collaborators to help with photography, design, and accounting.

“I wanted people to feel in clothes the way I did with the clothes that I made for myself. That was the moment I decided to start my own fashion brand,” she says.

Today, she designs and even sews some of the clothing for Les Common People, drawing inspiration from art, music, and film. The name of her company, which combines English with her native Spanish, reflects Martinez’s own fashion philosophy and why she wanted to get into the industry in the first place.

“The name of the brand was born from the idea that all human beings are the same and that we communicate who we are through the clothes we wear. We are ‘common people’ full of originality and uniqueness, people who use the garments that we wear as a way to let the world know who we are.”

But expressing your individuality through beautiful and stylish clothing, she says, doesn’t have to destroy the environment.

“In a market full of fast fashion brands, finding unique, authentic and designer garments is an almost impossible task, which is why at Les Common People we decided to create unique garments from upcycling of completely new textile waste,” she says. “We add value to fabrics that were wasted for others; we transform 100% new textile waste into garments.”

This strategy — creating pieces that are not only different from what you find in the store, but that are crafted and designed individually, using available fabric waste to create a look literally found nowhere else — creates a perfect marriage of style and sustainability. And this union results in the opposite of fast fashion: handcrafted, quality garments meant to look great for years.

“By mixing design with sustainability values, we reached the midpoint we were looking for,” Martinez says. “We are offering a product with the style and design of the brand, a product that will help mitigate the environmental problem generated by this industry, and that was developed respecting all the links of our productive chain.”

Supply and Demand

Another of Martinez’s priorities is cleaning up the supply chain. The bargain-priced, trendy clothes lining shelves at many western shops are often made by workers in China, India, and other countries, primarily women and girls, many working long hours in dangerous conditions for as little as 15 cents an hour.

To make sure her clothing is both skillfully and ethically made, Martinez collaborates locally to create her inventory.

“We outsource the manufacturing of the garments to small producers in Bogota, where our brand is located,” she explained. “As a brand with sustainable values, we managed to create designer garments from upcycling. And by producing locally we can manage the work conditions of the people who make all our garments possible.”

The source of her clothing itself is new textile waste — that is, unused fabrics that would have otherwise been discarded into landfills. The raw material dictates what kind of projects Martinez and her collaborators can work on and forces creativity into the design. The result is a one-of-a-kind patchwork look in her clothing that mixes complementary patterns and textures.

“By taking the waste of others, we have the possibility of developing our creativity through the different shapes, textures, reliefs, and designs that the textile waste gives us, and with this create a unique garment,” Martinez says.

The waste fabric also impacts the lineup in the inventory. Right now in the Les Common People shop, you’ll find jackets and pullovers for sale — because they built the collection based on the materials that were available at the moment.

Martinez and her team are currently busy producing their next collection, which will feature shirts and pants designed to pair well with the outerwear. In addition to sustainable production and supply chain, Martinez’s products stand out for their design.

“Our products are recognized as a garment with style and design, which is appreciated for its originality as well as being an easy garment to integrate into our clients’ closet.”

Challenges and Triumphs

Owning and running a small business suits her, says Martinez — even with the long hours it demands of her.

“I like the independence that having your own business gives you — having control of your own time and working the way you like to,” she says. “Even though you may think that working by yourself is going to be a more relaxed job, it isn’t. Sometimes you have to work 10 times more, but it is really gratifying when you see the results of working on your own project.”

The workload was a challenge, especially in the early days of Les Common People, but bringing in outside help allowed Martinez to hone her strengths. She learned to let go of the details and keep her eyes on the big picture.

“When you have a small business usually you do almost everything by yourself and that is not an easy task,” she says. “For me, it was hard to let people in and get help to do things. I thought that I could do everything by myself, and I was so wrong. Even though I wanted to do everything and have control of every little process so everything gets done the best way possible, it was impossible and I was draining myself. Now that I have some collaborators, I can focus on the design and management — the things that I am good at.”

Martinez has been able to build Les Common People into a full-time job for the past few years. “I love what I have achieved,” she says. Now she’s looking forward to continuing to grow the business and building a bigger team.

Of course, Martinez’s background in advertising has been an asset, “with all the communication of the brand and how to work with inspiration boards and get ideas to reality,” she says.

And customers have really connected with the brand, Martinez says. They feel they can really get behind the social mission of her clothing label — and the style and design don’t hurt either. They especially recognize each piece for the time that it takes to create by hand — the oversized bomber jacket in the Les Common People collection, for example, requires more than 10 hours of sewing to construct.

“People love how original and innovative our products are and how easy they can mix it with all kinds of garments,” she says. “The social and environmental core of our brand are also really appreciated by our customers, who are looking for ways to make a good impact on the world, and they find that in our brand.”

Related: Building Your Own Business Website? Don’t Make These 10 Mistakes

Spreading the Word

Les Common People is an online e-commerce store without a brick-and-mortar location. Fairs and other live events put the clothing in front of buyers, so they can see and experience them in person. Otherwise, the brand relies on connecting with potential customers online and through social media.

“We love to hear what our customers have to say about our brand and products,” she says. “Through social media, we connect to our clients and possible clients, and on our website, they can find all the products so it is really easy to get from Instagram to our site, for example.”

Related: 10 Easy Social Media Tips for Your Hard-Working Small Business

Les Common People’s website is simple and to the point, and the homepage goes directly to their shop — a choice Martinez made purposefully.

“What we love about our website is that it is really clean so clients can focus on our products,” she says. “Even though it is a basic site, it is really easy to navigate and to get in contact with us if our clients want to. The main thing we want our clients to find is our products and that is the first thing they see when they get in.”

She recognizes that there’s room in the future to develop the site more and use it as a space to tell more of the company’s story, but for now, it is focused on showcasing their products to the world.

Martinez used WordPress, hosted by DreamHost, to build her website. This power combo, she says, helped her make a smooth entry into building an e-commerce business that relies so much on its website for sales.

“DreamHost has a very user-friendly dashboard, is easy to use, the support forum is very complete, and the customer service is excellent,” she says. “The WordPress hosting plan really helped me to build, develop, and manage my website.”

Changing Our Clothes, Changing the World

For now, Les Common People ships only within Colombia. Shipping costs outside of the country are high, and as a small brand, they are focusing on local growth for now. They do have plans to ship worldwide in the future.

To benefit her work with Les Common People — and for pure personal enjoyment — Martinez is studying artisanal dyeing techniques, such as marbled fabric and dyeing textiles with natural pigments. “I really enjoy learning new things that I can use for my personal and professional life,” she says.

She also is always on the lookout for new ways to support her brand’s mission of sustainability in fashion.

“We want to keep creating unique garments made of upcycled fabrics, to learn new techniques to keep hundreds of kilos of new fabric out of the landfill, and to continue our path into sustainability not only with the brand but with our life as well,” Martinez says.

With these changes in hers and other brands and a growing awareness of the environmental toll of fast fashion, Martinez is optimistic about the future of fashion — and hopes that her customers and others will make responsible choices about what clothing they purchase and wear.

“We all can be part of the change and dress without affecting the planet and its inhabitants,” she says. “The world is changing; the way we dress should too.”

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Fast forward a few years: El-Tayib’s baby girl is six and now has a four-year-old sister. His gaming was going strong, but with one hiccup — the girls kept stealing his dice. “Eventually I realized if I ever wanted the dice back, I’d have to come up with a game for the girls to play,” he says.

So he started looking around for options to introduce his kids to tabletop RPGs but came up short. “Considering their ages, most of the role-playing games out there were either too advanced or too adult,” El-Tayib says. “Some of the few that I found, while good, were often just simplified versions of adult games.”

His solution? Invent a new game to play with the girls.

Several years and hours upon hours of work later, the Power Outage world was built, and its corresponding Core Rules Book finally ready to be published.

“Power Outage is a superhero-themed tabletop role-playing game that is designed for kids, but fun for adults looking for a more casual, light-hearted gaming experience,” El-Tayib says. “It’s absolutely drenched with puns as well.” Built to engage kids as young as four years old, Power Outage’s cast of characters pits such villains as Break Fast, InstaGator, and The Bulshefist up against the Pocket Protector, SuburbanKnight, Rockin Troll, and other heroes.

After reaching its funding goal on Kickstarter and making an official debut in 2019, Power Outage was nominated twice for an Ennie, a notable award in the RPG world. El-Tayib is building an audience for Power Outage and has gotten great feedback from fans so far.

“I think the best compliment I ever received was when someone referred to me as the ‘Mr. Rogers of role-playing games,’” El-Tayib says.

And along the way, he’s relied on DreamHost to power this and other passion projects.

Choose Your Own Adventure

As a kid in elementary school, El-Tayib loved Choose Your Own Adventure books. “So much so,” he adds, “that I would write my own and run them with kids at the lunch table. That was before I knew that RPGs existed.”

He was introduced to the concept as an adult through the early Penny-Arcade podcast crew, which was testing out and describing the new Dungeons & Dragons fourth edition. The idea of RPGs “immediately shot me right back to elementary school,” he says. His favorite game these days, other than Power Outage, is Tales from the Loop, which represents the kind of quality he’s chasing with his own game.

“My goal was to create a game that brought parents and kids to the table, have fun, and maybe learn a little,” El-Tayib says. “I’ve yet to meet a person that hasn’t claimed to have had a blast playing Power Outage.”

In creating the game, El-Tayib relied on his daughters for playtesting to craft an RPG that was truly centered on a child’s experience. “I built it from the kids’ perspective up — I think that really informed the shape of the game,” he says.

While most traditional RPGs focus on battles and fighting, Power Outage was built with a choose-your-own-adventure flair that gives kids — and their parents — different options for what kinds of games they can play. El-Tayib created a system he calls CAPE: Combat, Alternative, Puzzle, and Exploration. Each path creates a custom adventure that styles gameplay according to the preferences of both parents (who lead the game) and kids.

“Don’t want your kids fighting? Choose an Alternative path,” El-Tayib explains. “Want your kids to practice problem solving? Choose a Puzzle path. Additionally, I created a substantial amount of guidance for new gaming parents that I’ve been told sheds some light for even veteran players when switching to gaming with kids.”

Ultimately, he hopes the game can help parents, gamers or not, connect with their kids in a way that resonates.

“I want kids to have experiences with their parents that they’ll remember growing up,” El-Tayib says. “I want a channel to open up about themselves, without fear of reprisal. The ability to instill into an avatar their desires and see those play out, and in doing so, educate those adults playing with them.”

Feedback on Power Outage has been overwhelmingly positive — especially once he can help players ditch the expectation that this child-oriented game aligns, or should align, with Dungeons & Dragons gameplay.

“It’s also amazing seeing pictures from fans holding up kids, often infants, next to my book with the promise that a new player will be starting up soon,” he says.

Related: Herald and Sons Publishing: The Ultimate Father-Son DIY Project

Child’s Play

By trade, El-Tayib is the chief technology officer for a public school system in New Jersey. Part of his work includes considering the needs of students with disabilities, and in developing Power Outage, accessibility was top of mind.

The Power Outage rule book has a section outlining accommodations to make the game playable for all children, including those who need physical, communicative, behavioral, cognitive, and emotional adjustments to the gameplay. In creating this content, he consulted experts in special education to review his recommendations and terminology.

“Role-playing games allow all of us to not only break free of the limitations we find in our everyday lives, but express our real selves through our avatars,” El-Tayib says. “The absolute need to make that process available to everyone is imperative. We need to be accessible. We need to be inclusive. We need to bring everyone to the table, and if we can’t, then we need to drag that table over to them.”

El-Tayib wants his entire mythology — based on Outage, an ancient, mysterious island that appeared in the Pacific Ocean — to be fun and understandable to children of all ages and abilities.

“I eliminated death from the game, changing your standard HP (health points) to YP (yield points),” he says. “Kids are freer to enjoy their creative spirit with the knowledge that they can get up and try again. All the villains are fun and humorous, but many have deeper contexts that parents can use to exemplify lessons.”

Power Outage does have a slight amount of number crunching, and still uses the “‘math rocks’ — i.e., dice — my kids loved to steal in the first place,” El-Tayib adds. The game is designed to allow players of different skill levels to work together on the same goal, so kids of all ages can still play together. It lists generic powers for the avatars to use but leaves the details up to players’ imaginations. Power Outage throws out the traditional RPG character races or classes — wizard, human, elf, etc. — to give kids more wiggle room to create the avatar they want, be it a robot, a werewolf, or a princess.

“The sky is literally not even the limit,” El-Tayib says. “It allows kids to keep their creative mind, while conditioning the effects into manageable gameplay. Heck, it even has a comic strip in the back that explains all the powers.”

Related: Leveling the Web: 12 Questions with Accessibility Expert Gian Wild

Running the Game

Creating and testing the game and teaming up with designer Rosanna Spucces to give it a polished look was the fun part. Getting Power Outage, a self-published, indie game, out in front of an audience, has been El-Tayib’s biggest challenge.

“I’ve often described promotion of an indie game with the analogy of a crowded bar,” El-Tayib explains. “Everyone is in there, clamoring to have their story heard, often talking over each other. You have that solid group of people that are always there listening to you, but your story never really branches out from your table. Your friends will share it, but the message doesn’t get much farther out from where you are. Then someone walks in and everyone in the bar looks up at once and shouts “NORM!” You’re incredibly appreciative and flattered by those that you have with you — your small group of friends and fans. But you always wonder, ‘Man, what makes everyone like Norm so much?’”

El-Tayib’s found that his best tool for promotion is creating loyal fans of the game. He’s given the rule book to podcasters and Twitch streamers and has run games online and at conventions.

Earlier this year, he coordinated Shelter in Play, a quarantined-themed charity sale with 17 other kid-friendly game creators, who offered their products together as part of a $10 bundle. Proceeds were split between Extra Life 4 Kids and the Child’s Play Charity, with each charity receiving a little over $3,500 each.

“I’ve probably given away eight times or more digital copies than I’ve sold,” El-Tayib says. “On the whole, I believe people in the communities I’ve engaged with have a bit of faith in my character, and they’ve rewarded me by helping me to promote things.”

Home Base

El-Tayib has been a proud DreamHost customer since 2006. So when it was time to get serious about publishing Power Outage, he knew exactly where to build its website, which he hopes to grow into a community hub for game players and fans.

“I like that it’s built with WordPress, which has a lot of adaptability and the allowance for personalization,” El-Tayib says.

He’s built websites for others and himself for years. Along with a website for Go Nerdy, his parent company that publishes Power Outage and other resources, El-Tayib runs a personal website, bebarce.com (“Who else gets to claim their own first name as a domain name?”), and is developing a wiki site to provide resources to make tabletop RPG play more accessible to people of all abilities.

“DreamHost’s support is great,” El-Tayib says, “and absolutely tolerant of my late night blunderings. There have been quite a few times they have bailed me out of a hotspot. The site structure on the back end is super intuitive and it offers a lot of control. Honestly if I’m not building a site directly on DreamHost, I’m often encouraging others to migrate to it.”

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Work Ahead

Outside of his day job and work on Power Outage, El-Tayib is passionate about writing. He’s written a few children’s books, and he’s working on a series of princess-themed STEM stories with titles like “The Princess and the Placebo” and “A Princess’ Primer to the Theory of Evolution.”

“I also enjoy woodwork, even though I’m a bit of a novice at it,” he says. “I made a tie rack and, recently, some custom sandboxes for my kids and extended family.” Tech consulting and side gigs also keep him busy, not to mention juggling his family and trying to invest time into advocating for more accessible gaming tables.

As far as Power Outage goes, he isn’t done promoting or working on the game. He’s working on supplemental adventures — a necessary component to keeping a tabletop game growing and earning money.

“The biggest mountain is sustainability,” he says. “I have to find a way to create future products faster, with better turn around, and increased promotion.”

Currently in the works: an adult version of Power Outage.

“It’s called Power Outage: Neon Knights,” El-Tayib says. “The idea is to take all the campy weirdness of Baywatch Nights and apply it to my own world setting. But of course, ‘adult’ doesn’t necessarily mean it’s in any way more mature. After all I’m a pretty immature adult myself.”

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