Why have there been no posts recently? Well, two reasons primarily. First, I rented an office that was a sublease. No revelation there, but there was a catch: the other tenants were architects and designers **who enforced a code of silence! No joke. I took one phone call and got a warning. After sitting in my car for two weeks, I decided I needed to move. And fortunately I found a nice office in the same cool office park. Artists, recording studios, Gibson guitar showroom. Cool.

But I said two reasons. The second is Yelp. Yelp is addicting because it is about places you know. And for me that means writing about restaurants. So I have been Yelping a good deal. And that has sapped some of my blogging mojo.

At the same time, I have been assembling our start-up quarters. As I was huffing in the toxic fumes of freshly made folding tables (from China), it got me to thinking that I need to create a checklist of things for you to buy for your startup (should you venture down that path). So I will do so shortly, and include some of my witty repartee that makes my writing so poorly structured. My writing is like one of those hidden pictures: if you read it out loud you can almost hear me saying it. And somehow it works! It’s how I speak normally, and you’ll see what I mean when I finally get those demo videos (remember that?) online.

Suffice it to say, none were produced in the “cone of silence”, but stay tuned!

As a little bonus for the tech crowd, I wanted to offer a little peek under the covers of our site to help the next bootstrapper facing a launch of a consumer facing site. One detail we all forget: we create these great sites and never teach anyone how to use them! Personally, I love screencast tours. Short of commentary and long on how-to, these little movies are worth 10,000 words. That said, how can you make them?

Well the short answer is buying some expensive tools. You can try to cobble a system together, but you will find some weird mis-matches. For example, most of the good capture tools are based on Macs. But if you want to address a consumer audience, you are stuck with Windows and IE. Face it! Okay, so we are stuck in Windows. The software I chose is Camtasia. It is basically an NLE-style movie program. Pretty basic and, as you would hope, they have great demos. A couple of rules of thumb:

• Keep them short! 3 minutes or less.
• Keep them focused. One thing at a time.
• Begin at the beginning.
• Use a real microphone!

Yes, sound is the #1 concern. It amazes me that amateur film makers and screencasters put so little effort here. If you can’t hear dialog, the whole experience is muddy. This does present a problem: how do you plug that microphone into a computer. Well for me on a Mac it was easy. But on a PC…well I’m still working on that. But I am hopeful I have a solution.

And if that works, you’ll be enjoying Key Ingredient screencasts very soon.