As I have mentioned before, I am a New England Patriots fan. So it goes as no surprise that I would have received the biography on current Patriots coach Bill Belichick for Christmas from my wife, and this was my read for February.

For a book on football, The Education of a Coach had many takeaways for business. The biggest one that permeated the entire story was networking. Even though Belichick’s father was a well-known and respected Naval Academy football scout, on his own he continually sought out connections with coaches, general managers and owners. This is due to the lack of job security in athletic coaching, which in some regards is no different than contracting in the business world. The second, yet of equal importance, was mentorship. Though Belichick was skilled at reviewing football film to analyze past games, he sought out positions that would allow him to continually grow and be overseen by coaches that were willing to take him under his wing. He then paid it forward as he did the same for young and up-and-coming coaches. Where mentorship may not be as much in vogue today as it was years ago in business, I believe it should be.

If you are a football or sports fan, I highly recommend this book. But if you are not a sports fan, you may lose interest in the detailed descriptions of coaches, teams and games. For the fan, the book reads like you are hearing stories of people and games as being told by an old uncle who may have been at the game themself. And if you are a Patriots fan, it fills in many details of the career of coach that has made you proud of your team again!

Note that the title of this book is The Education of a Coach and not The Education of a Man. People who are familiar with Bill Belichick know all too well that he is an extremely private and publicly shy person and abhors the limelight. Where you get great insight into his maturity as a coach, you learn very little to nothing about him personally. There are barely 4 sentences about his family – only mentioning he got married, had to have his family protected when he was the coach of the Cleveland Browns, got divorced and likes to spend time with his kids. In an age where you know far too much about celebrities, as much as this is different it is also refreshing.

Shortly after I finished reading this book, its author, David Halberstam, was tragically killed in a car crash. The Education of a Coach would be his last book, though others were in process or completed but not published. After reading Halberstam’s style of storytelling, I am eager to explore his other works.

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This is from The Hot Iron, a journal on business and technology by Mike Maddaloni.

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Book Take-Aways • Business • Diversions • (3) Comments • Permalink

Back in January I pledged to read one book a month, and write not a review but take-aways I got from the book. If you read regularly, you will only see that I have posted one take-away so far. Well, I am catching up, both on my reading and writing. I am one book behind on my reading and have several take-away posts swirling in my head - watch for more!

Book Take-Aways • Business • Diversions • (0) Comments • Permalink

Many of you reading this are using a feed reader, where you aggregate many blog feeds and read them together. As a blog writer, I want to make my feed available to anyone who wants to read it. However, many people don’t realize that you can utilize your own blog feed for yourself, and not just to read your own posts.

Making your blog feed available on Web sites is way to draw new readers to your blog. You may have seen widgets that you can place on a Web site to share with readers your latest blog feeds. Where widgets work well in many cases, with some extra effort, namely some server-side Web scripting, you can use you part or all of your feed and control its presentation.

One of my clients is River Junction Press, the publisher of the book Lewis and Clark Road Trips, a great book on heritage travel along the trail Lewis and Clark took over 200 years ago. When we developed the Web site the author, Kira Gale, wanted to make her blog posts available on the Web site. On the home page of the Web site, we display the first paragraph of the 3 most recent blog posts. The blog itself is an option in the tab navigation at the top, and Web site visitors will get a taste of the blog, and links to it, right on the home page.

This was achieved using ColdFusion scripting, the language the Web site was developed in, plus the same style sheet for the Web site. This can be done with any other language that allows you to process an XML file. Looking at the Web site home page, does it look like there’s blog content there, other than the heading? That is the beauty of RSS!

Technology • (0) Comments • Permalink

Hello reader! You may be reading this blog post after visiting thehotiron.com or using a feed reader, whether on a computer or mobile device. If you are using the latter, how did it get there? And if you are the former, you may be asking what a feed is.

This video on RSS by Commoncraft has been in circulation for several months, but is still current, on how RSS works. If you haven’t seen it already, it is good for everybody.

Technology • (2) Comments • Permalink

After being declared a low-rank nerd, I was suspect to trying any other Web site “calculators” that make generalizations on a subset of data. After re-reading that opening sentence, my apologies to political pollsters.

Domain name guru Frank Schilling wrote on this calculator of the worth of your blog which is based on Technorati data. Only this week I created a Technorati account, to right away find I had an authority of 15 without even trying. So I gave it a try, and I found The Hot Iron is worth $8,468.10. For a blog that I started in January of this year and with rough calculations of the amount of time I spent on writing just over 100 posts, I’d say that is not a bad return.

Not that I am actively selling my blog. And just like those real estate reality shows there could be more to do to simply pump up the value of my blog. However my commitment is to my community – now and in the future.

Domain Names • Technology • (3) Comments • Permalink