Blessed by the Potato

I’ve been productive with my long weekends: I wrote a book! It’s a book aimed at beginner investors, and recommends a passive indexing strategy. The main strengths of the book are:

• It’s a short book.
• It covers the basics in plain language.
• It’s written by a Canadian for Canadians.
• It has pictures of bunnies.
• It has step-by-step instructions for how to apply the basics of index investing to actually get starting investing, including how to set up an account and how to place a trade, with some key screenshots to help.

Though it’s only been about two months from when I first started to now, IMHO, the book is done. The formatting is there, the text has been revised a few times, and I even sacrificed a counterfeit $10 bill Tim Horton’s passed to me to mock up a cover image. If you’d like to review the book (preferably to post on your blog and the Amazon/Indigo reviews when available) please send me an email at holypotato@gmail.com and I’ll send you a copy. I have two formats at the moment: regular letter-sized (best for reading on a computer or to print in hard-copy at home) and Kobo/Kindle formatted PDF (not quite as smooth as an epub or Kindle native format, but looks really sweet on my Kobo), both as DRM-free PDFs.

Most of the material is not exactly unique to me or new for an investing book: basic stuff about why saving/investing is important, what’s a stock/bond/fund, what’s an RRSP/TFSA, etc. What is unique is that it’s written by me, and that it includes the kind of hands-on material that I’ve never seen anywhere else that’s needed to actually get started on your own (how to open an account, how to enter a trade, where to go to find CC’s rebalancing spreadsheet), and just inside, written in large, friendly letters are the words “Don’t Panic.” (Though in contrast to the HHGTTG, the words are not all-caps.) It is, as I mentioned, short: just 37 letter-size pages once you discount the pictures and things like the title page and ToC; in kobo format, just 89 screen refreshes including all the filler.

If you’d like to buy a copy right now (just $5) before I sort out publishing, again just send me an email at holypotato@gmail.com and I’ll sort out PayPal with you and email you both PDF form factors.

So I have just a few main questions that maybe you all can help me answer (whether you feel like reviewing the book or not):

1. Do I go for a self-publishing model, or try submitting to a traditional publisher? If self-publishing, e-book only, or physical copies too? If a publisher, which one?
2. Should I publish under my “real” name, or Potato? On the one hand, I might want to offer education services alongside the book, which is really a real-name kind of thing. On the other, I have more “brand recognition” for investing discussions as Potato… though people who aren’t familiar with my writing might take it somewhat less seriously with the pseudonym, and those who do read enough to recognize Potato as being a serious force in Canadian personal finance probably don’t need a beginner’s book.
3. If I do publish under my real name, do I “out” myself in the process and use this site to promote the book, or do I just not mention the book again here and hope the connection isn’t made?

Another option (Wayfare’s sage suggestion) is to just split BbtP: do all the finance stuff on a new blog with my “real” name, and keep all the video game/political ranting/science/random stuff here.

I got a strange email today. First off it was to the wrong address (I have a preferred gmail contact address in the sidebar, this person had figured out how to get my host to forward an email to me). It quite simply was from a person claiming to be a follower of this humble blog, and asking to do a guest post.

She said “I really liked the following two articles” [and linked to two posts] I have about 5 years of experience writing about similar subjects and would love to provide a detailed post that matches the tone of your blog…” then went on to link to some of her articles, which even from the URLs looked like search engine robotext.

Now what makes it hilarious was the two articles of mine that she chose to link to and to try to match the tone of, and had “experience writing about similar subjects”: they were some of my more random posts that did not have any kind of subject to them. One was “on Q-tips” and the other was my shot-gun catch-up post after I finished my PhD (“It’s Over!“).

Note to Jennifer: if you are real and that was genuine, I’m sorry for not responding by email, but your request was really weird.

Posting has been light, but I have been spending time on the site lately, just mostly fiddling with the back-end. The spam comments have crept up from nearly 100/day to almost 200/day over the last few months, and that’s just getting ridiculous. I skim the spam filter so quickly to try to get through them all in a decent amount of time that I’ve lost some false positives (sorry to those of you whose legitimate comments were eaten). So I put in a quick javascript check (which you can see now), but that only cut out about 20% of the spam. So I’ve tried a new method I found referred in the wordpress codex, and that cut out about 30% of the spam. So I’m back to the tide of spam I was facing a few months ago — more than I’d like, but a manageable amount.

Most of it comes from the 173.2** range of IP addresses, and I’m tempted to block the entire range in my .htaccess file. But that would also deny access to any legitimate users that might be in that range, and I’d rather deal with spam than accidentally keep actual readers out. One other feature of spam is that it tends to focus on the older posts, and seems to hit only certain ones (I think) so what I’ve been doing is closing comments to posts that are more than a few months old as the spambots find them. If for whatever reason you do want to comment on an old post, you can either email me, or comment on any post that does have comments enabled, and I’ll move it.

Now, part of doing this manually is to continue to learn about how my platform works, and part is because all the modern plug ‘n play spam tools for WordPress are for the newer versions, and I figured it would take less time to hack at the guts of my current install than to try to upgrade to the current version of WP. Maybe that was a mistake, but I’m so used to the way this one works (and it does work for me) that I’m loathe to change it.

I also wanted to create a new archives page that might work better than the current method of sifting through the archives 10 posts at a time by category or date (via the links in the sidebar). I wanted to group the posts by category, then have the full list of post titles under that. I couldn’t quite get it to work, but I do have a simple list of posts under the page BbtP Archives in the sidebar now. The formatting isn’t quite there either, but it works, and I think I’m going to stop wasting time trying to improve it.

If you’re reading this, then we’re saved. The world has not ended, despite the recent predictions of some. Macho Man Randy Savage died to save us, by keeping Zombie Jesus in a headlock through the appointed hour. Thus every year henceforth, followers of this sect will celebrate Macho Mania on or about May 21 (Canadians may do double-duty with Victoria Day), to celebrate the Macho Man’s sacrifice for all. Ooooh yeah.

Of course, others believe that the prediction was nonsense to begin with, so little to no supernatural mercy can be ascribed to Saint Savage. Potatoism (the way of the Holy Potato) does not contain any explicit teachings on eschatology, no hints as to whether the world will grind to a halt in the freezing darkness, be consumed by flames, drowned by unstoppable seas, or devoured by ravenous zombie dinosaurs — and has certainly provided no sell-by date for the planet.

So yeah, either no danger to begin with, or our continued existence is owed to an unlikely hero’s struggle in the hereafter. Either way, life goes on, and the devout have their new hero, and the rest of us have an excuse to party and eat slim jims in the nice weather of early spring (any recommendations on vegetarian slim jim alternatives?).

So I forgot that after I got a real webhost I also signed up for Google Analytics, and it’s been a little sobering to look back on the stats now. I get, on average, 7 unique visitors per day. Considering one of them is probably me (since I no longer access the backend directly, as my real webserver is with some company with server farms and probably my old dog Schwartz frolicking, because he totally went to a farm like my parents suggested when I was 11 and not put down like they told me when I was 22, and if he went to a farm it was probably a server farm; and not a decrepit Windows ME system under my desk), that’s just 6 people who visit the site per day. True, many (uncountably many) people may be on the RSS feed now that it actually works, while others may only check every few weeks since it’s not like I post all that often anyway… but I also know that I wake up to 20+ spam comments caught in my filter every morning afternoon. The average length of my posts is about 800 words, so that’s roughly 133 words per visitor.

I thought I had more “real-world” friends reading than that, plus the odd internet person (or chatty AI)… apparently not. Though there have been more than 6 people that have commented in the past on particular posts, it doesn’t appear as though they stick around. So, guessing at the identity of my 6 readers, here are 133 words for each of you:

Wayfare: “She tries to get me to write, and I try to get her not to edit.” I know you must feel in some way obligated to read, if only to check in and see if I was killed in a horrible fiery wreck on the 401. Still, I know you like all the rants here. It’s tough getting this worked up about major (and admittedly, minor) issues and then writing about it for the internet, and mistakes are bound to creep in. I’m glad you use the comments section for corrections. Please send me adorable cat pictures, as I know I don’t have nearly enough for your tastes, and our cat is way cuter than all of Scalzi’s put together (which, as a 3-headed 12-legged monster cat, probably wouldn’t be all that cute).

Netbug: You got me into this whole WordPress thing, then abandoned your own for Twitter. I just can’t do Twitter, man… I can barely get this 133 word gimmick to fit in this one-off post, so a 140 character limit all the time is a serious straitjacket for me. Can you start doing movie reviews on Twitter? I’ve seen some awful movies recently that someone really should have saved me from: The Box, Amelia (actually, both of those I saved myself from after the first fifteen minutes or so). I’m reminded that I should start writing about the upcoming StarCraft2 launch to help get you psyched for it, because if you let me down on SC2, man, Ima gonna be pissed. I’m even carefully timing my graduation so I will have more play time!

Ben: I find it a sign of the times that we seem to be more up-to-date on each others’ lives by reading each others’ blogs than we ever were when we lived in the same city. Speaking of up-to-date on each other’s lives, what’s going on with the housing search?? You put that big blog post up, I put a big messy comment in reply, and then nothing except pictures of meat! (There are a lot of meat pictures on your blog!) Inquiring minds want to know! Also, I have no idea what the deal is with wine, so many of the “descriptive” words used make no sense to me, yet somehow you describing a Pillitteri Chardonnay (a liquid) as “Like a mouthful of oaky buttered toast” makes the world a stranger, better place.

Michael James: I feel bad, actually, that you read this blog. You’ve got an interest in personal finance, and I do occasionally have a post on finance which, IMNSHO, I totally rock. I even have graphs sometimes, and I know you must have a great love of graphs because you so often have such awesome ones on your own blog, and nobody graphs like that just because they think it’s a useful way to convey information. I’ll try to make more graphs (and good ones too, not just graphing alleged cookie ninja attacks vs university exam schedule). Still, I can’t help but think that I somehow tricked you, that every time another post arrives in your RSS feed, and you see it’s not finance related — let alone full of awesome crazy — you shake your head… Sorry.

Spambot: They say flattery will get you everywhere, and I’d say that it’s partly true. When you come in here and post a message about how awesome my blog is and asking for “more information on that topic”, it makes me feel good, in a really vague way. I start to convince myself that you might actually be a real person that likes my writing… until you post ten of the same message daily. That ruins the effect, Spambot. Plus, sometimes, you go and start what I can only assume is swearing in Chinese, and it’s not appreciated, even from a nascent distributed-computing sentience that hasn’t yet properly learned nettiquette. Also, it’s not cool to post more per day than I do, or to make money from my blog when I’m not. Fuck you.

Unknown reader: I don’t know who you are, you’ve never commented. This whole Web2.0 thing is supposed to make it possible for people to provide feedback and make the web all interactive, but that doesn’t mean you’re obligated to. I respect your decision to remain silent and anonymous, and thank you for your readership anyway, and hope I’ve helped entertain or educate you. Besides, I hardly ever comment on other peoples’ posts, even though I read a lot out there. You wouldn’t think it from a guy who goes around blogging and trying to get readers for his blog, but I’m actually kind of shy myself, even on the great anonymous supertube network highway, and sometimes compose comments on other posts, just to delete them without posting. So I totally get where you’re coming from.

In conclusion, I suppose I should be glad I don’t have more readers, because otherwise I’d be up all night looking at what crazy google terms you used to land here, and have to write minor monologues to each of you…