Online collaboration for your right brain, part 2: MindMeister at Social Signal
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July 24th, 2008 by Alex
Click here to read part 1, an introduction to digital mind mapping.
MindMeister works a lot like MindManager, with the features I've come to see as essential for a good mind-mapping experience:
- rapid creation of new nodes and node "children". (Hitting return creates a node; tab creates children of the node you're on.)
- automatic linking of nodes. When you create a node, it's automatically linked to what's already on the map (as opposed to a tool like OmniGraffle, in which you manually link nodes.)
- support for visual elements to illustrate/highlight
- control over color and font of elements
- attach files or hyperlinks to any node
- intuitive and visually pleasing interface
- drag-and-drop editing so you can quickly reorganize your thoughts
- share maps with colleagues
- track edits to your mind map via e-mail or Twitter
- publish maps to your blog or elsewhere online
- use offline (via Google Gears)
- Skype integration to chat with your collaborators
- change tracking to see who added what
See who added what when viewing a shared map.
- optional automatic link maker (links the selected node to the most relevant web page for that term)
- enterprise version to brand MindMeister for use with clients
- browser extensions and widgets that make it easy to add to your default mind map
- and of course, an a.p.i. (developers, start your engines.)
- export to FreeMind, Mindjet and other formats (premium only)
- prompt, non-bureaucratic customer service (i.e. when i asked them for my free upgrade after Rob paid for his premium service, they didn't hassle me about the process whereby I'd referred him)
But what makes MindMeister rock my world is the fact that it lets two or more people work on a mind map at the same time. No locking and unlocking the document; no waiting a minute while your collaborator's changes show up. If you and a colleague are editing the same map concurrently, you'll see each other's changes in about five or ten seconds. This makes the experience of collaboration a lot less like Google Docs (which we use regularly, in exchanging drafts of a document) and a lot more like SubEthaEdit (which we use constantly, to collaboratively write or note-take in real time).
MindMeister goes to work for Social Signal
As an almost real-time collaboration tool, MindMeister unlocks a whole new way of working together. You're not limited to linear structures (like task lists, documents and even wikis). You can take notes, jot down ideas or capture information -- then dynamically and collaboratively reorganize it. Where document sharing (at its best, i.e. real time in SubEthaEdit) can feel like writing together, with MindMeister you can actually do your thinking together.
We've been using MindMeister for a little over a month, and already we've used it to:
- plan and outline writing projects
- wireframe the navigation structure for a website
- outline a community engagement plan
- diagram an organization chart and decision tree
- map out deliverables for a complex project
- figure out the relationship among multiple overlapping technical terms
- map out responsibilities on a complex project
But if you really want to understand what MindMeister can do for you, you've got to see it in action. So here is the very latest mind map we've created -- a map of where mind mapping fits into the big picture of collaboration tools that we use here at Social Signal.
(Click and drag on the map to move it around so that you can see the whole thing. The tools with the hearts are the ones I personally use every week, if not every day. Click here to see the map in all its glory on the MindMeister site.)
Share your thoughts for a chance to win a free year of MindMeister premium
Are you using MindMeister yourself? Curious about -- or experienced with -- some of the other tools on the Social Signal map of online collaboration tools? Have another approach to collaboration that you prefer? Tell us your ideas about mind mapping and online collaboration, and you could win a free year of premium MindMeister service, which lets you maintain more than 6 maps, download your maps to your local machine, attach files to your topics, and is 100% ad-free.
Share your thoughts by:
- leaving a comment on this blog post
- responding on your own blog or site, linking back to this post
- creating your own MindMeister map (please link to it by leaving a comment below)
- any other nifty collaborative online way that you want (just let us know what it is!)
Online collaboration for your right brain, part 1: an introduction to digital mind mapping
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July 23rd, 2008 by Alex
Most online collaboration tools engage your left brain: that part of you that likes structure and organization, and supports linear, sequential thinking. Think of Basecamp, with its careful system of tasks and milestones. Or Google spreadsheets (I have dozens of them!) organizing everything from budgets to menus in neat, orderly rows and columns. Even wikis seem to work most effectively when they are gardened into a coherent structure, with some kind of intentional hierarchy of information.
That's ironic, because the web itself is a very right-brain medium: hyperlinks let you flow from site to site in the same kind of random, intuitive and creative way that your right hemisphere works.
The latest addition to the Social Signal toolbox is a terrific online application that engages your right brain very effectively: MindMeister.
MindMeister is an online mind mapping application that lets you collaborate in producing visual representations of information or ideas. A mind map typically looks like a tree or network: you put your title or central idea in the middle of a piece of (real or virtual paper), and then you draw branching lines outward to capture related ideas and most crucially, relationships among ideas.
In this two-part blog post I'll introduce you to mind mapping and to MindMeister. Part 1 (you are here) introduces mind mapping and some of the options for digital mind mapping. Part 2 looks at MindMeister's features, and how we use MindMeister for collaboration at Social Signal. Part 2 also includes a MindMeister-generated map of a range of online collaboration tools at Social Signal, so even if mind mapping doesn't seem like it's for you, you may want to check out some of the other tools on our map.
Birth of a mind mapper
The king of mind maps is Tony Buzan, who has written more than a dozen books about mind mapping and its various uses for improving memory, study habits, et cetera. Buzan argues that mind mapping
harnesses the full range of cortical skills - word, image, number, logic, rhythm, colour and spatial awareness - in a single, uniquely powerful manner. In so doing, it gives you the freedom to roam the infinite expanses of your brain.
I became quite a dedicated mind mapper while in grad school, using mind maps to take most of my notes on course readings, chart entire sub-fields of political science, and outline my own papers and thinking. That was back in the olden days, so I did my mind maps on paper, which had the advantages of being very immediate and making it easy to implement Buzan's recommendations to engage visual thinking with lots of colour and imagery.
This is part of a paper-based mind map I created while studying for my general exams in political science in 1997. It summarized the major debates and authors in the field of political culture. (This is just a snippet -- click here to open the entire map in a new window.)
But it had some significant disadvantages: there was no easy way to edit or move around elements within a mind map, and I usually arrived at my afternoon seminars with my forearms covered in a rainbow of ink (from letting them rest on top of all the coloured pens I had open while mapping).
Thanks to the popularity of Buzan's work, we now have lots of software options for ink-free mind mapping. I've tried out a lot of these over the years, and have found that different tools work well for different kinds of mind maps.
Mind mapping goes digital
If you're creating a map to diagram an organization or information structure you're actually going to implement, you need a lot of control over layout options, so something like OmniGraffle is great. (That's what we usually use for information architecture work, i.e. planning out the navigation structure of a web site.) If you're creating a map to organize your thinking, it's better to use something that automatically creates relationships among elements and lets you work very quickly: after years of searching, I was recently delighted to discover MindManager, which I now use regularly. 
I've also tried using Personal Brain, which I discovered through Jerry Michalski: it has the potential to become your primary tool for information management, since it can grow to virtually infinite size (Jerry has thousands of items in his brain), and can even replace your finder or file browser. In addition to letting you map topics, Personal Brain lets you attach notes and URLs to each item in your brain, so you could actually use it to replace your current system for managing bookmarks.
I took it for a spin over a few weeks in February, but it feels like the kind of tool you'd need to work with for quite a while before understanding its full potential or assessing its fit for your personal workflow, and my trial license ran out before I was ready to commit to it. If Personal Brain establishes del.icio.us integration, so I can keep del.icio.us links synched to a brain, I'll be tempted to try it again.
As a committed mind mapper and a devotee of social web applications, it was inevitable that I'd want to get a little peanut butter in my chocolate. Rob and I do a lot of our writing and thinking together, and most of our creative tools are eventually subjected to the "but can we do it together?" test. Thanks to my recent love-in with MindManager, it occurred to me to Google the phrase "collaborative mind mapping" and voilà , I found the extremely fabulous and user-friendly MindMeister.
Project management and workflow with Basecamp
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September 25th, 2007 by Alex
Let me begin by saying this is very much a work in progress: we're still searching for the Holy Grail of optimized workflow, and feel like the tools we use now -- particularly Basecamp -- don't fully meet our needs. I'll address some of those limitations towards the end of this blog post, but let me begin with an overflow of what we use and how we use it.
Our main tools are:
- Basecamp: for project-related task management and client communications
- OmniPlan: for prospective project planning and gantt charting
- Remember the Milk: for internal task tracking
- iCal: for internal scheduling and time tracking
- Google spreadsheets: for capacity planning and docket review
This blog post will focus on how we use Basecamp, which is our main tool for managing the ongoing work of individual projects. The fact that we use so many other tools speaks to the issues we have with Basecamp -- which is one of the issues I'm particularly keen to hear Rob address. We're also fans of -- though not religious adherents to -- David Allen's Getting Things Done methodology, which has influenced our approach to task management.
Set up
We set up a Basecamp site at the beginning of each client engagement. Some of the best practices on Basecamp set up that we are trying to adopt as our standard include:
- posting a welcome message to Basecamp that explains how to use the site (see VentureMarketing's Basecamp Welcome PDF, and their Basecamp client jumpstart, for another approach)
- presenting an overview of Basecamp at an early client meeting
- when clients e-mail us outside of Basecamp, redirecting them back to the Basecamp site, often by copying-and-pasting their messages into Basecamp
I add all our subcontractors to Basecamp as members of Social Signal, so that we can cover any technical issues without dragging the client into the Drupal abyss. We recognize that our clients don't always benefit from seeing how the sausages are made, and when it gets into some of the intricacies of module development or permissions configuration, we like to keep the excruciating details private so that clients aren't drawn too deeply into technical issues. Unfortunately, Basecamp only allows private communications among members of the same company, so we choose to treat all our subcontractors as members of Social Signal.
Structure and usage
We use messages for communications that require an action or response. This includes:
- communications with clients and client updates
- client requests (bug tracking, questions, etc.)
- internal discussions of how to handle tasks (marking these discussions private so they aren't visible to client)
We use writeboards for communications that are FYI only (though we may use messages to notify each other of a new writeboard).
We use task lists for items that require a "next action" (in GTD terms).
Messages
We have recently refined our use of messages to keep better track of all open loops. We respond to urgent messages as they come in, and at least once a week (and ideally every 2-3 days) we review all the messages in a given project space, and update status. We find that updating message status on a real-time basis is excessively time consuming and leads to duplication of effort.
Our message categories vary a bit by project but mostly reflect major categories of project activities (see screenshot -- some items deleted to protect client privacy).
When we review a message we briefly note our response, action required, or action taken, even if it's already completed, for future reference.
We then edit the title of the original message to note the status of that message:
- QUEUED: the message requires an action or response. An item is only marked as "queued" when it has been added as a specific task or tasks in a to-do list. An item may be marked as "queued" even if we anticipate that it will prove too low-priority to address; however by adding it to our queue it can be reviewed with the client during our next review of outstanding tasks, and prioritized accordingly.
- CLOSED/RESOLVED: the message requested or required an action or response that has now been completed. We switched from marking items "resolved" to marking them "closed" because sometimes messages are closed because the team (including the client) decide that no further action is warranted, because the item is low priority or because the issue is not expected to recur. When an item is closed we ALWAYS leave a final comment noting the action or decision that led us to mark the message closed.
- NOTED: the message provided information that is needed by the team or client, but does not require direct action. When an item is noted it is usually placed in a writeboard we expect to refer to at a later date, e.g. a "think about for phase 2" writeboard or an "items to review before launch" writeboard.
Editing our message titles to reflect the status of each message gives us an at-a-glance view of which client issues have been addressed, and which need to be reviewed for action items.
To-dos
We have recently shifted from using fewer, generic to-do lists (which we were trying to standardize across projects) to using a lot more to-do lists, each one corresponding to a set of related tasks. This reflects the GTD notion of grouping tasks by "contexts" or as "projects" consisting of multiple tasks.
By grouping related tasks we ensure that:
- related tasks at the same time, and can therefore consider a solution that might address multiple requirements or bugs at once
- tasks can be ordered in sequence or priority, so that a team member can quickly see which tasks must be completed in which order
- a team member can see who else is working on related tasks
- tasks don't get lost in long (20+ items) lists
When we had fewer categories we found that the very long lists of tasks under each made it hard to identify relationships or priorities; the shorter list of tasks makes this much easier.
We keep our to-do lists organized alphabetically; when we decide to prioritize a specific set of tasks as the next focus for our work, we move that to-do list to the top of the page and mark it "P1: to-do list name" (as in "priority 1").
Writeboards
Writeboards are our long-term storage area and collaboration space. We use writeboards for:
- to-dos that we are considering (often for a future phase) but haven't prioritized/organized yet
- reference information (like a description of our e-mail configuration)
- meeting notes
- personal notes that we might want to share with other members of the team, but which don't require an action from anyone (we may still use messages to notify the rest of the team that we have created a writeboard for them to look at)
Assessment
Our experience with Basecamp has been shaped equally by the technology itself, and our diligence in using it. Of course, these aren't unrelated issues; if Basecamp really met all our needs, so that we could keep all our tasks organized in one place, I suspect we'd be much more consistent in using it.
We find that Basecamp works well for:
- collecting client and team correspondence in one place for future reference
- organizing project tasks, particularly site/softeware development tasks
- keeping track of our "someday" ideas in writeboards
- centralizing our project notes as writeboards
We find that Basecamp works poorly for:
- personal task management; we often transfer our basecamp tasks to Remember the Milk, where we each maintain an integrated personal "to do" list
- sensitive communications with other team members (due to lack of privacy settings)
- project planning (we use OmniPlan, then transfer milestones to Basecamp)
What we like about Basecamp:
- industry standard -- most of our partners and subcontractors, and a few of our clients, have extensive experience with Basecamp
- nice-looking user interface
- client-friendly/intuitive to use
- e-mail notifications include full text of the message
- availability of 3rd party add-ons
What we need that we're not getting from Basecamp:
- deadlines for specific tasks, not just milestones
- priorities for tasks
- ability to assign one task to multiple people (though I recognize that could be a mixed blessing)
- ability to comment on a task
- bug tracking (could be addressed by ability to comment on a task)
- ability to make messages/to dos private when communicating with people outside our own company
Nice-to-haves would include:
- spreadsheets (as well as writeboards)
- personal calendaring
- ability to store project templates so we don't have to recreate all our categories from scratch each time
- option to automatically alphabetize categories
- option to keep message categories and to-do lists in sync (i.e. creating a new to-do list would create a new message category with the same name)
- tags in addition to categories
- better RSS output and/or an iGoogle widget that lets us interact with our tasks from our Google homepages (as Remember the Milk does)
Basecamp alternatives
One of my favorite compulsive activities these days is looking into Basecamp alternatives. So far my conclusion has been -- to paraphrase Winston Churchill -- that Basecamp is the worst possible project management tool, except for all the others. Here are some of the "others" I have looked into, or mean to look into; I'll try to come back to this post and annotate the list with the reasons we haven't moved to any of these:
Unfuddle -- intriguing because it includes subversion and bug tracking
Clocking IT -- a free basecamp alternative, but as far as I can see no built-in messaging. Time tracking, though.
Michael Silberman of EchoDitto put me onto Central Desktop as a somewhat pricier Basecamp alternative that includes many of our concerns about Basecamp. We're trying it out, and it looks promising, although I'm a bit disappointed in the look and feel (it's not nearly as pretty as Basecamp) and daunted by the prospect of moving our projects over. However the prospect of being able to assign deadlines to tasks (imagine that!!) probably outweighs every other issue.
Brian Benzinger's roundup of project management tools for developers provides quick takes on some of the above, plus many more.
Other Resources
In the course of my obsessing over Basecamp and project management workflow I've found a number of useful blog posts on other people's use of Basecamp and Basecamp alternatives. For some reason many of the blog posts I've come across are by friends in the non-profit tech sector; I'm not sure if that's because of Google's freaky habit of customizing search results, or because non-profit techies are somehow more obsessed with workflow (comments, anyone?) Here are some of the posts I've found helpful.
Sonny Cloward mapped his workflow, which hinges on Basecamp, Backpack and Mozilla Calendar.
Ruby Sinreich blogged her thoughts on Basecamp plus GTD, which includes creating virtual "people" who represent different contexts, so she can assign her tasks to contexts.
LifeDev reports on using Basecamp with GTD, in this case using to-do LISTS as contexts.
Jon Stahl provided an overview of collaboration practices at ONE/Northwest, which includes using Basecamp.
Next steps
I'm going to take Central Desktop for a serious spin. I'm going to continue praying to the 37Signals gods for true Basecamp-Backpack integration, or to the Remember the Milk guys for Basecamp-RTM integration as an answer to their "how can we start charging for RTM?" quest. I'm going to try out Omni's forthcoming OmniFocus task manager.
And I'm going to resist the temptation to engineer an in-house Drupal solution to our project management wishlist. After all, our needs aren't THAT exotic, and there are an awful lot of people chasing the same vision. I'm trusting that one of them will get us much closer to a solution before long.
Meanwhile, I'm eager to hear from Rob Purdie and others about how we can improve our current Basecamp usage. In particular I'm curious to hear:
- how people use Basecamp as part of GTD
- best practices for to-do list structures and message categories
- best practices for managing privacy and disclosure among staff, clients and contractors
- advice on how to manage personal to-do lists within/alongside Basecamp
- how people cope with Basecamp's lack of task due dates
- experiences with Basecamp alternatives
- advice on encouraging good Basecamp habits among staff, clients and contractors
Falling for Facebook
.28.4 | No Comments »
April 28th, 2007 by Alex
I'm besotted with Facebook. I can see it becoming the primary way that I -- and many other people -- interact online. So if you aren't on Facebook already, join now. Now.
Still here? Don't tell me, you need actual reasons to join. Fine, here goes:
- It's huge, and it's growing. While Facebook started as a network for college students, it opened up to anyone who wanted to join in September 2006, and grew more than 75% -- to almost 25 million users -- by February. I haven't found numbers more recent than that, but I can say that between 1-3 people in my own personal address book (1500 email addresses) are joining every day.
- Your friends are already there. If you import/connect to your address book when you sign up , you'll discover all the folks you know who are already on Facebook. This is a great way to keep in touch with them. You can even find out who in your universe is already on Facebook, before you sign up yourself.
- It mixes business with pleasure. Unlike LinkedIn, which feels like some sort of massive résumé swap, Facebook brings a personal side to its user interactions. More than half of my Facebook friends are colleagues or professional acquaintances, and now I'm finding out about their personal passions as well as their professional pursuits.
- It's one-stop shopping. Facebook offers blogging, photo sharing, messaging, web-to-mobile communications, social networking, and groups.
- It's a window on your world. Once you've added your contacts to your list of Facebook friends, your Facebook home page will be the best place on the web for you to find out what's going on with the folks you know. My favourite part of Facebook -- the thing that makes it truly addictive -- is checking in to see what's going on with all my friends and groups. I can see my friends' latest status reports, their latest new friends and groups, their notes, their photos....all in one place. The best way to get how cool this is is to take a look, but I don't think I can really share a screenshot because that would mean sharing details on my friends' activities. And that underlines what is so great about the Facebook feed: it feels far more personal than what you'd normally see on the wide open web.
- It's pretty. God knows, I've fallen in love with my share of social media tools, but most of them have required me to look past a barebones or even downright ugly interface in order to appreciate the inner beauty of content sharing, social networking, or whatever. In contrast, Facebook has a very polished interface.
- It can help you connect with your community. Facebook has now got an API -- application programming interface -- that lets people extend Facebook with all sorts of little applications and enhancements. (Check out some of the options so far.) And that API is going to see Facebook integrated into more and more 3rd party sites. If you find it easier to connect with your members, supporters, customers or friends on Facebook than to lure them into registering on your own site (and for most organizations, it will be MUCH easier to connect via Facebook) you need to start thinking now about how you can integrate Facebook's community and functionality into your own site.
I'll have more to say about Facebook -- and especially about the options for integrating Facebook with external web communities -- in the coming weeks. But if you want to understand why this matters, you need to join Facebook now. And once you do, be sure to add me as a friend!
Kudos to Fido
.6.9 | 1 Comment »
September 6th, 2005 by Alex
Within a few days of my post, Fido responded with a 100% perfect solution:
The $50 GPRS Unlimited bundle was added to your account. It was possible to do so as we have not yet fully converted to our new Billing platform - thankfully.
The usual condition is that customers will be able to preserve a non-existent bundle or price plan under a grandfathered clause, which is now applicable to you.
So a big thank you to the kind folks at Fido for taking pity on a Treo owner, extra bonus points for a quick resolution, and triple bonus points for responding far more rapidly than I have in my own blog. My only excuse is that I’m on vacation, with limited Internet access…an excuse that should be deleted from my repertoire, now that I’ve got ubiquitous access on the Treo!
Scratching at Fido’s door
.27.8 | 3 Comments »
August 27th, 2005 by Alex
29 days into my love affair with an unlocked Treo and I have discovered why it’s nice not to be married to any one cell phone carrier. I made the leap into wireless, thinking that Fido’s unlimited data plan offered a net; they’ve since pulled the plan, though existing subscribers are grandfathered in — for now. One of Fido’s customer service reps told me today that Fido is planning to scrap its unlimited plan altogether once it migrates to the Rogers network as of September 15th.
I’ve written to Fido, asking them to make good on the access plan I counted on when I bought my Treo. If nice Mark of Fido customer service had the story right, then other Fido customers may want to start whining, barking or growling to make sure they keep the unlimited data plan that they have now.
I’ll be sure to post news of Fido’s response. I’m hoping for a happy outcome but failing that will post details on what’s available in terms of alternative data plans with other Canadian carriers (suggestions more than welcome).
Here’s my letter; contact information included for the benefit of other would-be letter writers:
August 27, 2005
Formal Complaints
FIDO
800 Rue de la Gaucheterie
Suite 400
Montreal, PQ
H5A 1K3fax: 514.937.2554
To the Formal Complaints department:
I am writing to request that you switch me to your unlimited data plan at a rate of $50 per month. I received a verbal commitment from one of your representatives that this plan would be available, and ask you to make good on that commitment.
On July 30 I purchased an unlocked Treo 650 while in the United States, at a cost of $600 US. I purchased this Treo after extensive research on different pda/phone options, and went to the trouble to purchase an unlocked phone during a US visit so that I could stick with Fido. I wanted to stay with Fido because I wanted to keep my Fido number, and because of your unlimited data plan. I know the easiest option would have been to buy your hiptop, but I had had the opportunity to review a hiptop for an article I wrote last winter, and while I was very impressed by it, my experience had convinced me it wasn’t the right device for my needs.
I returned to Vancouver after purchasing the Treo and immediately called to activate my data plan. The Fido representative I spoke with suggested that I start with the 5MB/$25 plan and see whether that met my needs, advising that I could always upgrade to the unlimited plan if my usage warranted it, and that I should simply call after reviewing my first bill on the wireless plan, since that would catch my usage halfway into a monthlong cycle, before I racked up major overages.
I received my first bill on this plan yesterday, and since I had a little over $36 in excess data charges, called today to upgrade to the unlimited plan. Imagine my surprise when I was informed that the plan was no longer available. I spoke with two people in your customer relations department, one of whom had little interest in trying to help me get grandfathered into the unlimited plan (as I understand you have done for people already on the plan – I suppose they were lucky enough to be advised to start with the unlimited plan and work down). Then I was very fortunate to speak with a terrific representative named Mark, who took some time to investigate the possibilities before advising me that the only thing he could do was to reverse that initial $36 in overages.
While I certainly appreciate Mark’s efforts to accommodate me on this first bill, that doesn’t begin to address the cost that I have incurred thanks to your precipitous change in data plans. I did a lot of research (six months!) before making my purchase, and would not have invested in a Treo if it were not for Fido’s unlimited data plan. (I wouldn’t have purchased a hiptop, either; I think I probably would have waited for the implementation of the CRTC decision allowing people to move their cell phone numbers to new carriers, anticipating new phone/pda and data options at that time.)
Thanks to your unannounced change in plans, I am now out-of-pocket some $720 Canadian for this device, not to mention the time I have invested in reorganizing all of my workflow in order to make the most of the Treo. (If you think I’m being dramatic, you can get a sense of how much time I’ve put into this transition by visiting http://www.alexandrasamuel.com/categories/treo/).
Mark mentioned that your upcoming transition to the Rogers system may result in the elimination of your unlimited data plan, which makes me all the more anxious to resolve this situation. At this point the only acceptable resolution is for you to either grandfather me into your unlimited data plan, or for you to waive any excess data charges for at least the next twenty-four months – the minimum amount of time I would expect to use a device that represents such a significant investment.
Since I have been tracking my Treo adventures on my blog, and since some of my fellow bloggers will be interested in the future of your unlimited data plan, I am posting a copy of this letter on my blog at http://www.alexandrasamuel.com/archive/fido-complaint/
Thank you in advance for your consideration, and I look forward to hearing from you soon.
Why have one home page when you can have ten?
.24.8 | 4 Comments »
August 24th, 2005 by Alex
Just discovered a very cool Firefox feature. If you have several web pages open in tabs, and then click Peferences/General in order to set your home page, Firefox gives you the option of setting your home page to “current pageS“.
So if you like to check your bank info, the New York Times, and your Basecamp projects every morning, just open all three pages in tabs (but in the same window). Then follow the steps above to set up Firefox so you can get to all three in one step.
Speed feeding
.22.8 | 4 Comments »
August 22nd, 2005 by Alex
Part of the plan with the telecentre.org ecosystem is to bring relevant content into telecentre.org sites using RSS. In the case of event sites — like the Capetown site that is the very first telecentre event site to get up and running — we’ll use special tags (keywords) to help create our event blogs. That way people who already have their own blogs or web sites can post stories on their own blogs, but have the stories show up on the event site, too.
The challenge is figuring out how to gather all those blog posts together in a way that brings them onto the event site in something close to real time. In other words, how quickly can we move a blog post from a personal site to an event site?
I tested that out today with my first cross-post to the Capetown site. I wrote my post, then included the tag capetowntelecentre, which is the keyword we designated as our “flag this for syndication on the Capetown site” signal.
Next step was to check in — about half an hour later — with the various blog search services that could help us aggregate all these blog posts into a single RSS feed. I had already set up a PubSub search on capetowntelecentre, because PubSub only starts searching for terms once you set up a search; but my PubSub feed hadn’t found my post yet (six hours later, it still hasn’t; nor has it found the test post Rob wrote last night!).
Then I tried Technorati. Technorati had a feed for posts that contained the word capetowntelecentre (where I found my test post), and it had a feed for posts that used capetowntelecentre as a tag (where I found Rob’s post, but not mine, even though I used capetowntelecentre both as a tag and in text. Ah, the enigma that is Technorati.)
Next stop: Feedster, where a chorus of RSS angels opened their throats and spilled forth the whole universe of (two) posts containing the term capetowntelecentre (interesting, pulling mine in indirectly via the Web of Blogs site set up for the upcoming Web of Change conference.) I had a winner! Up went our shiny new RSS feed for capetowntelecentre, which the kind folks at Feedster were good enough to set up (on request) as an ad-free RSS feed, because they thought it was “just the right thing to do” for a “good cause” like telecentre.org.
One more note: Mark tried a test post too, but since he put capetowntelecentre in quotation marks, it didn’t get aggregated; it’s worth noting that you have to avoid quotation marks to make this kind of tag-based aggregation work.
This is your brain in binary
.21.8 | 2 Comments »
August 21st, 2005 by Alex
As part of my ongoing quest to find a Mac counterpart to the Personal Brain (thanks to Jerry Michalski for ruining my life with his software demo) — and as part of my re-evaluation of all my productivity apps in the wake of my Treo purchase — I have been playing with a bunch of new tools. The one that has most quickly insinuated itself into my workflow is VoodooPad, a very simple little tool that solves that eternal problem: what to do with all those little random notes, thoughts and jots that aren’t to-dos, calendar items, or full-fledged documents?
VoodooPad is basically just a wiki for your personal computer, but its very straightforward interface makes it ideal for keeping all your notes in one place, and creating links and categories (a.k.a. tags) that help you organize and retrieve your work. I now keep VoodooPad running all the time and use it for any note or work-in-progress, ranging from project tracking to incipient blog posts to early document drafts to to-do lists. Because VoodooPad offers wiki-style automatic link creation (but doesn’t require that your links be in CamelCase form), it’s very easy to create a new page for every new topic or idea, no matter how small, while preserving its relationship to other ideas/topics/pages; I also use categories as a way of tagging and retrieving all related pages. I’ve created categories for each project I’m working on, and since VoodooPad lets you assign multiple categories to the same page, I’ve assigned pages with code snippets both to the category for my current web project (where the code originated) and to a category called Drupal (since I might want to re-use code in a future project).
One of the intriguing things about VoodooPad is its open API; I’ve been wondering whether it might be possible to create a plug-in that would generate visual maps for link relationships within a Voodoopad document. If so, that would come pretty close to full Brain functionality.
But until that moment arrives, I still find myself searching for something even more Brain-like, which is why I was interested to see David Heinemeier Hansson — part of the 37 Signals team — describe his vision for their much-lauded Backpack tool:
It’s the product I tried to create through a mesh of outlines, email inboxes, post-it notes, The Brain, and a gazillion other systems under the sun.
This has me poking around Backpack again, as I have periodically since it launched. But I’ve yet to start using it, partly because I’m nervous about having big chunks of my life accessible only if I’ve got an Internet connection (yeah, that’s most of the time, but it’s not all the time) and partly because I’m not really clear on how it’s going to make me taller, smarter, or more beloved by small children and animals.
I was intrigued to find Christopher Wimmer’s post on engadgeted.net » a few suggestions on how to improve backpack, in which he talked about his own curiosity about how he’d integrate Backpack and VoodooPad. I’m hoping he may soon offer some insights about Backpack versus (or alongside) VoodooPad, now that he’s become an enthusiastic Backpack user. Does Christopher (or anyone else) have tips on how to make Backpack play nicely on VoodooPad, advice on which things I should use Backpack for and which things I should use VoodooPad for, or a compelling argument about why I should give up one in favour of the other?
In search of the perfect host
.16.8 | 3 Comments »
August 16th, 2005 by Alex
Rob and I seem to be in the market for a new web host. We’ve been delighted with our current hosts, Ace of Space, but as our site and domain empire expands, it’s beginning to look like it would be economical for us to get a hosting package that allows unlimited domains.
A friend recommends IV Hosting, which offers 3GB of space and unlimited domains for only US $99/year. A great deal, but not the most widely-known company, so we’re exploring the various possibilities. After all, switching web hosts isn’t like buying a house or getting married; it’s a serious, long-term commitment that can potentially enhance or destroy your connections to the outside world.
So I’d be delighted to hear from anyone with a reseller host to recommend. We’re looking for hosting of unlimited domains, ideally also IMAP support, and somewhere or other I swear I saw somebody offer free domain registrations into the deal. We might also consider Virtual Private Server options but those sound a bit high-maintenance, so I think we’ll be happier with a reseller package.
Rob Cottingham » A little something for the Getting Things Done crowd
.12.8 | 1 Comment »
August 12th, 2005 by Alex
OK, Getting Things Done fans: my extremely witty and brilliant husband has got a must-see web page:
Rob Cottingham » A little something for the Getting Things Done crowd
Drupalled
.9.8 | No Comments »
August 9th, 2005 by Alex
OK, I’m officially drinking the Drupal Koolaid. Boris skyped me through the process of putting our doc on choosing the telecentre.org platform right into the Drupal handbook itself. Now I feel all Drupally and won’t be able to sleep.