Seriously over the past few months I have been so obsessed with finding the perfect GTD/Todo System that I have become less productive. I reached a point that I was downloading the same desktop system or signing up on the same site a few times a week. It’s crazy. I scower the internet looking for anything that is GTD/Todoish and I either sign up or download it immediately. Once I’m in I give it about a 5 minute once over. In that time I look for ease of use, Firefox plugins (very important), iGoogle/Netvibes modules, SMS options, email/gmail integration, lots of Ajaxy goodness, a mass import function and on and on. Then I’m done. Most of the time I never go back or when I do it’s because I forgot that I had already seen it several time before. What’s even crazier is that I use Todoist to track the sites I sign up for so what I come of my binge I have some trail to account my lost productivity. Oh but just to keep my self on the edge of insanity I bounce between using Google Notebook, Toodledo, Vitalist and Remember The Milk for tracking my Obsession as well.
During one of my “this is the last GTD site I’ll sign up for” binges I got all jazzed up about using Backpack as my personal nerve center. I set up several different pages for Todo’s, Contacts, Reminders, Links and what not. I gave it the bold title of “My Life Organized”. Then just a few days ago I stumbled upon my Backpack site and this should come as no surprise that the site was pretty much empty. The main page with the bold title was blank. Just the title “My Life Organized” heading on a blank page. No Todos, no contacts. Just a good idea not executed.
But it’s not just GTD stuff it’s everything these days. Firefox Plugins to Blogging and Task Management. Google Desktop, Yahoo Widgets, Offline Desktop apps and Outlook plugins and GMail Greasmonkey scripts. For gods sakes I logged in to Facebook and said give me one of every thing on their apps page. I had to reset my Netvibes account because it becme so over loaded with GTDish modules. I’ve got so many Greasemonkey scripts for GMail that when ever I open GMail in a new tab Firefox comes to a screeching hault and it takes up to 2 minutes to load my inbox. Oh and if the GTD app offers GCal/iCal integration you can beet your sweet a$$ that I’ve added it to my GCal account.
Wow, I’m starting to feel a lot better now that I got that off my chest.
So if you’re going to comment please do not feel the need to recommend any Web Apps or Software unless of course it’s a really cool one and I shouldn’t miss it.
This is a very easy hack that I created today.
Prerequisites
- You'll need a RememberTheMilk Account
- The Custom Buttons Firefox Extension
Once you've got a RTM account setup and the Custom Buttons extension installed you're ready to add the button.
In FF click View->Add new button....
A dialog box will appear with space to add a Name, an Image, some Code and Initialization Code.
The name and image are self explanatory. The Code box is where you'll paste the code below which will launch a new window that displays a form to add a new RTM task. The Initialization Code box is for code that will run when the browser starts up.
Past this JavaScript code into the Code box which will launch the RTM dialog when the custom button is clicked.
-
javascript:(function(){h='www.rememberthemilk.com';p='/services/ext/addtask.rtm';if(window.getSelection){d=window.getSelection();}else if(document.getSelection){d=document.getSelection();}else if(document.selection){d=document.selection.createRange().text;};cp='http://'+h+p+'?d='+encodeURIComponent(d)+'&t='+encodeURIComponent(document.title);w=window.open(cp,'addwindow','status=no,toolbar=no,width=475,height=260,resizable=yes');setTimeout(function(){w.focus();}, 500);})();
Click OK to save and close the dialog and then click View-Toolbars-Customize and add your new button to a toolbar.
Clicking the button will launch the RTM form and now you can add tasks right from Firefox.
A few days ago I was working on a PHP project. I did the usual edit, upload and refresh to see my changes. But instead of seeing the results of my new code I see a "undefined function" error. That's odd I thought. So, I check my text editor to see that I was in the right folder and I was. I check my ftp client to be sure I uploaded to the right directory and I did. Humm???
What happened?
) by jayIf your in the market for a groupware solution I highly reccomend activeCollab. It's free and Open Source and it's got most of the beels and whistles the other free/pay hosted services offer. But the thing I like most is that it's a downloadable/installable server software that I have control over. This me be a turn off to those with out web hosting but for $40 a year you can have a domain name and excelent shared hosting fron 1and1.com. At $40 it's cheaper than the Personal account on Basecamp and still has more features.
A new version of activeCollab just came out (9/28) and it's pretty darn good. I have compared activeCollab with Basecamp and ZohoProjects and for a free solution nither Basecamp nor Zoho can't even compre.
Zoho is really nice though it's well polished and very responsive but the free (beta) account is limited to one project and they are still working on a pricing scheme. That alone left me to question if I could justify hosting a Intellectual Property Project on a service that is beta and does not clearly state that I would have a free account for life. But that's just me, paranoid.
Basecamp is nice but it's just a glorified version of Backpackit and quite frankly not everyone like lists.
If you don't have your own server I'd recommend Zoho for a parject with multi-people or for a Independent Contractor. But if you do have a server and know what you are doing then activeCollab is your answer. It's free. It's got tons of features and the community is growing.
This is my first publicy released WordPress Plugin/Widget. This plugin reads a Writely RSS Feed and display the items in a Widget on your sidebar. It's based entirley on the RSS Feed Widget that comes with the WordPress Widgets Control but instead of just displaying the feed items I have modified it to remove the Introduction and Private items.
How It Works:
The Writely RSS Feed Widget will display a list of links of documents from Writely. If a user is either the owner or a collaborator they will see the document in edit mode other wise they will see the document in a read-only view mode.
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I recenty decied that I wanted to upgrade my hosting package. The FAQ's recommends that you back EVERYTHING up before applying for the upgrade and that's when I realized that a) I did not have a good back-up sloution and b) I did not have a file storage solution for my back-ups.
Since I work on gotfoo.org from both work and home I did not want to use a local storage solution. I wanted to be able to access a backup from anywhere. This lead me to invsstigate Online File Strorage services in search of a free solution.
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Tags Tags Tags. I love Tags and I love Tagging. So the Ultimate Tag Warrior is a perfect one-stop-shop for your tagging needs.
When I was writing my post, Wordpress Plugins: Technorati I noticed that I had the UTA plugins in my plugins directory but I wasn't using the plugin. I had UTW there for to support the SEO Plugin which, by the way is also very handy. I think I did tryit out at one point but at the time the concept of tags and tagging was lost on me. But now that I have discovered a new addiction to tags the UTW is the perfect enabler.
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