Tag Archives: google

Staying Organized and Developing Incrementally

As promised in an earlier post, I will be discussing the importance of organization and the use of various tools to help keep progressive development. In the past I used to think that if you were going to write blog posts you had to sit down for an hour and think of your topic, research, write, edit and rewrite your posts all at once. I tried to do this for a little while and I ended up becoming counter productive. The problem with a busy lifestyle is that you never have the time to just sit down and concentrate on one thing. This is why I developed a different strategy.
Incremental development is the best way to keep productive without overwhelming yourself. The most noticeable part in incremental development is that you don't feel overwhelmed, which in turn wears you down. I have found that when you write a little bit then put it down, the next time you you come back you will read what you wrote and revise it for the better; therefore, you get a creativity boost because it forces you to reread and edit your work. The only drawback to incremental development is that it will take you longer to complete a particular task but, hopefully your work will be more quality, not quantity. Also, when you are busy, getting work done eventually is better than not getting anything done at all.
In order for incremental development to work, you have to have a place to jot down your idea's. Some people find sticky notes to be a very easy way to jot down your ideas. Now I am not talking about grabbing a pen and post-it notes; however, if that works best for you, by all means use it. For me, I sit in front of a computer about 80% of my day. It is better for me to use computer based note taking software. Some good options are Tomboy (for the Linux users) and sticky-notes (for the windows users). Personally, I like to use web applications because of the multiple computer problem.
As previously noted, I sit in front of a computer about 80% of the day. One problem I face is that I have a laptop, which I am in front of part of the day and during the other part of the day I am in front of my desktop. Because of this, I had some notes, files, etc. on one computer and not on the other. To over come this, I use a series of applications to make sure that no matter what computer I am on, I will have the latest updates that I have made. When writing my posts, I have ditched the sticky-notes / Tomboy method. Instead I have grown accustomed to google notebook which, unfortunately may be going away. Don't worry because there are some other alternatives This ways I can create various notebooks for different topics. I have one for my personal site http://seandfeeney.com and one for each website I write for. I then can create posts (notes as google notebook calls them) for each blog post I wish to write. I also create a "note" for general website ideas and changes. This makes ideas and posts easier to write but, what about pictures, documents and other various files?
In order to address the problem with files being located on multiple computers, I recommend looking into various file transfer or on-line storage programs / services. In a previous post, I recommended the use of Dropbox. Dropbox is a great way to keep certain files on all of your computers without having to do anything more than just putting the file in your Dropbox folder. I won't get into to much detail here if you want to know more read my previous post. The only problem with drop box is that the free version has a 2GB limit. That is normally a good amount of space for everyday use but, if you have a lot of pictures, videos, etc. you will quickly run out of space. This is why you may want to look into programs like SyncToy from Microsoft. SyncToy, however, only works with windows. If you need a program that works for both windows and UNIX based operating systems you may find Unison accomplishes what you are looking for. Finally, if you are willing to spend a little money you can keep all of this information in one place by using on-line storage services like Mozy. Unfortunately, it doesn't appear that Mozy supports Linux operating systems at this time. If you really need Linux support then you are probably better off using Dropbox and upgrading your account to the 50 GB version for $9.99 (at the time of this post).
Finally, consolidating your work is essential to bringing everything together. Using applications like Firefox is a great way to bring your work together. For web design, I have found that the less you have to switch between applications and the less applications you have open, the easier you life will be. There are a number of features to Firefox that help you consolidate. First, it is a web browser and you can test and view web pages. You can also use services like google notebook, google reader, google docs etc. There are other similar services out there but, Google integrates their free services together in a nice, simple way. That is just the basics though, Firefox also has a lot of add-ons that can increase productivity and help you to stay organized.

Digg’s Read Later Bookmarking Problem

When you have been using digg since 2005 (see my profile seandfeeney), you pick up a few things along the way that, in a way, ruin the experience. It is known that some content that reaches digg popular is, well, less than adequate. In order to really understand the point I will be trying to make, you must first understand why someone Digg’s a story on the popular social news site digg.com.  Some people digg to express their liking for the article, others try to drive traffic to their friends or their own website.  The overall goal of digg.com is to let the users decide what stories, articles, videos, pictures etc. should be seen by the masses.  The problem, is those who use the site as a social bookmarking tool to read an article or follow up with it later.
Back to the original point, unfortunately there are an over whelming number of articles that lack substance on digg popular.  Part of this is due to armies of users who push their friends articles for potential fame and fortune or for quid pro quo reasons.  This is an issue in itself but, it becomes a bigger problem when other digg users discover the post that appears to be getting a ton of diggs but, the server is down on that small website because of the digg effect. The result, digg users start digging the article to read it later, causing a broken submission that reaches digg popular with no real substance or value. Don’t believe me?  Next time you encounter an article that links to a crashed server with no mirror in the comments, refresh the page a few times and watch the diggs keep climbing.
For years now, digg users have been begging for an article caching service that is embedded into digg to help users keep on reading and digging even when the main server is down.  Lets face it, duggmirror.com had a lot of promise but, missed more articles than it caught. If the Google to acquire digg.com rumors are true we may just see Google’s website caching tool integrated with digg article submissions. This alone would be a win-win for everyone because Google be able to cache more of the internet without relying strictly on crawling the net and digg users will be much happier to be able to read the articles before digging them.
Since no one outside of Digg or Google really knows if the Google to aquire digg.com rumors are real, there may be an easier solution to help to keep the content on digg.com more substantial.  For this, I recommend that the guys/gals at digg.com add a “read later” option to every post.  This way people don’t have to digg an article in order to bookmark it for a read, later when the server comes back up or the user has more time to read the article.  This will significantly reduce the number of broken / lame articles that reach digg popular.