I wrote recently how I was using a wiki to manage my time, projects, and deliverables. But some fundamental truths about this practice become apparent to me after a couple of months. Here are a few things I’ve found.

Don’t become enamored of your own writings. It’s real easy to fill out a page of things you intend to do in the coming weeks. It’s even easier to feel proud of yourself for doing so. It’s nice to see that page in all it’s wiki goodness neatly displaying those goals you intend to achieve; neat line items surrounded by a familiar wrapper and compelling navigation. But the whole point of using this wiki is to keep track of events on a daily basis. You need to be willing to delete, rewrite, add, change; really mess with the thing on a daily basis to make it truly reflective of your reality. This is not a book, not a narrative. You are capturing those things that you must be aware of constantly to drive and prioritize your business.

Set the wiki as your default home page. Make it the first thing you see each morning (that is, if you’re like me and the first thing you do is grab coffee and fire up your computer). Doing this forces you to immediately consider the day ahead, the week ahead, and get your head wrapped around what needs doing. I set mine to my This Week page so I get an overview of what I have done and what I have left to do for the week. After this, I check out the People to Ping page to see if there’s anyone needing attention there. Next, I recheck my Client Whiteboard to make sure I am on track with current projects. All the while I am doing this, I am editing the pages. Deleting, rewriting, notating, making sure they reflect reality as much as possible.

Keep it simple. For me, about five pages is enough to capture what I need (including one page for internal projects and another of feeds for reading). Some folks will need more, some less. (You could do it all on one page with breaks and headers, but that makes for a lot of scrolling.) By using only a handful of pages, you keep your thoughts clear and to the point and in context. It also makes for a very simple and easily navigable left hand menu.

I cannot imagine my worklife without this tool; it is how I manage everything and keep myself organized. But in order for it to truly add value, you have to give it the proper attention.

written by Christopher Murray

Of necessity, I was recently forced to migrate to a new computer. My laptop has become flaky, shutting itself down without notice at random intervals throughout the day. I have my jacked-up alienware box that I use for my home studio and decided to dual purpose that for music and work. At the same time, I have shut down my server here at home and moved my website, development environment, and email to a hosted service. Lots of changes this week, and not the fun kind.

This all went exceptionally well, with the exception of my blowing out an extra 250GB hard drive by plugging the wrong power source into it–the smoke coming from the back was a dead giveaway. But what makes this a more interesting experiment is that rather than digging through boxes in the attic to find my old MS Office and Photoshop discs, I have downloaded and installed as replacements the open-source tools OpenOffice and GIMP.

OpenOffice is an office productivity suite that mirrors the offerings of MS Office. Included in the bundle are sisters to Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and several other applications. Each of these applications can save and open native MS documents. I am delighted to report that so far these tools work seamlessly with MS products. I have found no limitations (although I am admittedly not a MS power user), and at the cost of no dollars I am now a believer. (I should note here also that I did try Google Docs for an hour or so, but had to forget about it when it refused to accept formatting I had done in Word–these things need to play nice with the rest of the world).

GIMP was even more of a surprise. I remember using GIMP on a linux machine years ago, and abandoning it quickly because it was so different from my beloved Photoshop. I found the learning curve too steep. But having used GIMP for a few hours the other day I can say the product has definitely matured to the point where I can use it for everything I need. The interface also has become more intuitive. I’m not sure if GIMP is to the point where it can be used by Photoshop professionals, but for what most of us need it is definitely all there.

I’m not ready to take the jump to a Linux desktop, but these open-source tools fill a huge gap in my working toolset, and remarkably, they’re free. (As with any open-source offerings, they do gratefully accept donations, both monetary and development contributions).

written by Christopher Murray \\ tags: gimp, open-source, openoffice

At any given time I have a dozen or more customers and prospects to manage deliverables for. Add to this that I have struggled for years to find a good way to keep things like this organized. About a month ago I installed MediaWiki on my site to help manage my workload. I have a Client Whiteboard, a Partner Whiteboard, a People to Ping page, a page for my own internal projects (business infrastructure), a listing of Articles to Read, and a simple page called This Week which simply lays out what I hope to accomplish in the week ahead. This has been huge for me. Each morning this is the first place I go to get a handle on the day’s and week’s work.

Throughout the week I find lots of articles I want to read, both industry news and development ideas. Or course, I manage these by tagging them in deli.cio.us. But it occurred to me this morning that it would be infinitely more manageable if I were able to pull the feeds from deli.cio.us into my Articles to Read wiki page. I did some Googling and found a plugin called SimplePie. And it could not be simpler to install and use. You just drop the plugin into your wiki’s extension folder, add an include line into your LocalSettings file, and then use the following syntax on your wiki page to display the feed (you also can pass parameters within that tag to control display options like number of articles and text styles):

<feed>http://del.icio.us/rss/webdevteam</feed>

Done. I have been advocating using social media tools to customers of Intranets. Using things like deli.cio.us, Flickr, FaceBook, and even blogging tools, users of an Intranet can collect and share all sorts of information without having to own and manage the systems that provide them. For one company, I set up a group deli.cio.us account and gave everyone access. We displayed the feed on their group homepage. Within a week, everyone had contributed articles relevant to their work and their home page became far more valuable.

written by Christopher Murray \\ tags: intranet, social media, web tools, wiki, workplace

Many months ago (perhaps even two years ago) I installed the WordPress multi-user package on my development host. Within minutes, I abandoned it. I can’t recall now what the issue was, but I do remember thinking to myself that if it is this broken just trying to get the thing up and running, it isn’t yet ready for prime time (or my debugging time, either).

But yesterday, imagine my surprise when after downloading, unpacking, and installing I found myself tricking out a fresh instance of WordPress Mu (the Mu is actually a symbol rather than letters on their site). I went out and found some very nice themes; one three-column setup that I am particularly enamored with, and began customizing and exploring the new features.

Why am I bothering with this? Because WordPress in an of itself is a simple but powerful content management system. It can be tailored for almost any kind of site (newspapers, universities, any kind of blog), and makes it very easy for writers and editors to publish and own their own content. It also integrates well with other open-source tools, like vBulletin. And now, having this multi-user version, we can literally host hundreds of blogs using the same WordPress instance. Imagine a company with several brands or locations that wants to have their sites all look and behave similarly but also wants each to manage their own content. This kind of flexibility (and centralization) is a huge step in providing that kind of control. I’ll be spending a lot of time with this system in the coming months.

written by Christopher Murray \\ tags: cms, multiuser, wordpress