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

I’ve been spending time lately culling through a variety of plugins for WordPress to offer clients who want to beef up their CMS capabilities. I came across three recently that I find particularly useful.

The first is Flickr Photo Gallery. The toolbar integrates nicely with the image upload component in the writing window of WordPress. Once configured, rather than just selecting from images I have uploaded to my blog site, I can also select images from my photos on Flickr. I can add individual photos or whole albums. Once on a published page, I can view them in their own window with navigation, or go right over to Flickr and use their viewing tools. This is a great solution for companies who want to display images (say a recent event they sponsored) without the overhead of managing their own image library application.

The second is Viper’s Video Quicktags. I’m not sure why, but I found it very difficult to embed a YouTube video into my blog. I found lots of sites offering code that required cutting and pasting into the code view of the editing window. None of these worked for me. Finally, I stumbled on this plugin, which like the Flickr plugin, offers a solution nicely integrated into my editing toolbar. And it could not be simpler: press the icon and a window prompt pops up requesting the URL of the video. Press OK and the code is inserted to your posting. It works with all the major sites like YouTube, Google Video, IFilm, and more. And like the Flickr tool above, this also provides a business solution of linking to content without having to own and manage the content system itself.

There is one other plugin that I think is truly invaluable. The All in One SEO Pack. This form below the editing window ensures that every post I make has the required metadata to keep the search engines a-calling. There are also lots of other options in the admin interface. This is a must have, while the others are just good to have.

written by Christopher Murray

Brilliant slideshow by Khoi Vinh discussing the differences between digital and print media from a design perspective. The takeaway here is that print media was designed to tell a story … that narrative was the guiding principle and as such control was the most critical tool. With digital and interactive media the guiding principle is behavior, thus removing some (if not most) of the control from the designer and putting in the hands of the user (a notion that infuriates many designers). Fascinating stuff and worth clicking through the slideshow.

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written by Christopher Murray