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

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

The title of this post comes directly from an ad on Craigslist today. I kid you not, here is the text of the ad:

We are seeking a creative person to update our 8 page website. Hoping to work with a student or amateur – No Pros Please.

Website originally created in Yahoo Sitebuilder software.

Short, quick, and easy job.

People, please. You truly get what you pay for. Please do not try this at home, or more importantly, with your business. Call me.

written by Christopher Murray

I felt bad leaving my good old cmurray.org blog behind. That was my first crack at writing a blog, the one that let me pretend to be one of the Churbucks, O’Regans, Cahills, or Slaters in this space. I left one last post out there letting people know the site would languish and to please come visit this new site. But even better, I found some tools to help me.

The easiest was to simply edit my Apache configuration file to include a redirect from cmurray.org to northboroughgroup.com.

RedirectMatch ^/$ http://www.northboroughgroup.com/blog/

Using this method rather than a meta refresh tag makes it seamless to the viewer (the refresh tag is often slow to actually take action).

But what of my feed? How do you redirect that? Turns out there is a nifty WordPress plugin called FeedBurner Plugin 1.2. The process was as simple as uploading the code to my site, activating the plugin from the control panel, and then adding the URL of the feed to redirect to. Now anyone who gets the cmurray.org feed through a reader (like Google Reader or BlogLines) will see articles from the northboroughgroup.com feed.

written by Christopher Murray

One of the most exciting aspects of setting up a new site is turning on Google Analytics. At first, of course, you will see zeros in all those places displaying site metrics. And then, after clicking reload on your browser a couple hundred times, the numbers begin populating. From there you can witness the growth and expanse of your new site, see who is visiting, what they are coming for, how they got there, where they are coming from … all sorts of useful and fascinating information.

I’ll be watching my metrics closely over the next few weeks. I’ve added my site to the appropriate places, have tagged my content and home page in a way the ‘bots’ should find them. It will be most interesting to see who visits the site and what they looked at. Even better will be if they call and hire me.

Next, we’ll get Feedburner plugged in …

written by Christopher Murray \\ tags: google analytics metrics