This is not necessarily a conscious strategy on my part; it was just the way I was raised and the way I think. Being in business for myself, I can control how I manage my time and my clients’ expectations. Turns out it also is a good way to edge out your competition, by being more responsive than the next guy.

So, with this post, I begin writing in my blog again (but not at the expensive of my clients’ time). In the coming weeks, look for some case studies on the projects we have been working on over the last year. Hopefully, they will inspire you to take a look at your own sites and judge whether or not they are living up to your goals and expectations.

My beautiful little girls are of course my greatest blessing. Mia turned seven this year and Sophia turned two. (My wife and I, well, yes, we had birthdays too.) They truly fill my life with a lot of joyful mayhem.

I also am blessed with a wife who truly supports me in everything I do. I’d be a mere fraction of the man I am without her.

I am grateful to have finally finished my BS degree in Information Technology and was even more blessed to have my family surrounding me at the graduation.

I am extremely grateful to my clients for giving me the opportunity to do good work for them, but also for the chance they’ve given me to start this business, which is something I have wanted to do for a very long time.

I mostly want to wish everyone a healthy, prosperous, and joyous new year. I hope you all find what you want in your life.

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.

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).

This should be a ongoing series. There are so many companies who still do not get basic customer service. Today’s example is brought to you by VistaPrint.

I’ve used VistaPrint only a few times: to order business cards for both my wife and I, to have some cheap brochures printed up, and to take advantage of a couple of freebies like branded refrigerator magnets. But since I started to use them the volume of email offers they send me (daily) has reached spamming proportions. I get sometimes two email ads from them a day, offering 24-hour savings on everything from cards to coffee mugs, shirts, hats, banners. Everything I pretty much don’t need.

But today they lost my business. They send me an email (fancy, designed like a newsletter) with photos of my business cards. The ad states that these items still are in my account cart, but if I do not place an order by December 15, they will be removed from said cart. What reason–other than strong-arming a sale–could they possibly have for needing to clear out my cart? Are they running low on disk space? Database is getting too full? Need more room for higher-end customers? I tell you, I can’t believe they have resorted to threatening me to make a sale. Here’s the copy from the email:

We wanted to let you know that the items currently in your VistaPrint account portfolio (shown below), have not been ordered and will expire on Dec 15, 2007. Once the items have expired, you will be unable to recover them.

Well, what goes around, eh? Not that I am a volume consumer of their products, but now I am not at all a consumer of their products. I wonder how many others were equally turned off by this tactic. Do you suppose it worked on lots of others and they just racked up lots of sales? No, I don’t either.

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.

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.