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.