ClearDev Plug

Thanks, Jake!  Check out the station here!

One of the worst things about getting organized is the trap of getting obsessed with organizational tools.  It happens to a lot of people.  Just look at the number of visitors going to sites like LifeHacker or 43Folders.  Getting your tasks organized can’t be so difficult that you need post after post of tips… can it?

After battling with an addiction to multiple todo applications, binders, notebooks, and planners, I decided I just needed something to keep a list of tasks with due dates and organize them by project and place/context.  And the hook was I needed it to be available anywhere and fully up to date.

Thanks to “cloud computing”, I found a really good solution: “Remember the Milk“.  It can be a simple todo list, or you can pimp it out into different lists and projects, contexts, and more.  The sweet thing is that it’s available everywhere.  On the big computer, the laptop, and the iPhone.  Plus, thanks to Google Gears, you don’t have to be online to use the site.  It will download everything to your local machine and then when you hook back up to the internet, everything syncs up.  Very nice feature if you have a decent train ride everyday.

Now “RTM” just released an application for the iPhone.  I haven’t used it yet, but I have used the iPhone interface via the browser.  It worked fine over the EDGE network.

One of the BEST features is that you can print your lists in a nice looking format.  Months ago I used an expensive (relatively) local application called OmniFocus.  When printing lists, I got some crazy formats.  Hopefully they fixed that by now.

I did pay for the “pro” account ($25 for the year), mainly because I didn’t want these guys to disappear.  That’s one of the only threatening things about relying on the cloud.  If they go out of business, so do my todo lists.

Oxford University compiled a list of top ten irritating phrases and I think they’re on to something.  Here they are:

The top ten most irritating phrases:

1. At the end of the day
2. Fairly unique
3. I personally
4. At this moment in time
5. With all due respect
6. Absolutely
7. It’s a nightmare
8. Shouldn’t of
9. 24/7
10. It’s not rocket science

Here are a few we’d like to add:

1. game changer
2. net net
3. leverage synergies (used individually as well)
4. hard stop
5. think outside the box

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to scour the site to make sure we don’t use any of these!  Feel free to add your favs in the comments…

We do a lot of work with artists and galleries in case anyone has missed that, so I thought I’d pass this along.  We received an email regarding the Pool Art Fair in Miami Beach, December 5, 6, and 7.  Here’s a bite of the release:

ABOUT THE POOL ART FAIR
The show focuses largely on challenging and innovative artists that do not have representation in art galleries. The fair’s ambition is to create a meeting ground for artists, art dealers, curators, and buyers. It is an exceptional opportunity for curators and gallery owners to hand pick un-discovered talents.

PooL is the successor to the acclaimed New York Independent Art Fair (November 2000), a groundbreaking exhibition that attracted thousands of US and international visitors. The simple, modest approach of the PooL Art Fair offers an exciting alternative to the “art fair” experience for dealers and collectors, as well as the general public.

Check out these sites for details:

www.frereindependent.com
www.poolartfair.com

If you have news you want to share, don’t be shy.  Let us know.

It’s election day here in the U.S.  It only took me about 10 minutes to vote but now I can spend hours checking out the coverage.  This year there’s a new site that mashes up Google Maps, and Twitter’s tweets to produce TwitterVoteReport.com.  

The site publishes a steady stream of reports coming in from Twitter users that mark their posts with #votereport.  I’m guessing they used something like Yahoo Pipes to bring this info together.  It’s pretty cool to watch if you have the time.  Maybe you can use it on your own site!

If that’s not for you, maybe go out and pick up some free election day stuff.

A festive wreath found on the upper east side.  Happy Halloween!

American Express recently posted a series of videos from Seth Godin and Tom Peters from the “Inside the Entrepreneurial Mind: New Perspectives on Business” conference.  Being a fan of both (and maybe a super-fan of Seth’s), I think the videos are fantastic.  If you have a business, a passion, or an all-consuming hobby (and it’s likely you do if you’re a ClearDev client), you may want to take a few minutes and check out the videos.

There’s one on having a blog.  If you don’t have a blog, installing it is about a two or three click process with our Installatron service.  I recommend Wordpress (that’s what this blog is built on).  It’s incredibly flexible, easy to use, and you can fully customize it.

This video on “Social Networking - good for small business?” is great as well.  It’s not about the numbers!

Judging from the number of MySQL databases created on the CD servers, databases are driving just about all of our websites.  From blogs to collecting visitor info, there’s a lot of information floating around in “the cloud.”  And it’s really powerful stuff.  The part I could never get my head around is that if you can do all this crazy stuff with your site and a MySQL database, why is it so hard to kick out some Avery mailing labels?  Or how about an easy way to export select fields on the fly without command line karate?  

All that stuff and more was one of the joys of using a desktop database application called FileMaker Pro.  The only drag about that was that unless you did a bunch of non-standard voodoo, driving a website with that system was tricky.  So, we lived in two different worlds  - the web database to drive the site(s) and the desktop database to do all the fancy little tricks.  

Now… worlds collide!

With FileMaker Pro 9, you can tell FileMaker to look at a MySQL database up in “the cloud.”  It pulls in the live data and you can format, update, output, modify, whatever your heart desires.  From first look, it’s what we’ve been looking for.  It gives us all the accessibility to have info available and active on a website, as well as the flexible output formats so many of our clients need to get their work done.  Plus, it’s seamless.

This coming week, I’ll be working on a project for a client that should put this to the test.  I’ll keep you updated here with some screenshots and feedback.  Any highlights or lowlights, I’ll note and pass along.  Hope this helps in your future projects!

I’ve been a fan of Brian Gardner’s “premium” Wordpress themes for sometime.  In fact we bought the whole developer pack from him earlier this year.  They’re great out of the box but the real power is in customizing them to give them just the right look.  Plus we mix and match the code from the different themes to really supercharge them.

If $300 (or whatever the price was) is too salty for you, don’t despair because next month he’s going to start releasing some ‘open source’ themes.  ‘Open source’ as in free.  He shared some sneak previews on his blog and they look super pro.  I can’t wait to get my hands on them.

If you’re a Wordpress user, you might want to bookmark Brian’s site.  Also, if you have the money and a purpose for them, you might want to pick up those premium themes because I think they’ll be disappearing before long.

Just a quick update to let you know that ClearDev is now on Twitter.  I reckon we’ll use it to keep you up-to-date with daily stuff that’s happening around here and even use it in the case of “emergencies”.  You can subscribe to us here:  http://twitter.com/cleardev

Here’s an idea - if you’re on Twitter and you host with us, leave your address in the comments.  Would be cool to know what you guys are up to!