I'm trying out this new design that's available from wordpress. What do you think? I can't use my own design on WordPress.com, and I'm waiting until their export feature is ready so that I can move this blog to my own server and set it up properly.

So should I keep this design or go back to the old one?

RSS Feeds. When it comes to All-Time Great Inventions, RSS feeds are right up there with air conditioning, cars and sippy cups. Well, for me anyway.

What is an RSS feed? RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and what it basically allows you to do is to pull content from other sites. You can (with permission) stream that content on your site or, what I love, you can use a feed reader to read all your favorite blogs in one place.

If you press your refresh button a little too often and spent hours just surfing to all your favorite blogs to see what is new, then you're about to think I'm really cool. But you do anyway, right?…right?

A feed reader is a program that you install on your computer (or you can use an online feed reader) and it pulls all the latest content from your favorite sites and allows you to browse and read at your leisure and notifies you when a site has been updated. Technically, you could read a blog everyday and never visit the site.

Cooooool, huh?

So here are some great Feed Readers:

Mac: The best reader for Mac is NetNewsWire. There is a free, light version that's great. The paid version, though, has all kinds of goodies like a built in browser, post flagging, smart lists and can handle podcast feeds.

Web: GMAIL -If you have a gmail account, you can use their built in rss reader and then read your email and blogs all in one page. That is convenient, but I don't like the interface of the Google RSS reader all that much. If you don't have a gmail account, just let me know and I can send you an invite. Bloglines is another web based RSS feed reader.

Windows: For those of you who are on a PC, go and heal thyself. In the meantime, Feed Demon is supposed to be a good RSS reader for PC.

There you go. Feel free to post a comment if you have any questions!  

This site is still in private alpha, but watch this video and let the drool fall. This web app looks incredible.

Here’s their main site.

I often think of blogging ideas for my various blogs, but I’m not always up for surfing to all my various sites and having to log in to each one….

Enter Ecto. Ecto is a desktop program that allows you to write blog entries for multiple blogs from one interface – and a nice one at that. I can easily add photos:

I’ll write a better review once I’ve played with it a bit more, but thus far, it’s very cool.

This is hilarious. Just click the link here to watch.

I recently found a blog dedicated to Apple email program Mail.app. The site is called Hawk Wings and it’s written by Tim Gaden. He’s got some excellent Mail resources.

The best thing I found on the site, though, was his article on implementing a GTD system in Mail. I can’t say I really know much about GTD other than what I’ve read over at 43Folders, but what I’ve learned has been very helpful in helping me be more productive and get a better handle on all the stuff I’m juggling.

Anyway, Tim’s article highlights two plugins that are available for Mail: Mail Act-On and Mail-Tags. I’ve only been using them for about a week, but I think they’re the best thing since sliced bread (was bread ever *not* sliced?). With Mail Tags, you can attach notes, projects, priorities and flags to any email. I really like the notes section as it has allowed me to jot down my initial thoughts about and email without having to create a reply.
So, for organizing my inbox I’ve basically created five new folders:

• Action
• Defer
• Future
• Waiting On
• Reference

Each time a message comes in, I file it in one of those categories.

Then I also have a Smart mailbox entitled Next Actions. Any emails that I mark ‘urgent’ with Mail Tags automatically go in the Next Action mailbox. I try to just keep 5 items in there at a time. Each time I finish something, I look in my Actions folder for another item to mark as urgent and put in my Next Actions folder.
This system has increased my productivity because my inbox is now EMPTY. Yes, empty. Psychologically, that really helps me feel like I’m on top of things and ready to conquer more. Then the only place that I go when I have time to start a new task is my Next Actions folder – which again, only has 5 items it in – it makes it all seem doable.

Again, it’d only been a week, but so far I’m loving my new system. I used to look at the 150+ emails in my inbox and be thoroughly overwhelmed, but now, I look at my empty inbox and I’m ready to tackle some replies.

How do you all manage your email?

After months, ok, maybe years of searching for the perfect to do list program, I think I’ve finally found what I’ve been looking for. Heck, I paid $70 for it, I hope it’s “the one”.

So what is it? It’s OmniOutliner with the kGTD script. I’m *loving* it. It’s really helped me to get organized because I can list my tasks by project AND by context. It syncs with my palm and I can use Quicksilver to easily add items to my list without ever opening the program.

OmniOutliner is pretty stinking cool all by itself as a to-do list app, a general outliner app and even just a word processing app. Combine that with the kGTD script, and I’m ready to conquer my procrastination!

I’m a web designer by trade and I also happen to be a program junkie…if you haven’t noticed. I’m always looking for the best programs to solve all my problems.

One problem I had was managing all my clients, their information, invoices, to dos,  yada, yada.

Then I found Studiometry and I love it almost as much as my Mac. It actually prompted me to buy my mac because although there is a PC version, some of the really handy features are only available for Mac.

I can time my work on a project and then send an invoice with just a couple of clicks. Then in Studiometry I can easily see what invoices have been paid and which ones haven’t. I can also have all my most important client info – ftp, cms logins etc. in one place.

I tried lots of different programs, but this one was by far the best for my needs.