Online Task and Time Management Tool Debuts

I’ve written before about the Action Machine, a productivity application that brings the tried and true “time boxing” technique into the 21st century. I was one of the early users of the Action Machine and have found it to be an excellent tool for task and time management.

The latest version of the Action Machine has been relabeled as the Action Enforcer and is being sold by Dennis Becker of Earn1KaDay fame. Dennis is known as The Five Buck Guy for his now famous 5 Bucks A Day system. The Action Enforcer is ideally suited to the 5 Bucks A Day system as it helps the user focus on a single task for a given period of time by reducing distractions. In addition, the time boxing strategy at the heart of the Action Enforcer compels the user to plan a set of tasks, prioritize them and work through them one at a time.

As you can tell, I’m a fan of the Action Enforcer. As I said earlier, I own the desktop version (currently available for Windows only). Despite its many virtues, the desktop version has a couple of drawbacks. First, it’s only available for Windows platforms, so Mac users couldn’t take advantage of it. It also doesn’t work very well on netbooks due to resource constraints in those mini-machines.

Well, the good news is that both of those issues have been addressed! The Action Enforcer is now available in an online version so any machine that can run a browser can get the benefits of the Action Enforcer’s time boxing techniques. Even better, the online version is free! Check it out here:

http://johnthegeek.us/proaction

Download the user’s guide from the site and read it over, then give the online Action Enforcer a test drive. I think you’ll be as impressed with this tool as I am. The online version does have a few limitations compared to the desktop version, but is still a very powerful time and task management tool that will make you more productive.

So, the question now is: what will you do with the extra hour or two you’ll have each day?

John The Geek

Seesmic Desktop – Time For Another Look?

In my last post on Twitter tools I mentioned that I’d tried Seesmic Desktop, but stayed with TweetDeck due to some issues with Seesmic Desktop. Shortly after that post appeared, an updated Seesmic Desktop was released that addressed many of the complaints I’d had with it.

I’m now using Seesmic Desktop as my primary Twitter interface. There are still a few things about it that could be improved, but overall, it’s working really well for me.

The big advantage of Seesmic Desktop over TweetDeck is its ability to handle multiple Twitter accounts simultaneously. TweetDeck can only display one account at a time. Although there is a way to use the Search function to monitor other accounts, you can only tweet or retweet from the account with which you’re logged in.

Seesmic Desktop, on the other hand, gives you the ability to not only monitor multiple accounts, displaying the account(s) to which a particular tweet was addressed, but to reply or retweet from any of your accounts without a separate login. IMO, this feature puts Seesmic Desktop ahead of TweetDeck by a long way.

I’d like to see Seesmic Desktop provide a means of synchronizing settings between multiple machines. I use a minimum of two different computers on any given day and regularly use up to four different machines. It would be wonderful to have a way to automatically synchronize the settings between all my machines and avoid the lame manual copying that has to happen now.

You can download Seesmic Desktop for free from here:

http://desktop.seesmic.com/

John The Geek

How I Handle The Chaos of Twitter

Unless you’re living in that cave in which my wife grew up (a little family humor), you’re aware that Twitter is the hottest thing on the planet and therefore the single greatest contributor to global warming at the moment. I’ve been using Twitter for a couple of months now and have come to a number of conclusions about it.

First, it’s an incredible time sink if you don’t take control of it quickly. Once you’re following a few hundred people, you could literally spend all day reading their tweets and get nothing else done. Unless you have nothing better to do with your time, that’s pretty obviously unproductive.

Second, the tweet-o-sphere is chaotic, to say the least. The word “twitter” is much more benign than the visual cacophony of tweets that come flying at you once your follower count starts to grow. I don’t care what anyone says, it’s not physically possible to follow a large number of people and A) read all their tweets and/or B) get anything else accomplished.

Third, Twitter is a marvelous source of information, if you can manage to filter out the wheat from the abundance of chaff. I’ve learned some useful things from tweeple and managed to do so without spending more than 20-30 minutes a day on Twitter.

After a fair amount of experimentation, I’ve come up with the following system that works pretty well for me. I use TweetDeck (http://www.tweetdeck.com) as my interface to Twitter. The Twitter website is a terrible user interface unless you sit there staring at it all day dealing with tweets as they come in. Its shortcomings are fertile ground for application developers, however, and there are a number of Twitter applications out there.

Admittedly, I haven’t tried most of them. So far, I’ve used TweetDeck and Seesmic Desktop. I simply don’t have time to use and evaluate the rest.

Seesmic Desktop (http://desktop.seesmic.com) shows promise. What I like about it is that it can handle multiple accounts simultaneously. I have several Twitter accounts for specific purposes and one “main” one, so it’s nice to be able to aggregate all my accounts in one place. Unfortunately, there are a number of problems with Seesmic Desktop that are annoying enough that I’ve given up on it for now. It’s still very much beta software, so hopefully, they’ll get it together eventually.

I’m using TweetDeck regularly. It took me a while to figure out how to configure it for the best results. My current configuration is based on this article, so I can’t take credit for coming up with this strategy all on my own.

Here’s what my current TweetDeck configuration looks like:

Note there are four columns. The column on the left is for all tweets from all those I follow. As you can imagine, that column fills up rather quickly!

The second column from the left contains tweets from those I have added to my one group. These are people I want to follow more closely.

The third column is a Search query. This is the key to keeping track of all my accounts. I have written the query to search for my main Twitter username: johnsawyer or any of the other of my accounts. This is accomplished by using the OR keyword. My query reads like this:

johnsawyer OR john_the_geek OR critterreiki OR rootsrocknblues

The results of this query include any tweets containing one or more of those user names. This includes tweets I make, re-tweets of any of my tweets, replies I make to other tweets and replies to my tweets. It would also include any arbitrary references to any of those user names in anyone else’s tweets.

The last column on the right is for Direct Messages to the account with which I’m currently logged in via TweetDeck (usually my main account).

You’re probably wondering why the screen shot shows three of the four columns empty. That is because I keep them empty to reduce the clutter. I leave the search column tweets because those are typically the ones I’m most interested in and may want to refer back to later. The other three columns are disposable.

I know this will likely bruise some egos, but the left column gets skimmed fairly quickly. I’m looking for pictures I haven’t seen before, or for keywords to jump out at me. If I don’t have time to get through the whole column (there are often several hundred tweets), I skim as far down as I can, then clear the entire column and let it start over.

If I find someone tweeting something interesting, I’ll add them to my group so that they show up in the second column. This is a small percentage of all the people I’m following, so I can keep up with them more easily. I can always remove people from the group is need be, and sometimes it needs be! The idea is to keep people in the group whose tweets are interesting and/or useful to me and remove those who aren’t. This column is read and cleared regularly after noting URLs or whatever other info I may find to be of value later on.

Again, the search column is never cleared, but it doesn’t tend to fill up that fast, either. I’m not one who tweets constantly, as many seem to do, so at any given moment there aren’t a zillion tweets out there containing my usernames.

Finally, the DM column is checked when TweetDeck starts up to see if there are any new DMs since the last session. If not, the column is cleared.

One other tool I use is TweetLater (http://tweetlater.com). I discovered TweetLater by way of a tweet that touted it as a way to eliminate many of the automated Direct Messages we get when we follow people. TweetLater can be configured to block any that come from its service (which is most of them, apparently). That alone is worth its weight in gold! I get far fewer DMs now that I’ve turned on that filter.

TweetLater has a number of other great features. The two I use regularly are the keyword reports and the auto-follow feature. The keyword reports are just that: reports of tweets containing specific keywords for the time since the previous report. This is very handy for keeping track of references to your username(s) and for references to topics in which you’re interested. These are automatically emailed to you at specified intervals.

The auto-follow feature saves me having to manually check out and follow (or not) anyone who follows me first. I’m very likely going to follow back most anyone who follows me, so I figure it takes less time for me to unfollow the few I find obnoxious than to manually visit the profiles of those who follow me. I don’t believe I can make an informed decision on whether to follow someone just from their profile, unless they’re obviously a mismatch. So far, few people have been an obvious mismatch.

Between TweetDeck and TweetLater, I find I can accomplish what I need to on Twitter in about 30 minutes a day. I’d be interested in other strategies you’ve used that worked for you. Please leave a comment about your favorite Twitter tool or strategy.

John The Geek

WordPress Plugins Site For Users and Developers

I’ve been a fan of Mass Automation’s WordPress plugins and tools for some time. These are high quality blog administration tools, for the most part, that save me a tremendous amount of time keeping my many blogs updated. If you’re just running one or two blogs, these are not for you, but if you’re like me and have a number of blogs, I highly recommend them.

The Mass Automation folks have recently opened a new site featuring free open source plugins for WordPress called PluginEdge. PluginEdge is a repository for WordPress users to get some very handy utility plugins. It is also a place for WordPress plugin developers to upload plugins for distribution and additional exposure.

I’ve installed several of the free plugins from PluginEdge and found them to be very useful. There are still others I’ve got on my list to check out when I have a chance to do so.

The PluginEdge home page lists the 10 most popular plugins in terms of downloads. Because the site is only a couple weeks old as of this writing, the list changes pretty frequently. As of today, the top 10 plugins are:

1. GAFMonitor – monitors the Get A Freelancer site for project requests
2. ScuttlePlus – create your own social bookmarking site
3. WP Bazaar – turn your blog into an online store
4. Plugin Remover – removes unwanted WP plugins without FTP
5. Robots.txt – creates a robots.txt file for your WP installation
6. WP Database Reverter – restores a WP database to its previous state
7. Trackback Search – search for and find trackback URLs to add to your posts
8. Comments Pinger – pings comments instead of posts
9. Set Permalinks – makes .htaccess file writable via FTP
10. WP Checkup – pings a list of your blogs and warns if any are unavailable

Since this site is so new, you’ll want to check it on a regular basis to see what new goodies are uploaded. Enjoy!

John The Geek

Using WordPress? Update Now!

If you’re a blogger using WordPress, be sure you’re at the latest version 2.7.1. Earlier versions of WordPress are vulnerable to a security loophole that allows the bad guys access to your server via a “back door”. Needless to say, you don’t want this to happen!

I was recently hacked through an old version of Joomla I’d left laying around on my web host. Fortunately, no real damage was done, but it brought home the folly of running old versions of popular software. The fact is: the more popular the software, the larger target it is for those who get their jollies finding ways to exploit it.

WordPress is the most popular blogging software on the Web, so it stands to reason that vulnerabilities will be found and exploited. For that reason alone it is important to keep it updated to the latest version.

If you need help updating your WordPress installation, get my free guide to upgrading WordPress quickly, easily and safely:

http://JohnTheGeek.com/wpupgrade

John The Geek

Google Chrome Security Update

If you’re using Google’s Chrome browser, be sure to update it to the latest version (version 1.0.154.48 as of today). A critical security flaw has been found which is fixed in the latest version.

Google Chrome is a great browser for limited applications, especially Google’s own applications like GMail, Google Documents, etc. Chrome has been optimized for Javascript and runs Javascript noticeably faster than Firefox or IE.

I use Chrome for GMail, Google Calendar, and Google Documents, primarily. I use Firefox for everything else because of the rich set of plugins available. It’s a bit of a pain switching back and forth, but the additional speed in GMail is well worth it, IMO.

John The Geek

WordPress Automatic Update Plugin Updated

A few days ago I reported that the WordPress Automatic Update plugin (WPAU) was no longer working in WordPress 2.7. I’m happy to report that the author has updated the plugin so that it now works with WordPress 2.7.

As I reported at the time, WordPress added its own “automatic” upgrade function to version 2.7. So you may well ask “Why do I need the WPAU plugin any more?”

The big advantage of the WPAU plugin is that it provides for very easy backups of your files and database before actually upgrading WordPress. WordPress’ automatic upgrade warns you to back up the files and database, but gives you no way to do that as part of the process.

There is actually no way to backup the fiiles short of manually copying them to another location via ftp or a script of some kind. The database can be backed up via CPanel or other means, but again, it’s a manual process.

The WPAU plugin’s first two steps are to prepare your files and database for backup, giving you download links so you can copy them off to your machine for safekeeping before proceeding with the upgrade. Except for clicking the download links, it’s automatic!

For complete instructions for downloading, installing, and using the WPAU plugin, see my free ebook:

How to Upgrade Your WordPress Blog

John The Geek

Free Backups For Your Data

Last year, the folks at Neobyte, makers of Titan Backup, offered the full version of their excellent backup software free for a limited time. I’m happy to report that they’re repeating the offer with a little different slant.

You can now get the full retail version of Titan Backup v.1.5 free from Neobyte. Note that this is not the current version of the software (v2.5), but IMO it’s still a great deal. The older version worked fine and you can’t beat the price!

You can download the free version here (opens in a new window):

http://www.neobytesolutions.com/trial-versions/free/titanbackup15.exe

After you install the software, use the following key to register and activate it:

000020-ACM8KK-1YXPMT-JZT49Z-05Z6JZ-7C68TR-9Y7FU9-6PD2P8

If you decide to upgrade to the latest and greatest, Neobyte is offering a coupon for a special upgrade price. Use this link to get your discounted price:

Special Titan Backup Upgrade Discount

I’ve got Titan Backup on all my machines and I recommend you jump on this deal.

John The Geek

Secunia Personal Security Inspector (PSI) Released

Secunia’s Personal Security Inspector (PSI) is now out of beta. I’ve been using this handy application for quite a while and have found it to be extremely valuable for keeping my applications updated.

Secunia PSI scans the applications installed on your PC and warns you if any are outdated and contain known security flaws. It also flags applications that are no longer being supported by their vendors.

Windows users typically keep their machines updated with Windows Update or Microsoft Update, however, Microsoft Update only scans Windows and Microsoft applications. Secunia PSI scans not only Windows and Microsoft applications, but a long list of other applications from other software vendors such as Apple, Adobe, Sun and many others.

This latest version of Secunia PSI adds a “Simple” mode for non-technical users. The Advanced mode gives the user extensive control over the patching process while Simple mode makes the process, well, simple for the average PC user.

Secunia PSI runs in the background and constantly monitors your PC, scanning periodically to determine if the status of any known applications has changed and warning you if it does. The program is unobtrusive and doesn’t seem to consume noticeable quantities of resources.

This is not an anti-virus scanner. You still need AVG or another good anti-virus application. Secunia PSI compares the versions of known applications on your machine with its list of the latest secure versions. If there’s a mismatch, i.e. you have an older version of an application installed, PSI will warn you and tell you how severe the threat is.

The user interface is clean and straightforward, showing you graphically which programs are insecure or at end-of-life (no longer supported), how severe the threat is, whether there’s a direct download for the update, and very importantly, where the application is located on your machine. The latter information is very helpful when PSI shows that you have two instances of the Java runtime, for example.

I highly recommend installing Secunia PSI on your PC and keeping your applications updated with the latest security fixes. You can download the latest version here:

http://secunia.com/vulnerability_scanning/personal/

John The Geek

Google Chrome First Impressions

Yet another shot has been fired in the ongoing browser wars. You may or may not know that Google has launched its new browser Google Chrome. I downloaded it yesterday and installed it on two different machines, one running Windows XP Professional and another running Windows Vista Home Premium.

The first thing I noticed about it was the significant increase in the speed of GMail in Chrome. According to a blog post I read, which was one of the things that convinced me to give Chrome a try now rather than wait, Google has done some very serious optimization of their Javascript implementation. Since GMail is an AJax application which makes very heavy use of Javascript, this makes sense and explains the difference in speed vs. Firefox or Internet Explorer.

Firefox is my browser of choice for a number of reasons. Not the least of these is the vast array of add-ons available for Firefox, many of which have become integral parts of my daily activities. I don’t know of any add-ons for Chrome yet, but given that it’s open source I expect there will be many very soon.

I’m limiting my use of Chrome to Google applications for now. It’s a bit inconvenient having to have Firefox open at the same time to make use of all its plugins and Roboform (which doesn’t work with Chrome yet, either), but the speed difference in the Google applications is worth it. I fully expect that gap to close quickly as developers port their add-ons to Chrome and create new ones.

One interesting glitch: when I installed Chrome on my XP laptop, Chrome asked me if I wanted to import my bookmarks, history, etc. from Firefox. Since Firefox is my default browser, of course I did so.

When I installed Chrome on my Vista laptop, I was only given the choice to import bookmarks from Internet Explorer. Firefox was nowhere to be seen in the dropdown list. Needless to say, this is an annoyance, but since I’m only using Chrome for Google apps for now anyway, not a show-stopper.

The bottom line: if you like playing with new software or you really want GMail to be faster, download Chrome and check it out. If you want it to replace IE or Firefox, wait a while. Because Chrome is in beta, I expect things to be pretty fluid for a while. I’ll keep you posted on significant news as it happens.

John The Geek