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As a web developer, I have to keep track of an awful lot of things at work, not to mention my life and projects outside of work as well. With a wife and small child thrown into the mix I really have to make the most of my time! I need a way to ensure that the tasks that I have to do get done at the right time and in the right order and somehow still leave me time to enjoy being with my family.
I’ve tried a lot of different web apps for organisation and task management, and WorkFlowy is how I choose to organise a lot of my life, both inside and outside of work. I want to give you an insight into how I use it for everything from keeping up to date with my personal projects to keepings tabs on who has asked for what for Christmas. I’m not dictating how you should use it, as the beauty of it is that it is what you want it to be, I’m merely sharing my techniques for keeping track of things, hopefully there will be a few things that you haven’t thought of doing.
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The web is often blamed for the prevailing language decay and plagiarism we see today. Thanks to Facebook, and Twitter, internet slang usage is on the rise. People write “dnt” instead of “don’t” and “wer” instead “where” thinking “tat tey r” saving their valuable time. Most of us utterly disregard punctuation and proper verbiage.
Hank Moody, once rightly quipped,
Internet is a medium for a bunch of stupid people pseudo-communicating with other bunch of stupid people with a pseudo language which is much worse than what the Caveman used to speak.
I once worked with a guy who wrote, “I hv wrked on…” on his official resume. This got me to into thinking, are we truly addicted to the Internet slang that we can’t keep it out of our professional lives anymore? I was looking for a way out, and then I stumbled upon Grammarly. It promises to save us out of this misery. Can that even be possible? That is exactly what we are going to find out today.
Do you remember the cork board of old with Post it notes/ recipes/ photos and telephone messages all pinned onto the board? I do, very well, and I miss it. You know what I mean: whilst it seemed disorganised to others, to you it was perfect, everything had its place and you could find things instantly.
It’s been one of those things that I keep on thinking about, and trying to find a modern analog to. Let me tell you about the closest I have come to finding this level of utility in an app. It’s called Spaaze, and it’s marketed as an infinite cork board. That sounds like just the ticket to me. Read on to see how new-fashioned, digital cork compares to old-fashioned, tree cork.
It’s hard enough to run a fundraiser and convince people to give to your cause. The last thing that should be difficult is receiving the money once people decide to contribute. Recently, I needed to raise money for a fundraiser and was looking for a tool to be able to do this easily. After searching through various big sites such as JustGiving, I realized that there weren’t many ways to raise funds online for personal projects.
PayPal was the only place that kept coming up as a simple way to raise donations. Well known as the most popular way to send funds online, PayPal is something many of us use regurally in work already. It’s not 100% straightforward to set it up for receiving donations, but it’s not too hard either. So whether you’re raising funds for your school or perhaps for Movember, here’s what you’ll need to do to accept donations via PayPal.
If you need to set up a dinner date with friends or a meeting with colleagues, the most difficult part of the chore has to be finding a day and time when everyone is free. The usual process is that you call one person, find out their schedule, then call another and see if the dates match up, and so on and so forth. It’s tiring, tedious and there has to be an easier way to do this.
Well, there is. Select The Date makes it so easy to set up an event that you’ll end up wondering how you could have ever done without it before.
The bane of online existence is that our data is invariably scattered in different places. And nothing is affected more by this than photos. In all probability, you have pictures on different services – Facebook, Flickr, Picasa, Instagram, and many more. The end result is that when you need to find that one photo you are looking for, you don’t know where to begin searching. Wouldn’t it be better if all your photos were collected in one place, ready to be accessed at any time?
PixelPipe promises to make this easier by letting you migrate images and videos from one web service to another in a dead-simple interface. So whether it’s because you’re running out of space or you simply want to change your image host, this just might be the magic wand you have been looking for.
The Internet has made it possible for anyone to become a writer with the click of a button. Naturally, the number of quality articles have increased, which are more easily discovered by curators such as LongForm, Kottke, TheBrowser, and more. Invariably, it means that you won’t have enough time to read everything that catches your fancy. So here’s an idea: why not listen to it on your commute?
A new web app called SoundGecko makes the process super-simple by converting any article you want into an MP3 file, using text-to-speech technology. The audio files are sent to your email inbox and can be synced with your Google Drive or Dropbox. There’s also the option of listening to your files in the form of a podcast from any device. Let’s get started: (more…)
Let’s face it, cable is expensive and it is definitely not going to be getting cheaper any time soon. About two years ago, my wife and I finally made the decision that it was time that we “cut the cord” so to speak, and get rid of our cable bill. As I look back on it, it was probably one of the best decisions that we made. I thought I would miss it, and there are times when I do, but for the most part, I have definitely learned to live without it.
I didn’t get rid of watching television all together, and I don’t think I could ever do that. But, what we did do was we took a long look at some web alternatives that would help us get our TV fix. As with any other cost cutting move, it definitely did not come without some sacrifice on our part. But, if you are every interested in making the move, then continue to read on and see if it is the right move for you.
The internet is a great resource for news and updates, and no matter what you’re looking to keep track of, you’re sure to be able to find countless sites that will be able to keep you up to date with the latest information. To help make it easier to keep track of new developments, you might make use of an RSS feed to save you having to look things up manually. You might already be used to using RSS in apps like Google Reader, but there’s so much more you can do with RSS feeds.
Pipes is a tool from Yahoo that enables you to take things a step further so you can, amongst other things, create your own custom RSS feeds that pull in content from a variety of sources and filter it so that you only see the most relevant news stories. It’s a venerable web app, starting off life in a rather Google-ish way of being in a lengthy period of beta but then living on for years, long enough that many of us have likely forgotten about it. But it’s still a great tool, even in 2012, so let’s dig in and see what you can do with it.
Pinterest boasts an incredible number of users, but those of you who haven’t signed up yet might wonder exactly what Pinterest is good for. In fact, even those who have been using the service might wonder about some new ways in which Pinterest can be used. Luckily, Pinterest is good for a wide range of activites.
From home life to marketing to writing, Pinterest has a great variety of applications. It’s a simple app that might seem like just a passing far, but it actually can be a useful too even for real work. Read on to learn about just a few of the many ways Pinterest can be used.
