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- This just looked awesome
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- Neat label
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- Two of the coolest and scariest doors I have ever seen
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- Support for EV is getting better!
Awesome stuff I saw today
Todo list software is missing…
In the process of putting together a list of software I have looked at I came across Doit.im. This is the closest software I have found to what I am looking for! They allow grouping on your combined lists outside of the normal “project” grouping, but giving you date and priority grouping!
I already wrote up all the stuff below, so I will keep it there.
If I just ignorantly glanced over this same feature elsewhere, please tell me!!
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I went on a quest for Todo list software because of my post about what I’m looking for from a todo list.
First I should say, all of these products are worthy todo lists. I am a picky bastard and want a very specific use case. Any one of these products could probably add in what I am looking for and solve my use case immediately. Now, if I’m the only one looking for this, I wouldn’t expect them to do that at all.
Here’s what I have found so far…
This is project management software that I at one time was intimately familiar with, because I used it every day. If I ever need PM software, I will go here first and not look anywhere else. Their support is awesome and I still to this day talk with their devs on Twitter because they are awesome people.
Looks awesome. I love that you can have status-based lists. However, I still don’t have the universal todo list.
For me, this is not really any better than Evernote. I like that they have done a ton of work to make this so clean and minimalist, but having to drive my way through lists of lists makes my anxiety skyrocket. I couldn’t finish the video.
Beautiful UI. OMG, it’s so clean. I actually installed this on my laptop. I found that I can’t tag anything so I am forced to write “tag name: task title” which drives me crazy, because it would be fantasmic to be able to pull all tasks by tag. Also, my heart fluttered when I saw there was an “All” list, but then I found that it wasn’t any better than what I can get with TeamworkPM’s all tasks list.
These guys hit me up on Twitter. I have no idea what they do, but their marketing material is decent. They also said they forwarded my ideas to their team for their potential software release that is to come. I signed up for Beta, to see what they come up with.
This was suggested by a friend, but I saw the price and said no thanks. I don’t want things for free, but I can’t afford the $90 entrance fee to this ride just to see if this is the solution for me. To their credit, they have the syncing that I am looking for.
I have used this software before and really enjoyed it. At the time they didn’t have the universal todo list, instead they break it up like TeamworkPM does. Things, Wunderlist, and TeamworkPM are the closest to being able to have a solution to my problems.
Resources:
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I’m looking for a new kind of todo list
Want a kick ass project for a hackathon or Startup Weekend. Here’s a freebie. Feel free to put me on your board, give me lifetime access, and buy your t-shirts from me when you start to give away/sell this product. 
Highest priority:
- Clean UI
- Syncing across devices (ipad, iphone, android, MBP, and web)
- Universal todo list – similar concept to universal inbox for email
- identify which list this task is from by name in the task
- organize my due date, then priority
- Individual lists – so items can be organized
- Tasks get color-codes based on priority and background pattern (cross hatch, polka dot, whatever) based on list
Medium Priority
- Ability to tag an email in gmail, have it show up in that list by tag (i.e. work-medium)
- Link to the email so I can archive it, or even better use the gmail API to archive when the task is complete
- Reply, reply-all, forward this email through task app
- Ability to create an evernote document from a task or for a task
- Pomodoro integration – define types of tasks or tags on tasks that need to be done, rotate through a pomodoro timer based on lists, tags, etc.
- Ability to attach files from dropbox to a task
- Sharing lists, ala Wunderlist
Low priority, but still awesome:
- Developer API for the task list
- Ability to use ifttt with the task list
- Example: Pull in an RSS feed, add this to a specific task list at a specific priority
- Put a task in a list with a time/date, if time date is past ifttt pulls it in and does something. Then, archives the item. (this would probably be two ifttt recipes, but you get the point)
- Ability to make an Evernote note into a task, link it, less important but adds flair: modify the note and sync mods to Evernote’s server
- Integration with project management software like TeamworkPM.
Hints: If you were to take Wunderlist’s UI and add these features, I would be sold.
This would work gloriously with my post about being more organized and it would allow me to get way more done from ALL of my lists because they are combined instead of having them seperated. As it is right now, I will get heads down on one list and ignore the others which is less than ideal!
Edit: It looks like Wunderlist has an API..so you could potentially just build all of this on top of their system…
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Why I bought The Startup Shirt
I recently purchase The Startup Shirt. This is a company that I helped to start in 2011 with some great friends. We built The Startup Shirt on the premise of helping startups to get the swag they need in order to help get the word out and say thanks to all the people who help them along the way. I love this model!
I bought this company, because I believe in the concept and I love t-shirts. My favorite swag from conferences, meetups, and events are always the t-shirts. Not only that, but my wife looks awesome in startup t-shirts. So far, I think my favorite shirt that I grabbed for her is Mode Set’s “Talk Nerdy To Me”. Every time she wears it, I start reciting resumes I memorized and she just rolls her eyes at me. It’s bliss, you don’t even know.
Anyways, I believe in helping out startups. They are the future of their industry (notice how I didn’t just say tech) and they thrive on and in the community where they are located.
Shirts are great for two reasons:
- When you get a shirt, you are forever grateful and remember the name of the company who gave it to you. (Especially when they are awesome polyblend shirts)
- When you wear the shirt, you are a walking billboard for the company. Marketing is all about Eyeballs. There’s no better way to be seen than having awesome people wearing your awesome shit.
If you mention this post to me when you order the shirts, I will take 5% off your total order.
I am excited to not only feature the shirts that we create, but the awesome shirts that we get from everyone else. Why? Because I love startups, I love this community, and if I can show off their shirt and kick them a free link back to their company then I’m going to do that!
If I can help you out in some way with your t-shirt needs or if you know someone who could use some shirts, please tell me.
Thanks so much for you constant support and feedback. I can’t wait to hear what you think about the new website and my mission with this project.
As far as all the other ideas I have been working on and thinking about? They are all on hold, unless they are almost done (i.e. my Good Eats site). This is because I want to focus on providing the best quality product by learning as much as I can about this industry and providing shirts in the most cost and time effective ways possible.
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If you’re rethinking WP as a CMS, let’s chat
Update: The author of the original post emailed me directly and we’re talking. He said that he appreciated the article I wrote, despite the fact that I disagreed with most of it. In the spirit of improving the lives of WP users, we’re talking about ways to implement specific ideas and it looks like he’ll be blogging about these things soon!
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I read an article, http://www.webinsation.com/rethinking-wordpress-as-a-cms/, the URL is in plain text bc this person doesn’t deserve ANOTHER link.
For most clients WordPress is overwhelming
First off, I should say that I agree with this statement in so far as you add the phrasing “out of the box” and “non-technical”, oh and switch “is” to “can be”. Maybe, like this:
For most non-technical clients, WordPress out of the box can be overwhelming
If you have been hired to install, configure, design, and implement a site on WordPress it is your JOB to teach your clients how to use it. That means that if your clients are overwhelmed, it’s YOUR fault. Not the clients, not WordPress. If 60million websites are made on WordPress, it isn’t that hard.
As an example, let’s talk about Microsoft Word, which is arguably the most used text editor in the world. It has more unused and cluttered features than WordPress by a long shot, but these same users who are having so much trouble with WordPress seem to figure out Word. So, I suggest that you spend a little time putting things into context for your customers instead of dropping them in and walking away.
When the average business owner logs in to WordPress they are greeted with a host of options including “Custom Types”, “Appearance”, “Plugins”, “Tools”, “Permalinks”, “Widgets” and on and on. Even when they do finally figure out how to edit a page, they see symbols entitled “Remove Formatting”, “Insert Special Character”, and even “Text Colors”.
Why is there a menu item at the top of a client’s install called “Custom Types”? You should name a custom post type in a user friendly manner so that it is obvious what the user is doing. Again, this is your fault. Not WordPress’. Try something like “Beers” or “Testimonials” that makes sense for the type of content that is being entered.
I will give you that “Appearance”, “Plugins”, “Tools”, “Permalinks”, “Widgets” are all features that are special to WordPress. These are all things that you can hide from your customers. You could also just train them properly.
To hide these things from your users you can do it as easily as giving your customers lower-level users (Author maybe) or you could create a new user type and define their roles using the Role Scoper plugin (super easy to configure). The last option, if you feel like it’s morally incorrect to modify a user’s permissions is to copy and paste this code from an article called How to Make WordPress Easier for Clients.
Remove formatting, Insert Special Character, and Text colors are not new features to people who have used Microsoft Word.
a fresh install of WordPress is almost as overwhelming for our Clients as Photoshop is to a beginning photographer.
How is a fresh install of WordPress any different than any other WYSIWYG editor out there, including MSFT Word and so very many sites on the web. Even “antiquated” sites like yahoo groups have WYSIWYG editors built in (yes, they hide it by default, but they have it). Also, WordPress uses TinyMCE which is arguably one of the MOST used editors on the internet, even if you cut out all 60million sites on WordPress.
As a creative community, we really haven’t put much thought into designing a beautiful, simple solution that is a joy to use. Rather it’s more like “Okay, so you need to edit the site? We’ll build it on top of WordPress and charge you an extra 3-5K”.
Building the site on WordPress should not add an extra $3-5k, because you can cut the PSD or illustrator file down to HTML/CSS specifically for WordPress, skipping the step of hand-coding and then integrating. It’s kind of crappy to add that much money to a website cost, just because you are putting it on WordPress. It really doesn’t get much more easy to build a theme for a website. The fact that it’s a WP theme should only add a couple hours of work and definitely not $3,000+. As an aside, if you claim installing WordPress is costly, most hosting accounts have a one-click-install. Without one-click, it takes 5 minutes to install WordPress. 30 max, if you have to install MySQL and PHP to Linux yourself.
Actually, the correct way to change images is to click on the image, select “Add Media” and then insert the new image – not very intuitive or simple.
This is true, you do have to click “Add media”, select an image and then click “Insert into post”. Dragging directly into the editor would be better, but you have to remember that this is a web-based system and dragging/using within the browser requires flash or Java. WordPress is almost there, they have the drag-drop for upload already – adding drag-insert to the WYSIWYG editor is a step away, but then people would bitch and complain that the images aren’t in the media manger, that they can’t edit them, blah blah blah. The solution isn’t ideal, but have you ever used Joomla?
But how about creating an advanced 2-column layout like Dropmark’s site?
This is easily done by using The Loop with posts. Yes, you could do a custom post type as well. Or, you could just add a category for the homepage. There are a bunch of ways to do this, but it all boils down to using The Loop. This is basic WP templating.
Or maybe a beautiful one-pager like Circles Conference :
Use Google, find a theme that exists and modify it. WP and all plugins, themes are GPL – so you can (and should) build off someone else’s work. That’s about as easy and effective as it gets.
It’s very difficult to build advanced responsive layouts with WordPress.
It’s really not that hard. Use a theme that exists and is responsive or add Bootstrap to your CSS files, you should be using a reset anyways. Then to make custom fields and content areas on specific pages, you can just use add_meta_box in your functions.php file to make this process easier. The functions that WordPress adds make things about as easy as they could be. Yes, there’s code involved (OMG) but most of that code is copy/paste and doesn’t require anything more than basic understanding of Mad Libs to figure it out.
Conclusion
Instead of writing flaming link bait articles to help you sell more square readers, maybe you could do a little research and write articles that give people practical knowledge. Also, it will improve the quality of sites and the functionality that you provide the customers who dropped $10,000+ on a website.
Posted in WordPress
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Automation 12 – Be notified of all Reddit messages by email
Software/Accounts/Hardware required for this automation:
- ifttt.com account
- Reddit account
I don’t check my reddit account daily, but I do post every once in a while. When I post, I want to know about messages or comments immediately.
You can get your private reddit messages RSS feed through your preferences > RSS Feeds tab. Right click to copy the URL.
Go to ifttt.com and create a new RSS->Email recipe, using your feed.
Now you will be notified when people write comments or messages to you in Reddit!
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What am I working on right now?
Good Eats blog - This is a for fun site I am putting together because the collective information on the internet about this show mostly is terrible. It’s either got bad UI, incomplete information, or no information. This site is for me and I don’t expect it to really gather any traffic ever.
Hackathon License – There is a fundamental Intellectual Property problem with going to hackathons. If you create a viable solution/product/whatever at a hackathon, you’re on the hook to all the people who helped you at the hackatahon if you want to build a business around this idea. I am working on a solution with a lawyer (possibly many lawyers) and some friends to solve this problem or at least come up with a 60-80% solution. We will open source this license or agreement (the wording is not clear yet, as we haven’t ironed everything out) and make it available to the community to build upon. More information on this coming soon as it’s moving forward and awesome things are happening.
Learning Ruby and Rails – I am a coder who has a business card that says “Recovering Developer”. The problem is that I don’t really want to recover. It’s a joke because I don’t get paid to code anymore (and not really at this time looking to be paid to develop). Riding the “ex-developer” wagon sucks, so I refuse to do it. In my spare time (hahaha) I am learning Ruby and Rails. I really like what I have found so far and see the possibilities unfolding in front of me, like the guy watching the screen on The Matrix. There’s a project I am probably going to build so that I can learn Rails in a hands-on manner, we’ll see if it goes anywhere. The point is not for it to be huge, unless some interest shows up for it. The point is for me to learn a new language and a new framework at the same time.
Ignite Denver and Denwhere? - I wanted to be one of the organizers for Ignite Denver for at least a year before I weaseled my way in. I really enjoy the organization aspect and I love the idea of building an event that 300+ people love to go to every couple of months. It’s a great way to learn more about event planning and to meet some awesome people. Also, the sparks are always fantastic. While organizing, we realized there was room for doing so much more both for the event and then down the road for the community, but there was a problem. At the time, Ignite was a for-profit sort of non-company that was being run through one of the organizer’s bank accounts. This created liabilities and fun-times with money that were not conducive for growth and community involvement at a greater scale. So, we started down the path of building a non-profit called Denwhere?, a 501(c)(3) eventually.
The name Denwhere? is a play on the fact that so many people see Boulder as the place to be. It’s cheeky and fun.
This non-profit will allow us to accept donations that are tax-writeoff-able for the organizations donating. It allows us to show that no one person is pulling down money from Ignite, because we have to report any money paid out to Board Members to the IRS and state of Colorado. We have no plans to pay any volunteers, organizers, or board members for their time. All money is rolled back into the org so we can put on bigger and better events that help us to build the Denver community. It will also allow us to do so much more for Ignite like bigger venue, free stuff, t-shirts, the possbilities are endless. We are working towards the goal of doing more in Denver, but focusing on making Ignite more amazing with every new event. Lots of stuff in motion and many more announcements to come here.
Building the Startup Community in Denver - This is a huge goal of mine and many other people in Denver. There are an amazing number of startups, entrepreneurs, tech companies, and wickedly smart people in Denver. The big issue is that many don’t know each other because we are so spread out and everyone is so busy. If we had more places that people WANT to be, where they see value, and gain business advantage from being involved – we will see Denver grow and be known as a tech city. There’s no reason that Denver should be seen as a suburb to Boulder as far as the tech community is concerned. We have more of everything and should work together to prove it. My goals here are just to be involved with the right organizations, get the right people together, and get them working on a common goal. Helping with and getting the word out about events like Denver Startup Week and organizations like Built In Denver or Denver Coworks are exactly where I will be spending my efforts.
Getting started as a developer SUCKS – This is one of those ideas I am floating around to see what people think. I am working to find a solution to the gap from academia to being a professional with regards to being a developer. I got REALLY lucky in college that I had two companies who could see the potential and didn’t have the budget for super-coders. They let me start fresh with them, kicked my ass for a year and a half, and then I was able to leap from there to do new things. I am super grateful to both those companies for how they helped me. I was the exception to the rule.
I see a great space with many possibilities for what could be done as a sort of “Finishing School” (Thanks Seth Levine for the term and the great convo about this idea) for developers. A place where they get to be immersed in the Agile workforce with a real project manager who keeps things on track, where they get paid for their work, and they get to work on the technology that will get them a proper job with an awesome company.
There is also great possibility here to do amazing things for the community, ala code for community, where projects are brought in partially funded or without funding for awesome non-profits or social-good companies who don’t have funding. On top of this, there would need to be funding and some paid work with reputable companies who might be looking for these people down the road. We will provide a way for developers to be exposed to awesome companies, engineers, and potential employers through the work their doing while providing great value to those organizations.
This is one of those things that I am really excited about and I am seeing tons of interest. If you know someone who might be interested in helping out with this idea or who I should meet, please tell me!
Secret Sawce - There are a couple things alluded to above with Ignite and Denwhere?, my first real Rails project, and I am working on a couple other things that fit into these above very nicely. More info will come if these things are allowed to see the light of day.
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My ideation process
I come up with ideas all the time, which is one of the main reasons I have evernote. I couldn’t keep track of everything in a regular notepad. I have mentioned before that I have an entire notebook that is based on “Projects”. My ideas come to me at different times of day, in different situations, and while working on other things. It’s random, but I like to write them down so that later I can say, “What the heck is this?” it’s fun.
For the ideas that I am really fond of, I typically will shop it around. In my “shop around” phase, I will talk to people about the idea just to see what they think. I try to be clear that this is something I am trying to get a feel for and that I am not actively working on it. If I find that people are passionate about the idea I am shopping around, I will move forward. If I can’t find even one person, then I move on and bank that idea for later in case someone says something to me that sparks a memory of this idea and I can pass on what I learned.
Next steps usually involve measures of planning, budget ideas, and trying to get people on board with me. Getting people interested in action towards a goal is tough and if I can’t find anyone, the idea might die here as well.
I love the idea of being known as “the genius behind” something. Many of my ideas are such that I know I will need specific types of people to make it happen, because I admittedly don’t know a lot about a lot of things. Maybe some day I will be the guy who made the thing all by myself. Someday. Soon.
Despite this, my fear is that people think I am flaky. While that may be true to some extent, I am not flaky about ideas I commit real time to. I just want to make sure that there is some interest, demand, or excitement about things before I commit real time to them. Hopefully, this makes sense.
What’s the startup mantra again? “Always pitching; Fail often.” Or something like that…
Posted in Organization, Random Thoughts, Uncategorized
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It’s not personal and that’s the problem
When I first got into Social Media it was a free for all.
Q: How many people could I add to every profile?
A: ALL the people!! How else can you get to the top of twitter grader?
So, I very meticulously added everyone until my fingers hurt, my arms felt like I was getting carpel tunnel, or I hit limitations. Seriously, I figured out that all you had to do to get past 2000 friends on twitter was keep the friends and followers number within 10% of eachother. So, I found some tool that would unfollow people who didn’t follow me back. It was so easy!
I accepted every friend request on Facebook and started adding every suggested friend. I even had a real friend who I’ve actually known for years ask me:
Why are you friends with all these people from my highschool class?
This was the beginning of the end for me. Really it was, because I started to ask myself
Why the hell AM I adding all these people? What’s the purpose?
Well, I knew the answer. It was because so many article and “gurus” said that this was the way to do it. Increase your audience and your audience will increase from there. Really what they were saying was:
Add all the people, pray they read what you’re putting out there and share it.
This was great for a while because I didn’t give a shit about broadcasting. What I realized though, was that there were people who were happily going about their lives and really getting a feel for a very specific group of people and what they were up to. Some people call these “Friends”, using the original definition.
It made me realize that what I was doing sucked and that I wanted to keep things more personal. I couldn’t keep up with the people I cared about because they were drowned out by the people I didn’t give one shit about. Also, I really didn’t want everyone on the planet knowing everything about what I was doing. I only wanted to push that to the people I like!
The answer? Drop them all. Yes, all of them.
With Twitter, I unfollowed everyone and only followed back the names of people I could remember off the top of my head. This was fun, because it helped me to realize who I enjoyed talking to and who I wanted to hear from more. Let the stalking begin!
With Facebook, I went through my friends list and unfollowed everyone who I couldn’t recognize either their picture or their name. This was a bit more subjective, because there were some people I recognized and didn’t want to see anything from anymore. It wasn’t personal, that’s the problem.
Foursquare made it easy, with their little “x” button that shows up when you hover. I unfollowed everyone in less than 10 minutes. That was great. Here, I really didn’t want to broadcast to all those people where I was. So I stopped.
Now, I have made a couple mistakes in un-friending/un-following. That’ll happen. So, if you feel slighted and want me to reconnect just hit me up on one of those mediums. If I ignore your request, you’ll know what’s up. If I accept you, you’ll know more than what’s up because I post a lot.
If it’s personal, it hurts more and it feels better all at the same time. I want to get to know people better and I am working through my little subset of the world.
Friends…real friends… what a concept.
Why recruiting?
A while back I wrote “Being Unreasonable about working on Projects“. I took this to heart when I decided to work as a recruiter, because I know that recruiters are seen as horrible scum that really do no good for the world. I decided that the only way I could work as/for a recruiter was if that company fit the MO that I set forth in the article I wrote previously. At the time of writing that article, I had already started my new job but the rubric for choosing it was in my mind when I interviewed the owner of this company about how he runs his company.
So, to directly attack my restrictions for being unreasonable:
Why do you want to do this project work here?
I have always wanted a job where I could help people and get paid to do so. Recruiting affords that opportunity and gave me the option to step away from coding for a while, which I felt that I desperately needed. Burn out is a bitch.
Will it make money?
Does the pope shit in the woods? No really, does he? Because that would be hilarious.
It does make money, but the money is based on performance. Am I doing my job? Am I finding great people? Am I in the community making things happen, introducing people to other people, and is a difference being made for our clients and candidates?
Does it do any good? and/or Who does it benefit?
Yes, it does good. I get to help developers find great jobs at companies that want to pay them what their worth, teach them to get better, and grow together. It is pretty awesome helping someone who deserves it (because they worked their ass off to be awesome) get into an awesome job. I also get to help companies who need these people to grow to find these people. I love the idea of being responsible for building teams that foster innovation, build quality, and help to make the company move forward.
What is the MVP? How hard will it be to get there?
The MVP here was me. I had to learn the industry, learn the process, learn my customers, figure out their company culture, and figure out how to find the right people. I love that the MVP was me, because it means I got to learn something new and use skills I already had in a new way.
Who else is excited to work on this with me?
The owner of the company was excited to work on this with me before I even knew it was a possibility. He’s a recruiter, so he saw qualities in me that would allow me to succeed. He knew that he’d have to spend extra time teaching me, but ultimately that time spent would be worth it. He knew this before I knew this. I was ready for something new, but I assumed it would be at a keyboard putting curly brackets to text editors not searching job boards and calling people.
The question I didn’t ask myself was, What does the market think of this project job?
The answer, which I knew at the time even though I didn’t directly spend time thinking about it, is that the market hates recruiters. They are the insurance salesmen of the HR world. Recruiters are known as slimy sales people who have their heads up their asses so far they haven’t seen daylight in years. These are people who are underqualified to talk to the people they are hoping to hire, they sell people on jobs, they sell clients on using them to hire people, and they are paid on commission.
So, why did I take this job? Because of that part I mentioned above where I interviewed the owner of this company. He didn’t interview me, he knew that he wanted me to work for him. I asked specific questions about process, quality, tactics, community, and customers. These questions helped me to realize a couple things:
- The sales pitch wasn’t a sales pitch – it was straight conversation about what this company does and how, that’s it.
- Brutal honesty is a mantra, it’s a business model, it’s a way of living and working. Some people can’t handle it, but most people appreciate it.
- Doing things because they are the right thing to do, even if it costs a ton of money, is the right thing to do – everytime.
- Spending time with people (customers or candidates) is the best way to find out if there’s a good fit. Keywords and resumes are only a way to get close, you still have to weed people out, if you don’t you won’t get anywhere.
- This job is not easy, it’s tough because you really have to know what peopel are looking for and be willing to tell people they are a not a good fit – even when they’re a good fit technically. It sucks, but it doesnt’ do our customers a bit of good if the person we find for the job is a complete asshole, won’t think outside the box, or can’t work with other people within 10′ of their desk. This means we turn down or pass up a ton of people, but it’s the right thing to do for the people who pay our bills when we find the perfect candidate.
I didn’t specifically mention who I work for because a sales pitch is not the point of this blog post. I used my example in order to illustrate the point that being unreasonable works. I got damn lucky that the first person I called when I needed my next job just happened to be the right job for me. Ask yourself the questions above before you start a new job, before you start a new project, and you can find something that will help you grow and learn – even if it is in an industry that is despised and hated. Then, you can do what I am doing, trying my damnedest to give recruiting a good name and turn it from a necessary evil into a service that makes a difference.
Posted in Lessons Learned, Random Thoughts
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