So I mentioned Jason Kottke’s jump to full-time blogging in passing over in the sideblog, and I was going to let it go at that. Yet kottke.org kept popping up in my thoughtflow here this week. for a number of different reasons. The biggest reason is that I’m contemplating ripping off his posting style.
See, even though Jason’s doing this gig full-time now, his posting style is one big post every day or so, punctuated by a smattering of short links in-between. When I recently flipped the switch to TOTQ 2.0, I added a sideblog. What happened next, I hadn’t expected – that little sideblog has taken on a massive life of its own. For those of you who check this blog every couple of days, I’m averaging five new posts on that thing about every 36 hours. This is cool, but it means that people who don’t check here as often miss a bunch of links, and it also means that the mainblog is being somewhat neglected.
Therefore, I’m seriously considering rolling those little links into the main blog section a la The Kottke Method, and replacing the sideblog with Recent Works or Currently Enjoying or something like that. So TOTQ 2.5 is in the offing (and I should mention that TOTQ 1.0 has just been officially deprecated; the links to the old inkblotsmag.com/mt_testing address should now all forward here). Of course, to do so I’ll need to boot some client gigs around to make the time. I seriously need to work on my efficiency.
That said, lately I’ve been making a more concentrated effort to incorporate Quicksilver into my daily routines, as advocated by the efficiency wonk Merlin Mann. At first QS didn’t do much for me – I tried it out back when it first came on the scene – but now that it’s had some time to officially mature, I have to say I’m really impressed with its quality. If you haven’t downloaded and installed it yet (sorry, Windows users, this is another reason to buy a Mac), by all means do so, and then grab the plug-ins for at least iTunes and Safari. The ability to queue up a Norah Jones by simply typing command-space iT left down down down left Nor left return is pretty freakin’ amazing. Definitely give this a try, guys – it takes a little getting used to, but once it’s in your thoughtmap it’s nigh impossible to imagine living without it.
Also, in case you missed it, Panic’s new Transmit 3 is crazy useful. The more I use it, the more I love it – my newest love-on for it is the addition of subsets for bookmarks. At first I thought, “What am I going to use this for?” And then I realized that I could create a subset purely for my dreamsbay.com development extranet – which is bloody useful when you need two FTP shortcuts per client, one for the dev site and one for the actual site. Yet again, go get it.
Finally, to round out my software-upgrade Friday, folks should take another look at Jumsoft’s Process, a to-do list on steroids. It still lacks some of the features that I would have in my dream system, but it’s getting perilously close. It’s just added a new progress bar animation which is definitely cool, but it still lacks the ability to do that calculation for each subproject, and to compare the progress on all open projects. Further, in the Best of All Possible Worlds (cue Voltaire) it would have some kind of hooks into some facet of 43things, such that my to-do list transforms social software. Social software is the new everything – look at 43things, Basecamp, Flickr (Stewart and Caterina, say it ain’t so) and the rumored next version of Delicious Monster, the future of the Web OS is all about the social factor.
Hell, even Inkblots is getting in on the act, but more on that later. Much later. 😉
And I’m still looking for some more reliable staff people here, so shoot me an email if you’re interested!