chillu.com

There are innumerous posts about getting things done (GTD), and I spent so much time reading them that I actually didn’t get anything done ;) So, what would a geek-blog be without it’s GTD-post – here’s my take on the topic: Organization of your life’s daily actions basically needs a consistent system. I tried really basic stuff such as moleskines (handwriting sucks) and text-files (too unflexible). Then I switched to Circusponies Notebook (no todo-categories), Backpack (online-only) and Burnoutmenu (clumsy UI). All this systems failed for the stated reasons – I needed cross-platform compatibility in case my Powerbook dies again, offline-access and an intelligent GUI that does not get in my way.

After several weeks of testing, I’m still excited about a simple HTML-tool that now keeps all my todos: NextAction. Somehow in my development-life, I missed the fact that webpages can save data to theirselves via Javascript and JSON – I mean, how cool is that?! By that, you can have a full-blown interactive web-app in a single file, in the case of NextAction executable in every Mozilla-based browser. NextAction is really tailored towards GTD, with action-contexts (a very important principle to learn), actions for the next X days and human-friendly due-dates (“next month” instead of 2006/04/01). Of course, it’s interface is freely customizable via CSS – I’m planning to do a chillu.com-skin for it ;) To make this web-app behave more “desktoppy”, I’m loading it into a seperate browser (Camino) showing only this page without any title-bars. By this, I can instantly switch to my todo-list, and don’t clutter it with tabs of other websites – simple access is everything.

So, having a functional system that I trust, the only thing I have to learn is actually implementing good GTD – I still have those monster-todos floating around in my list that are not “actionable” in the original sense – they can’t be accomplished in a simple sitting. I guess I have to do some more GTD-reading... before I get things done… g

Trying to develop after the open-source-principle “Publish early and often” I’m releasing some “under the hood”-updates to this website. A new design is on the way, but for today the focus is on content and functionality. I’m very inspired by the fresh ideas of signal vs. noise, the weblog by Ruby-on-Rails-creator 37signals – especially one post titled “A challenge for 2006: Cut your site in half”. So, what’s been done:

• CMS-Upgrade to Typo3 4.0RC1
• more RSS-formats (RSS0.91, Atom, RDF)
• language specific blog-view ("show only english posts")
• focus on a single web-portfolio (and a tiny link to "other works")
• updated "about"-section
• named my "thoughts"-section what it really is: a "blog" (to hell with those pseudo-individual wording
• dumped the "fr33 the pixel"-tagline – I’ve never known what it meant anyways…
• mini-blogroll (with xfn-tags)
• RSS-feed on recent works
• improved human-readable urls (RealURL rocks!)
• temporarily disabled the styleswitcher due to incompatibilities with the new Typo3-version

Update: Comments are not working…again sigh