My intentions of posting about all sorts of stuff since we got back from the UK didn’t come to anything. Now, with the deafening clatter of the keyboard, here’s a bit of a re-cap:
Web Essentials 2005
The great news at the beginning of the month was the announcement that Web Essentials 2005 will be on 29 and 30 September and is open for registrations. I didn’t waste too much time testing out the registration process!
WE05 promises to even bigger and better than last year’s exceptional inaugural effort with resentations by the likes of Molly Holzschlag, Eric Meyer, Tantek Celik, Jeff Veen, Kelly Goto, Doug Bowman, and Derek Featherstone. Early-bird registration is available until June 30.
Basecamp
After reading Stan’s article Independent Workflow back in February I decided that I’d been met with a watershed of references to Basecamp and better see what all the fuss was about.
Basecamp is a creation of 37signals, whose brilliant Defensive Design for the Web is one of a handful of essential books for anyone who designs web sites. Basecamp is a project manager with what seems to be, at first glance, very few of the features you’d expect from a traditional project management system (I’m thinking of MS Project and the like here), however, I signed up for the free Basecamp plan, which allows you to have only one project. This was all I needed to get my work schedule in order. 37signals offer several monthly subscription rates that allow increasing numbers of projects and the ability to fully personalise the system.
Initially I didn’t quite ‘get it’ but, as I loaded up my project, started associating my to-do lists with my milestones and automatically updating my Mozilla Calendar from Basecamp’s iCal calendar feed, I had a bit of an epiphany — the approach all started to make sense. Jon Hicks writes about a similar moment &mdash although, unlike Jon, I haven’t been using it collaboratively but I must have hit some sort of milestone-and-to-do-list threshold that caused the penny to drop — I suddenly felt in control.
By all accounts, once you start managing a number of people and allow clients access to Basecamp’s messaging system it all gets rather good.
Check out the two spin-off products from Basecamp: Ta-da Lists and the recently released Backpack. Ta-da lists is a very useful, stand-alone, implementation of Basecamp’s to-do lists — I use it to keep track of personal to-do items — and Backpack is like a personal information manager on the web. You can create pages an include to-do lists, diary entries and images. A neat feature is the ability to set reminders. At the allotted time Backpack sends a message via email or, if your mobile phone service is provided by one of the listed companies, you can get our reminder by SMS.
Malarkey redesigns
Andy Clarke has done a brilliant job of redesigning And all that Malarkey with a special treat for IE viewers! Jeremy Keith will, no doubt, be very happy with the site’s newly found fluidity.
Waxmuseum
For those that follow the fate of the Waxheads, the Waxmuseum is now fully database-driven.
After last week’s game (not because of last week’s game, I hasten to add) Clive, the venerable Waxheads goalie has added himself to the Waxmuseum. Clive announced his retirement after more than 20 years in the team. He will be sorely missed. Luckily, he’s said to be coming out of retirement for this week’s game — but that could have something to do with the a proposal for after-match drinks …