Well, I was waiting this for a long time! After 3 amazing days at the Confoo conference, I got home yesterday evening, tired but the head full of new ideas and techniques I’ve heard about at the conference. I stopped by to check the mailbox. There was a key in our box. This means that a package was waiting for me in the other bigger mailbox. I opened it and here it was, the long awaited book we’ve all been waiting for: REWORK!
If you are even only remotely involved in web technologies or web business, you probably already heard about this book by 37signals Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson. If not, well, what are you waiting for ? Have a look here.
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Since a little bit more then a year, we were using the services of CVSDude (which has now become Codesion) for the SVN repositories and Trac instances of ImpressCMS. When we first created ImpressCMS, we were using SourceForge: for these things but at that time, SourceForge features were not meeting our needs. Plus, they did not have Trac. This explained our choice of using CVSDude.
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Since a few weeks, I’ve been seeing some weird borders in forms of some sites I’m using a lot, like Highrise and Freshbooks. At first, it only occurred in Highrise so I thought it might be a side effect of one of the updates 37signals are making every 2 weeks or so. I contacted them and they did not seem to have a clue what it was. Weird. If it was specific to Highrise, others would have reported it and 37signals would have fixed it. As it was not a biggie, I let it go.
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Recently, I upgraded the family computer from Windows Vista to Windows 7. How I could go nearly 2 years without throwing that computer out the window is a complete mystery to me. The computer is a nice HP dual core with 2 Gb or RAM. And while Vista was on it, with no applications running, CPU usage was always at least 60% and so was the memory used. Opening any applications would take a minute or so. Really, I was that close to actually rip my arm off and beat this computer to death with it.
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Lately, a few people have been asking me how to format messages and writeboards on Basecamp. As you may know, Basecamp supports Textile formatting which is a wiki-like format. It allows to easily format messages and Writeboards. You simply need to learn a few basic syntax elements.
I have found two interesting cheat sheets explaining the syntax you need to know to be able to quickly format text in Basecamp. I’ll give you the link at the end of this post, but, for the sake of “getting things done” 
, here is what I think you need to know. In fact, I use Basecamp on a daily basis and those are the only elements I’m using, 99% of the time: displaying links and lists.
One of the tool I’m using nearly every day is Webex. 
It’s an online conferencing tool which, in our line of work, is essential! Since we have clients, staff and partners everywhere in the world, what would we do without web conferencing! I’m currently using both Webex and GoToMeeting, which are the 2 main players in this market. First one is by Cisco, second one by Citrix. I like them both, with a little preference for GoToMeeting, which is a little bit simpler for clients and a bit more user friendly.
But GoToMeeting has one main issue: it does not work on Linux… And, I can not go back to Windows for my main desktop OS, I would go crazy! So I use Webex on a daily basis, and once a week I use GoToMeeting for a conference I’m doing with people at ImpressCMS which needs to be recorded. I have to do this on my wife’s laptop though, as she has Windows .
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I like the Wordpess tag cloud. It’s nice to see with a glimpse of an eye, the topics that are most discussed on one’s blog. However, my very good friend and SEO guy James Morris told me many times to NOT USE the tag cloud unless it’s modified to add the nofollow attributes on links.
I started looking for a solution and find this one. A very interesting solution. Jan has made a patch to edit the Tag cloud widget to add an option for nofollow tag. Unfortunately, his change was not accepted by the WordPress team because average user would not understand what the nofollow setting does. Which makes sense by the way and explains why WordPress is so great. They always ensure that by default, an average user will understand what he sees. I like that. And anyway, plugins exists specifically for that reason: adding extra things you need! Read more…
Take a good look at our current site http://inboxinternational.com because very soon, you will never be able to see it again! That’s right! After months of efforts we are only a few hours away to reveal our brand new flagship web site! In french, we would say that we were suffering from the syndrome of the “coordonier mal chaussé”. A literal translation would look like “a shoemaker with very old shoes”!
Yes, I know it, our current site is old, it’s not that pretty, frankly, it’s far more Web 1.0 then 2.0 . But you see, our problem is the love of our client. We love them so much, that they are always more important then our very own web site. And it’s normal! Without clients, you don’t need a web site, as you’ll be running out of business very soon! Read more…
As I discussed in a recent post, I had to downgrade to a previous version of Subversion to make it compatible with Subclipse in EasyEclipse. Everything worked perfectly. However, the day after, Ubuntu proposed me some packages to upgrade. I accepted without thinking. Then, the problem I had with Subclipse got back… Of course! In the system upgrade I just did, Subversion package was upgraded to the latest version. Back to square one! Read more…
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