TextMate & Wordpress

Over the last few days I've been trying to get a wordpress blog on the go - to replace my personal blog. Its been a trial and education setting up my server space with my ISP.

Its all done now though and I like the idea of wordpress. One advantage over the blogger version is that I can write and post my articles from inside TextMate, a package that I've been using more and more over the last few days.

My website needs an overhaul too and I've traditionally used Dreamweaver on my PC to develop these - the WYSIWYG format is good for me. With the mac however, I'm looking around for an application to replace Dreamweaver. Obviuosly I could get Dreamweaver for the mac, but some comments I've heard recently are that its bloated and it creates pages that contain padding. I've decided I ought to know more about HTML & CSS (which will help on the blog too), so I invested in Learn HTML in 24 hours. I'm not that far into it but have discovered that I could use TextMate to develop my pages, or something with a preview function like Coda.

OmniFocus

I spent yesterday looking at the new OmniFocus demo video.

I've tried a few products on both the PC and my new MacBook Pro to record my GTD needs. Kinkless is the product that I've had the best results with and it is very closely related to OmniFocus.

I come across a couple of "wouldn't it be nice" moments when using kinkless, but after watching the video yesterday they all seem to have been addressed and some. The new features look REALLY good.

I've joined the mailing list for the product and I'm hoping that the posts regarding a public beta in the next few weeks are true. Can't wait to get stuck in.

Posting from TextMate

So this is a general test of blogging using a new app I'm trialing. TextMate seems to be a really powerful text editing tool that can be used for pretty much anything. It has loads of plug-ins or Bundles, which allow you to perform several tasks.

I'm not really into HTML, and I'm looking for something to replace my dreamweaver on the PC (without buying dreamweaver for the mac). I'm looking at coda too, but again an understanding of html would be good. I'm not too bad on the simple link things, but complex formatting and tables is never something I've done.

If anyone has some ideas on books or sites I can visit for getting good html advice let me know.

Menu bar

So whats in your menu bar??

Strange thing - yesterday Mark & I had a long chat about the menu bar and how we'd seen things in Merlin's menu bar that we liked the idea of. The full date time was one and I hunted down this instruction set to perform that - which I really like, a quick glance up to the top right to check the date.

And behold this mornings feed shows a 43Folders article on whats in Merlin's menu. I've heard about skitch and was keen to give it a try, but its still in private beta - hope to get that when its released to the masses.

[What's in my menubar? at 43Folders]

Change of Plan - Journalling

Following my previous post on journalling, I have (in a quite typical fashion) completely changed my mind!! I don't think this is a bad thing though and I think that systems and tools should be constantly reviewed to see if they are still the best option. Granted, this is a pretty quick change, even by my faddy standards!!

I was trying out iGTD at the same time as Scrivener and it was proving to be quite a useful tool, the interface was good and I invested some time in getting all of my inbox transferred into it. Something happened though and it appeared to reverted to a set of data that was a few days older and I had lost a considerable amount of tasks and thoughts.

I turned then to the trusty Merlin Mann at 43Folders and looked for a similar product and decided to try kinkless GTD (I like the look of OmniFocus but that isn't available yet). From what I can see OmniFocus and kinkless GTD are similar and the developers appear to be friendly by reading the blog posts. I'm guessing that as kinkless uses OmniOutliner as its engine, that there may be a path of upgrade.

The long and the short of it is that I figured I could also use OmniOutliner to record my weekly journal, so I've held back on the purchase of Scrivener for that reason. It is a good tool, but it didn't quite feel right in the end.

As an extention to this post I also took the GTD book back off the shelf and have started reading it again, just to polish the edges on technique!

Buying the Beast

So I finally bought my mac. Almost an impulse purchase and certainly not the model that I was originally looking at - BUT I AM VERY PLEASED!

I finally went for the Macbook Pro and I’ve started to set it up with “trial” applications to see what I might use permanently now I’m in the mac world.

The first thing that I looked into was VMWare, which is a package I’ve used on Windows to create virtual machines and it will allow me to operate the few legacy applications that I need for work in a windows environment. I could have used bootcamp, but I didn’t want to have a windows partition on my hard drive, and as I already have a library of VMWare images with different configurations, it won over the Parallels product too.

I’ve been taking a few notes from podcasts and blogs as to the type of things I should be using on my mac to help with productivity. I’ve therefore decided to evaluate the following products
OmniOutliner - this package came onboard my new mac and is great for lists. I’m sure it has more powerful things as well that I hope will become apparent as I use it more. Any tips are welcome.

Quicksilver - this commonly seems to be “the must have” tool. I’ve got the evaluation copy at the moment, but from what I’ve seen it seems to be very impressive. I have got Merlin’s 43Folders post to gen up on to hopefully get towards being a power user. I’ve reduced the items in my dock to encourage me to use Quicksilver more.

Scrivener - Again the trial version is being used, and I’m constructing this post in it now. Not sure at the moment if I can use it full time. I’d like to be able to use it as a project management tool for projects that aren’t writing projects. I’m sure that it can be adapted, but is it right me me?

Notebook - Final trial piece of software, which at the moment I’m using to replace the journal I used in Microsoft OneNote. It seems to offer a similar way of working, but I’m not sure I need it as well as scrivener and omnioutliner.

If anyone has any tips on the products above or alternatives that might suit me, please let me know.

Easy To-do

Following on from yesterdays post I spotted this on the DIY Planner blog. It speaks of a little piece of software which ticked some boxes for me. It allows me to create recurring tasks (a feature I'm fond of in Remember the Milk) but it has all the information offline. I've downloaded it for a trial, but seems to offer a lot of configurability and could fit nicely with my system.

[GTD@Work: My Quest Ends from DIY Planner]

[Easy To-Do from Xanadu Tools]

Application Reviews

I've been introduced (and been using) a couple of little apps in the last week or so. The first is JDarkRoom, which is a text editor that provides a "matrix" style green text on black background interface. I've been using it to write longer blog posts and musings and found it just what I needed to keep me from having distracting toolbar messages. It has a neat word count feature too. Its written in java, so no need to use .NET.

The second application is Launchy, which is a windows utility designed to save time when starting applications. Mark found this application after a discussion we'd had on using Quicksilver (which I intend to get into when I get my Mac), but for now we thought that this was a good "practise" using windows machines.


JDarkRoom from code alchemists
Launchy from Josh Karlin