WordPress mobile
While blogs and some simple social networking-type sites have become commodity software, far too much of the web still faces low-level development challenges that lead to lots of frustration for both the owners of those web sites and for their users.
About six months ago I did a cursory check of a bunch of blogs thought to be SAS — such as WordPress and Blogger — to see if they were iPhone friendly. They were not. Then, yesterday, I found by chance that my WordPress-powered blog is iPhone friendly. My blog being iPhone-friendly is quite a nice surprise, because I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how web site creation is still far too low-level. Years ago I had a MovableType blog that I administered on my own, on a physical server that I owned. While I wanted to be blogging, sometimes I felt like what I was really doing was administering and customizing the blogging software, and not doing enough actual blogging. For non-technies, administration and customization tasks would have been insurmountable barriers to actually having a blog. And even as a techie, when I powered down the server, the blog disappeared forever.
This blog is different. I don’t do anything, and over time, its interface evolves with the changing web. In addition to being iPhone-friendly, WordPress also supports Google gears. The site I started for the Enterprise Rails online community is also SAS, and is powered by Ning. I don’t have to worry about either site, and they just run, letting me concentrate on the content in the sites and not their low-level implementation.
Expect to hear more from me on this topic soon.
blog.chak.org is iPhone friendly
ScoreCard
Pivotal Labs is the creator of Pivotal Tracker, a fantastic task management tool that I use every day. I visited their office in NYC on Thursday to share a project idea with them, which hopefully they’ll build into their tracker software. The idea is called ScoreCard. It takes some ideas from Pivotal’s agile/scrum focus, and some from GTD (Getting Things Done). ScoreCard provides high-level view of all your tasks, organized by project.
These days, people work on so many projects at once — both at work and in their personal lives — that managing everything can become daunting. I counted the tasks in my personal “ToDo” list in Pivotal and found that I had over 150 tasks ahead of me on about a dozen small projects. I don’t need to see all of these tasks at once, because there’s no way I can work on everything at once. What I do want to know is “What are all the projects I’m working on” and “What can I work on now?” I’d also like to know, at a glance, how my projects are doing. Are they getting the attention they need or am I falling behind? Scorecard shows you this information across all your projects in one screen, and hides everything else from view to let you concentrate on what’s most important.
The image below shows the overview screen of all the projects.
ScoreCard project list
Here’s a zoom in on a single project, with an explanation of each part of the interface:
One ScoreCard Project
Like Tracker, ScoreCard gives you info on project velocity via the color of each project summary. It also adds trending (the flag) and a measure of project staleness (the time since last action). For the GTD’er in you, ScoreCard shows you two items from the project’s task list. It shows you the next action you need to focus on (with Tracker-style workflow steps: start, finish). It also shows you the last action you just completed. The tracker notion of “Accept” is assumed (this item will disappear when you complete the next action), but there’s a button to reject the action if you need to for some reason.
So yes, keeping my fingers crossed that the great folks at Pivotal will grant me this wish. If not, maybe someone else will build it for me — any takers? This tool can certainly be built on top of tracker’s web-service API.
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