Cobian Backup: Not the most beautiful user interface, but definitely the best free backup tool that I found and use on a daily basis. Has ALL the features.

JetDrive & PC Fresh: Two of our own programs that I use on my PC. JetDrive is the best defragmentation software on the market (in terms of PC speedup) and PC Fresh lets you configure all the low level stuff, that windows tries to hide from you. Both boost performance.

YouTube Song Downloader: Another one of our tools. Want to have music for free? We have the Windows tool. Getting YouTube avi videos or MP3 is no problem with this.

Skype: Why doesn’t everyone use Skype? It’s instant messaging with group conversations and included high quality phone service. It can send files. Perfect. (If the ads were removed.) You could even do video conferencing, but who would want that?

HeidiSQL: A free MySQL database client thats VERY nice and easy to use. If you find yourself or anyone else using phpmyadmin, tell that person that HeidiSQL is much better. Even if you need to tell it yourself.

TeamViewer: Help your father fix a Windows problem? Help a friend to setup his e-mail-client? Use this and share his screen and use your mouse and keyboard on his machine over the internet. Saves a lot of travelling time.

FileZilla: The best FTP client out there.

VLC: If you want to watch a video, just download this and watch it. Superb video player.

I’ll update this list if I find something else that I’d use every day.

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I lately got criticizm for the way I write (in the comments). My content is too unstructured, too badly laid out and sometimes incomprehensible. I think that is true, and I think I have to embrace these comments. So I’ll try to write more clearly, more to-the-point and better structured from now on.

Sadly, my writing workflow is sort of different. When I have the motivation to sit down and write, it usually comes flowing out and I don’t use much time after the actual writing to sort everything or rewrite stuff thats sounds bad. And I also don’t plan much ahead of how the content has to be structured. And I may add, that English is not my mother’s tongue, so I may often pick the wrong words or phrases or might just build sentences that may sound weird.

But never mind my self-pity: I’ll just go on writing, and if people don’t like it – well. I’ll get better at writing at some point in time, even if it’s not now.Thanks for the insights, hope I can get better.
photo credit: Mikey G Ottawa

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photo credit: ATMOSPHERA and KOLORZ

Sometimes, I’m really convinced of something. Like in my research that the new iPhone will be a better pick than an Android Desire – where I scanned through 20+ reviews, had both devices in hands (okay, an older version of the iPhone to be true) and am generally well informed about technology and smartphones. Or that someone really shoulod try some framework or technology, that would maybe even change his life (like using Twitter for example, which is the most terrific communications change in the last 10 years). But even if I’m really convinced, I just fail to transport this emotion correctly.

Is it my fault? I don’t know. I think the examples above (Twitter, iPhone) are just mainstream thinking (more people than just me coming to the conclusion that they rock) and therefore people expect me to be an Apple fanboy or a fellow runner or a person without life for advocating for such mainstream choices. They just can’t think about someone being right who has not their own attitude.

When I played the card game Magic from 1999 -2008 I often experienced the same – and was like this at first too. Only a strategy or thinking that I had invented myself or that was really underground could work for me or was “cool” enough. Later on, I learned that the mainstream ideas were already proven good ideas and could just be improved a bit to have the ultimate advantage.

Somehow, its the same with all these services. If I would use the iPhone or Twitter like a mainstream person, I wouldn’t like it much. But Twitter has so many 3rd party apps that make it useful and fun, and with a Jailbreak I can tinker in my system more than all those “Google-Fanboys” with their Androids.

Well, I’m still researching about iPhone 4 vs. Android 2.2 … should make a nice blogpost in the next few days.

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The point of this post is, that goals are no “wishlist“. I gave the example for goals you might want to reach (home or car, or a relationship with a partner you don’t know yet). These are more like a wishlist, as you don’t really know what needs to be done to reach these goals. If you want to reach them, you need to think about what needs to be done to reach them. Which can lead to other, more realizable goals like “get a better job” or “party every week” (sounds like a strange goal, but is closer to reality than “get a relationship”).

But these new goals are also pretty meaningless, if you don’t know how to reach them, and some of your goals might even be deleted from your list, as you realize they’re wishes and that it might really be the new job you need, or more friends to party with. Therefore, when you think about what you need to do, look at your goals and think of stuff that could bring you closer into the direction of these goals – like “watch [jobwebsiteOfYourChoice] for new possibilities”; “subscribe to the RSS feed of the fresh renting offerings website”; “arrange a party for my friends”. Make tasks out of them and put them on your ToDo-list. Do one of these every day. You’ll move forward faster.

One sentence productivity mantra from Penelope Trunk for free:

One thing at a time. Most important thing first. Start now.

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Twitter Plugins

First, there were the plugins. I wanted Twitter, but I had to acknowledge that all Twitter-plugins I tried were incredibly slow. Sad, as there were some nifty functions and nice styles included, but I wouldn’t want my pages to load 5 seconds longer because of that. So I ended up with the really nice and fast Tweetmeme-Button and the not so nice but fast and easily customizeable Xhanch – My Twitter plugin to show my lastest tweets. Xhanch needed some customization, and I’ll likely make it look a little fancier by jQuery when there’s time.

Must Have Plugins

Then there’re some must-have plugins: Google XML Sitemaps thats unbelievably important for the pagerank. Gurken Subscribe to Comments, as you just need as subscribe-to-comments-plugins anyways, and this one does double-opt-in, which is sadly a law-enforced necessity here in germany.

Akismet is included into Wordpress anyways, and your Blog wouldn’t survive without it anyway. I wanted to install the Math Comment Spam Protection plugin too, but forgot that you need to include code into the pages to show the mathematical question (like “type in the sum of 2 and 6″), so I deactivated it for now. Maybe it will already be active when you read this post.

The All in One SEO Pack plugin is a no-brainer too – it optimizes META-tags, generates descriptions of your post if you’re too lazy to write one and generally is a good thing.

Speed Plugins

Sadly, Worpress was developed on PHP. This means, Wordpress is pretty slow. You want to add some plugins, that help you with the speed as the visitor’s time is very valuable – don’t agrue with me here. To speed things up, you could install a lot of plugins, that help you.

First said, loading pictures is a pain for the browser, especially if you have a lot of tiny pictures for all the soicla networks you want the visitor to share your post – each of these usually uses another HTTP request, and those are damn slow. The jQuery lazy load plugin helps you A LOT here. It basically makes the browser only load pictures that your visitors can see, loading other pictures when the visitor is browsing down the site and reaches the point where the pictures are shown. One Gotcha here: the sidebar pictures were only loaded when you scrolled to the bottom, as the HTML code for that is below all the other stuff. But you can define a CSS class within the plugin, that get loaded the usual way. Putting this class in your image-tags will help you here.

For the same reason as above, the WP CSS plugin is pretty nice, as it includes all your CSS import into one file (meaning there’s only one HTTP-request for the CSS-files) and even gzips them, so they use up fewer space while getting downloaded to the visitor’s browser. Neat. (Update: Does not work with the @font-face CSS-stuff needed to embed a webfont – as that used on this site.)

Another plugin that strips out whitespace and compressed the generated HTML is WP HTTP Compression. No configuration needed — this just works, so use it.

The speed-bazooka after all is WP Super Cache of course. This plugin makes everything superb – the site that goes out to your visitors will be stored, and should another visitor want to see the same page, he will just get the stored copy, so PHP doesn’t need to use its slow braincells for putting the site together again. This one’s just perfect, I would only advise to disable it while you’re working on the design of your blog, because *deleted for obviousness*.

Then you can just Google for “improving wordpress performance” or “speeding up wordpress”, there are a lot more hints out there for stuff you can do without plugins. Like modifying your .htaccess file to stop hotlinking or keep spambots and other unwanted crawlers out.

Other Plugins

Efficient Related Posts is like the best plugin I wished everyone was using – so put it into your blog NOW. It uses the tags you put under your posts to look for similarities and puts the “related posts” part under the post. I often read a lot more that I wanted on other blogs, just because of me thinking “well, that post could really be nice too”. You can watch it in action if you’re on the posts single page below.

Zero Conf Mail is just the most simple solution to putting a feedback-form on your blog, in case someone wants to ask you something directly. I put mine in the about-page, in case you want to use or see  it.

Shadows is a plugin that will underlay all pictures on your site that you add a certain CSS-class to with some sort of shadow. I’m still experimenting with this one. If you want to use it with Zemanta (as I clearly want to), you’ll maybe have to hack a bit in your CSS files, as Zemanta adds some CSS that interferes with the picture’s shado and makes it look weird. If you want to see it in action with another picture I included, you can see that in the post What is Viral Marketing? for example.

When I have some more nice stuff to show off, I’ll post another one. Hope you like this post.

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The key concept of time management is that you just have a better system of organizing your work – so you need lesser worrying and rushing and get your stuff done nevertheless. Time management is like a secretary for your mind. And for some people like me, it’s exactly what I need… while others might prefer rushing and a flurry to get their stuff done.

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The Problem

But powering out so much stuff makes me think if people might want to read that much from a small and unworthy blog like mine. Nobody knows. But I only know one blog with content thats interesting enough, is able to power out one post per day and not some stupid watchblog (thats only reposting stuff it finds on the interwebs): the blog of Seth Godin. But even for me (who really likes that blog) its hard enough to keep up with the posts, even when they’re usually not too long. This leads to reading many of them in a short amount of time – which let them not sink in as deep as they could.

Collateral Damage

Another point is, that I often want to write something new that needs to fit in between some other posts to make sense or that need to be release ASAP, which usually means the next day (as I don’t want to post two times a day). So, I write a post, and try to fit it in, and that makes me reschedule a lot of other posts, taking up some time that would better be used to write more.

Consequences

If you identify a problem, you should try to solve it. As my reservoir of drafts slowly comes to an end anyways, I think of planning ahead posts every two days. This way, all the problems mentioned above seem to be discarded, and I can make sure that my flow of ideas and posts I usually draft on the iPhone or write as a bulk-writing on weekends doesn’t come to an end – this blog will be very active. I’ll try to sum up whyin one of my following articles, where I reflect about Creativity – how to become and stay creative.

So from now on, I’ll publish a post every two days, whenever there’s more than that I just had to stuff something in between.

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