Producteev is the new kid on the block in the collaborative task management arena, but this app puts the emphasis on the social and makes multi-tasking, our 21st-century way of life, a lot easier.
Just to be clear, this is not another Basecamp-type application. It is a product of the less-is-more mentality, which often makes for the best applications. Producteev is for managing your activities and communicating with the other people involved in those activities.
My sister-in-law could really use this. She’s a swim team president, an assistant den mother, and in charge of fundraising for a large muscular dystrophy group in Los Angeles. On top of that, she is the Project Queen, at any given moment managing more of them than I ever could; everything from putting solar panels on her roof to organizing a family reunion in Hawaii.
All of our lives are like this to some degree, and web workers have to juggle not only home but also professional activities. We’re under particular pressure to be sure that nothing falls through the cracks. If you haven’t found a solution to that problem yet, read on.
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I’m planning to have a good 2009 – and this is going to be the year that I actually plan that. I’ve managed to muddle through the past couple of years of web working without any major plans, but like many of you, the economy has me worried. So I’ve set myself some quarterly goals of how I want my business to be doing – in terms of income stream and diversification – and my main resolution is to actually keep those goals in front of me and work towards them.
There’s plenty of debate about how useful resolutions are, or whether there’s some more productive way to spend the last or first day of the year. But they’re certainly traditional, and this is a good time to take stock. According to myGoals.com, you can increase you chances of following through by having a written plan – so why not share the resolution with the rest of us, as a first step towards writing it down?
2009 is the year you resolve to …
Can the internet public know more about you than you would like? According to an article at New Scientist, there’s a company that uses software to analyze blogs and forum posts to find out a blogger’s age, gender, and interests. Web workers who are avid users of Twitter also let the public know what they’re up to most of the day. Here at WWD, we also discussed the lack of privacy of the average web user when it comes to their browsing activity.
How do we maintain privacy when we work on such a public platform?
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Last week I wrote an article about Liferay, an open source portal app. Today, I’ll be looking at another option, Cyn.in, from Cynapse, an enterprise software solution provider.
Cyn.in is an open source collaboration app, and as such only offers a portion of the functionality of Liferay, but those looking for a more pure collaboration platform, and not a full-fledged intranet, may find it more tailored to their specific needs.
Cyn.in is centralized software that collects all of your basic collaboration software, like blogs, wikis, discussion boards, etc. It also supports file sharing and repositories. I tried the live demo to get a sense of what Cyn.in has to offer, with a special focus on how it might compare to Liferay regarding my specific goal of using it to help organize and grow my collaborative writing blog.
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A while back, a friend of mine and I had an idea for a new e-commerce web site we were thinking of launching. We eventually shelved the idea after digging up a couple of sites that were too close in spirit to the same idea, but one of the things I remember we worked hard on was mocking up a good looking design for the site, complete with a slick logo. This can be more dificult than it seems at first, but is an important first step in moving from your vision of a web site to execution.
Here are some free resources that can make the process easier, and provide good prototyping results.
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We last briefly looked at Invotrak in the Summer of 2007. The service is similar to Freshbooks, in that users can create and track invoices and timesheets for client projects and employees as well as some funky analysis of payment history.
Feature-for-feature, Invotrak and Freshbooks seem almost identical, though the latter offers a wider range of price plans, the former does seem to enjoy a cleaner and clearer design.
However, perhaps the ace-in-the-hole for Invotrak is its support for the iPhone, via a native App Store application, and its availability as a Dashboard widget for Macs.
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You may be interested and motivated to become a freelance writer, but it’s hard to know where to start. First, you should write, but that goes without saying. How do you turn your passion into paid work? It’s not a simple process, and it involves a lot of searching, digging, and some luck, as well.
These resources can help increase your chances of finding freelance writing work. It’s important to remember that whatever romantic notions of the solitary writer you may have, being successful as a freelancer depends on community, and these resources provide a good starting point for building your own.
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Web Work 101: How To Escape The Cubicle
