Zoho has released a major update to Zoho Projects, its online project management system that allows you to share projects with your team via the web. Zoho Projects 2.0 could be a tempting service for small- to medium-sized organizations that cannot afford Microsoft Project, the “gold standard” for project management in the enterprise. Zoho Projects requires no special software, just a browser and an Internet connection.
Several plans are available, including a free account that enables you to manage one project. That free account has unlimited users, which is a great way to get your feet wet. Create an account, invite all your team members, and give Zoho Projects a test drive before splashing out on one of the beefier plans. The good news is that you can now also import Microsoft Project files, which means you don’t have to recreate everything from scratch for an active project. Read the rest of this entry »
Editor’s note: With this post, we welcome Will Kelly to the WebWorkerDaily team. Will is a technical writer, analyst and consultant living and working in the Washington, D.C. area. His current areas of interest include mobile computing, Web Office suites, online collaboration tools, unified communications, and social media.
Reviewing technical documentation presents a number of challenges in many organizations. Stakeholders and subject matter experts are too busy or too dismissive of documentation to give it a thorough review, meaning project managers and writers often need to follow up with face-to-face meetings. As web workers, we sometimes miss out on the opportunity for face-to-face contact, putting us at a greater disadvantage when managing document technical reviews. Therefore, it is imperative for us to put the right tools and processes in place to manage technical documentation collaboration and reviews.
LiveTechDocs can help. It’s an XML-based online collaboration and document review tool that is designed to handle technical documentation, unlike many of the collaborative editing tools that we’ve reviewed here on WWD. Read the rest of this entry »
Whether you have only rudimentary web development skills, or are an expert developer, there are quite a few free sites that can help you extend your skills and learn new things. If you’re looking for education specific to, say, markup languages, CSS and the like, W3Schools is a good place to turn for exhaustive free lessons. However, if you’re looking for articles that can extend your development skills and projects in more general and theoretical ways, try Developer.com.
Read the rest of this entry »
I recently moved my web site between platforms, which involved changing the URLs of the pages on the site. As a result, my life as a webmaster has become an ongoing hunt to find and fix broken incoming or internal links on the new site.
Linkpatch is a web app designed for people like me who are on a mission to find bad links. Once installed, it sends you an email whenever a user encounters a 404 (page not found) error page on your web site.
Installation
The most difficult part of using Linkpatch is installing the code for the tracking script on your web site. Linkpatch works in a similar way to a statistics package like Google Analytics, except that the tracking script is only installed on your site’s 404 page.
Linkpatch’s installation instructions assume you do not already have a custom 404 page on your site and shows you how to create one. My site already had a custom 404 page. This saved me the step of creating one, but made installing the script itself a little more complex. Read the rest of this entry »
Task.fm, the task management/reminder app with natural language input that I wrote about in May, has just come out of beta, promising an improved interface, Twitter and email support, and improvements to the natural language input. As I noted previously, Task.fm’s input was limiting, which would likely frustrate many users.
The input on the new version is better; the particular input that I complained about in my previous post (”meeting with Dave in 30 minutes”) now works perfectly. However, there are still problems with it. For example, if you enter “dentist today at 4:30,” you’ll get a reminder of “dentist today” set for 4:30 a.m. on the current day. Try “dentist at 4:30 this afternoon” instead, and the result is even worse: You’ll get a task of “dentist this after” set for noon. As I noted in my previous post, natural language input is very hard to get right, and unfortunately Task.fm hasn’t cracked it yet.
The new email and Twitter support means that you can enter tasks by sending Task.fm an email or a tweet, so if you really want to interact with your reminder app through email or Twitter and you’re willing to put up with the shortcomings of the natural language input and learn its syntax, it might be an option for you. But given the problems with task entry, I still can’t recommend this app for widespread use.
Have you tried Task.fm’s natural language input? How could it be improved?
What methods do you provide for people to contact you through your web site? Generally, providing more ways for your visitors to contact you is better, but including everything on your site can get messy, and can also leave your details open to spammers. VisitorContact is a free service that makes it easy and fast to add a smart and stylish customizable contact form to your site. The form is accessed through a nonobtrusive yet noticeable button on the side of your web site and gives your visitors an easy way to get in touch with you though a variety of methods (through email, Twitter, Skype and more), yet also includes some spam protection. Read the rest of this entry »
Generally speaking, a worthwhile project isn’t easy. That said, the process can be made a little easier by using good project management software. EasyProjects.net certainly sounds like a good bet for some PM software that makes things easier, but can it live up to its own moniker? Read the rest of this entry »
It seems hard to improve on a standard screen capture, right? You want a copy of whatever happens to be on your screen, so you take a screen cap. But Aviary, which already has an impressive array of online photo-editing tools, has come up with a nifty screen-capping web app and a matching Firefox plugin that improve on the basics.
Here are five things that make Aviary screen capture really useful. Read the rest of this entry »
