Web Worker Daily

It’s a great time to be a web worker. Almost every day, a new site, service or product comes on the scene that promises to make our work more efficient (or more fun). Some areas, like project management or image editing, are crowded with options. And in order to gain a following, many services are being offered inexpensively or at no cost.

But as Paisano wrote recently, current conditions won’t last forever. Many sites will eventually become fee-based; others will shut down when their funding runs out, or when their owners decide to move in a different direction.

So when I evaluate a product that I’d like to incorporate into my company’s workflow — especially a product that will be visible to clients — I try to consider the product’s feature set, along with the issues raised in Judi’s 2007 WWD post. I also ask the following questions: Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been on somewhat of an OS X productivity tools kick lately, with posts on EventBox, Mindnode and Manhour. So I’m going to round out that journey with a quick peek at a useful little tool that was recently brought to my attention, Sentinel Design Group’s Serverskine.

You may support any number of web servers for your own projects or for your clients, and keeping track of account names, URLs, passwords, etc. can be tricky. Serverskine provides a notebook for storing your credentials for each account.

The free application groups each server’s credentials into server, FTP, database, hosting provider and domain provider subsets, enabling one-click access to remotely-hosted control panels and suppliers’ web sites, as well as the server in question.

Sadly, the application lacks some essential extensibility. For example, the ability to add groups for commonly installed applications, such as Movable Type, would be welcome.

Serverskine stores its data as binary, SQL or XML files. Somewhat worryingly, the latter pair of formats store passwords in clear text; similarly, there’s no way to secure the entire database with any form of authentication. And Serverskine takes no advantage of being a native OS X application.

Interestingly, the creators of Serverskine — the Sentinel Design Group — developed it as an internal tool for tracking and storing server credentials, recently flipping to a public release to share their creation with the wider world. They may want to consider creating it as an extensible web-based service as a way to overcome its current shortcomings but maintain its utility.

Serverskine is neither clever nor sophisticated, but it is a useful server configurations notebook, and it’s free.

What do you use for managing server credentials?

Sitemasher

I wasn’t sure what to make of Sitemasher when I first heard of it. With Sitemasher, you can build a web site, manage the content, get analytics, implement basic SEO, and you get managed hosting to boot.

But at $99/month, I felt the kerpow of sticker shock. I knew that I had to think about Sitemasher differently to fully appreciate its value.

So after a demo with the company, here is what I’ve learned.

Read the rest of this entry »