Category Archives: Productivity

Productivity

Number one feature on WordPress.com

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How convenient: today’s suggestion for blogging from the The Daily Post is to ask yourself:

why not write a post about either: a) Your feature wishlist (what do you wish WordPress.com did?) or b) Your top complaints, especially as it regards being a frequent blogger

Now of course I have one feature that I really would love to see, and that is the implementation of Markdown, a lightweight markup language by John Gruber. In John’s words:

The overriding design goal for Markdown’s formatting syntax is to make it as readable as possible. The idea is that a Markdown-formatted document should be publishable as-is, as plain text, without looking like it’s been marked up with tags or formatting instructions. While Markdown’s syntax has been influenced by several existing text-to-HTML filters, the single biggest source of inspiration for Markdown’s syntax is the format of plain text email.

This post is currently being written in Markdown and I write most of my notes in Markdown, precisely for the fact that I can easily type them and read them as plain text without the sometimes enormously long HTML tags getting in the way and at the same time being able to very easily convert them to a formatted version, such as HTML.

Now I know that plugins exist for WordPress to allow blogging directly in Markdown. And if you have a self hosted WordPress blog you can install these plugins, but for WordPress.com this is not possible. I brought up the question in the new ideas forum to find out if it would be possible after all and generated a number of replies by supporters. I even went so far as to say I would pay for this feature although I believe it would be a very nice addition to WordPress.com as such.

So what is my number one feature I want to see on WordPress.com: the ability to write notes, articles and blogs in a simple and easily learnable markup that is consumable by humans and not only by computers.

The Aperture Trash demystified

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Joseph Linaschke, the Aperture Expert, has an excellent, very detailed explanation on what exactly happens when you empty the trash in Apple Aperture. The trash mechanism in Aperture can be complicated depending on what you are trying to trash: albums or projects, versions or master images, referenced or internally managed pictures. Joseph goes through all these possibilities and explains what happens when you actually empty the trash. Good reading and certainly helps avoiding mistakes which could lead to data loss.

In fact if the explanation is too detailed for you, check out the video included at the bottom of the blog post which explains the same thing.

So I have not managed to update my blog once a week… I think I have to try harder. So far I wrote a draft which I still have to edit. Hope to get to that tomorrow…

I’m Posting every week in 2011!

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I’ve decided I want to blog more. Rather than just thinking about doing it, I’m starting right now. I will be posting on this blog once a week for all of 2011.

I know it won’t be easy, but it might be fun, inspiring, awesome and wonderful. Therefore I’m promising to make use of The DailyPost, and the community of other bloggers with similiar goals, to help me along the way, including asking for help when I need it and encouraging others when I can.

If you already read my blog, I hope you’ll encourage me with comments and likes, and good will along the way.

Andrew

What is (not) a GTD context?

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As someone trying to apply the Getting Things Done methodology, it is often quite difficult to define good and useful contexts. In particular if the standard ones like @office do not work. Thankfully Evomend has some help available on how to define good contexts:
What is (not) a GTD context?. Even more important it also covers bad choices of contexts to avoid.