In all honesty the office in the other room was really only passable. I was using a desk that my wife originally wanted when she worked at home and did mainly paper based work. I had ‘hacked’ this desk so it was passable for the programming and design I did as my job. It wasn’t ideal but it worked.

When we moved the desk in to the bedroom it made a passable solution way worse. The desk had little storage. It had some super deep drawer for ‘pens’, which is some writing tool that I don’t use at least that’s what people tell me they’re for. The desk was also huge which made it an awesome spot to collect papers, cups and lots of other junk that had only a passing association with work.

I purchased two okay shelves and piled them high with printers, action figures and software boxes. Said shelves were always sagging and had to be flipped over every few months when the the wheeled Transformers started to drive themselves off the edge.

The room also had enough light for a sleeping area but that light was neither the right type nor pointed in the proper direction for working at the desk. This of course increased eye strain which is a career killer if you’re not careful.

The end result of this clutter was a work area I hated to be at. I didn’t hate the work I just hated the place I had to do the work in.

the old work area

As my business became more successful I decided it was time to purcahse a proper working area. Off I went to the Ikea site to find a great desk with an awesome storage space, and I eneded up with a simple small table top (VIKKA AMON) and two shelves (EXPEDIT). Added a few lights and I was able to have a great work space.

the desk in flat pack form from Ikea

this is the new work area shot from about the same place in the room

As I said above the huge desk that was used previously was a magnet for clutter. The new desk has enough room for my keyboard, mouse, laptop, monitor and tablet. If I need a reference piece of paper then the tablet has to move. This limited space makes sure that nothing can get left on the desk unless it’s vitally important.

Second I needed some lights that were meant for the work area. This was the part I was least prepared for. I had a vague idea of what I wanted but never felt like I new what the perfect solution was. I ended up with 3 LED lights under the top shelf and one wide spread lamp mounted to the shelf pointing at the desk. I hid the switch for the 3 LED lights below the desk where you can’t see it.

under shelf lighting

Finally I wanted to manage cables better. My currently 14 month old daughter is like most kids, curious. She wants to pull on everything so getting cables off the floor not only makes everything look way nicer, it makes things safer for her. I ended up using another Ikea product (SIGNUM) to control the cables and then used a picture hanging velcro kit from the local hardware store to mount two power bars on the underside of my desk.

managing all the cables

The end result is a work area that has lots of light and doesn’t feel cluttered in any fashion.

I do feel like there is room for improvement but I’m just not sure what it is yet. I’m not 100% sold on the lighting but it’s 110% better than it was before. I’m also not happy with the cables yet. Part of the trouble is that I don’t have a Thunderbolt equipped MacBook Pro so I simply need more cables when I want to hook things up, but part is also how they run across my desk. Again I’m not sure what I can do to fix this yet but it’s way better than it was.

The next steps will be the purchase of an Aeron chair in the next few weeks. I’ll also be adding arms to hold the monitor and keyboard off the desk. This will let me adjust them as needed and even provide better from bed movie watching.

This is an especially poignant question for freelancers who do business under their own name. How far do you let business relationships join with your personal life? Do you want clients to see the latest pictures of your children? Do you want them to know how much we visit coffee shops to work?

For me this came up recently when a client wanted to know if I was on Facebook. If you’ve seen any of my tweets you’ll know that while I have a Facebook account I’m not really a fan of the service (and we’re not even talking about their privacy crap yet). It took a few tries to communicate with the client that while I was on Facebook it was not a place that I did business, so even if they did friend me I would not approve the request.

I know that many businesses have had great success getting work from Facebook but I’ve decided to draw a line on business joining my personal life and Facebook is off limits. I don’t have a business Facebook page and I won’t approve your ‘friendship’ with me if we strictly do business together. I honestly don’t really care if you’re upset about it. I don’t even approve all of my college/highschool/gradeschool friends and we were truly friends at one point. While it ‘s sorta neat to see where they are and what they’re doing we don’t hang out, I haven’t seen them in years, we’re not really friends now.

I think that everything has to have boundaries, places that aren’t open for everyone to see. If we let business in to every spot in our life then there is no place we can go an unwind, no place that is truly personal. That’s why I turn my phone off at night and why not everyone gets to tread on my Facebook profile, it’s reserved for friends, people I interact with on a regular basis that mean something to me on a personal level.

So yeah if we do some business together and we’re friends on Facebook you should feel lucky, you’re in a select group of people that I’ve let cross that boundary.

Sure we’re all flying this way and that way online in our lives but I think that the real person that can affect change in the comments of sites, is the site owners.

While the post in question has a fair few decent comments that are thoughtful, many repeat the same ideas as another commentator (a ‘me too’ comment) and at least one just says ‘great post’ (vanity comments). My question to Smashing Magazine and all popular blogs is why on earth do you let people provide useless ‘great post’ comments? The very fact of not removing them in the first place means that you’re contributing to the problem.

I have a firm policy of only allowing comments to stay on my site if they are actually useful. Sure I’ve never gone back and made sure that old comments are only like that but for a few months now I haven’t approved any comments that are of that nature.

I realize I’m a small blog and don’t have the problems of scale that many sites will have when moderating comments. I know that if you’re using WordPress scanning through some comments and removing any that aren’t useful isn’t really all that time consuming.

So here’s a call to all bloggers. Don’t let useless comments get on the site. Then when someone is interested in making a useful comment they won’t have to wade through a ton of crap saying ‘good job’ to post their comment. I know that vanity comments on posts often mean any useful comment would be lost so I just don’t comment.

Vim and TextMate sitting in a tree

Why Vim

Really anyone doing any type of coding should be fairly comfortable in Vim (if you’re not I know a post on Vim). Vim is on any Unix system so it’s on all the servers you’re putting client sites on. If you have SSH access to your server Vim is way faster than FTP trickery.

Vim’s Killer Features (yeah I mean good things)

The feature I miss the most from Vim (when I’m coding in TexMate) is the modal editing. Just by hitting escape I’m moving the cursor around. Then start looking at using ‘W’ and ‘B’ to move whole words and you’re flying around the file so fast your hair will curl.

NERDTree is another pretty dang awesome Vim feature. Yeah I know it’s a Vim plugin but just go install it since it should just be included by default. NERDTress gives Vim a project browser like any other modern GUI text editor. You can move around with the normal Vim keys and open,close files lightening fast. It’s also super easy to jump to the parent folder and close it.

Vim’s Killer Features (as in your dead to me)

That dang copy/paste buffer. So you have a normal system wide copy/paste buffer that is pretty much the same no matter what operating system your on. Well Vim doesn’t care about that and it doesn’t use it. You see Vim has it’s own copy/past buffers that only work inside Vim (at least as far as I can determine) and the system ones don’t work. So that cool piece of code you put in your blog so you could reuse it, yeah it won’t paste into Vim, sorry.

No CMD+t to open a file in a project. While NERDTree rocks it’s still no CMD+t from TextMate. Sure PeepOpen adds that type of function to MacVim but not to Vim (and of course it couldn’t if you used it on a remote server).

TextMate go to file CMD+t

Still Using TextMate

Really the only feature from Vim that I miss when using TextMate is the navigation of code with HJKL. There is a plugin that adds this to TextMate but I’ve found it a big buggy (lets just ignore the fact I’m on a hackintosh please). Well that’s not quite right I TextMate started having occasional issues getting stuck in the project drawer after I renamed a file, after I installed ViMate.

That’s All She Wrote

So I’m going to stick with both Vim and TextMate for now. Neither is quite what I’m looking for in a code editor. They both have awesome features and things that are a bit lacking.

At the very least if you’re working on code use Vim long enough that you’re comfortable in it. It just makes you a more well rounded coder. One day the time you spent in Vim will save your ass when you need to live edit some files on a live server that keeps dropping FTP but keeps and SSH connection. Trust me it saved my ass more than once.

The Catalyst

The issue that finally broke my will to live and made me write this blog post came a few weeks back when working on getting Redmine setup to manage my projects. The whole process went according to plan (well maybe I had some help) till it came to setting up email through my Google Apps domain.

For those who don’t know I’ll provide a bit more detail. When setting up Redmine you have to configure your email client. It’s not a text field in the settings but a file in the application itself. No having it in a text field in the admin would not have helped me at all.

It took me 2 hours on two different days to get the email working (no this has no reflection on Redmine, read on). I read blog posts, combed through issues on the Redmine site, stuck my tongue out while coding, and nothing worked. It’s only as I beat my head against the table yet again that something jumped out…I spelled the username/email wrong in the configuration file.

I suppose the fact that I was getting errors from Redmine saying there was an issue with the username or password and that the login was failing should have been my first clue, but I guess the hammer wasn’t big enough to knock sense into me.

The real issue is not that I made a spelling mistake but the fact that it took me 4 hours to find it spread over two days. Why didn’t the incorrect username jump out at me right away? Redmine is a solid piece of software with good testing. All the blog posts I read said to do what I was doing (mind some were for older versions), and yet I missed a simple spelling mistake. Something in my head just didn’t want to see the forest for the trees.

Learning It All Again

I’m sure that I’m not alone here in saying this is not the first time I’ve had to learn this lesson. There is no way I could count the times that I struggle with implementing something on a site and after spending days (sometimes) I realize that I’ve made a spelling mistake, syntax error, didn’t link to a script…. The hard thing is how do I stop myself from learning this over and over again?

Got any suggestions?

girl screaming cause of distraction

It’s kind of like the ‘killing zone’ in the movie Wanted. You start off with it just happening and you have no control. Over time you learn how it works for you and grab the shuttle from the loom. Then you become a master.

The Distractions

Whether you work at home or in an office distractions come at us fast and furious. In the office co-workers visit your desk to chat. At home dogs bark, kids cry, neighbours stop by to say ‘hi’. In either place the phone rings while you are focused. Email comes in and audibly notifies you. You keep your twitter client open and it notifies you (my hands up on that one for sure).

The Weapons of Distraction Death

My primary weapon to kill office distraction is headphones or at the least music. Even if I’m not actually listening to music I have my headphones on. The headphones create a visual barrier for people when they come up to my desk. It makes them think twice when I don’t immediately react to their entry into the office (even though I see it at the edge of my vision). A number of times, when I stay focused for a few seconds extra they leave and shoot me a quick email which I can answer during my email times.

Second you need to turn off your email. Don’t leave it open all day. Don’t respond instantly to every message that comes in. Don’t open your email first thing in the morning. My daily routine goes something like this. I arrive at the office and login to my computer. Open Google reader and triage the items I’m never going to read. Fire up mail.app and triage my secondary email (99% of the time just filing and marking items as spam). Then I open my normal work email and deal with what needs to be dealt with. Once I have dealt with my email I close the window.

I personally have my email set to provide no notification of any fashion when new email comes in. This lets me Tab to Entourage if needed and create a new email from the keyboard without opening the app and seeing what might be there. I only open my email if I am between items of work and have a few minutes that I am not focused on a project. I also open it directly after lunch and just before I leave for the day. It takes a bit for co-workers to realize that you don’t answer email instantly but in the long term they learn and it makes you way more productive.

Finally, stop the social networking. Don’t have Tweetdeck open. At the very least turn off the notifications. For a while I used Seesmic and it lets you turn off all notifications but a small tone if someone DM’s you or replies to you. While I love this feature in Seesmic I went back to Tweetdeck cause it’s way faster. Unfortunately Tweetdeck notifications are on or off. So turn them off or close the application.

While multitasking is all the rage constant interruptions are unproductive. So let’s decide to kill the distractions and get more done. Have any other ideas to kill distractions love to hear them.

restoring and ipod

My experience with my iPod 3.0 update was less than satisfactory. 3 hours 2 reboots 1 complete restore and I was up to date. I played with it for the night plugged it in to charge and went to sleep. I woke up in the morning and tried to grab my iPod to do some email triage before work and crashy crashy is what I was met with. So another complete restore and resync is what I had to do to get the iPod working again.

Needless to say I was not super happy. I know this is totally a first world problem. I still had food, I still had a roof, and I probably threw out more food last night than lots of people have opportunity to eat in a day. But it got me thinking…

The Epiphany

This whole experience got me thinking about my 5th Gen iPod video. I don’t ever remember having to restore it. I used it while I was working construction and going to school for 8+ hours a day 5 days a week for 3 years. I dropped it 2 stories onto concrete (as it was spinning and playing). Not once in the time I used it did I have to do a restore.

Really, the big thought here is that all of the power and good stuff about the iPod Touch and iPhone (when was the last time to restored your basic flip cell phone?) breeds a whole lot of complexity. If something is more complex it’s way harder to keep running properly.

This transfers to our designs and information architecture on sites. The more ‘stuff’ we throw into the mix the more ‘stuff’ there is to break. Next time you want to add the cool new plugin to your blog or the boss wants to add just one more thing to the site really stop and evaluate if the added complexity is worth the time.

With great power comes great complexity. KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid).

build social capital

I was recently asked to do some social media consulting for a business. They wanted to know all of the normal stuff like what ages and target markets are on social networks. Which networks they should focus on. Should they let employees use social networks during work to talk to clients?

What they failed to grasp though was that they needed to invest in the networks before there was anything to get back out of them.

They have an event in 3 weeks and wanted to advertise it on Twitter and Facebook. Of course advertising over those sites is great, the problem is they don’t even have accounts on them. No account means you have no followers. No followers means you have no one to market too.

What they failed to grasp was that in many ways social media is like a bank account. You don’t just open an account and start taking money out (and if you know of pre-filled bank account leave it in the comments). Before you can get anything out you have to put something in.

So if you want to use social media as an extra way to advertise your service or event remember it’s not magic. You have to cultivate you followers, fans and friends before social media has anything to return to you.

I do use Dreamweaver. Oh yeah I also use Notepad++ and Textwrangler. I have tried coda (great by the way) and BBedit and Aptana and many other applications for web development.

At my fulltime job it simply comes down to cost. I use Dreamweaver because it is in CS3. There is no real break through feature that I could find to justify to my boss so that they would purchase Coda. At home I use Dreamweaver because there is no good alternative on a PC. Sure there is Notepad++ but no mater how many times I have tried I can’t get the code completion to work. Really why would I waste time to get an application working when Dreamweaver works out of the box? It’s just not good practical use of my limited time. Using Dreamweaver has no bearing on my code writing skills.

The problem with Dreamweaver is that a large number of people purchased it solely on the basis of the WYSIWYG view. Really these are the people that recruiters want eliminated from applying for jobs as web designer/developers not the ones that hand write code inside Dreamweaver.

So come on people that post jobs know what it is that you want. You want good web designers/developers. Let them use whatever tool they find most reliable and easy to use. If it’s Dreamweaver fine. Focus on the end product not the tool used.

There are 3 options for membership when signing up to become an iPhone developer. Two are paid and one is free. To start with I have gone with the free option though it seems there are some limits. (write down the limits).

I also downloaded the special content from Apple for iPhone developers. Really it’s just a series of videos that take you through Xcode, Dashcode, and Cocoa (the native OSX programming language).

Finally to actually be able to code for OSX and iPhone you need to download the iPhone SDK which includes all of the applications for writing code.

Unfortunately since I am not a paying iPhone developer I don’t have access to the iPhone 3.0 SDK. I haven’t found any info on when this may become available to non-paying developers but I hope it’s soon. The only application that I can think of building that isn’t out there wouldn’t require the new SDK but the function would be enhanced by push notifications. Ah well maybe I’ll pay someday.