Fuel for Fusion

My Web Brain going away?

2012-01-29T15:33:00.003+10:00

I thought I would share some information about My Web Brain and where it is going. I know I have a couple of users out there but there are not too many. As you have no doubt figured out, My Web Brain has been languishing unchanged for sometime (My excuses are: buying a house, starting a family, focusing on my new permanent job).

So what should I do about My Web Brain? Looking over my source code for the project I am actually quite proud of all that it is. My Web Brain is a very basic application in some respects but being built on then-new application platform (Google App Engine) meant I had to work several things out from scratch.

I could leave My Web Brain be, but Google has changed the Google App Engine pricing structure to an extent that even for such a low volume application as My Web Brain I was getting billed a modest amount every couple of weeks. One of the major issues is that the storage system My Web Brain uses has now been deprecated and made much more expensive. Porting My Web Brain to the new High Replication Datastore is possible in theory but in practice is causing me too many problems.

At the same time I now know a little bit more about Python and about HTML5 technologies that I would be very excited to try out.

I myself have been using Omni Focus for the past several months which has provided me an overly complex and not truly GTD experience across my iMac, MacBook Air, iPhone and iPad (I think the last time I wrote in this blog I was a Windows/Linux guy - how things change). I've gone from being quite attached to the application to being continuously annoyed as my task lists fill up and and my sense of control weans away and my tool does nothing to help.

A new version of My Web Brain is coming... sometime

So I have an itch to scratch still, some technologies and design principles I would like to try and not a lot of time to do it in. This is my round about way of saying that My Web Brain will be reborn, very slowly, and a little bit different to how it was in the past.

If you are a current user of My Web Brain, here is what you need to know:

Your data on My Web Brain will probably go away at some point in the future. Migrating your data is probably not something I will have the bandwidth or patience to do while developing something else. Sorry (I can entertain do or die requests to do some one off exports if this will badly impact you).
Before it goes away completely, the URL or web address will probably change. You will no longer be able to acces My Web Brain from www.mywebbrain.com. I will let you know what the new URL is before I make this change. The domain www.mywebbrain.com will then be pointing to the new version.
Consider using another tool in the meantime. I can't help much with migrating data, but the sooner you switch to a different tool the longer My Web Brain will be around with all of your original data intact. I don't know when the functionality the current My Web Brain will be replicated in a new version, nor whether there will be any overlap between the old version and the new one launching. Best not take a chance.

So what is in the new version?

Right now, very little. I am rewriting My Web Brain from ground up. This a pretty big time investment for anyone and an even bigger one for someone about to become a father for the first time. So I can not make promises and feel alright about doing so. That being said, here are some of my thoughts on what the new My Web Brain would look like:

I still really want to fill the gap in most task management tools right now that makes them imperfect for implementing GTD - namely the concept of collecting raw thoughts and batch processing them.
Another thing I am keen to do is to 'nail' the idea of prioritisation. All of us can think of many more things we should or could do each day than will ever be done. I think a tool like My Web Brain should help float the important things to the top of your action list and not inspire panic about the hundreds of now irrelevant and unimportant actions you created months ago that you might never do.
I would like to make it super-easy for new users to try My Web Brain, and for users to remain more or less anonymous if that is what they want. To this end, I already know that the new version of My Web Brain will not use Google Authentication.
I have already mentioned I want to try more HTML 5, and I predict one outcome of this will be less perfect support for ancient browsers. The extent this is true will really depend on my time and user interest.
My Web Brain has to this point been a GTD tool, but once an application knows quite a few of your thoughts and your actions, what else can it do? Tell you what to read? Watch your actions on the internet and imply future actions? Who knows, but the 'Brain' in My Web Brain has always been aspirational and a source for motivation.

So, to summarise - My Web Brain as it stands now (and all of your data, if you are a My Web Brain user) is going away, but not immediately. I will let you know prior to anything else happening. I am working on a completely new version of My Web Brain, but only slowly. Still I am excited to be working on it again.

Contact me if you have any questions or comments, or add comments to this post.

A slight change in coloring for My Web Brain

2011-02-01T08:12:00.000+10:00

Hello everyone and welcome to 2011!

It has been a while since I posted in this blog. I have been comparatively a lot more active in posting in Ferny Blog and Learning Technical Stuff. The stillness here reflects the lack of user-facing changes to My Web Brain, my GTD web application. I've been hard at work paying off some technical debt and fixing bugs when time permits.

A couple of days ago however I made a slight change to the coloring of the application which you may have noticed. Within the application-parts of the application the banner area now has a background of white and is not quite so heavy handed with the dark colors. This is hardly a major change, but it is the first change in a major interface refresh.

I still have a great deal of additional functionality planned for My Web Brain, and though the going might be slow I am excited to bring it to you. Stick around to find out where My Web Brain goes in 2011.

Filtering Thoughts on My Web Brain

2010-05-25T22:15:00.000+10:00

At the start of this month I announced a new feature in My Web Brain that allowed users to filter their actions by context or topic on the Actions Screen. I've just added a similar feature to the Thoughts Screen, which allows you to filter your thoughts by whether they are processed (or not) or marked Priority (or not).

The new filters work the same for Thoughts as they did for Actions. Click one of the two links to define your new filter and click Update.

The number of additional features and refinements planned for My Web Brain is large and ambitious. Remember you can provide feedback or ask questions about this or any other feature (or suggested feature) on the My Web Brain Google Group site.

Not a Fan of Date-picker Controls!

2010-05-12T23:02:00.001+10:00

I am not a fan of the typical 'date-picker' approach to entering dates in web applications. I believe in many situations date-pickers slow down interaction with an interface, and that even if providing a date-picker is a good option to provide, it should not necessarily be the only or even primary approach to entering dates on a web form. Rather, I prefer using a text input for more efficient and usable date collection.

If you are not familiar with what I mean by a date-picker, you probably aren't a web (or any other kind) of interface developer. But I guarantee you that you have seen them before. Here are some examples from around the web:

Date Picker from Google Calendar

Date Picker from my local bank

Date Picker from Facebook

And you can find out more about the date-picker at any number of sites.

Getting Real, an electronic and hardcopy book from 37 Signals I have blogged about before, encourages web developers to be opinionated. The Cluetrain Manifesto encourages company and individuals to be authentic, so I do not mind going out on a limb in speaking out against what is perhaps an orthodoxy.

What is wrong with datepickers? Firstly, although many datepickers support keyboard interaction, the most common, natural and intuitive use of a datepicker is using a mouse. If you are filling in a web form using the keyboard - tabbing between fields where required - a date picker is one element of the form that users will take their hands off the keyboard to interact with. This slows them down and makes them less efficient.

Secondly, for many applications shifting to a calendar view to find a desired date is jarring. Except for dates the user already has in mind, they typically need to work out where they are in the current month, understand use the weekdays to understand the date they need, and find the correct month, and then row, and then weekday, of the date-picker before they can enter a date. This is a lot of cognitive overhead.

Some date decisions are complex enough that understanding the relationship of the date in calendar view helps. But what if you only really need to find tomorrow, or today, or yesterday, or next week, or next month? The combined overhead of taking your hands off the keyboard AND finding a relative date in a calendar representation is excessive.

And what if you already know precisely what date you require? Using a date-picker in this instance may require the user to point their mouse to open the date-picker, click three times to move the month forward three times, find the known date (whose location on the calendar will move from month to month), click it and then re-engage with the rest of the web form's elements.

There ARE certain situations where a date picker really assists the user determine a date in the future that they have not decided yet, but I would argue in many other situations the user knows the date (either as an absolute day or relative to their own) where a date picker just gets in the way.

I believe that date pickers are not only popular on web sites because they are known convention, but also because web developers want a lazy way to ensure dates are returned in a known format. But there certainly enough date-parsing and date mask validation plugins and libraries available now that this laziness is not justified.

How should dates be collected then? I prefer a free form text input, which can accept a wide variety of date formats and relative dates (like 'tomorrow').

There are a few of requirements however:

The interface should provide some examples or otherwise give the user permission to enter a date (something many will no longer be used to!) and to show just how wide their options are.
A supporting and entirely optional date-picker should be present to help with those situations where a user really does need to see a calendar to make up their mind.
All entry in the text input should be a validated on-the-fly, giving the user valuable feedback as they type to let them know their chosen input format will be understood.

In my application, My Web Brain, I allow the user to enter an action due date using text input:

Using a text input for date entry in My Web Brain

The examples are there to encourage the user to start typing naturally. The links below the input text populate the text input not with a date but with the linked word itself, letting the user know that the next time they complete the web form they can use these words (eg. 'today') if it is more convenient to keep their hands on the keyboard.

My Web Brain does not yet have a supporting date-picker or on-the-fly validation, so I do not quite pass my own test - these are things I will add in the future.

This approach of emphasizing text input over a date picker is in my view a good idea, but it makes particular sense in applications like My Web Brain that lend themselves to relative date entry and have a repetitively used form whose speed and efficiency is important to day to day usability.

I am not a fan of the date-picker. The picker has a role in collecting dates for an application but not an exclusive one. Re-evaluating the way your web form collects dates may improve the user experience.

PS. Is it date picker, date-picker or datepicker? Sorry about the inconsistency in spelling this term in the post. I do not think the internet has made up its mind about this word yet.

Announcing He3-AppEngine-Lib

2010-05-02T13:21:00.001+10:00

I recently built a simple Paging module for Google App Engine, and in the process I created a Google Code site named He3-AppEngine-Lib to host this and any other App Engine code I wish to share. All the code on the site is available under the Apache 2.0 licence. Feel free to take a look!

Sorting through your Actions in My Web Brain

2010-05-01T23:29:00.000+10:00

My Web Brain now has additional options for filtering through your actions on the Actions screen, and a new 'cancelled' state has been added for actions you choose not to complete.

For a long time the Actions screen has been the unloved cousin of the Today screen. Yes, it had a listing of your pending actions, but so did the Today screen. From the Today Screen you could also quickly register thoughts and filter by context, so it was difficult to imagine why people would use it. I rarely did.

But while the Today screen is very useful for day-to-day (or, in my case, hour-to-hour) use, sometimes I want to view completed actions, or see which actions are in a specific topic. After all, why have topics if you can't organize a view to show just the one topic you are presently interested in?

Understanding the serious shortfall in functionality, I recently released some enhancements to the Actions screen which make it more relevant. Above the listing of actions on the Action Screen you can now see a statement describing which actions are being shown. Clicking on the context, topic or status links allows you to set a different set of filters. Clicking the update button refreshes the Actions Screen to show just the results you have chosen.

Another small enhancement is the addition of a cancelled state for actions. Lets face it, sometimes we miss the opportunity to perform an action before it becomes irrelevant. Other times we change our mind. Setting an action to cancelled allows you to remove the action from pending actions, without inaccurately reporting it as complete.

I hope you enjoy the new functionality of My Web Brain. There is still a lot of other features I would like to add. As someone who uses it each day, I've come to rely on the tool and am only too aware of some of the rough spots. If you have any problems with My Web Brain, would like to suggest a new feature or report a bug, please go ahead and speak up in the My Web Brain Google Group.

Improving Intranet Search with Starring

2010-04-05T21:13:00.001+10:00

At the start of March Google added the ability to star search results. I think this interesting idea may have applications for intranets, allowing faster, better searches and improved content discovery through social bookmarking. These are all good things for improving the value of the intranet.

For those unfamiliar with how his feature works, when you launch a Google Search you now see unfilled stars next to each result:

Google search results now include the option to star results

If you click one of these unfilled stars, you 'star' the result, which means that when you repeat the same or a similar query, you see starred results at the top of the page:

Starred results appear at the top of the results page. I am not sure why my starred result is duplicated here. Google?

Behind the scenes Google also adds the starred item to your Google Bookmarks, an obscure service which has been around for a while which does not rate a mention even from the Google More Products page. The Bookmarks services allows you to collect links and categorise them into one or more lists, which you can then go on to share.

The benefits of this facility to star results of web search seem obvious. I can remember many times I have sifted a few good results from bad ones. These results are perhaps not bookmark-worthy but none-the-less I often need to revisit them. Starring results within Google is an easy and costless way to do this.

It occurs to me this is also an interesting feature for an intranet. Google and many other web search providers are already excellent search engines, built for the endless supply of content the internet provides. Intranet search can be more of a challenge. There is nowhere near the amount of content and cross-linking that forms the basis of PageRank and lexical and linguistic analysis is often not up to date with the state of the art.

A starring feature on an intranet search facility could be implemented to provide a number of benefits.

Search performance on a single user's common searches could be improved, as per Google's implementation. Crafting intranet search queries is subtly different from web searches, sometimes requiring broader terms or attention to the company's domain vocabulary. Sometimes it can be difficult to understand when an item of interest does not exist or simply has not been found by the specific search query being used. For this reason, decreasing the amount of time to return to an item of known value could be more useful on the intranet than on the broader internet.
Unlike the World Wide Web, the intranet has a homepage that will always receive traffic. The starred results (or bookmarks) could be floated and accessible from - or close to - the home page of the user who starred them. They may never need to search for that item again.
The act of starring a piece of content could be a strong signal of value which can be factored in to search weightings for that particular content. This would improve every user's search experience.
Finally, this interface could form the basis of or complement an existing enterprise social bookmarking application (like IBM's Dogear project). Aided by an understanding of the team and role relationships within an organisation, a clever intranet could use the knowledge of starred items to aid in the content discovery process of colleagues in the same position or team.

You could view this starring facility as an aid to search, bookmarking, social bookmarking or team collaboration. The reality is that your mileage would vary with the implementation. I think it would be very interesting to see an implementation like I describe in action.

Does the idea of bringing starred search results into the intranet sound workable? Has it already been done? What if anything would you do to improve it? I am interested to hear what anyone thinks on the topic.

Intranet Search is Overrated

2010-03-25T14:54:00.000+10:00

You should not rely on your intranet's search capabilities to ensure your users find the tools, content and collaboration that they need. Many intranets appear to cede the battle of providing proper and useful organisation and navigation under the premise that their search capability can quickly find the content their users can or should find value in. I believe that intranet search has value but is inherently limited, both functionally and technologically. Search can be improved, but is only one of many solutions for connecting your users with content, tools and collaboration opportunities that form the basis of intranet business value.

From what I have seen, intranet search is overrated.

I had the idea to write about this topic from both reading some of the discussions on the Linked In group Intranet Professionals and my recent experience at a large organisation. Intranet search can be an excellent tool for connecting users with the content they want to access, relatively quickly and without reliance on knowledge of the intranet structure and organisation. I do not want to devalue that capability, but rather point out the important limitations that we should be aware of. Some of those limitations are functional, and intrinsic to search. Others are technological, meaning that the right search engine may alleviate the limitation, but I do not think the solution is widely available.

Search is a poor tool for discovery. This is a functional limitation. Users may not know that specific content exists or could be useful, and search can not reveal this to them. The concept of enabling discovery is key to the success of many public social web applications, and for good reasons: As good as a search such as Google or Bing becomes, search does not surface interesting content before you know that you need it. Social networking applications such as Facebook and Twitter, or social bookmarking applications such as Digg and Delicious are valuable because expose information we would not have guessed that we cared about. In the intranet environment discovery it is not hard to find the value of discovery. It may mean that a user is made aware of a new procedure, or of an existing initiative they could add value to, or of a document summarizing highly relevant and costly won experience.

Search can also founder on providing context and authority for the items returned as results.

The context of a result in this instance refers to its place within the website hierarchy that can expose important contextual information. For example, imagine a set of guidelines on the use of social networking websites by employees. That set of guidelines may be interpreted significantly differently if the user understands the placement of the document within the marketing department's section of the intranet, and not as a part of the more general policy documents applicable to all users. Another example could be an exciting project proposal which, unbeknown to the user, was actually written years past and was since moved to the 'shelved projects' area. A good intranet search facility can highlight the place of a document within the intranet within the search results, but I would be willing to bet that everyday comprehension of this context by users is lost.

Authority is a related concept to context. Users commonly need to judge the authority with which a piece of content is written. Is the content old? Was it written by your manager, as opposed to by the over-zealous contractor? In other words, especially as the intranet become more encompassing of all business content, the user needs to know whether the search result is current and should acted on, or whether it should be treated with skepticism. Again, a good search engine can expose the information and signals around a piece of content that influence the user's judgement of validity. However, user ability to interpret or even notice this information may not exist.

The above are functional issues with search, but there are a number of practical issues as well. Users can have difficulty formulating search queries that will surface the content they need. Business terminology can vary wildly between different departments, let alone organisations. Thanks to the preeminence of search on the wider Internet, users are increasingly skilled at formulating a search terms. However, the intranet is not the boundless container of endless forms of content that the intranet is. Failing to achieve results in an intranet search may reflect either a poor search or that the content that does not exist. How can the user know, without performing more than one search?

The more insidious issue with intranet search is one of overconfidence. Reliance on search can encourage both intranet maintainers and users to ignore or neglect both traditional intranet navigation and organisation and newer social ways to aggregate content for discovery and reuse. This is unfortunate, since these are the very tools that can compliment search and provide for the limitations and deficiencies I mention above.

With this in mind, it is my opinion intranet search is usually limited and that you certainly should not rely on search to meet the end user's needs. Thinking about how users can take part in Discovery and understanding how content context and authority can be communicated should be a priority. Search can be improved, but equally important, other forms of content navigation should be reviewed and buttressed.

All intranet search is not created equally. There was a time when full-text search was a major feature, and now it is simply the starting point. Does your search provide any context or authority for the results? Can the user understand how old the document is, who wrote it, who maintains it or how valid the content is? Does the search support word stemming, synonyms or the domain language of your business? Can it be tuned, or even better, learn from user behaviour? Does it leverage intranet structure and document links (ala Page Rank)? Unfortunately the average intranet search facility is a black box that is difficult to understand and harder to customize, especially for the maintainers themselves.

Intranet Search is a useful tool, and you should maintain and enhance the functionality to reduce the limitations I have described. But very often the potential for a particular search package is tapped early, and replacement too costly. Sometimes investing in a dedicated search appliance can be advantageous to allow a decoupled upgrade path. But regardless of how you can improve search, search is fundamentally only one way of connecting users to valuable content, tools and collaboration.

Reviewing and improving the intranet features that complement search, such as intranet organisation, navigation and customization are essential for avoiding an over-reliance on search. A well designed intranet will compete strongly with search in allowing fast access to frequently required content. Where users can navigate with speed and efficiency in an intranet to the content they need the limitations of search do not apply.

Navigating the site hierarchy communicates context and authority excellently. Any content hosted from the Sales area of the intranet can be assumed to apply specifically to the Sales department. Any content specifically linked from the the Sales homepage is more likely to be authoritative on a subject, at least for the Sales department. Each page, which may be navigated to organically or via a search result, should also give a clear indication about the context that accompanies that page or piece of content.

There are many opportunities to enable content discovery through traditional navigation. Content discovery can based on the area of the intranet, the user, the activities of other users and other signals. Home pages can be customized with frequently accessed content or provide a staging point for accessing the content, tools and collaboration around a specific community or project.

Where intranet organisation, navigation and customization are working well, search should only see use intermittently for occasionally accessed content. This should be a user preference. If it is not, I would take that as a sign the intranet organisation, navigation and customization can still be improved. You can also perform a simple test. If you disable the search facility, is it still possible to find all of the information required for a specific user?

What do you think? Do we rely too much on our intranet search. Is over-reliance on intranet search, like the user bookmarks I discussed in my previous post, a symptom of poor intranet design?

A Litmus Test for Intranets: Do your users use Bookmarks?

2010-03-11T13:58:00.002+10:00

I have a working hypothesis about intranets. If your employees and users create and maintain bookmarks to revisit portions of it, your intranet is not working to it's potential. It is likely difficult to navigate and because of this you may be missing out on the intangible but valuable benefits of the intranet enabled enterprise.

Recently I was working on a job at a large organisation and I had over the course of a few months the opportunity to work with their Microsoft SharePoint-driven intranet. This was a large intranet, stuffed full of content, documents, team pages, project sites and links through to other tools and web applications. I would have been completely lost, but a helpful coworker shared their Internet Explorer favorites (bookmarks) folder structure, and I knew at least what parts of the intranet were important to her and the team.

I am not a huge fan of Microsoft SharePoint but I know it does not lack search functionality; If I knew the names of the web pages I would have been able to find them. If I had been a much better understanding or the organisational structure of the company, and the confidence that SharePoint reflected that, I also would have been able to find them. But I did not know of the specific areas of the intranet that might be useful without asking, and I had little idea about how the intranet or the larger business were organised.

Interestingly enough, months after starting, I was still only using the bookmarks that had been shared with me. I had no idea how the reach the bookmarked pages from the homepage, nor any idea what other useful tools or content might be available that I did not know anything about. No one else in my team did either.

I have since reflected that the collection and maintenance of bookmarks into your intranet by your employees and users is not a good thing; Not only does this spell obvious problems for the inevitable intranet or organisational restructure, it is also a symptom of bad health in your intranet. The average user does not want to create a complicated bookmark folder structures, or even maintain bookmarks at all. What does this say about the intranet?

My hypothesis is this. If your users are managing bookmarks into your intranet:

The intranet is too time consuming or confusing to navigate. It is a sign that your homepage is not doing the job it supposed to be doing - taking users where they want to go.
Bypassing the homepage means your users are missing out on the other chief role of the homepage: content discovery. If your users are going directly to their destinations, how will they ever find out about the other ways the intranet can help them?
The user accessing their destinations from bookmarks only sees the intranet as a set of unconnected islands of content. They learn nothing about the intranet - and by extension, the organisation - by jumping between these islands.
Likewise, an employee skipping between these islands of content and functionality will contribute, participate and ultimately enrich fewer areas on the intranet.

If you notice employees and users creating bookmarks into your intranet, you have an opportunity to improve the way the intranet works. You should review your homepage and whether it is really surfacing the tools and content that your users and employees need. Your intranet pages should make their organisation within the larger intranet (and organisation) obvious, using the traditional patterns like breadcrumbs and contextual navigation. Finally, encourage your content creators (and this should be almost everyone) to use hyperlinks to create relationships with other relevant intranet content. These create land bridges that span team and departmental boundaries and further open up the intranet for navigation and exploration.

Any of these approaches could and be discussed further, but the main purpose of this post was to shine a spotlight on what the act of creating and maintaining bookmarks into your intranet might say about the way your intranet is or is not working for your employees and users. Are your users creating bookmarks into your intranet, and do you agree it is symptom of bad intranet health?

My Web Brain: Create a new context while processing your thoughts

2010-02-22T20:00:00.001+10:00

After some valuable prodding from a helpful user (again, thanks Adam!), I have brought forward some changes to My Web Brain, my Getting Things Done application, that allow users to create a new context as they process a thought or edit an action.

Normally when a user processes a thought into an action, the only contexts available to select are those that have already been defined.

The new version of the Create Action /Edit Action/Process Thought into action form includes a link to 'Create a new context' which allows the process to occur inline without disrupting the thought processing or action editing workflow. This is a definite improvement, especially for new users who may not have a definitive list of contexts defined.

Let us know how this new features works for you. Feedback or other ideas about how My Web Brain can be improved are gratefully accepted at the My Web Brain Google Group.

My Web Brain now supports Unicode (sorry for the oversight)

2010-02-22T18:00:00.001+10:00

Last week I received some excellent feedback from a user (thanks Adam) who let me know that there were some problems in the way My Web Brain handled non-roman character sets. Over the weekend I rolled forward some changes that make My Web Brain compatible to all character sets in the Unicode standard. This is a common courtesy for any English-web application that seeks an international audience, and one I wished I understood more clearly prior to this.

Internationalization is an important design requirement for My Web Brain. If you come across similar issues of any sort, please bring them to my attention by commenting on the My Web Brain Google Group.

Put Full Text in your Feeds

2010-02-08T00:46:00.000+10:00

If your organisation, group or blog has a news feed, think long and hard before deciding not to provide a full text copy of each entry.

News feeds syndicated with RSS are a powerful tool for any organisation or service with timely news to share. But when an organisation choses to truncate or poorly summarise the content in the feed, they erect a barrier between their news and their users' consumption of it. Users like syndicated news feeds because they allow news from a hundred or more different sources to be aggregated within one environment - their feed reader - and rapidly browsed and consumed with little friction.

Asking users to leave this experience by not providing the full text of an entry makes the bet that your story is compelling enough for the user to actively seek out more information, and that you have communicated this to your audience. I believe many users simply pass on the story, or find another comparable news source with no such restriction. This is an opportunity lost.

You can imagine advertising supported websites wanting to draw traffic to their site for their advertising revenue. It is difficult to say for an outsider to say how effective this is, but some blogs (such as Google Operating System) have started sending advert inventory in the feeds themselves, along with the full text of the story.

In many cases though is hard to understand why an organisation wants to drive traffic to their sites, when they most probably do really want is simple engagement with the people who subscribe to their news.

The two examples that are currently bothering me are:

The Australian Government Media Releases feed, which shows only the first 100 words or more for each Media release. Unfortunately this is most often boilerplate text for each ministry, so it does nothing to provide any additional information beyond that provided in the story title. As this news feed is in fact a government service, there is no reason to not put the full text of the entry in the news feed. It is public information.
The SOE Everquest II news feed. Gamers who like to adventure in dynamic worlds want to keep up with changes in the game, such as new items, events, adventuring zones and quests. The dynamic nature of the game is one of the core attractions that keep gamers paying money every month. The Everquest II team post monthly updates to their feed with boilerplate entry titles and text, rendering a subscription to their news less valuable. Is the SOE Everquest II team trying to drive traffic to the game site, or increase engagement with the game? It is hard to see how the news feed works for them.

If you want your blog post, product news or branding message to reach people who will be interested, you should include the full text of the entry. Driving website traffic in most cases is not, and should not be, the primary objective. A full text news feed creates engagement; A truncated or poorly summarized news feed is often ineffective and sometimes, simply annoying.

Someday / Maybe Item Tickle feature added to My Web Brain

2010-02-03T23:32:00.000+10:00

Across the last week I have implemented Someday/Maybe item reminders in my GTD application, My Web Brain. Previously, Someday Maybe items had a title, information and a tickle date. They did not have a way to remind you when the tickle date came around.

Now when you define a tickle date for a specific Someday / maybe item, the item will appear in your unprocessed thoughts on the tickle date for you to reconsider. You then have the normal options to create a reference item, new action or someday /maybe item. The original tickle date on the someday maybe item is removed.

I hope you find this feature useful. I expect the operation of the Someday / Maybe item reminders to mature in the future, so watch this space.

Changes to My Web Brain: RSS Feeds, GTD Help and Changes to Today Screen

2010-01-04T01:07:00.000+10:00

Hello everyone. Just before Christmas last year (2009) I rolled forward the latest changes to My Web Brain. Apologies for not getting this notice of changes out sooner.

Changes:

The interface for changing your current context on the Today screen has changed. Instead of a drop-down box, your contexts appear are links with the count of pending next actions after them. To change to a context, simply click on its link. This change makes it easier to see at a glance the status of all of your contexts.
I added a help page about Getting Things Done / GTD. This provides a simple and short description of the GTD process and why it is useful. See it at the About GTD page .
You can now access your pending next actions as a RSS 0.90 news feed. You can use this feed in most news clients (I use Google's Reader). You need to enable your next actions feed for each context. These settings can found in a new Feed Settings subsection in the (surprise) Settings area.
The appearance of the Welcome screen was tweaked. I am not sure it is for the better, but it is a change so I thought I would list it.
I have added some additional navigational links to the Settings area to make navigation slightly more intuitive.
The Thoughts screen received some love with a slightly improved listing that allows you to forget one or more thoughts without visit the detail page for each.

Fixes:

Due to an indexing problem reversing through a list of Actions, Thoughts, References or Someday Maybe items could occasionally cause an error. This has been resolved.
The Action list could sometimes render incorrectly in Internet Explorer 6. This has been fixed.

Known Issues:

There is still a bug with the timezone implementation. On the Today and Actions screen, Next Actions will be highlighted as overdue according to UTC / GMT time, not your local time.

Development has slowed on the web application since I am now working full time with a client (and will be for a couple more months). However, I will still push ahead with enhancements to My Web Brain to the best of my ability.

As always, if you would like to leave feedback or comments about the web application at the My Web Brain Google Group please go right ahead.

Looking back at 2009

2010-01-01T22:17:00.001+10:00

My (micro) company Helium 3 IT Solutions was formed at the beginning of 2008, but 2009 was the first full year of company activity. I thought it would be useful to look back at the year just passed and reflect on what the year meant for me and my professional interests.

ERPs and Solutions Architecture

From January through to June of 2009 my company and I were employed to perform solutions architecture and systems analysis work for an ERP project in a major mining company's operations in Australia. I got the role through my good friends at CGTS and it represented something very different to my previous experience. At the time my background was software and software development. This role very broadly covered communications, infrastructure, interfacing with the ERP vendor as well as some data analysis. Getting things done was an exercise in communication, coordination, and frequently, compromise.

This role very much broadened my experience. I learnt something about mining operations, about how individual operations once acquired need to be unified, about how a single piece of software - the ERP itself - can be both a critical tool and a critical risk to business. I appreciated the exposure to the role of IT infrastructure including virtualisation platforms, Citrix and network (LAN and WAN) links. My manager at the time, John Tebbitt from Jet Communications, is a real IT professional who is both a master of traditional project management and has forgotten more about network and server management than most infrastructure teams collectively know.Working with John was tremendously educational and always interesting.

I left the ERP project and my Solutions Architect / Systems analyst role at end of June for the radically different world of independent projects. The ERP project had a large and exciting scope change since my departure, and my replacement, a friend and previous co-worker, now has far more scope and duties than I ever did. I have conflicting feelings of jealousy and relief.

Independent Projects and My Web Brain

I left the ERP project for a number of reasons. One of them was a desire to get my hands on with projects I could make a visible difference in. I wanted to reconnect with the open internet and the leading edge of technology. I wanted to create and develop software once more.

From July to September I worked on independent projects, the biggest of which my GTD project My Web Brain. My Web Brain is still 'in development' but has been open to users from the first version in July. The development has been very open, and hopefully transparent, as the service has developed from its crude beginnings to its current less-crude state. There is still more work to be done. There has been little interest from the outside world in the project, but having said that I have put little effort into marketing the service. Monetisation seems a long way off.

The transparency in the development of My Web Brain runs counter to the Hollywood Launch model used by many web startups these days. These other projects have very formalised launch events and seek to capture 'buzz' through invitation only periods and strict information control. This works for many cases, and might have improved My Web Brain's chances. I am on the fence; I prefer strongly in transparency and openness and this approach does not sit easily with me. Maybe next time!

Learning Opportunities

My Web Brain was built on Google App Engine using Python. This was my first foray into either App Engine or Python, so I had a lot of (enjoyable) learning to do. I enjoy furthering my technical skills, and to share some of my learning I created another blog, Learning Technical Stuff, where I could talk about specific technical topics of interest.

Other technical topics which have been of interest to me this year include the wider Google-verse of services, especially Google Apps and the transformative possibilities of cloud computing. I have enjoyed learning about collective intelligence, Enterprise 2.0 and all web technologies. Lately I have been trying to improve my aesthetic skills in web design, which historically have not been a strong point. With my Lynda.com online training account and piles of yet unread technical books I am more than passingly aware of how much there is to know in both established and emerging technical lore.

On a broader, less technical note, I have been keeping up with technology news and developments a lot more actively. During the year I read both What Would Google Do? and The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual which have had a strong impact on the way that I see the internet and the transformation it has on culture, business and society.

North American Holidays

During October I took a month out to go on holidays to the west coast of Canada and the Unitied States. I got engaged to be married while I was over there and had a great time. Absolutely no work was done (there were however, many pictures taken).

Back to Reality (and Paid Development)

I knew before I went aware on holiday that on my return I would need to find a paying contract when I returned, both to re-engage with the local professional community and to (more pragmatically) keep food on the table. I attended to the first CF.Objective(ANZ) conference in Melbourne in November and there got a lead on a short-term ColdFusion low-level developer position at a major Australian financial services provider.

One of the attractions to this particular job is the institutional use of agile development methodologies. I have read a lot about agile development techniques in the past years but this was my first chance to see them implemented on a project. It is gratifying to work in a more structured development environment than I have previous experience in, even if it is not perfect. I am still learning, after all.

Looking ahead

I will remain on this short-term contract into the first two months of the new year. During my free time I am mostly devoting my effort to learning. Afterwards my company may take another paid contract or return to independent projects.

My Web Brain has not have been overwhelmingly successful (yet) but nonetheless I am looking forward to more independent projects in the future - I have many ideas for services for the public and for companies that I am excited about putting together. How this desire for independent (and uncertain) projects will fit in to a future of houses and possibly family is unknown, but I will take what chances I get.

My overwhelming impression is that I learnt and experienced a lot in 2009, and I am looking forward to more of the same in 2010. Happy new year!

Updates for My Web Brain: Timezones, Topics and Bling

2009-11-30T14:16:00.001+10:00

This Friday just past I released the latest changes and improvements for My Web Brain, my GTD web application.

Timezone support has been added for both action due dates and Someday/Maybe item tickle dates. You can now nominate your timezone under General Preferences. This change means that My Web Brain will know your current timezone and properly flag your actions as 'due today' and also properly calculate what you really mean when you say an action is due 'tomorrow'. Update: There are some edge cases where dates are still displaying incorrectly. These instances will be fixed the next iteration.

The concept of Topics has also been added the web application. A topic provides a way for you to categorise your actions independently of context. Part of the genius of the GTD methodology is divided actions between the contexts you can perform them in. This is excellent for actually performing the tasks efficiently, but oftentimes you wish to group your actions around a topic. This change is intended to provide that facility. You can create or delete topics within your user preferences, and you can select your topic when you process your thoughts into an action or edit it later.

In the future I will add topic associations to thoughts, reference items and someday/maybe items. The intention is to also make it easier to create a topic on the fly and view all your information by topic. Topics are not the only organisational tool to be added; Down the track I intend projects and goals to be form an essential tool for organising your information within My Web Brain.

Finally, My Web Brain has a new logo and banner graphic. Prior to my holiday to Canada and the United States in October I ran a logo design competition through the SitePoint service 99designs. I was awed by the number and quality of the submissions and in this last release I am happy to apply the winning logo design to the website. I hope you like it (I do).

As always, feedback and comments are welcome. The application is currently free for use and and can be found at www.mywebbrain.com. To leave feedback or a comment, use the My Web Brain Google Group.

More updates to My Web Brain

2009-10-09T12:24:00.000+10:00

I have made some new updates to My Web Brain. My Web Brain is a GTD ('Get Things Done') web application I have been developing across the past several months.

Many of the changes were not be visible to you as a user. Some of the updates you may notice are:

You can now register interest on the welcome screen if you would like to be informed when the service officially launches.
The Setting tab has been moved to the utility menu at the topmost right of the page.
A first pass of the terms of service are now available.
Action URLs have been migrated across to the new, shorter versions.
The space where enter the title of your thoughts, actions, reference items and someday/maybe items has been expanded.
From the settings page you can now nominate whether you naturally use month- or day-first short date formats.
You can now elect to process and reprocess individual thoughts from the thought detail screen.
When processing thoughts, the new action, reference item or someday/maybe item now has the thought's title by default.
Numerous other stylistic or ease of use changes.

There is still a lot of capability to be provided for this application, including the addition of topics, projects, search, RSS feeds and other exciting features. This set of updates was designed to focus on the ease of use of the existing features. Many of the changes were directly inspired by my own daily use of the tool.

There will a brief hiatus to the updates across the next month while I am in holiday in North America. Try out My Web Brain when you get an opportunity and let me know your problems, suggestions or feedback in our My Web Brain Google Group.

Eating your own dog food

2009-09-28T14:46:00.001+10:00

Last week was a big deal for My Web Brain. At the end of week we released some updates to the product (see this post). But the updates were not what made it a significant week. What was important - and heartening for me- is that I started using it for both personal and professional use and have now used it continuously for more than a week.

Yes, I used the product prior, but that was largely borne of a professional interest in ensuring the quality of the web application as it developed. Nearly immediately after our iteration 3 (version 0.3) release I started using the application more naturally and with fewer roadblocks.

While My Web Brain still requires a lot polish to round off its features, as well as exciting features that users would be willing to pay for, it is very satisfying just to have a new tool at my disposal to help me manage my time and efforts (and feel in control).

It is very educational to use My Web Brain in a realistic way as well, as you start to notice where the pain points of the experience are. You also notice which features are important. For example:

The implementation of due dates (for actions) and tickle dates (for someday/maybe items) does not respect user timezones. I was content to let this feature slip to the next iteration but in hindsight it has a very detrimental affect on the tool.
Currently when you process your thoughts you need to type your complete action name; you are not given any sort of default based on the thought you are processing. Surprisingly enough there are many times when the thought is sufficient detailed that this would be very useful and decrease the friction generated when processing thoughts.

These and other observation are surprising in their immediacy. I have many other features on the docket to implement but it is clear from my own use that tackling these basic issues will enhance my experience, and hopefully the experience of other users nearly every time they interact with the application.

Using my own product is also inspiring. If I can provide value to myself, I can provide value to others. As each update is completed I get excited about what changes are coming next; Even though it will be myself working hard to create them.

Go ahead and try My Web Brain if you have not already. You only need a Google account, and if you do not have one you can create an account through the application.

Updates to My Web Brain

2009-09-25T23:53:00.000+10:00

I am happy to let you know I have just made some updates to My Web Brain, the GTD (Get Things Done) web application I have been developing. The update includes the following:

Fixes

A bug that was preventing access to other pages in the unprocessed thoughts listing has been resolved. Unfortunately I had to disable the priority sorting on this list which would normally float priority thoughts to the top. Google is expected to release updates to the environment shortly which will make paging simpler. Currently, effective paging is somewhat of a black art for all but simple queries. I plan to restore priority (and other) sorting to the unprocessed thoughts listing as soon as possible. Note that when processing thoughts urgent thoughts are still prioritised.
Some formatting has been fixed on the contact us page.

New and Changed Features

Support for Someday/Maybe items has been added. Someday / Maybe items can be managed independent via their own section on the website. As per GTD, you can choose to create a someday/maybe item when processing your thoughts. Each someday/maybe item has a tickle date, which will eventually be used to proactively remind the user of when they wanted to reconsider them.
URLs for thoughts have been made more readable and search engine friendly. Contexts, Reference Items and now Someday / Maybe items all use the improved scheme, with only Actions now remaining to migrate.
You can now mark complete multiple next actions directly from the Today page's list of Next Actions without individually editing each action.
The Quick Thought form on the Today and Thoughts pages has been enhanced for users with Javascript enabled. This form no longer completely refreshes the page when it is submitted, allowing users to continue collecting thoughts without interruption.
A few other stylistic enhancements have been made.

The release includes a large increase in the JavaScript used by application pages. I expect the amount of JavaScript to continue to rise. However, the site does not require JavaScript and runs fine without it.

You might notice that I am no longer referring to number releases (this would be iteration 4, version 0.40) . Internally I will still number releases as they are made but I would like to avoid preconceptions about where the application is on the path to launch.

You should try out the new features and the remainder of the application if you have not already. Feedback, suggestions or questions are very welcome and can be made in the Google Group for My Web Brain or in the comments to this post. Have fun.

My Web Brain 0.3 available for testing

2009-09-19T14:40:00.004+10:00

My Web Brain release 0.30 has just been made live. My Web Brain is Get Things Done (GTD) web application currently being previewed throughout its early development.

This iteration (from release 0.20) took longer than expected but there are a number of user-facing changes you might notice:

You can now create reference items, either directly or when processing your thoughts. Eventually I would like the reference section to be a searchable journal that can pull in information from other services while recording your activities on the site.
All the data tables, including next actions, thoughts, etc received are somewhat more formatted and ideally easier to read and work with. I consider all style and web design to be a work in progress.
Thoughts now have a priority field that you can check while entering them. A priority thought will be processed first, sorted higher and visually distinct in the thoughts listing.
Actions now have a due date. At some point in the future you will have the assistance of a calendar widget to select the correct date, but for the moment text field allows a variety of date formats and even words like 'tomorrow', 'today', 'Monday', etc.
You can now view the originating thoughts that became an action or reference item. Currently there is no way to view an already processed thought except via the resulting action or reference item.
The Quick thought collection form on the Today page now supports a number of shortcut directives that can be appended to the entered thought:
- A exclamation mark (!) will mark the thought as priority
- A colon (:) will take you to the detailed thought collection form
- A greater-than symbol (>) will let you process the thought immediately, and
- Two greater-than symbols (>>) will automatically create an action in the current context using the thought text.

My Web Brain is still in active development but I invite anyone to try it out. You only require a Google account to sign in. Feedback is always welcome at the My Web Brain Google Group.

My Web Brain 0.20 available for testing

2009-08-27T12:46:00.004+10:00

Release 0.20 of My Web Brain is now available for testing. There are not a lot of user visible changes in this release. Of note:

Session cookies are now user specific
The HTML markup is now validated (HTML 4.01 Strict) and in content-first markup order for users with screen-readers
A draft privacy policy has been added
URLs that include the context, like the Today page, are more readable
Basic paging has been added to action lists
The default form field on a page automatically receives the focus without being selected
New actions have the current context assigned by default
There have been a few small stylistic changes

There are still a lot of features and polish to add to the web application. I hope to post the next release in two weeks.

If you have any feedback or comments please go ahead and leave them at the My Web Brain Google Group. If you want to be kept informed of developments, you can subscribe to the My Web Brain news feed.

Visit My Web Brain now

Company Closedown October 10 to November 6

2009-08-27T10:42:00.002+10:00

Hi everyone. Helium 3 IT Solutions will not be operating from October 11th to November 5th 2009. I am going on holiday to North America, visiting the West Coast of Canada and the United States. Should be a lot of fun.

My Web Brain now on Custom Domain

2009-08-13T09:16:00.005+10:00

Last night I set up a custom domain for My Web Brain - www.mywebbrain.com. You can still access the application at the *.appspot.com address. I blog about the process of setting up a custom domain for Google App Engine on my other blog here.

My Web Brain 0.11 available for testing

2009-08-11T22:19:00.003+10:00

It is with some excitement and trepidation that I announce that My Web Brain, a GTD flavored task manager and mental appliance, is available on the web for anyone who is interested to take a look.

As per my previous post this release (I am calling it 0.11) is limited in size, scope and functionality and will certainly not be winning any awards. It is however something to talk about, discuss, and get feedback on.

You are welcome to try it out by going over to its temporary URL at my-web-brain.appspot.com. All you need is a Google login to get started. Knock yourself out, but remember this is an application in the very early stages of development and you should not record any irreplaceable information there.

If you have any feedback, or want to report a bug you can do so at the My Web Brain Google group.

Status update on the Alpha 1 My Web Brain Release

2009-08-08T23:54:00.000+10:00

I have had a busy week putting time into the development of My Web Brain. I was optimistically hoping to be able to release the Alpha 1 version of the web application today, but time was against me and I now think it will likely be early next week.

To ensure I am in a position to release something soon I have been pruning the planned functionality down. My intention is to ensure that - as much as possible with an Alpha release - enough time gets dedicated to non-functional concerns, such as markup validation, accessibility and to a lesser extent, performance.

The good news is that I now have a pretty accurate idea of what this initial release will provide:

Users will be able to manage thoughts, actions and contexts (sorry, no someday/maybe, reference or project items in this release).
The design of the web application is relatively simple and uncluttered
User interactions are through basic, scriptless forms
A solid technical basis for further development is in place, including CSS layout, validated pages ans semantic markup, RESTFUL design.

After this release there will be a small mountain of features to develop and integrate, but my focus has initially been on implementing the smallest possible feature required to make the application useful.

As always if you have any feedback you can post it as a comment on this blog or, even better, at the My Web Brain Google Group.