What nobody tells people who are beginners – and I really wish someone had told me – is that all of us who do creative work get into it because we have good taste. but there is this gap. For the first couple of years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste – the thing that got you into the game – is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phone; they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know out work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know that it’s normal and the most important thing you can do is a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you finish one piece. It’s only by going through a volume of work that you will close the gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this an anyone I’ve ever met. It’s going to take a while. It’s normal to take a while. You just gotta fight your way through.

Ira Glass

Podio

My main tool for organizing my work. I use Podio to mange both my personal and work projects. What makes Podio such a unique App, is its customization. There is a Podio App store to add different functionality to your projects or you can build your own Apps. It is really something you have to try to see how expansive and useful the App can be.

To give some examples of how diversely Podio can be used. I use it for managing the technology inventory at work. I track development progress on several websites. It even powers the contact form on this website.

Hootsuite

Running several Twitter, Facebook, and Linkedin pages and profiles for companies and websites, as well as my personal accounts (swoicik), is hard to manage. Hootsuite makes everything a lot easier. It gives me one dashboard to view feeds, post updates, and schedule events for all of my accounts. I recently upgraded to the Hootsuite Pro account. If you do any social media work for a company, I highly recommend trying them out.

They also have a nice bookmarklet for quick posts, that I use quite often.

Edmodo

A social network build around education, Edmodo has a great community with lots of resources. You don’t need ‘friends or followers’ to begin seeing the benefits. Users interact in communities based on interests rather than just your fiends.

Edmodo is also used to mange students in a classroom. If you are a teacher this is a great way to interact with students in a safer way than email. You can set up private areas just for your class and students.

You can find my profile here. There is also a group where I post most educational resources I find (group code: ovq0ab).

Evernote

This is a rediscovered favorite of mine. I tend to take a lot of notes for myself. Some are random tangents that never amount to anything, and some are really important. Evernote makes it easy to organize everything. I can input notes from anywhere (my computer, cellphone, iPad, or even a web app).

Evernote integrates nicely with other applications as well. There is a clipping extension to save websites and articles to read later. It works with many of the Apps I use on the iPad.

IFTTT

Standing for If This Than That. Automate tedious online tasks. IFTTT has a collection of recipes and you can make your own for sharing and organizing data across your digital life. Most the tasks are so simple, it’s surprising it hasn’t been thought of before. If I change my Twitter profile picture, IFTTT will change my Facebook profile picture to match. If I favorite a tweet, it will be sent to Evernote so I can view it later. Simple and little things that can really save you time on tedious tasks.

*Bonus* Agenda

Agenda is an iOS calendar App. It has replaced the default calendar App on both my iPhone and iPad. It lets me view my schedule of upcoming events much easier than most calendar Apps. I can see what I am doing that day, and over the next week. I put my entire life on a calendar, so being able to view it quickly and easily is a boost to productivity.

When I first started listening to music, it was on the radio. I had a yellow Casio hand-held radio. This “hand-held” radio is bigger than my smart phone is today. I didn’t know much about radio stations, but I knew how to scan around with the manual knob until I found music I liked.This got me by, since it was portable and I didn’t really know music.

Next came the cassette and the introduction to on-demand music. With a cassette, I can pick out what I was going to listen to. I could hear the same song over and over if I wanted to (and I often did). The cassette also taught me the mix-tape. The favorite gift of every high school student in the 90s. It was a big deal at the time (a prelude to the personal play-list). You could combine songs from different sources into a single cassette with ease.

Most my music moved to CDs next. However I was still making mist-tapes on cassette. The CD burner was years behind, and digital music software was even farther behind. The CD and the cassette were different technology for the same ends. The CD simply improved the ease of use, but no innovation to listening to music.

Next was the revolution, “A thousand songs in your pocket.” I got an iPod. Spent my summer savings on a 15gb model. I was an early adopter. I saw it as one of the greatest electronic I’d every bought (part of the reason I still use Apple products today). It changed how we listened to music. It brought the play-list to replace the mix-tape. It made mp3′s the preferred music medium. I had my entire music collection a click away no matter where I was. That was an innovation.

The iPod transformed into the iPhone, but the concept stayed the same. I carried my music collection with me on a single device in my pocket. I had play-lists and genres. It started with mix-tapes, but was driven home by play-lists. I didn’t want albums or artist’s collections, I wanted individual songs. Listening to an album in its entirety was a rarity.

Which lead me to my listening habits today, Internet radio. With the iPod I was listening to single songs and jumping around to different artists and genres. I stopped really caring what would play next, I knew it would be a song I kind of liked (after all I put it in there). Internet radio has advanced quite a bit. The services (Pandora, Slacker, LastFM) can learn your listening habits.  I was listening the same way I was on my iPod, except I didn’t have to mange the playlists and I didn’t have to purchase new music. Add in that I now have a smart phone and can carry my internet radio device everywhere with me, and I’m back to being a radio listener. The adverts don’t seem to bother me. It’s an even trade-off.

So my listening style has come full circle. Instead of radio waves, my music is usually traveling from a cell tower to my phone, but the concepts are the same.

I wouldn’t be surprised if I shifted again to an iPod type system in the not so distant future. It all seems to be somewhat cyclical.

• responsive layout
• twenty eleven child theme

Cost: Free – info and download | demo

Hum

• twenty eleven child theme
• responsive by nature

Cost: Free – info and download

Pink Touch 2

• post formats: aside, gallery, link, image, quote, status, video, audio, chat
• custom header

Cost: Free – info and download

Oulipo

• sticky post support
• threaded comments

Cost: Free – info and download

Melville

Inspired by classic literature, we wanted to create a theme with no widgets, no distractions—just a clean

Cost: Free – info and download

Min

• two widgetized footer area

Cost: Free – info and download | demo

Chateau

• based from the twenty eleven theme
• free for use on WordPress.com blogs
• updated fro WordPress 3.0

Cost: Free or $1.99 – info and download | demo

Pixel Power

• responsive layout
• post formats: aside, gallery, link, image, quote, status, video, audio, chat

Cost: $35 – info and download | demo

Waves

• wootumblog compatibility
• portfolio pages
• advertising management

Cost: $30 – info and download | demo

Memo

• post formats: aside, gallery, link, image, quote, status, video, audio, chat
• 3 custom widgets (twitter, flickr, video)

Cost: $40 – info and download | demo

*Bonus Themes

Doc – Cost: Free – info and download

Manifest – Cost: Free – info and download

This write-up has some bias. I very much want my iPad to be a computer replacement, for battery life, size, and ease of use alone. I set out to see if I could develop and maintain a website using only the iPad.

The project chosen was Quotey.net. A WordPress based site filled with quotes, poems, and essays. To be clear this was created from scratch on the iPad. There was no previous version I was updating

Tools Used

• Google – purchase domain
• Media Temple Grid-Server – host website
• PlainText – getting thoughts to ‘paper’ and saving blog posts
• SketchBook Pro – minor sketches and outlining of website
• Note Taker HD – notes on the site as well as writing on mock ups
• Textastic – WordPress Theme development connected through FTP to server
• WordPress – for a management system
• Whiteboard Framework – for a more rapid theme development

Getting the domain and server set up.

I purchased the domain name on Google and already had the server space on Media Temple. Media Temple has a nice one-click install program that set up a generic WordPress install on my domain. All this was done through Safari on the iPad.

Planning the website.

I knew the site would be simple. Mostly text-based, no images. I used Sketchbook Pro to draw mock-ups of the site. Get an idea for the look and feel I wanted. PlainText was used for any notes I needed (features to add, colors used, etc.).  Note Taker HD was also used occasionally to make corrections to mock-ups.

There wasn’t any wire-framing needed for the site. There are Apps for this though.

Building and coding

Here is where I strayed from the path a bit. I installed the Whiteboard Framework on my WordPress installation. It’s made for more rapid development, not styling is included in it. To install the framework, I uploaded it through FTP on my computer, not the iPad (see additional notes for further explanation).

All the HTML, CSS, and PHP work was done in Textastic. I can’t speak highly enough about using this App. I connected directly through FTP to my theme files on WordPress, edited them, and view changes on Safari. My only complaint was the onscreen keyboard. It bcan be hard to use for extended time. I would strongly recommend using a wireless keyboard with the iPad.

Launch and additional notes

You can see the finished project now on Quotey.net. I have no plans to develop this website on software outside of my iPad.

Since this project, I have developed several other websites on the iPad. Most of this is updating and maintaining code, not starting from scratch. My workflow and app use has changed. Almost all of the planning phase is done in Evernote. It keeps everything in one place and is easier to manage. If I need to draw something out, good old paper and pen is used.

To use the Whiteboard Framework, I had to download and upload it to WordPress on my laptop. I haven’t figured out a good way to do this with the iPad. It is a shortcut step to getting the initial documents on the server. There is no reason you couldn’t go the extra mile and create the theme from scratch entirely on the iPad in Textastic (or using the now bundled WordPress Twenty-Eleven theme).