Getting things done

Recently, like Ouriel, I’ve become aware that I’m getting the most recent news by social channels.

It seems that the prorogation of news through social channels like Twitter and blogs is lightning fast and reaches the masses far faster than “traditional” news’ sites (I won’t even mention newspapers and TV).

For instance: Today the world was informed about the Microsoft-Facebook deal. Initially I got the low down from Webware post @ 16:00 followed by a Twit from Scobleizer @ 21:15PM and finally officially confirmed as posted on Techcrunch @ 22:30.

With social media it’s just a matter of following the right sources. Faster, almost as reliable media … is it worth it ? most definitely!

It seems that, aside from being the name of my blog, “Getting things done” also refers to an action management theory, abbreviated as GTD by The David Allen Company. My blog is in no way related to GTD.

While being a bit presumptuous, the name is intented to reflect the content of my blog, which documents my activities towards getting some things of mine done.

Twitter started as a web application dedicated to the answering of a single question: “what are you doing ?“. However important and fascinating as the answers to this question may be, I would chase away with a stick anyone trying to convince me to bet my money on this concept. It’s a good thing nobody bothered, since Twitter, Jaiku, Pownce and their like, are the talk of the town nowadays.

It seems these services have become more of a micro blogging platforms than anything else. Micro blogging posts are not necessarily limited to answering “what are you doing ?” but can rather deal with any subject.

Why people do micro blog posts ? Why settle for 140 character limit, tinyurls and no pictures when you can easily use off-the-shelf blog system and avoid all these limitations ?

A possible explanation is that writing micro blog posts is less demanding and thus less frightening to most people. In order to write a 1-2 liner about anything, you don’t have to think things over, no preparations or research, just spill out whatever is on your soul. That makes this medium a lot more accessible to many people who look for a place to express their creativity but do not have the time or ability to write a full blown blog post.

This also explains why there are some top notch bloggers out there that are also micro blogging (e.g. TechCrunch, Guy Kawasaki etc.). Why should a person excelling in the blog sphere with lots of subscribers get into the habit of micro blogging as well ? Same answer as above (minus the ability part :)): the medium is a lot more accessible and less time consuming.

However, the lack of the above mentioned also dramatically degrades the quality of micro blog posts compared to the already controversial quality of the regular blog posts, making sifting the good posts out of the muck a lot tougher.

Besides authoring micro blog posts, there are different kinds of complementary services aimed to help generate content for these micro blog services. One I started to use recently with my Twitter is twitterfeed. twitterfeed provides bloggers the ability to publish their regular blog posts on Twitter with a tinyurl to the original post. Another such service is TwittyTunes which enables FoxyTunes users to post their currently playing song on their Twitter. All these multitude of services provide an added value for users of micro blog services since they ease the generation of content making micro blog services even more accessible and thus even more successful.

I’ve unleashed my personal site under medovs.com. It’s main functionality right now is to link all the different sections I have published. Currently it includes my blog, phash and a project I’ve done several years ago on a computer graphics course in the Technion.

The layout is still raw and I do plan to improve it over time. I’ll probably start with making a decent logo. The most important style decision I’ve made until now, though, was to color my site black (like my blog). I find white tiresome for the eyes after staring for a while, while black is much more soothing (and dramatic).

Following a friend’s (Alex Sirota) recommendation I’ve started looking into widgets as an additional presentation layer for my pet project. I must admit that I did not take the time to research all the available widget environments but rather plunged right into one of the first few I’ve tackled - Netvibes‘ UWA (Universal Widget API).

What immediately appealed to me was the U in UWA that stands for Universal. Universal is such a lovely word. It promises so much. Just by the sound of it I’ve started imagining numerous platforms all coalescing to execute my widget.

In the real world, however, UWA 1.0 mainly supports the following: Netvibes, Google IG and Apple Dashboard. It is also possible to host UWA’s widgets on your own website and blog (lookie down below).

3 facts about UWA:

• It needs to be XHTML
• It is client side only technology
• It forces all javascript code to be included within the widget file when not working within a iframe

I’ve started playing with UWA. For learning purposes I’ve tried to produce a widget for phash (phash is described in my previous post). This was a good choice for starting out with UWA since phash’s widget is client side only. Developing the widget was a breeze, although, I had a couple of rough hours adding it to my Netvibes page. Turns out that UWA does not enforce XHTML when working ’standalone’ (development mode where you execute the widget from your own http server), but does very much so when working online.

Invigorated by recently solving the missing ‘/>’ problem on my phash widget, I’ve started looking into developing a widget for my current pet project, which was the real purpose of my UWA incursion. To my demise, I found out that there is even more difference between ’standalone’ mode and online mode.

UWA allows to fetch data from server side via ajax operations. The ajax wrappers are nice and simple, however, when working ’standalone’ there are some quirks to workaround. These quirks make the whole ajax experience in UWA somewhat uncomfortable. I found myself spending several hours making all of my ajax calls work.

For starters, when working in ’standalone’ mode, there is a need to delegate all ajax operations to a proxy. The proxy’s code is rather simple and can be found in UWA’s documentation.

Next, I’ve tried to use JSON in ’standalone’ mode and failed miserably. After a couple of hours I’ve learned that working with JSON in ’standalone’ requires disabling a proxy workaround by setting the following: “UWA.Data.useJsonRequest = false;". I couldn’t find this documented anywhere.

Another thing that was kind of painfull was the password field. Password fields are stored on the Netvibes site when in online mode or in cookies when in ’standalone’ mode. They are virtually inaccessible after authentication phase and they cannot be used when the widget is hosted on a blog or a website.

Overall, UWA is nice and easy, in spite of the annoying differences that are required in the code for the different targets the widget is hosted on.

One last thing: when hosted on a blog the widget seems to be a bit uglier than its counterpart on Netvibes. This probably can be fixed with enough time spent.

Down below you can find the first fruit of my labors with UWA.

Update: I removed phash widget from this post since most aggregators do not support a widget embedded within a post. I’ve put a new page with phash widget embedded within for you to see.

phash is a project I’ve created 1.5 years ago to ease password generation and management. I’ve now re-enabled it under the domain medovs.com.

phash lets you generate various passwords. By typing your single base password and then by typing a service name (gmail etc.), a new password is generated. This ensures you’ll have a different password for each service, a password that is easily generated from your base password.

For instance I have 6-8 web services I visit very frequently, on each one I can have a different user ID and a different password. I have rather a hard time to remember all the passwords so I need to write them down somewhere. Sure, you can say every decent browser today has a “remember password” feature, but what happens when you use more than one computer (home, work, university) ?

phash saves me the need to manage those passwords by enabling me to regenerate the passwords for my web services anywhere, anytime in a secure way.

The service also assigns the generated password to clipboard (available only on IE & Opera, since FireFox’s security settings prohibit such behaviour) for a duration of 10 seconds after which, it restores the previous value, for security reasons.

The service is client side only, so your precious base password never gets transfered.

The service is complemented by:

• - Bookmarklets that enable an easy way to generate passwords and put them directly in the password field of the login form in the web page.
• desktop application (for Windows) that is elegantly tucked as a tray app and fades away unobtrusively.

Looking back, the name I chose for the service has a nice ring to it, however, it has similarity to phishing. Today I would probably choose another name for it, but I’m too used for phash now.

Enjoy,

First post right here, come and get it.

The first thing one ought to do when creating a blog is pick a name. In my opinion the name should reflect the future content of the blog, all the while keeping it short and catchy.

Since I’m currently juggling the following:

• Getting a new bigger apartment
• Day time work
• My pet project

Well, one can understand why I didn’t have any specific title in mind. What I eventually thought of was “Getting things done“, it’s both generic and reflects my current state of mind. As you can see it’s definitely not fulfilling the two criteria I’ve defined above, therefore it’s likely to change over time.

That said, I do expect this blog to have a technology orientation (rather than just me spilling my guts about who knows what), since I do have an ulterior motive for writing this blog: I would like to have a place where I can record all the different technologies I’m tackling and all the issues I’m fumbling through, hopefully arousing interesting discussions around them that will allow you & me to see different perspectives.

Anyways, hope I’ll have fun writing it and you reading it.

- |)ov.