Twenty 7 and counting

Here’s a list of Wordpress plugins I find extremely useful:

Akismet
All-in-one SEO Pack
Feedburner Feedsmith
Adsense Deluxe
Google XML Sitemap
Theme Test Drive
Wassup
Photodropper

I recently became involved in the beta for a new windows application to manage your task list. It is based upon the excellent Mac application TaskPaper. Here’s a quick walkthrough on TodoPaper.
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A quick tutorial I put together to test Screensteps
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I mentioned in my previous posts that I am not a fan of shared hosting. Now don’t get me wrong it does have its place. Unfortunately my OCD like desire to have the best finds issues with it. My biggest gripes are around flexibility and performance.

Let me start with performance. In a typical shared host you can easily have 100+ customers on one server (that number is probably conservative). That one server is probably running the web server, database server, mail server, control panel and perhaps an application server. All of these take up server resources. In that scenario all it takes is some poorly written code or someone to be Dugg to bring the server to a screeching halt, taking down your site.

If you visit the support forums of any of the major players you will see many complaints over the performance of their sites.

My second gripe is flexibility. This is improving but only just. Trying to host a Ruby on Rails application shows what I mean. Although it is becoming more common for hosts to allow you to deploy RoR applications you are often limited to small applications only. You may not be able to use Mongrel and if you can you probably won’t have enough memory to run a cluster. You may also struggle to use Capistrano.

As I have said shared hosts do have their place. They offer an affordable way to host your website or blog but at the cost of performance and flexibility.

The first thing anyone wishing to run a website of any sort needs is a web host, it would be nice if finding the right host was easy but it isn’t. You have shared accounts, premium shared accounts, VPS’s or dedicated servers. And within those groups you have many companies to choose from. What makes it more difficult is that not all hosts are created equal. The shared hosting market seems to be the most saturated and within it you will find the very good and the very bad. Over the years I have tried many different shared hosts and I personally don’t like any of them, my biggest gripe is performance. Now before I go into that let me say that you do get what you pay for, you should not expect the same level of performance on a $10 a month plan compared to a $200 a month dedicated server, it just ain’t gonna happen.

In order to find a solution to the poor performance of shared hosting I started to look at VPS (Virtual Private Servers) and dedicated servers. I tried several VPS hosts and so far the best overall for me has been MediaTemple and their DV accounts.

I currently have accounts with MediaTemple, Slicehost, Brightbox and SoftLayer, all have their pro’s and cons and I have each for slightly different reasons. Over this series I will post more info on each of the above and also expand on what is involved in hosting your account on a VPS or dedicated server.

I have recently decided to setup a number of Wordpress blogs, including this one, and one of the most important aspects is picking the right theme. Now some people have the design-foo to create their own themes, I am not one of them. In searching for a new theme I came across Revolution. This was my first introduction to a premium theme. There have been numerous discussions in the blogosphere about what makes a premium theme. Now the first on most obvious difference is that a premium theme will usually cost money, between $20 - $250 seems to be the norm. Support is another difference, if you are paying for a theme you expect a decent level of support. Third, you expect the design to be of a higher quality, probably from a more renowned designer etc. This is a very subjective area, just because I like something doesn’t mean the next person will. That said, with only a few exceptions I much prefer the look of the current premium themes.
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I have just come across a fantastic little program for Windows called Q10. It’s very similar to Writeroom which I use on my Mac. For those who haven’t used Writeroom it’s a distraction free full screen word processor.

Q10 is the best implementation I have found on Windows and it even adds a few extra features. My favourite is the timer. You set an amount of time you want to write for and an alarm goes off at the end of that period. If you follow Merlin Mann you have probably seen some productivity hacks involving timers. There are also other goals you can set such as setting a target to write 1000 words in a session.

Oh and best of all it’s free

I’m in shock right now. I just caught part of the strongman super series on tv and found out that Jesse Marunde has died at the age of 27. Jesse was one of my favourite competitors, not only did he have tremendous talent and drive but he seemed like a quality guy.

Rest in peace.

When it comes to planning my day and setting MITs I’ve found the best way to do it is using David Seah’s ETP Forms. Not only are they wonderful to look at but they are extremely useful. One thing I would recommend is that you print them onto good quality paper, you will find it is more pleasurable to use (and therefore more likely to be used).

I am a grade A procrastinator, someone who has tried and failed to follow GTD and whenever I get a “system” I change it a week later. The result is one stressed out me. I recently read Leo Babauta’s ZTD book, it’s a refreshing look at productivity. Two of the  most important points for me are around simplifying and taking action, two things I am not very good at.

Lets be honest, taking action is what matters at the end of the day, you could have the best capture and processing system in the world but if you don’t action anything it’s all for nothing. In ZTD the key is to start the day by listing your three MITs for the day. Your MITs are what you must get done, no excuses, but they are also the things that will move you towards your bigger goals. There is no point in having a todo list with a hundred items that just freak you out, instead just have three per day. I’m sure there are many psychological reasons why this works but I don’t know what they are. All I can say is try it.

The second major thing for me is keeping things simple. I work in a technical role, and as most techies I have the tendency to complicate things and then spend hours tweaking. I think a lot of people are guilty of this, especially those trying to follow GTD.  I’ll cover my simplified system in an upcoming post. Suffice to say by simplifying you don’t tweak as much, which in turn causes less stress. If you’ve spent hours trying to perfect your system and then stress out because you’ve not actually achieved anything you need to simplify.

I’m sure I’ll talk more about ZTD in the future, in the mean time I can’t recommend it highly enough.