Archive for May, 2008

If you take the internet out of context and forget about all the obvious productivity advantages it has given us, like email, skype and so on, it’s still not anywhere near to being as much of a time saver in productivity as it could be. Let me explain.

Take a look at the average internet user for example. He loads up gmail, sends and email, browses for an attachment, sends it. Then he logs in to his blog, writes an article, fires up GIMP and makes an image for the post. He simultaneously logs on to Twitter, to let the world know he’s writing a blog post, and so on and so forth. Much of our time is wasted on switching between apps, and overall, using too many application to accomplish our goals.

Services and technologies spreading like wildfire on the net are constantly changing this, and making us more productive. For once I’m not talking about Remember the Milk, or even Gmail, but the applications that serve to bring these all together.

Prism, Adobe Air, Google Desktop and a whole host of other applications are working together to serve us a dish which we can eat all at once, not bit by bit. Using Adobe Air you can use the much quicker interface of your desktop to control applications like Twitter, Chat clients, and almost any other web service. Using Prism you can integrate services into your desktop better, and Google desktop search brings together various web services with the power of Google Search on the web and on your desktop.

In my opinion this is all just the beginning. Prism in reality doesn’t give us a huge productivity boost, it’s just more convenient and browser independent. Adobe air is a better example, since this way we can customize better to our tastes and use our desktops speedier environment. The future lies in these technologies though, imagine an Adobe Air like software for bloggers, joining Wordpress, Splashup, Flickr, Twitter and News sites. It would be an online suite of the tools I use for blogging saving content online and on my hard drive as well. It could automatically create databases for me with post contents, titles, categories, pics used and so on. It could also automatically post to Twitter, notify me of comments and so on.

As you can see there is a great deal more that can be done, but I think what I described above is technologically very possible. What remains perhaps is an easy way to connect all these services, so users with minimal amount of programming knowledge can custom-tie apps together, to serve their own productivity.

As I was happily updating my theme on Hack Your Day I managed to overwrite the index.php file of my website danielpataki.com instead of the one for Hack Your Day. I only noticed now, so I had no undo option and no local copy, since I just made that page 2 days ago and hadn’t backed up yet, stupid, I know.

I a last desperate attempt I looked up the page on Google and clicked on cache to see Google’s view of my site, which luckily was the one I designed earlier. Instead of spending 5 hours pulling out my hair and shouting I managed to restore everything in 5 minutes.

If you’ve lost some website related code and you found out in about 24 hours you have a very good chance of recovering the data with Google’s cache. It depends on when Google’s spiders get to you, but if you get lucky you can retrieve everything.

A quick update for all of you on the new commenting system and Hack Your Day in general. I have implemented Open ID registration for the blog, so you are now free to use your Open ID. If you don’t know what it is, take a look at OpenID.net where you can find all the info needed.

Just so even this post digs into productivity a bit, I’ll quickly tell you that you might have long had an Open ID and not even know it. If you use Blogger, Flickr, Yahoo, Wordpress.com, Technorati, AOL, LiveDoor, Orange, SmugMug, or Vox, you can already use you identities there to sign up and use any service that is Open ID enabled. To get started you need to use your profile page URL usually, take a look at the list of Open ID URL’s you can use.

Your username will be that horrible long URL though, so please take a moment to put down a nickname in your profile, which can be found by clicking on the profile link to the top right of the Wordpress admin panel when you log in. You can also add any other info you want, I would appreciate an email address, but in no way is this necessary.

Happy hacking, productivity and organization to you, I hope you all join the community and get it going. There seem to be all sorts of extras coming your way if you do…

Hello to all of my readers, a new updates is almost ready for you guys. Chances are most of you already see the new design, which is not radically different, but I think it looks better. The first thing you’ll notice is the bar on the left side which will be a staple of all my websites.

The biggest change I made was in the commenting though. It now looks much better, and it now looks the same on IE and FF. From now on commenting on Hack Your Day is only available to registered users. My reason is that this way it will be just that much easier to stop spam, and also, I want to create a nice community of my awesome readers.

Entering your email address is perfectly safe, I won’t sell it, lease it, eat it or steal it, all it does is enable me to contact you personally if you have a problem. In the future it will also allow me to contact the readers who do the most commenting so that I can maybe give them elevated privileges and so on. All in all, registering is super easy and from then on you only need to login once. If you feel like joining the Hack Your Day community, please register here. There will be all sorts of goodies later on!

I hope you all like the new design, I may be polishing it a bit still, but this one looks final too me. If you have any comments please share!

I have been doing the blog for so long I couldn’t remember If I’ve ever done a post on RocketDock. I had a feeling that I didn’t, but I haven’t even mentioned it, oh the horror of it all! If you haven’t heard of it, RocketDock puts a little Mac-like dock on your Windows desktop and enables you to extensively customize everything from visuals to icons, to size and hover behavior and so on.

I actually had quite a problem naming this post, since it could easily have been “put folder contents on the desktop productively and stylishly” because I’m going to show you a way to use OS-X style stacks with RocketDock that makes navigating some folder’s files very easy.

I have a drafts folder for example where my drafts reside, but the contents change daily, and any single file will be gone in a maximum of 2-3 days. I needed to put the folder contents on the dock, not just the files, so I had a look at the addons page and found the Stacks Docklet, which I will be using to show you a great way to get to your files.

Once you download the zip file, extract it, and put the whole extracted folder in the “Docklets” directory in the RocketDock folder. Right click on the actual dock and go to add item and stack docklet. You will see a downward pointing arrow appear and all you need to do is right click and choose icon settings. You can specify which folder to use, and even which icon. You can also choose between the normal stack mode, like in OS X, and also a grid mode, which uses a box to show your item.

Let me give you one more productivity tip for RocketDock. Here is a screenshot of my desktop, and you will see that in my actual configuration, the icons are very small. The reason is that I keep them on top all the time, and even with a window running they are not in the way. Take a look at this Firefox screenshot and you’ll see what I mean. I am also using MyColors with one of the free themes, and IconPackager for my cursor scheme. This lets you access all the icons and files in your dock all the time, without having to minimize stuff, saving you a lot of navigation time.

“If you want to help out Hack Your Day and you’re looking for a hosting solution please choose Bluehost and sign up using this affiliate link. I can personally vouch for this company, apart from offering the best services – unlimited bandwidth for example – they have the best customer care ever. If you need a management solution please also consider Nozbe a great GTD based application.”

Always be prepared would be a nice motto for Rambo and John McClane, but productivity ninjas often use the phrase too. The point it that there are many situations where you would have the time to organize your thoughts, jot down notes, or outline a speech, but you can’t use your laptop, don’t have room, or have to stand for example.

Enter, stage left the trusty notebook and pen combo. Invest just a few bucks in a small pocket notepad and a pen and you will be ready for action any time. Sitting in traffic? Waiting in line at the pharmacy, whenever, wherever, you can always put some thoughts down. You may not save hours, but just a four minutes a day saved (or spent extra) could amount to as much as an extra day spent organizing every year.

I always have a small notepad at hand because I’m quite the forgetful guy, an awesome idea that comes to me while grocery shopping may be long gone by the time I get home. If you frequently find yourself in situations where you have a few spare moments, buy a notebook, who knows when it might come in handy?

I found this cool looking leather notebook on Amazon, although you do pay a high price for looks. If you need something simpler, just click the link and navigate to a different notepad.