What I have been doing for all my notes since I was about 16 years old was adding little bits of data on each page that would allow me to easily find what I’m looking for. I started simply with page numbers, something I’m betting many of us do, but there are so many other ways you can find anything in your Moleskine, here are a few tips.

Positioning your metadata

The most important thing when placing your metadata in your Moleskine is to go inwards. Put the most relevant or most important bit of data on the outermost part, since this is easiest to access. You can then work systematically inwards, placing the less important bits of data as you go.

Another way to go is to put all your data on the outer edge, which would be the right side for most. You can move along the side vertically instead of horizontally, so by just folding up a bit of each page you can see all relevant info. For me it’s hard to write consistently this way, and it would look horrible for me, so I take the horizontal approach, but whichever way you choose id fine.

Use information relevant to you

Just because all of us always put in page numbers and titles at the top, this doesn’t mean you have to too. You may have a book of thoughts where page numbers don’t really mean anything. In this case you may want to add tags, categories, dates, etc, so your data becomes better organized.

Having as much info as possible is good, but you shouldn’t go overboard and cram everything there is onto the top of your page. Choose a set of data that you need, but one that fits well on the page, adding to your experience instead of bogging it down with data not really needed.

Using tags and categories

Tags and categories can be used with Moleskine notebooks, not just blogs and web pages. In the same way you categorize a post, you can do so with an entry in your Moleskine. Once you’ve used one for a while you will get a rough estimate on your methods. You may spend 50% of the notebook on thoughts, 30% on tasks and 20% on misc. When you go out and buy your next notebook you can pre-label a number of pages with categories you will use.

Color coding is also a way of categorizing and tagging entries. Instead of having to label your Moleskine entries, just use some colored markers or highlighters to indicate them. You can create a page which contains the rules for categorizing, using just 3 markers, which you can keep in the Moleskine, you can color code at least 12 categories easily using horizontal and vertical lines, simple colors, the possibilities are endless.

Further customization

As I just said, the possibilities really are endless. You can cut off the corners of some pages to indicate they are no longer in use, you can cut away corners in different ways to indicate different categories.

You can fold them in, attach post it notes, even rip them out. The point it that there is no set rule for marking and organizing your Moleskine, it is yours to develop and tailor to your own specific taste. If you have your own cool ways of organization and productivity with your Moleskine please let us know!

I have been working quite hard in the last few days to complete and put a new site online called Blogtastique. The aim of the site is to help beginner bloggers churn out a truly quality site in a day, and to help pro bloggers manage their blogs.

With the free Basic Package we’ll install your Wordpress blog for example, recommend themes based on your content, recommend some cool plugins and generally give you some good tips about this and that. the Pro Package means we’ll make some theme customization for you, install plugins, third party applications like embedded Twitter, widgets and so on and we’ll try our best to synchronize the look of your blog with what you write about.

The Managment Package is for those of you who don’t like doing the “paperwork” that your blog generates. We’ll pre-configure your categories or optimize them for you, going through each post, we’ll create a custom theme just for you, we can check each new post for errors, we’ll moderate your comments, manage users, and generally do any task you bestow upon us.

Please take a look at this new service, I’m very excited to get started with it, if you have any questions, suggestions or want to sign up, please write to the Blogtastique team, you can find contacts in the contacts section of the Blogtastique.

If you are a blogger and need to keep track of some of your post ideas, but don’t really like writing drafts, let me show you a great way to store some notes. If you follow this tutorial, all you will really need is to be comfortable with writing notes in a text editor. In addition, if you are familiar with CSS you can do anything you like to your list, but this is not needed.

We will be modifying your index.php file, the one governing your admin, not the website itself. This file can be found in the wp-admin folder, simply named index.php. Download it and make sure to make a backup copy. Open up the file with a text editor, I prefer Notepad++, and search for the following line:

<p><?php _e(’Use these links to get started:’); ?></p>

You may notice, that this is the first line of your admin dashboard, so let’s put a to-do list above this. Now there are two ways you can go about this. You can either put the list right here, or you can write it in another file, and tell the page to call that file. Writing it here is fine, but you don’t want to go through all this code whenever you want to edit the list right? So let’s place it in a different file, to make it easily editable. Above the line we just searched for, type the following.

?php include(”todo.php”); ?>

This will tell your browser to load the contents of the file “todo.php” right here. All we have to do is create a new file, name it “todo.php”, edit it in whatever way we want, and upload it to the same folder that “index.php” is found in. First of all, create a new simple text document and save it, naming it todo.php naturally. Now we need to write the list, in the following form.

<ul>
<li>List item 1</li>
<li>List item 2</li>
<li>List item 3</li>
</ul>

Save the file and upload it, you should have a nice little list of things to do on your dashboard. It could be useful to jot down some long term things if you don’t feel comfortable editing this list all the time. If you think that rearranging and touching the list takes a long time try some of the advanced features of Notepad++, it can upload files directly to where you want it to, but more on this soon, in another article.

This article is part of the Wordpress customization series, with more to come, like skinning the admin interface, so be on the lookout for new parts. If you would like me to cover anything specific don’t be afraid to suggest.

If you have a Google Apps account you can change the default Google logos to your own, putting all your stuff in company colors. Whatever I work with I always customize to give it the smooth Hack Your Day feel, so I needed to put my own logo on there, no question about it.

It can pretty simply be done, all you need to do is go and manage your domain, click on domain settings and go to appearance. You will see that you can change the header image, although this will stay the same for all services. Be sure to make it exactly 143×59 or else it won’t work. For some reason Google crops bigger pics, but doesn’t put them in in the end.

Another word of advice to Photoshoppers, don’t just downsize your pic if it’s a lot bigger. My logo was about 2400×1200 and it looked horrible. The reason probably is that you’re going too small, sizing a huge image to 300×200 is fine, but with this size it didn’t work for me. I got around it by changing the size of individual elements, and then placing them together again. This makes sense as shapes are vectors, so can be resized in a scalable fashion, text looks better if you simply type smaller and gradients can easily be done again. It’s a little more work, but the result is much better.