Projects Possible

Projects Possible is a pretty young blog.  We don’t have high Google rankings and we don’t get thousands and thousands of hits per day (at least not yet) but we certainly seem to get a fair share of comment spam.  These are the spammers that want to post comments to my valid postings to get you to go to their porn site, or their prescription drug site or any myriad of other non appropriate or sales related Internet destinations.

WordPress allows me to block this spam in a number of ways including Akismet (their spam filter plugin) and options to not post comments automatically but to wait until they have been approved by me.   Unfortunately, I do not have the time needed to review every piece of spam so Akismet has been a lifesaver for me.   I can periodically just load up my comments and see that Akismet has already flagged them as spam.   With one click they are gone and if I never do anything with them in 30 days they are automagically gone.

Bloggers beware…  If you are new to blogging you need to get yourself protected and sooner rather than later.  I found when I first started the blog that I very rarely received a piece of spam but now it can be literally a hundred or more in a weekend and as I continue to post additional content and opinion it just gives them that many more messages to latch onto.  Do yourself a favor, get your spam protection in place early!

As many of you know, WordPress is now out with their 2.5 version.  There are a number of plugins that I use that are NOT going to work so I thought now might be time to do a thorough review, clean up the old, make way for the new, reclassify things.   Call it Spring Cleaning for Projects Possible.

There may be times over the weekend that the blog will be unreachable as I work through things.  I might even play with a new theme or two.  I’m finding that I’ve had a couple of comments about things being somewhat difficult to find so I might simplify.   I love 1Blog (my current theme) but if you aren’t using the features it doesn’t do any good to have them right?

Stay tuned… we’ll see what happens!

I use amung.us on my blow to show what posts people are currently viewing and where they come from… that is what this icon at the bottom of the pages does.  If you click on it and go to the MAPS you will notice that there is a large gap of missing stars in the continental US where you would find North and South Dakota and Wyoming.   Now I’m sure there are people in those states connected to the Internet so the next question I would have to ask myself is why aren’t the visiting me?   Must be a content thing I would guess.  What would you like to read about Dakotas and Wyoming?

As a project manager, I am always looking for great tools and utilities that will help me to become more productive and improve customer (internal and external) experience.

I know about the standard stuff that we use like Microsoft Project, Mindmapper, Excel, Outlook and the like.   What I would be interested in is hearing what you’ve found that you believe to be absolutely indispensable.  For example, I have posted reviews on an Outlook addin that I use called ClearContext IMS.  This tool helps me become a much more effective and productive email manager.    I’ve also posted about Excel and some of the things that I try to do with Excel to make me more productive.

 What do you do?  What little tricks have you found that help you out as you work on projects…  Share them with us!

There are a LOT of theories and ideas floating around to help with time management and productivity.  Classes and seminars are offered, books are published, and websites and blogs are posted all to try to help us better manage our lives.  For this author there has been no one method to help with time and productivity management.   In fact before I knew about these methods I was trying to come up with things on my own that many of these methods suggest.

In today’s posting I am going to give some insight on how I manage my projects using Microsoft Outlook, ClearContext’s IMS, Nelson’s Email Organizer (NEO) and Excel.   My goal has been to try to get everything I do that is work related consolidated into a single location and while Outlook is getting pretty close, my work environment requires some additional reporting structures that keep me away from my single trusted system.

For those of you familiar with Getting Things Done (GTD) by David Allen, or Total Workday Control (TWC)by Michael Linenberger it is all about changing the way that we work.  This can be as simple as the little things like grouping like things together and working on them all at the same time to much more complex and time consuming changes like rebuilding your workspace, developing filing systems, etc.   The key for me was to latch on to an idea or two and work with them, integrate them into your life and then add more once I had mastered the ideas I was working on.

When I started managing projects I found rather quickly that the medium that people wanted to use for communication was email.  I quickly went from an email box of 20-30 pieces of significant email every day to 200-300 pieces of email every day.  Combine that with customer face time and limited access to email and I soon found I was not keeping up.  I needed a solution that could help me manage and find things much easier than I had in the past.   The solution I found at the time was Nelson Email Organizer.  This is a great tool and one that I use to this day for email searches and correspondent management right from within Outlook.  NEO It was my first attempt at managing each piece of email in my Inbox, giving it a home, and knowing and being comfortable with the fact that I was going to be able to find it again if needed.   Another KEY feature of NEO for me was the ability to search across multiple mail stores.  Remember that 2GB limit that Outlook used to have?  My solution to that was to create separate Archives and move messages into those archives.   The down side to that is the messages were no longer search-able in Outlook unless I loaded each of the archives one at a time and performed the search.  Because NEO creates its own set of indexes that are super fast, this restriction was removed and I could keep years worth of email and search through 10s of thousands of messages in a matter of seconds.

NEO and Outlook worked well for me for quite awhile but NEO didn’t help me with managing tasks and so I went on the hunt once again for web solutions for project management.  Ultimately I stumbled across GTD (Getting Things Done) and TWC (Total Workday Control).  Take a look at the graphic.  The concept with these systems is that as messages come into your inbox you need to make a decision about them.  Ask yourself if you need to do something with this email… If not you probably just need to file it away as a reference or better yet if it isn’t going to be needed just delete it. (NEO would help me with this so this was nothing new.)  The other side of the equation however is more difficult to deal with.  If I need to do something with it, what is it that needs to be done, who should do it, when should it be done, etc… all start entering into the picture.   As you can see from the graphic there really are 3 choices… I do it now, I delegate it to someone else, or I hold onto it until a future date.  It was something that hit me as being so simple yet almost unbearable to manage.  That is where ClearContext’s IMS product entered the picture for me.  With IMS not only are the non-actionable items manageable but the actionable items become manageable as well and all linked to the appropriate projects and people.  I downloaded it, installed it and I’ve never looked back.  Keep in mind that I don’t claim to be a GTD or TWC guru and I don’t do all of the things that I’m supposed to do nor will I probably ever do them all.  I don’t even use all of the functionality that exists within ClearContext’s IMS product (yet).  That isn’t the point.  The point is I use what works for me and as I fine tune my process I may also find I use more of their concepts or in the case of the software their tools. 

The last tool that I have started using pretty extensively is Excel.  I find that I can use it to keep track of a lot of information in an organized form and have at my fingertips information about each project that I use on a day to day basis.  With Excel I am able to streamline common project tasks information on the items that are repeated for each project that I work on.  The members at Excelforum  have really helped me in this end goal by helping me to create scripts that help me keep track of tasks that are completed, scripts that help me to create new task spreadsheets with limited numbers of key-presses, and most recently with a script that helps me to create Outlook tasks for each and every item  of a project that I need to be tracking.

While my methods are not perfect… the goal is and has always been to increase my productivity and reducing the amount of work that I have to perform.   I’m always looking for great new ideas so if you have any to share please do so.   In the next few weeks I hope to share with you some of the scripts that I use in my Excel workbook.  I also encourage you to read my reviews on ClearContext or better yet go to their website and download the application and give it a try.

Every blogger is different and they way they manager their blog is different as well.  One of the great things about WordPress is just how easy it is to extend base functionality by adding and activating a plug-in.  Plugins fit into a ton of different categories and there are literally hundreds of them.  If you don’t believe me all you have to do is take a peek at the WordPress Plugin Directory.

I’ve included here some of those that I use on my blog - Projects Possible - They are in no particular order.

CoolPlayer - This is the plugin that I use to add the audio and video content into posts.  It does all of the under the covers stuff so that it is real easy for me to add an Xtube video or a MP3 file for your viewing pleasure.  Integrated right into the WYSIWYG post editor, adding media content couldn’t be easier.

FireStats- I am a stats geek and I really like the interface attached to FireStats.   There are a lot of different statistics programs out there.  I tried quite a few of them and liked the stats I got from FireStats so it has been my choice now for quite sometime.

NextGEN Gallery- For those of you that know me from my Big Brother past you know that I have galleries and galleries of images.  I used to run a site that was on Coppermine but when I decided to start a blog I didn’t want to integrate my Coppermine with WordPress.  NetxGEN became my picture solution.  If any of you Big Brother fans want those images posted just let me know.  I still have most of them from the first 5 years of the show.

TinyMCE Advanced- Lets me add some functionality to the WordPress Editor that I like or was used to when editing including Font Families, Styles and Formats, Rule Lines, Non Breaking Spaces, and Full Screen.  It just makes the writing of the posts much easier for me.

Dagon Design Sitemap Generator- I have always liked sites that had site maps where I could see content organized in some fashion and all on a single page.  Dagon’s Sitemap Generator does that anywhere you would like to put the tag to have it work it’s magic.  I chose to put it on it’s own page but you could realistically put it anywhere.  I may actually decide to change the page name to something like Archive since that is what it is.

Stray Quotes - I’ve always like short inspirational quotes.  The small little “blurbs” of wisdom that you see on calendars and posters or in the inspiration or motivation books.  Stray Quotes allows me to collect some of my favorites and to share them with you.  I currently display them in the sidebar.

Different Posts Per Page- Max Blog Press has a few nifty little utilities that you have to jump through hoops to download but once you get the link to them they offer some nice extended functionality.  I use a couple of them but the one I want to point out here is Different Posts Per Page.  When you are on my main page I want to specifically only show you the most relevant content.   When you display a category or search I want to you to see a lot more.  With this plugin I can tell WordPress how many posts to show you in these different situations.

As I said before I have many different plugins that I use and I will surely add to this list in the future.  If you are a WordPress blogger I would love to hear about your favorites. 

In my review of WordPress themes that I can use to display content I believe I’ve finally settled on the one that is going to give me the most functionality, a nice crisp clean appearance, and integrated features that you can use to make your reading easier and more enjoyable.    Keep in mind I am new to this whole “blogging” thing so my site is probably NOT going to be the most optimized, and as I’ve said before I am a “tweaker” so there will always be changes happening somewhere.

The 3 WordPress theme designers that I really like are:

Jai at Blog Oh Blog.  In particular there are a couple of themes there that I started using prior to Jai becoming owner of the site.  One of them is Big Blue and the other is Bob.   I liked Big Blue’s coloring, but I liked Bob’s use of excerpts on the main page.  I eventually mashed the two of them together and played around with a version of Big Blue that had the excerpt feature of Bob that I enjoyed.  I almost settled on using Xplosive but I wasn’t willing to give up the excerpt feature and as much as I tried my expertise did not allow me to get that functionality to work.

Small Potato at WPDesginer is another designer that I really like.   When I first started looking at WordPress it was Small Potato’s designs that I latched onto.  I ran his theme called Pride for a short while but I struggled getting my plugins to display properly in the sidebars.  I also played around with his Cold Blue theme for awhile when I first started.   What I really like about Small Potato and WPDesigner is that he shares his knowledge.   He has a tutorial section that has helped me tremendously in learning how all of this WordPress theme “stuff” works.  (Keep in mind to run WordPress you don’t need to do any “tweaking”… you can run literally thousands of different themes just as they are with no modifications at all.)

The final designer and the one that I settled on is Javier Garcia and the 1 Blog Theme with a “tweak”.  This is the theme that you are seeing on Projects Possible right now.   The tweak which will be coming soon is the excerpt capability that I like so well in Bob.   I chose this theme because it is so feature rich and configured from the WordPress Presentation dashboard.  It integrates some great features like the Socal Networking functionality, Related Posts, Email this Post and dual sidebars and an information rich footer.   I am going to create a brief tutorial on functionality that I will post in the future to help you get the most out of Projects Possible.

There were many other themes that I tried and many that I struggled to get working the way that I wanted them to work.  Now that I’ve chosen one, I can move on to getting it to display everything I want and to really focus in on the content.

Did you get here and expect to be on a different post?  Let me try to explain what happened…

Wordpress and other blogs have these great things called permalinks.   They were invented by makers of the blogs to be permanent links to the postings that are found on the blog.   The idea was to always make a post available even months or years later. 

When I started ProjectsPossible I used Wordpress right out of the box and then played around a little bit with the permalinks.  What I didn’t realize - and this was a newbie error that others just starting with blogging should take into consideration early - is that your permalink structure should NOT be changed once it has been established.  Doing so will break all of the links and all of the indexing that may have occurred at the various search engines and blogs indexing services.

I changed my permalink structure to something that is a little more friendly.   You will now notice that instead of getting a number for the post in the browser address you will get an actual post name.  Overall more friendly, overall better for indexing.  For the few of you that I knew I had sent a permalink I apologize for the change but it is a change that I felt strongly enough about needing to change even after the blog had been established. 

You can still find what you are looking for.  Use the Search located at the top of the sidebars, or you can look at the categories, or even the tags to find your article.   I apologize for the inconvenience.

So how in the world did you get here?  You thought you were going to the Deep Lake Webcam, or perhaps even bigbrofan.com and somehow you ended up here.   Through the magic of the Internet most of my personal Web pages have been redirected to here. In cases where I have decided to continue with the content or subject matter you may have been directed to specific posts or pages here on Projects Possible… my new blog.

You can expect to find some of the familiar content of my other pages and a bit more.   The goal is to provide an enjoyable and entertaining read where you can interact and comment and share some of your own thoughts on the varied topics that I will be found.

If you thought you were going to find a Web Page for a ski area in Spain you must have tried going to masella.com.   Masella is a family name and while I tried to register it, the ski area registered masella.com before I did.  I do have masella.us, and going to that domain will bring you here as well.  Two names, same great place.

What about bigbrofan.com?  The fan site for Big Brother Australia is no longer being supported or maintained.  I still own the domain and I may actually put some of the content into a page here if someone wants it.   Keep in mind I did not watch last season at all so any and all media I have would be from seasons 1-6.   If this is something you want or are looking for, leave a comment and I will see what I can do to perhaps accomodate that request.  In the meantime enjoy some of the new content.

The domains deeplakewa.com and grizzlyway.com are both for the webcams and weather station that are located at our home on Deep Lake.  These two domains will link directly to the Deep Lake page here on the blog so feel free to continue using them if you are not interested in the other content here at Projects Possible!

I own a number of other domains that may also eventually be directed to the blog.  

As I’ve said, I encourage your comments and discussion.  Feel free to use my permalinks in your posts and have a great time as you wade through the varied content of Projects Possible!