• Basecamp – Project management made incredibly simple and easy.  I’ve used Basecamp for many projects over the years.  Whether you are working on a project with a team of 30, or you just want to jot down everything you need to get done in order to move into a new apartment, Basecamp seems to fit very well.
• Backpack – Small companies, or even a group of people or family, can sometimes find it hard to keep track of each other, share files or ideas in an easy way, or just collaborate on something.  If Basecamp is a bit too much for your needs, or you just want to have a company calendar, Backpack strikes the right balance.
• Highrise – Contact management is made easy in Highrise.  What’s more, though, is that Highrise can track communications with these contacts simply by fitting into your existing workflow.  It adds zero time to your contact management, but eases the pain.

After the conference Ryan Carson, founder of Carsonified, told the attendees they’d make the video available online for free to all attendees because of some of the presentations issues they had.  Turns out the weather was beautiful in New York City and, because of the sunlight shining through the Javits Center, it was hard to see the presentations on screen.  I asked Ryan if we could share it through Viddler in a private way to attendees and he said “Absolutely.”

Long story short, for the first time ever this video is now available to the public whether or not you attended the conference.  And don’t think because these presentations were done in November of 2007 that they aren’t just as valuable today as they were then.  I just watched them all again, as every one did a great job.

Some of the presenters from The Future of Web Design were Joshua Davis, Ryan Signer of 37signals, Jeffery Zeldman, Andy Clarke, Josh Williams, Brian Fling, Jonanthan Snook, Elliot Jay Stocks, Lea Alcantara, Ryan Sims and D. Keith Robinson, Jina Bolton, Cindy Li, and Matthew Patterson.

So here you go, one place to watch all of the video, download the slides, and download the audio from these presentations.  This just saved you $150USD!  Also, watch the Future of Web Design’s Viddler account, as I think there will be much more to see there in the future.

Source: The Future of Web Design, New York 2007 videos.

The latest version of the Ta-da List widget.

Keegan Jones, the developer of the widget and a heckuva photographer, was nice enough to give me a copy of the working widget shortly after I complained about it not working.  I was able to get back up and running quickly and let him know that it was working.  Customer service++.

This makes my GTD circle complete.  I use Ta-da List on my iPhone while I’m on the go (mostly to add things to my list so I don’t forget them) and I use the widget when I’m on my computer to check things off as I get them done.

Head on over to Ta-da List, get an account, and download Keegan’s excellent widget.  It will help you, as it has me, Get Things Done for sure.

The erring widget.

I began reusing Ta-da Lists recently when I found out about the iPhone support.  It works beautifully.  When I think of something while I’m on the go, I can add a ta-da list item with my iPhone painlessly.  When I’m back at my computer, I reference the very same list.  I love it.

Up until the other day I was using the Ta-da Lists widget as my way to interact with my lists on my Macintosh computer.  But for some reason the widget now just spins (pictured) while trying to get the lists and their items.

I don’t know what is going on, but I’ve sent a few messages to whomever I could find contact information for.

As a side request: If anyone knows an application, rather than a widget, that utilizes Ta-da lists – please let me know.

37signals’ Job Board

The 37signals’ Job Board is probably “the best one” right now. Currently there are offerings from such companies as Apple, Sony, Amazon, Best Buy, and Flickr.

I actually know a few people that have gotten jobs they’ve really loved through 37signals’ board.

Authentic Jobs

An offering by Cameron Moll, Authentic Jobs, covers both full-time and freelance jobs. So if you are a freelance developer or designer, there is a lot of opportunity just waiting here for you.

If you are a company/person looking to fill a position or get a project done, I think Authentic Jobs is your way to go – being that they have a money back guarantee (maybe the others do too).

The Crunch Board

From the hard working people of TechCrunch, the Crunch Board is a lot less personal the the two sites I mentioned above – but these guys are all about business. I think I would check this site last, which is why I’ve ordered it as such, but if you need work – you’ll want to look here.

Why am I linking to Job Boards you ask? Believe it or not, I have people ask me if myself, Viddler, or any other company I know has work. And sometimes I’m able to oblige, but – most of the time – I can’t. So, for all of you reading this, if you need to find some work it can’t hurt to look through the above Job Boards first.

Do you know of any other good Job Boards? List them in the comments and I’ll add them to the post!

A note to 37signals, Authentic Jobs, and the Crunch Board… you may pay for this link via Paypal.

List of recommended boards

Below are boards recommended via email, instant message, Twitter, and/or through the comments on this post.

• Freelance Switch – Recommended by Jay Francis Hunter.
• Live near Philadelphia? The Indy Hall Job Board might be a place to look. Uses Google Groups and is free. — Recommended by Alex Hillman of Independents Hall.
• Do you know JavaScript? John Resig, creator of jQuery, has recently opened a completely free Job Board for JavaScript Ninjas such as yourself.

While I’m going to reserve judgement on any of the recommended boards, I will say that with the Job Boards I listed – the price point seems to be high enough to make sure that the company is very serious about filling the position and/or getting the freelance work done. With the recommended boards, your mileage may vary.

To be continued…

“37signals responds to downtime, perfectly. They start with an explanation of what happened, then apologize with the promise to compensate where warranted, and assure it won’t happen again, all with human feeling. Learn.” — (view bookmark | view their post)

Pulling this off is no easy task – though for a remarkably customer service conscience group like 37signals perhaps this comes pretty naturally. I wanted to take a second to show some bad examples of this type of response, so that you can see the contrast (and I’m sure I could be one of these examples if I was harder on myself).

Recently Flickr had some downtime that they knew they were going to have so they gave fair warning about it. This is a good thing. However, their maintenance took longer than they thought it would, and I think they might have stepped over the “snarky remark” edge just slightly. Just so we’re all clear, I love Flickr. I’ve met some of their staff members and each of them are good people. Here is a snippet from their downtime notice post.

“Do you remember when we said we were almost back online? Well, that time we were joking, but this time is for real!”

Personally I think they could have skipped the “every few hours” approach to updating and just waited until the service was updated to bring the community up-to-speed (more on this below). Snarky remarks like the above don’t help too much. How can this be avoided though? You don’t want to be completely unhuman. Let’s look at how 37signals brought the human-feeling into their post, with this line.

“Again, we’re truly sorry for this interruption. This is not how Fridays are supposed to be.”

During their downtime they also updated their users as best they could (this particular situation was relatively out-of-their hands) and while they injected some heartfelt messages into those updates, I think they could have saved that for this post.

Another bad example would be to remain silent and have your service degrade, well, not so gracefully. Blogger recently had some outage and their users just saw a weird message and there was no updates from the Blogger staff. Silence isn’t a good tactic at all.

Points to remember

Based on the good example of 37signals and the bad examples above, I think that we should all strive to do the following when web services go down – and I’ve ordered these by importance (in my opinion).

• Degrade gracefully. When downtime occurs, forward to some sort of friendly message that is easily updatable by staff members to let the community know what is going on.
• Keep explanations short and simple. Don’t update every 5-seconds (especially if you have nothing to report), and don’t be long winded. Sometimes “we’re working on it” is sufficient. Oh, and each update should have a timestamp.
• Don’t give false expectations. I’ve learned this the hard way. Even if your engineers tell you that it will take an hour, there is no need to say that publicly. Keep the “we’re close” messages to a minimum too.
• Be human. Try your best to explain the situation in human terms and be warm.

Once the service is back up and running, and a longer explanation is warranted, you can look no further than 37signals post for inspiration.

One thing we can’t see is whether or not 37signals did any contacting of their users behind the scenes. Since their product is a pay-for service, they could have very well personally contacted some of their larger accounts to let them know what is going on. Or, after they were back up, they could have reimbursed them beyond the offer they made publicly. Things like this go a very long way.

Please notice that I believe this task to be extremely hard to pull off well and that I think both Flickr and Blogger are great services.

I’m hoping that I can take all of these points and learn from them the next time we have any troubles at Viddler. In the past we’ve handled these situations fairly well, but I know we can improve a lot by learning from others good and bad examples.

Thoughts?

Addendum: It appears that I am not the only one that thinks 37signals did a great job. Not only do they have numerous comments on the post, but Dan Benjamin also thought so.