Web Worker Daily |
| Getting Fit: The Web Worker Way Posted: 25 Feb 2009 07:02 AM PST Written by Dawn Foster. It’s been a while since we’ve had a fitness post on WebWorkerDaily. The web worker lifestyle tends to be a sedentary one with many hours spent staring at the computer. Many web workers, and I put myself in this category, have a hard time getting away from work long enough to work out, but it is time well spent that will benefit you in the long run. Exercise isn’t just about losing weight; it has so many benefits for web workers, including keeping your brain working better, improved mood, longer lifespan, increased stamina and reduced risk for many health issues. Last July, Mike Gunderloy wrote a post covering three fitness resources for the deskbound. His post discussed reducing tension and pain with stretching, trying isometrics instead of the gym, and getting more active. These are all great suggestions, but I wanted to add a few more that work for me. Since we, as web workers, spend our days in front of the computer, I’ll focus on a few online techniques to help you get (and stay) motivated to get off your butt. In early October, I decided to make myself accountable to my friends on Twitter for working out by using a new Twitter hashtag, #getoffbutt. My intention was to track my workouts while, at the same time, increasing my accountability for actually working out. What I didn’t expect was to start seeing a bunch of other people using #getoffbutt for the same reason! People seem to have found some value in using a Twitter hashtag to track workouts. I recently started using Gyminee to track my workouts with more detail: workout type, calories, time, etc. However, my favorite thing about Gyminee is that you can invite your friends and all keep track of each other’s workouts. It also has plenty of special interest groups to join, pre-defined workouts, fitness challenges, and more. It even works great with the iPhone. I wrote a more comprehensive review of Gyminee in January if you want to know more about it. I also schedule my workouts on my calendar. I have a daily recurring meeting on my calendar for 3 p.m. for my workout. While meetings tend to get in the way of any recurring appointment, I can easily see that something is scheduled over my workout and can move it another time. Realistically, I will probably never work out seven days a week, but I can make sure that I don’t cancel too many of my workouts. The point isn’t about which tool you use to track your workouts or how you make sure that you find time for your workout. In the words of the famous shoe company from Oregon, Just Do It! What are your tips for making sure that you stay fit? How do you balance working out with web working?        |
| Open Thread: How Much Do You Trust Your Web Apps? Posted: 24 Feb 2009 04:01 PM PST Written by Simon Mackie. The news that Gmail went down this morning (UK time) got me thinking about how we increasingly rely on third parties for essential business services. With a proliferation of web apps offering to meet our every business need and the inexorable rise of cloud computing, are we investing too much trust in them? Fortunately, I have Offline Gmail support enabled, which meant that I could at least continue working on emails received overnight while Gmail was down. But judging by the outpouring of angst on Twitter, many people had a pretty unproductive morning, with some four hours of downtime. Gmail appears to be back up now, but you can bet that this won’t be the last time a major web app suffers downtime. While we can probably be reasonably confident that Google has the engineering talent to recover from most failures quite quickly (especially as Google’s paid-for Google For Domains users have a service-level agreement, including an uptime guarantee of 99.9 percent), we’ve seen many services suffer from a lack of continued support and investment, and some that disappear altogether. Are we putting too much faith in services that we have no control over? Do you have a backup plan in place in case a critical part of your workflow goes down?      |
| Web Work 101: No Web Worker Is an Island — So Join Some Groups Posted: 24 Feb 2009 10:00 AM PST Written by Pamela Poole. I think it’s safe to say that the web working lifestyle — being able to work in the comfort and tranquility of our own inviolate little worlds — is an introvert’s dream come true. But not all web workers fit that mold, to be sure. In fact, some people hesitate to make the leap to web working because they’re concerned about being isolated. No matter what your personality type, one thing is true for all of us: Every now and then we have to get out and get some human interaction, for our mental health as well as that of our careers. Holing up at home is not the best way to further your professional goals, get new clients, or find partners (of any variety). At any time, but especially in our current economic climate, having a substantial professional network can mean more security for the web worker. When I first started web working, I had moved to a new city in a foreign country where I had no local contacts, either social or professional, other than my husband. After a while, I needed to make a serious effort to get an offline life and become a participant in my professional community. So I chose a tech mixer that I’d read about on a blog for my debutante moment. I even bought a new shirt. And I can’t tell you how glad I am that I went. That evening I met a lot of people. (I was on a mission, after all.) Some I’ve written about, some I’ve worked with, and others are just fun to hang out with. That night, I discovered a coworking center, which is also a meeting hub for all kinds of tech professional groups and events (I now subscribe to the center’s events feed), and I learned about (and consequently joined) a local group for women in tech. Since this one event, my network has grown considerably. I recently started attending Paris Open Coffee Club meetings, which are held every Thursday morning (above). There are Open Coffee Clubs all over the world, from Boulder, Colo., to Chennai, India. And even though this group is generally for entrepreneurs, it’s a pleasant, coworking environment with a techie crowd. There’s always a chance somebody could be looking for the skills you have, or that you’ll meet people who share your interests, so don’t hesitate to branch out into areas other than your nearest extreme programming club… In addition to joining groups, consider volunteering. Some volunteer work I did recently led to two speaking engagements, one of which will be at the upcoming Society for Technical Communication - France annual conference in March. The conference theme is “Creating Communities,” and it’s open to anyone: STC members and non-members from anywhere in the world. I’ll be there, talking about online identity and the Wizard of Oz (really), so if you’re a web worker in the Paris area and you need to get out of the house, or if you want an excuse to come to Paris, this might be just the thing for you. If you’re thinking of becoming a web worker, my advice is not to worry about being isolated from other people, at least if you live in a reasonably large city. You can pick and choose the groups you want to be part of and adjust your extracurricular activity load to suit your needs. If you are an extreme introvert, just buy a new shirt and go for it. You won’t be sorry! Web workers: What groups do you belong to? How has participating in them has helped you as a web worker?      |
| Posted: 24 Feb 2009 09:00 AM PST Written by Dawn Foster. In my recent post about using Harvest to track my time, I discovered that I was spending too much of my time consuming information. As a result, I’ve been working on ways to further increase my efficiency, starting with some Twitter efficiency improvements, and I thought that a post about becoming more efficient at consuming blogs and other news content via RSS would be a good next step. I love information and wish I could spend more time reading and consuming it, to learn more about a variety of topics. However, the harsh reality is that there are only so many hours in the day that I can spend reading and learning. I could take the easy way out and just read less, but my goal is to become more efficient at finding the content that I want to read the most. Pruning your feeds is a good way to start. Fellow WWD blogger Celine Roque wrote a great article about how to fine-tune your RSS subscriptions a few months ago. Dead feeds and feeds that you rarely read only slow down the process of finding the content that you really need. I have a tendency to add blogs to my reader based on one or two great posts, but sometimes those blogs just don’t keep my interest and must be pruned later. I try to go through my RSS reader a few times a year and focus on getting rid of, or de-prioritizing, feeds that add less value or aren’t being regularly updated any more. Some feed readers even have tools for finding those old blogs that aren’t being updated regularly (dinosaurs) and the blogs that currently get the least amount of your attention. I also make extensive use of filtering to reduce the amount of content in my feeds. Yahoo Pipes is a great filtering tool, since you can use it to combine many RSS feeds and only display posts that match certain key words that are the most interesting to you. I use Yahoo Pipes to filter groups of blogs that typically have low relevancy for me but have occasional great nuggets of information that I don’t want to miss. With Pipes, I can make sure that I only see the nuggets, and not the posts that contain less interesting topics. Use an RSS reader that gives you a way to organize your feeds and use it as a way to prioritize the things that you should read more often. I use NetNewsWire, which gives me the ability to create folders and move them up or down the list. The things that I need to read every day are at the top, while the blogs that I read only occasionally are near the bottom. When working with clients who don’t already use a reader, I usually set them up with Netvibes, which has more of a dashboard feel. In this case, I organize their feeds with the top priorities in the upper left, lower priorities in the lower right and multiple tabs to group topics. It doesn’t really matter how you organize the information as long as it helps you prioritize your reading. Take the time to learn the keyboard shortcuts for your feed reader. I can get through the material more quickly when I use a few keys to navigate through the content. In my case, NetNewsWire lets you use arrow keys, the space bar and other keys to navigate through the content, mark items as read/unread, open in a browser, collapse/expand folders, and more. Navigating the menu items to find these functions can sometimes take more time than you realize. It also helps me to think of feeds as a stream that flows through my RSS reader. I don’t try to catch up by reading everything, and I don’t worry about leaving unread items in my reader. I read what I can with the time I have available and don’t spend any time worrying about the rest. There will always be more interesting content than I can ever read in a lifetime. What are your tips for getting through your RSS feeds more quickly and efficiently?      |
| Docstoc: Online Document Hosting and Preview Services Posted: 24 Feb 2009 07:01 AM PST Written by Darrell Etherington.
Personally, I have two uses for Docstoc’s services with regards to my online work. First, being a freelancer, clients ask me for all kinds of documents all the time, and I don’t have the luxury of just going to the company library and pulling out our template for whatever it is they ask for. With Docstoc, I can at least find examples (basic, if not best-in-class) to base my own, customized version around. Legal, contract and proposal documents are all available, all of which are types of documents that I find myself needing frequently. Even if I already have my own templates established for any of these, Docstoc’s large library provides me with examples to benchmark with and borrow from.
Docstoc is kind of an odd resource, and one which might not be useful to every web worker. That said, if your particular field of online work incurs a lot of paperwork, which can be very daunting if you’re a freelancer working without a network of support staff, give Docstoc a try. How do you benchmark your paperwork? Have you tried Docstoc? Share your thoughts in the comments.      |
| Gmail Goes Down and the World Grinds to a Halt Posted: 24 Feb 2009 06:32 AM PST Written by Judi Sohn. Or at least it feels that way every time it happens. Gmail, including Google Apps, went down for about four hours or so this morning (or this afternoon, depending on where you are). It says a lot for Gmail’s reach that when it does go offline, it makes immediate headlines. Like many, the first thing I do every morning is check my email accounts. When the errors started popping up, I went straight to Twitter Search to be assured I was not alone. I had other things to do. I could have checked headlines. I could have finished some work that had nothing to do with email. I could have balanced my checkbook. Heck, I could have spent extra time with the morning paper or gone for a brisk walk. But no, I kept trying to load my email while keeping an eye on Twitter. Judging by the tweets, I was not alone. I know I’m over-reliant on email. As soon as I saw it was a global problem, I knew Google would resolve it quickly, and they did. But still, it bothered me that it was so difficult to concentrate on anything else until service was restored. Checking email is part of the web worker’s routine. Does it throw you off kilter when it’s not available? What do you do to pass the time until Google gets the hamsters running again?      |
Working online, you probably need to share documents with clients, partners and coworkers. You also probably wouldn’t mind having a resource at hand whereby you could search, preview, and download a wide selection of documents to use as templates, research material, or benchmarks to help further your own work. 
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