Web Worker Daily |
- Redliner: Collaborative Editing Made Easy
- FileShareHQ Now Offering Paid Accounts and Branding
- Achieve Your Goals by Putting Them Online
- Wanted: “Star Trek” Technology for Web Workers
- 3 Efficiency Tips for Using Dual Monitors
| Redliner: Collaborative Editing Made Easy Posted: 02 Jun 2009 04:00 PM PDT Written by Simon Mackie.
Enter Redliner, a new collaborative live document editing tool that marries an online word processor with a commenting and revision tracking system. It is based on Microsoft Silverlight, and even though it’s only in technical preview, the app is quite impressive. The best way to demo it is to see it in action in a screencast: WWD Screencast: Redliner from WebWorkerDaily on Vimeo. Redliner is powerful, has smart workflow management features, and looks great. For those used to working with Word, its change tracking and commenting system should feel very familiar, which should make it easy to adopt for even the most non-technical of users. I wonder how it will stack up against the live collaboration tools that will likely be built into the next version of Word, but right now, Redliner is definitely worth checking out (a live demo is available) if you often collaborate on documents with your team. Redliner is currently free during the technical preview period. When the full version is released later this year, paid monthly accounts will become available. What tools do you use for collaborative editing?        |
| FileShareHQ Now Offering Paid Accounts and Branding Posted: 02 Jun 2009 01:00 PM PDT Written by Simon Mackie.
The most expensive “Business” plan also offers the ability to rebrand the service, giving you the option of creating a professional-looking client files area that matches the look and feel of your existing web site. Free accounts with 1 GB space and two users are still available. Have you used FileShareHQ? Let us know what you think in the the comments.      |
| Achieve Your Goals by Putting Them Online Posted: 02 Jun 2009 11:00 AM PDT Written by Darrell Etherington.
Step 1: Alert the People You Trust If you’re worried about the feasibility of your goals, bouncing them off of your closest friends and relatives is a sure way of getting some invaluable early feedback. You probably have some good friends who aren’t afraid to make you look foolish (and, in fact, might relish the opportunity), so you don’t have to worry that they’ll pull punches to spare your feelings. Conversely, if you have a good idea, they won’t summarily cut you down, like some of your more trollish online contacts might. Your inner circle of real-life peers and confidants will also have a better idea of what you’re realistically capable of. In fact, they might be more aware of your own limitations than you yourself are. Most Internet connections, as familiar with your work as they might be, will likely judge based on the apparent difficulty of the goal in a general sense, without specific reflection on your level of talent, dedication or ability. Step 2: Keep Your Twitter/Facebook Friends in the Loop Once your plan has passed muster with those you trust, you can broaden the audience using Twitter and Facebook status updates. Don’t make a huge deal out of it, but do post things like “Starting work on my ABC certification today, wish me luck!” At the very least you should secure some words of encouragement. Most likely, depending on the size and nature of your networks, there will be others among your friends and contacts who’ve tried to achieve the same or similar goals. They’ll be able to offer advice, helpful links, and possibly even prep materials or information sources, depending on what it is you want to accomplish. Mining your social networks for support is great, but be prepared for challenges, too. Anything from doubt concerning the merits of your chosen goals, to flamebait and personal attacks is possible, but the benefits far outweigh the disadvantages, particularly if you’re thick-skinned. Hopefully, you’ve already applied the golden rule of the Internet: Never take anything personally, unless it makes you look good. Step 3: Broadcast Beyond Your Network While making the people you know and interact with on a regular basis aware of what you intend to do is the best way to get yourself to stick to your guns, it might not be the most effective method of garnering feedback. Reaching out to strangers might give you a fresh perspective on what you’re doing, and how to go about doing it. It may also help when your goals are off the beaten track, and therefore less likely to be shared by other individuals in your social circles. To some degree, Twitter will broadcast your plans out to the ether if people are searching for keywords that occur in your tweets, but other alternatives are much more targeted. MySomeday is a new web app in public beta that is designed specifically to help you share your goals with others in a community setting that will help you garner constructive criticism and words of encouragement. The concept is simple: You post a plan, and other members of the community comment on what you want to do and how you want to do it. You set up steps towards achieving your goal, and then you rate each step in terms of importance and check them off as they’re accomplished. Checking off tasks updates your progress bar, which displays the completion percentage of your overall goal.
Just talking about your goals is a sure way to not accomplish what you want to do. Action is the only real solution, but sometimes the key to spurring yourself to act rests outside of yourself. Regardless of whether you draw your inspiration from yourself or others, though, the only way to achieve your goals is to persevere in your pursuit of them. Especially for web workers, using the Internet to garner encouragement might just be the extra push you need to keep your nose to the grindstone. Does sharing your goals with your network spur you into action?      |
| Wanted: “Star Trek” Technology for Web Workers Posted: 02 Jun 2009 09:00 AM PDT Written by Dawn Foster. I’m a big fan of “Star Trek,” all the way from the original series to the most recent movie. And I spend more time than I should admit to playing “What if?” games with “Star Trek” technologies, wondering how I’d use each technology if it existed in real life. Lately I’ve started thinking about how the technologies could apply to those of us who make our living online. Here a few of my top uses for “Star Trek” technologies for web workers. Transporter  Photo by tkksummers While I love to visit new places, I hate losing an entire day on an airplane while going through the hassle of air travel. The liquid restrictions and all of the rules about what you can and cannot take with you on the airplane can be a real drag for travel in the United States. I want to be able beam directly from my house to my client’s office for all of my business travel. You could beam to the office for a morning of work, beam home for lunch, beam back for the afternoon and beam back home to sleep in your own bed. I’ll bet that I could even find a few spare minutes to beam over to mom’s house for some homemade apple pie! Replicator We’ve all had those times when we weren’t quite equipped for the task at hand: missing tools, missing parts, incorrect cables and more. I would love to be able to replicate any technology required at a moment’s notice. Out of ink for your printer? Replicate new ink. Low on paper or disk drive space? Replicate more. Think about how much time we would save by not making lunch or going out for lunch if we could walk up to the replicator and simply request a bowl of soup and a side salad. Holodeck How many times do you need a quick break during the day or want to grab a quick workout? If we had holodecks, we could have personal gyms with holographic personal trainers available 24 hours a day, seven days a week, with no waiting for the next available treadmill or squat rack. I could save a lot of time by not having to go out to the gym, while still having an unlimited amount of equipment. I could even visit a sunny beach for a few minutes when I needed to escape the computer and take some time to relax. How would you use Star Trek technologies to improve your work if they existed in real life?      |
| 3 Efficiency Tips for Using Dual Monitors Posted: 02 Jun 2009 07:00 AM PDT Written by Samuel Dean. Recently, I switched to a dual-monitor setup for working each day, and I’ll never go back. The productivity benefits were immediately apparent, and we’ve written before about how easy it is to switch to this type of setup. Both the Mac OS and Windows have support for dual monitors built in, and you can get, say, two 20-inch monitors for less money than a much larger display costs. After working with two monitors for a couple months now, I’ve collected some efficiency tips that can help get the most out of them. Here are three tips that have worked for me. Mixing and matching browsers. In the past, I often fell into the trap of using one browser at a time and collecting tons of open tabs. That can increase crashing and slow performance down. With my dual monitors, I keep Firefox open on my left display, and Google Chrome open on my right display. Chrome is well-known for running applications and pages in tabs in such a way that if one tab goes down, the others won’t. But Chrome doesn’t yet have the customizability of Firefox, with its huge array of extensions. So, in the morning when I start opening all the applications I use, I reserve my “maximum uptime needed” applications for tabs in Chrome on my right display, and I reserve apps for which I can take advantage of Firefox extensions on my left display. This works well. Mouse Muscle. If you haven’t used dual monitors before, one of the great things about the setup is that you can navigate across both displays as if you had one display. In other words, if I start with my mouse arrow over at the left-hand side of my left display and start moving to the right, I can move the arrow all the way over to the right-hand side of the right display as though I’m working with only one screen. This provides the perfect opportunity to take advantage of advanced ways to scroll, and speed-scroll, using a mouse with a control wheel. I previously wrote a post about many ways to do this, here. The scrolling tips are particularly useful with two displays. A More Organized Desktop. If you’re like me, and you use a whole lot of software applications, your desktop gets cluttered very fast. When using one display in the past, I often had so many application icons on one desktop, that it would take me some time to find applications when I needed them. With two displays, I just use a simple organizational rule. I keep operating system utilities, other utilities, and any applications I’m going to open less frequently on the desktop displayed on my right monitor. I keep browsers, browser-specific applications, and all other applications that I open and close frequently on the left display. With this rule, I never find myself wasting time searching for a tool that I need. Share your dual monitor efficiency tips in the comments.      |
If you need to 
FileShareHQ
Nothing will motivate you to achieve your goals like making other people aware of the specifics of what you’re aiming to accomplish. At least for me, the threat of public shame is a great tool you can use to prevent yourself from giving up on your dreams. Making others aware of your plans also has the added benefit of potentially providing you with great feedback about how you might best go about carrying through with them, too. The web is a great place to publicize your professional goals, especially if that’s where you do the bulk of your work. But just tweeting your aim doesn’t mean it’ll come through. As with most things, a plan will help increase your chances of success.
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