Summersault Weblog

I recently found a neat little application that has been useful both at work and in my at-home computing. It is called Prism, and what it does is allow you to run your favorite web applications (Remember the Milk, Facebook, Google Calendar, etc.) as if they were desktop applications. Because it was built on the Firefox engine, it will run any web applications you can run in your Firefox browser.
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I’ve been waiting for a while now to see what Google was going to do with their acquisition of JotSpot, the collaborative wiki site that a number of non-profit organizations I’m involved in has used to organize our internal information. In my opinion, the long wait was a big risk to take on Google’s part…I used to send people to JotSpot all the time. when Google acquired it and stopped accepting new accounts, I still sent people there, saying “I’m sure it will reopen soon, it’s worth it.” Eventually I stopped sending people there at all, and encouraged them to use other tools or to go to the trouble to set up their own intranet with software like Mediawiki, the tool that powers Wikipedia.

Well, as of today, I’m pretty sure I know where to send people for creating free, powerful internal websites: Google Sites, the new incarnation of what was JotSpot.
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Though not just applicable for website development, Rob Swan has written a great article over at A List Apart that takes a deeper look at interacting with clients, knowing the reasoning behind your methods as well as questioning whether or not your methods are truly worthwhile.

In Defense of Difficult Clients

From the article:
"It’s only by being forced to question our beliefs that we can be certain they’re right. The web is an ever-changing medium, we need to be prepared to accept that there’s a possibility that some of our practices are no longer best. Or that—and it happens—they may never have been best in the first place, but no one thought to question them with enough force when they were first mentioned."

We use the excellent RT request tracker for our support system.

Each request is tracked through a unique ID that gets passed the e-mail subject line. Sometimes I want to update several tickets at once using a collection of unrelated IDs I have in my Inbox. Read the rest of this entry »