1. Click here to grab a Gist snippet and then copy and paste the snippet into your address bar. This tells Alfred to install a custom search. Alfred will ask you to confirm that you want to add the search and you should click on the “Oh Yes!” button.

Now, when you want to search on Greplin for anything, you simple bring open Alfred’s search box and type ‘greplin’ followed by what you want to search for.

If you want to see what’s been set up, open Alfred’s preferences window, go to the ‘Features’ section and select ‘Custom Searches’ from the left-hand menu. You’ll see that a new custom search has been added.

You can enhance the search further, if you want, by editing the custom search to add a Greplin icon and turn on ‘Encode spaces as +’ (though I’ve not noticed any appreciable difference with or with out this latter setting). The screenshot, below, shows my complete settings.

Greplin custom search settings in Alfred

Comments (and ‘like’s) gratefully received.

Ady

It’s something I’ve never done before and never really understood the point; I think because it’s so far removed from the day-to-day business of getting things done – to-do lists, projects and next actions. Plus, they’re very often cited in the context of a spiritual journey, which put me off & made me somewhat sceptical of their usefulness.

Now, I don’t know whether it’s my age (mid-life crisis), the fact that I’m now a grandfather, or the fact that every other productivity blog is discussing it, but I’ve reached a turning point in my position and have decided to make one for myself.

And I think I’ve found the solution to counteract my detail-focussed brain; it’s described in the blog post “Set audacious goals for 2012 using this powerful visual technique“ from The Mind Mapping Software Blog. From the post:

If you’re like most people, you take whatever you accomplished this year and will increment it upward by X percent. But what if you had a way to dream bigger dreams for 2012, to set ambitious goals that would help you to get much closer to your ideal future?

I encourage you to take a look at the post – it’s short and to the point. I like the idea of forcing myself into a non-linear mode of thought (in the same way that mind mapping does). According to the blog post it’s a well understood and effective method of ‘planning without limits’, but I’ve never come across it before (that I can remember, at least).

Another post I like on this topic (amongst the very many that are out there) is “4 simple steps to position yourself for getting it done in 2012” from smartselfmanagement.com. Mirko, the site’s owner had also made available an XMind mind map for 2011, which you can get from the end of this blog post.

I’m going to create my own MindJet template and make that available if anyone is interested.

Today I’m proud to announce that a “Responsive template” is now available on Initializr! It will help you dealing with all the various devices used to display your site. Mobiles, tablets, netbooks, laptops, desktop monitors, HUGE desktop monitors…

I’m going to grab a copy for myself and have a play.

Ady

I’m hoping that someone out there can help me find a tool or script that can show me ‘mailbox activity’.

In a nutshell, what I want to be able to do is:

1. ‘Tell’ the script/tool which mailbox I want it to scan.
2. The script runs and provides a histogram (or table – not fussed) of activity over time, so I can see where there have been more (or less) emails in and out that I’ve filed in that mailbox.

Environmentally, I’m interested in having this for Apple’s Mail application, running on an IMAP mail box. (So the script would probably have to talk to the IMAP server, as not all emails are necessarily available on the computer.)

I’ve tried a web search, but ‘mail activity’ tends to bring back a lot of noise and no substance.

Can anybody out there help me? Please leave a comment.

Ady

So here’s the deal. When you have a bit.ly account, you get an ‘Analyze’ page that shows you lots of information, including a bar chart of clicks over time. You can select a bar in the chart and it drops down the details for that bar. See the screenshot, below.

What I don’t understand is how I can have had 2 clicks on 7 links. I mean, if there’s been 2 clicks they can, at most, be clicks on 2 links, surely? So either I don’t understand what “2 Clicks on 7 Links” means, or it’s wrong. I’m happy if it’s the former, but not if it’s the latter.

Has anyone else seen this? Do you know what it’s all about?

Screenshot of my bit.ly stats today

However, I recently came to back up the machine (Time Machine onto a Time Capsule) and it kept locking up. I did all the things that the various forums and knowledge bases suggested to no avail.

Not wanting to do anything major without having a back-up (my most recent back-up being on a now-defunct Time Capsule) I figured I should get my data onto another machine. Fortunately, I had been wanting to do this for some time. I have a Mac Mini at home that’s got an Eye TV plugged into it and I wanted to have this as my major media device. This would mean transferring all my music and photos from the MBP onto the Mini:

• iTunes library and associated folders (2500 albums, plus a couple of films, TV series and podcasts)
• iPhoto library (~3000 photos)
• Aperture library (a couple of events)

I chose to do this in a very laborious (read time-consuming) way. I dropped each item into the Mini’s drop box and then backed up the Mini. Then I copied the library to the correct location and did another backup. Then I loaded the relevant application and made sure all was working and did a third backup. Then I deleted the copy from the drop box and the MBP (followed by a fourth and final backup). I did this for each of the libraries. Happy to say that all is working on the Mini. Fortunately I wasn’t in any hurry to get this done.

The next step will be to strip down the MBP and re-install from scratch. I’m hoping that this will both sort out my speed issues and allow me to get Time Machine working successfully. I’ll let you know how that goes in due course.

This blog post addresses the area that I have the most trouble managing – the weekly review. It’s refreshing to hear that he takes around 2 hours to do this – I seem to take this amount of time but was never whether that was too long.

I hope you find it of use.

1. Never, ever, ever provide a single date for a project or a single point for a budget without a range or a confidence level.
2. Expect to iterate on the release date and on the budget, and train your managers to expect that from you.
3. If you get a ranked feature set, you can provide working product in the order in which your managers want the work done, while you keep refining your estimates. This has to be good for everyone.
4. If you can say this without being patronizing, practice saying, “Remember, the definition of estimate is guess.”

I urge you to read the whole of the post – it’s a good précis of the difficulties in estimating budgets and timescales. I’m looking forward to future posts in the series. The home page of her “Managing Product Development” blog can be found here.

Update 3rd November

Johanna has posted the second part of this series.

Update 8th November

Johanna has posted the third and fourth parts of the series.

Ady

The one thing that would resolve the issue would be for WordPress to update the Delicious widget to use the V2 API, which works perfectly in the new Avos system, rather then the V1 API, which Avos have not maintained across the purchase. I’m not holding my breath, but hope that something will be done here.

Of course, now that I’m using an RSS feed, there’s no reason for me to continue with Delicious at all, and I could just as easily switch to an RSS feed from my Pinboard bookmarks instead.

Currently researching moving a suite of  hosted PHP (well, LAMP) applications to a cloud-based infrastructure. Particularly interested in:

• One-click deployment
• Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) – flexibility, performance, scalability, load balancing
• Metrics
• Resilience

I have discovered phpfog and would be interested in feedback:

1. From people who use phpfog – is it good/bad? Ease of use. Cost effective?
2. From people who use something that is not phpfog – What do you use? Your experiences.

If you have anything to offer to support my research, I would be really grateful if you would leave a comment. Also appreciate (re)tweets in order to spread the net.

Many thanks in advance,

Ady