Day: February 3, 2009

Using Social Bookmarking Sites for GTD

Ken Clark has an interesting list of 11 ways you can use Del.icio.us and other social bookmarking sites to get things done. For example,

Read / Review – When I come across web content that I do not have the time to read, I tag it with @readreview and move on.  I review the @readreview list as part of my daily or weekly reviews and then remove the tag once it has been read.

I do something similar with e-books I’d like to read offline. These days it seems like everyone is putting their novel or short story collection as a CC download. Typically I run across links to these when I don’t have time to actually go download the file and transfer it to my Sony Reader so I simply bookmark it with an @download tag. Same thing with MP3s I want to go back and download later. Then I simply remove the tag once I’ve gone back and downloaded it.

Most of the ideas Clark has can easily be adapted to different contexts and purposes, and is well worth reading in full.

Please Don’t Troll the Developers

All of the software that runs on the numerous parts of my websites is Open Source these days. I am clueless at programming so I am not in a position to contribute to development of any of the software I use, but I do try to help by being part of the support lists of several software packages I use and regularly answer newbie questions that constantly keep popping up and that I can answer based on my own experiences.

Along with requests for help, of course, people submit feature requests and inevitably with silly regularity someone shows up to ask that the developers stop what they’re doing on the core of the software to bake a commenting/discussion system into the software.

It doesn’t matter that the developers are usually working on the software in their spare time and barely have time to work on the core functionality. Nor does it matter that there are several hosted commenting systems that can easily be used for this purpose (such as Disqus) or that there are literally dozens of open source commenting and discussion systems available that could be easily used for this purpose.

But no, that would never work. So instead people show up and ask — and frequently demand — that the developers reinvent the wheel just for them.