A really nice theme to the WordPress admin interface inspired by OS X Tiger, which is huge improvement over the defalt interface. This theme is very slick - not only is easy on the eyes but it’s a breeze to navigate.
The theme was created by the very talented CSS designer Steve Smith of Ordered List and it can be downloaded here.
Originally published June 17, 2005 in the Amy@MEdTech blog.
I just came across this interesting quote while reading an article on knowledge work. The quote is from The Social Life of Paper by Malcolm Gladwell (published in the New Yorker):
“But why do we pile documents instead of filing them? Because piles represent the process of active, ongoing thinking. The psychologist Alison Kidd, whose research Sellen and Harper refer to extensively, argues that “knowledge workers” use the physical space of the desktop to hold “ideas which they cannot yet categorize or even decide how they might use.” The messy desk is not necessarily a sign of disorganization. It may be a sign of complexity: those who deal with many unresolved ideas simultaneously cannot sort and file the papers on their desks, because they haven’t yet sorted and filed the ideas in their head. Kidd writes that many of the people she talked to use the papers on their desks as contextual cues to “recover a complex set of threads without difficulty and delay” when they come in on a Monday morning, or after their work has been interrupted by a phone call. What we see when we look at the piles on our desks is, in a sense, the contents of our brains.”
As I take a look at my work area - both my physical and virtual desktop - I realize that it does in a sense represent my current state of mind at work. Spread out are the files and papers that are on my mind both at the conscious and unconscious level - the things that need to get done and things I’m not sure how to do yet. The charts on the wall and the files on my desktop are there not because I need them right away, but because looking at them every day and having them in my peripheral view helps the ideas percolate and eventually come into focus.
Originally published June 10, 2005 in the Amy@MEdTech blog.
I’ve been using del.icio.us for several months now as a way to catalogue all of my bookmarks. So far so good, although I find myself yearning for some additional features, such as ratings, notes, and the ability to export the bookmarks. Then along came de.lirio.us, an open-source knockoff of del.icio.us that would allow me to make my own social bookmarking application with the features I wanted. Despite my best efforts I’ve found it nearly impossible to get the required Perl modules up and running, mostly due to my innate aversion to Perl and a set of very ambiguous installation instructions.
So, I’m very happy to report that today I found a much more elegant and sophisticated solution done in PHP/mySQL called Scuttle. Not only did it take less that 10 minutes to install (which is nothing compared to the hours spent trying to understand the cryptic Rubric installation instructions), it’s also has a much nicer GUI than the del.icio.us-style interface of de.lirio.us, and it’s got a handy import feature so that all my del.irio.us bookmarks were in the system in no time. Scuttle can be downloaded from Sourceforge here.
My Scuttle bookmarks can be found here, and previews of my own implementation of Scuttle will be coming soon.
Originally published June 8, 2005 in the Amy@MEdTech blog.
I just installed the Flickr Gallery for WordPress which allows me to display my Flickr photo sets in my blog. The installation wasn’t as straightforward as I had hoped (it took about an hour and a half) as it turns out the readme file fails to mention a crucial step. The plugin can be downloaded here and the instillation instructions (with all of the steps) can be found here.
Originally published June 8, 2005 in the Amy@MEdTech blog.
I just installed BetterSearch, a Firefox extension which displays preview images for Google Search results and del.icio.us bookmarks as well as a host of other services. In addition to the thumbnail preview images, there is also the page preview feature which brings up an embedded preview within the results page.
Being a visually oriented person I find that having the thumbnail image helps me remember my own bookmarks more easily (apparently the tags and description aren’t quite enough some days), and having a picture of the page makes discriminating between search results a lot easier.
Originally published June 8, 2005 in the Amy@MEdTech blog.
