Alan Blaine Whitney

Their are some really good web applications out there, but in my life their still are some paper publishications that I have that no web app comes close to replacing.  Some of these are the AMC River Guide and the Delorme A&G.  The amount of detail, both in map data and text is far better than those found online.  With the case of the AMC River Guide, the trips that are detailed were actually taken by the authors.

This got me thinking about a larger scale issue.  In this era of “web 2.0″ and wiki’s and blogs, what will happen to detailed research.  Anyone who has ever done any large research knows that wikipedia may be looked at, but is not a great source of in-depth information.  Any information that may actually be there, is really a citation from something else anyway.

I just wonder what will happen to high quanlity content, that needs to be funded.

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Lately I have been using svn with a few various PHP websites that I maintain.  In short, here is what I have found out.

Once you get used to typing svn commit and svn update, it’s addicting.  That is a very slick way to go about dev.  I have used it update live websites with svn update, to do development from various places (tele-commute days versus at work).

Here are some things that I don’t like about it.  Inital imports and checkouts take forever, there is no tar like thing to transfer just one file.  Can really take a while sometimes.  This is my biggest problem.  My second thing, is that php websites always have some files you can’t track in the repo, like config files, template caches, or other tmp files, so you also have to remember to svn delete them.

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This morning I have read some awesome blog posts, just figured I would share.

Less is better
David Heinemeier Hansson, from 37 Signals, creator of Ruby on Rails, over usability guy.  Very good read about web application development.  Really enjoyed him talking about specs and functionality scope on the top of page two.

Small business owners are community managers
Connie Bensen often writes about community managers.  In this post, she covers why small business owners are more or less, community managers.  I liked the graphic.

underperforming
This is something that I don’t do much, but analyst traffic to see how to do things better.  This was a great article describing how to view stuff like google analytics.

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Starting tomorrow, I am going to change the way I start my work day.  Normally, I check email, phone messages, check my feed reader, maybe even make a few phone calls.  I think I am wasting my mornings.  The first hour, maybe two hours of my day are sort of quick.  Not everyone is in the office.

More than just that it is still quick, also my mind is still fresh.  Once I read emails, feed reader, etc.  I have stuff on my mind.  I am already distracted some.

So here is my game plan tomorrow morning.  Come in and get right two it.  Check email and feedreader before lunch sometime but later.  I will comment with how it worked.

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