Having a cluttered desktop doesn’t just look unattractive, it seriously hampers your productivity. It always starts the same way: You receive an important email attachment and you think, “Hey, I’ll put this on my desktop so I can find it easily” or “I need to use this file right away–I will drop it on my desktop and file it away later.”

Twenty attachments, downloads, and new files later, your desktop is like a pig on roller skates: unwieldy and bloated. But don’t fear gentle readers, I have five tips to help you reclaim this valuable real estate and impress anyone who happens to glance at your screen.

Tip #1 - Pick A Nice Desktop Background
If you have a great image on your desktop, one that you actually want to look at, it provides a bit of subtle, subconscious motivation not to cover it up with file icons.
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I’m learning that projects built on agile frameworks (like ArcSite) can really unfold almost by themselves–once the database is written, the objects fall out of that. Once the objects are written, controllers and web services basically write themselves, and once you have a controller, you’re ready for the template.

I was pleased this evening to get to spend some time developing ArcSite’s web services layer–it’s going to be really robust and easy to create and use.

Every year, I learn two new languages and write (or at least design) one; I’ve done this for four years now and I keep up my skills in each language. I usually take about a month per language. I always learn one in January and one in June (well, June 21 to the end of July actually) January, I learn a language I don’t want to know but feel like I should. My birthday is in June, so I feel like it’s a good point to reward myself with a “candy” language. Help me pick a new language to learn! (more…)

The Seattle Post Intelligencer posted an interesting experimental article in January that compared keynote texts given by Apple’s Steve Jobs, Microsoft’s Bill Gates, and Dell’s Michael Dell using keyword clouds. I know I’m a bit behind the times, but the keyword results and lengthy discussion were interesting.

If you scan over each keyword cloud, each speech evokes a different “personality”. While each speech was written for a different audience, you can’t help but notice the branding through repetition.

The popular Tag Cloud site is “getting an overhaul”, but here’s another tag-cloud generator I found while surfing. Go ahead, see what your keyword frequencies are in your web page, term paper, or presidential address.
http://www.tocloud.com/

I’ve posted a little snippet of Austin demo-ing ArcSite. ArcSite enables our clients to browse to any page on their web site, click a button and edit text, images and links. It is infinitely customizable and will work in any design.

Last Saturday, after a good dose of caffeine at Sebastian Joe’s and some grapefruit juice and zucchini fries at the Independent (seriously), I decided to throw my own after-party and do some night photography. (more…)

I haven’t thought about reputation much since high school, and that was primarily other people’s reputations, not my own. Return Path resurrected this term during their webinar Thursday afternoon titled “Reputation 101: Five Things You Need to Know to Get on the Good Side with ISPs”.

The presentation discussed the importance of monitoring your IP address reputation to better understand and manage your email deliverability rates. Reviewing your email bounce rates is one thing, but understanding why your email subscribers are unsubscribing, or not even receiving your messages is another.

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