Since we were already working on 21times.org we decided we could contribute to the effort while learning a bit ourselves. We reached out to some of the top users on Hacker News and asked if we might be able to use some of their content to create a course of motivation post to help keep people motivate throughout this month. A lot of those top users were gracious enough to let us user their content, and this was a great chance for us to test our idea.

So far we’ve received a great response. We’ve had a lot of signups and some great feedback. We’re excited to build this out further and get more courses in place. If you’re interested in getting some encouragement to get your app out this month in your inbox for 21 days, signup for free at hn.21times.org.

We have big plans for MightyBrand.com and I hope that you’ll check it.  Whether you’re a blogger, a startup or someone working for a company with any kind of online presence this tool will help you keep an eye on what people are saying about you online and then easily respond all from one central location.

As always, any and all feedback is welcome.  Feel free to contact me directly, post a comment below or use the feedback tab on the site.

Not only does BlueSwarm collect that information and display it in one easy to use location, we also do sentiment analysis and calculate an authority/popularity score (called a buzz score) for both the author and the item.  This way you can see what’s important to you.  You can sort by positive or negative items, by how popular the item is or by how authoritative the author.  That way you can get to the information that matters to you most, quickly and easily.

Once you have a chance to see what people are saying about your brand, you’ll want to be able to easily respond to these items to keep the conversation going.  BlueSwarm makes it easy to flag items for later follow up or to respond to them via twitter without having to leave the site (and we’re going to be adding even more ways to respond soon).

This is just the start.  We will be adding more services in the next few weeks, more ways to respond, display and interact with the data, as well as more ways to collaborate and share that data.  We hope that you find BlueSwarm useful, please don’t hesitate to contact me directly or anyone else on the BlueSwarm team if you have any questions, feature requests or bug reports.

It’s certainly not anything life changing, but it was a fun application to build and design (yikes! I said it! I design the site, so forgive me if it makes your eyes bleed). Let me know what you think and feel free to comment here or contact me if you have any bugs to report or any features to suggest.

Here is a couple of the features currently available:

• Complete control over the look and feel of the site via CSS
• Add/Edit/Delete web pages
• A blog, which can be used for project announcements or news
• Embedded maps on the page
• Clean, semantic, micro formatted code to aid in SEO.

I hereby present: Craigslist.org OPML Exporter

Hopefully some of you will find this useful.  Please don’t hesitate to contact me with questions or suggestions.

A friend and colleague David LeMieux has made some significant progress on this bookmarklet and has released it for all to use.  Unfortunately due to the aforementioned browser limitations this bookmarklet only works in Firefox 3 Beta 5.  But if that’s what you use for testing then it’s a great tool to add to the arsenal.

If any readers have any ideas on how to make this more cross browser compatible your suggestions and ideas are greatly appreciated.  This doesn’t seem to be a difficult thing to achieve, but it does require a more skilled developer than myself.

I want to give a big thanks to all that spent any amount of time trying to get this working.  A special shout out to David LeMieux and Ryan Cross for their help in thinking this through and for the time they spent making some great progress on it.

In the ‘Find’ Box:

\[(.?*)\] => (.?*)


In the ‘Replace’ Box:

\$$1 = $_POST['$1'];


Turn this:

[field_1] => asdfa
[field_2] => sdfas
[field_3] => dfasd
[field_4] => fasdfasf


Into this:

$field_1 = $_POST['field_1'];
$field_2 = $_POST['field_2'];
$field_3 = $_POST['field_3'];
$field_4 = $_POST['field_4'];


So here is my list of top 15 most useful TextMate shortcuts that have saved me countless hours accomplishing simple tasks, and these just scratch the surface. Take some time to browse through the bundles to find ones that work for you. You can also create your own or edit the existing ones to suit your needs.

'$1' => ${3:'$4'},$5

echo "<pre>"; print_r ($variable); die("</pre>");

echo "<pre>"; print_r (${1:variable}); die("</pre>");

Post your most useful in the comments. Thanks!

It was awesome spending all day with my family and squeezing work between conversations with Amber and play time with Noah, but it’s nice to have some separation again. After just one day of having the office I already feel an emotional relief. Having a space I can go outside of the house and have a good chunk of time to just work has made coming home a lot more enjoyable. I’m able to get home and just enjoy being home with out having to find some time to work. I just put in my time at the office and head home to enjoy the family.

This may seem to be contrary to the whole reason I wanted to freelance, but I think that it’s right inline with it. I wanted to be in control of my time and now I am. Granted I’m moving back to a more traditional way of working, but if I have things that need to get done that fall within the traditional work day I can still decide to do them. I don’t have to be at the office at any specific time but having a place I can just focus on work is very helpful.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how much of the work paradigm needs to shift. How far away from traditional work situations should I get and what parts if any should I embrace. I guess all life needs some structure, well at least my life. More on this later…