The Weekly Review

I’ve always enjoyed seeing the setup of other bloggers—what their desk looks like, the software they use, how they write\design\create etc.—so I thought it was time to do the same here. Here’s my cave:

Hardware

My setup is simple—I have a white 1.83 GHz Macbook with 1.5 GB of RAM. It’s my second Mac (the first being a used G4 tower) and it’s the best computer I have ever owned. I love the feel of the keys on the Macbook, making it a pleasure to work on.

As you can see in the image above, when I’m at my desk I use the newer Macbook-style keyboard and a wireless Might Mouse. And the desktop is marvelously displayed over the 23″ Cinema Display my wife gave me for Father’s Day. My Internet is served up by a 500 GB Time Capsule.

There is always a good notebook and pen around as well.

Atmosphere

I enjoy working in softer light—no fluorescent overheads allowed. Our office is a nice shade of yellow, and my desk lamp perfectly lights the space. The window looks out over the deck into the backyard.

Publishing

This site is powered by WordPress and is currently using a heavily modified version of Derek Punsulan’s Grid Focus theme. There are not a lot of plugins used on this site, but here are the few that makes things run smoothly:

• Feedburner FeedSmith
• Smart Archives
• WordPress Database Backup
• wpcache

Routine

With a full time job and a house full of younger children, most work on The Weekly Review gets done early or late in the day. Most often, I get up between 4:30 and 5:00 AM. After some quiet prayer and meditation, I put on some coffee or yerba mate and get to work. I’m a morning person, so working at this hour is not a big deal. I like thinking and typing in the quiet before the chaos and endless requests of the day begin.

Music and beverage are essential cogs in this machine.

Software

I have a love for fine software—it’s what makes being a Mac user so great. A lot of what’s written here is in regards to this software. Here’s a rundown of what I use:

Productivity

• Mail or Fluid instance of GMail
• iCal synced with GCal
• Fluid instance of Highrise from 37signals
• Things
• Yojimbo

Web work\Blogging

• Coda
• Transmit
• MarsEdit
• Acorn
• Dictionary.app
• WriteRoom
• Firefox
• Skitch
• Mint

Entertainment

• iTunes w\ CoverSutra
• Safari
• NetNewsWire

Web Applications

• del.icio.us
• Dropbox
• Flickr
• Instapaper
• Last.FM
• LinkedIn
• Nike+
• Twitter

Working on this site has been enjoyable so far—I hope it always remains so. A good part of that enjoyment comes from the tools and the environment. The rest comes from the actual end result and from the people I’ve come to know as a byproduct of this work.

Thanks to you all for keeping this fun.

With the aftermath of the move still evident in every room of the new house, I’ve been using a few sites and magazines to get inspiration on how to organize the clutter junk remaining necessary necessities. I thought I would share a few links for those of you interested in this sort of thing.

Site	Description
Apartment Therapy	Helping people make their homes more beautiful, organized and healthy by connecting them to a wealth of resources, ideas and community online.
Organize IT	Organize IT aims to help everyone, whether they be stressed workers, executives or just the average person getting on with their lives
Unclutterer	Unclutterer is the blog about getting and staying organized. A place for everything, and everything in its place is our gospel.
Unplggd	Question—why are vowels eschewed in web 2.0? Never mind. Sister site of Apartment Therapy, Unplggd is described thusly: Welcome to Unplggd, where our fearless editors will find the best of home technology and help you incorporate it into your home, without spoiling your décor.

Enjoy.

I don’t want to sound too negative, but surely we could solve some of the worlds problems with the money that is wasted on things of this nature - dinner in the sky.

After 22 days since my first post, I’m still enjoying having my own blog. I was worried that the zeal would wear off quickly and my attention would wander to other projects. There have been moments where I did not feel like writing or doing any research - it is after all work to provide good content. But overall I’m still enjoying myself and have been able to keep my long term goals in mind. And hopefully I’ll improve on providing content that actually is good.

One thing I have struggled with are the little details. Even though I’m happy with the overall product, there have been a few things I’ve wished I had done differently. And once you are live, like any production environment, changes have to be well thought out to minimize risk. Without diving into a rant on change management, I’ll stop at this - even though this blog is in it’s infancy, there are a subscribers. I need to think of them before making changes that may negatively affect them.

Feeds

The item I wanted to change the most was the RSS feeds. I had two - one for the blog posts and one for my weekly links that were located in the sidebar. These links were populated from my Tumblr page using javascript. The set up was fine in the beginning. But then I noticed that most readers were subscribing to the posts feed and the numbers for the links feed were quite low in comparison. I quickly realized that I wanted all readers to get all content for this site.

As other have said of their sites, my blog gives others an idea of who I am. And to me, a reader needs all the content I provide to get an accurate picture.

So as of today I have removed the links in the sidebar and will now post all content in the same manner. I’ve also directed the weekly links feed to the main feed.

Two other items worth mentioning. These both contributed to the decision to make the change:

• I tried finding a way to keep the setup the same but combine the feeds. I looked at yahoo pipes and tried out feedblendr. Neither seemed to meet my needs (and Feedburner does not currently have this functionality). So combining the feeds did not seem like a reliable option.
• We all lead busy lives. Having five kids makes mine even more so. I don’t always have the luxury of free time to write blog posts. There were times when I wanted to post some commentary that would make a really short blog post, but were a bit too long for the sidebar links. I hope this solution will solve that issue.

Hello world.

At long last, I have finally started by own weblog. The process has only taken approximately three years. Hopefully post frequency will not follow a similar timeline.

At any rate, welcome!