Tinderbox

An Unsatisfying Flirtation

Thursday, February 28, 2008 9:37 AM (permalink)

For a lark, I experimented with using creaky old Radio to upstream this blog instead of exporting from Tinderbox and manually uploading the site using FTP. Experiment over. While both options gave me a locally published weblog (which I prefer, cause I'm 'fussy' that way) and I still did a lot of my writing in Tinderbox, Radio's far-too-easy one-click interface between RSS and posting (and merciless, constant upstreaming) actually affected my writing--my blog posts were essentially becoming Twitter posts. I use Twitter for twitter posts, and I don't think I add any real value as a link-blogger, so the past two month's worth of my blogging output were strangely untherapeutic, and God knows I need therapy. I know pretty much any blogging tool can be customized to suit one's particular style, but it is funny how, all things being equal, my 'style' changed immensely from one tool to the other.

Old Radio links still work for now; will redirect them on my next big honkin' flight across the Atlantic.

Twitterbox, Updated

Tuesday, February 5, 2008 8:43 AM (permalink)

Two very helpful updates to my recent post on building Twitterbox.

Jack Baty wrote in with an addition to the agent code that allows the use of single quotes in your updates. I would have hit that issue soon enough, and not been able to figure it out on my own--so thanks, Jack!

Also, Rob Hamrick emailed me that if by chance you used the combination 'tbx' anywhere in another not-for-publication note in your file, this agent would fire off the title for the world to see. Surely I would not have been stbxpid enough to do that! In any case, I took his helpful suggestion and changed it to a boolean attribute named 'tweet' to prevent actbxidents.

The original post has been updated here.

Twitterbox - A Twitter Agent for Tinderbox

Sunday, February 3, 2008 8:40 AM (permalink)

I can't tell you how much I am enjoying the latest (4.1) version of Tinderbox with the seemingly-small yet ginormously-useful ability to assign containers with agents. Here is one small, powerful example of a simple agent that lets me "live in Tinderbox" while I am working during the day.

This is a simple agent that builds off of my last post on archiving and allows you to fire off updates to Twitter without even thinking about it, and clean up afterwards. Big thanks to Mark Bernstein, Jack Baty and Rob Hamrick for helpful suggestions, all of which have been incorporated:

Create an Archive container, if you dont already have one. I now send everything into this once it is done, to get it out of my sight and keep my working maps/outlines clean. Text is small and uses no space, so I keep everything, but I don't have to look at it!

Create a new attribute called "tweet". Make it boolean, and default to 'false.'

Create an agent called Twitterbox. Give it an action that looks something like this (obviously, add your own user:pass here, and big thanks to Mark Bernstein for helping me fix this code)
result=runCommand("curl -d 'status="+urlEncode($Name)+"' -u username:password http://twitter.com/statuses/update.atom"); Color=magenta;Container=Archive;Text=(); Tweet=false
Then, for the agent query, just use "tweet(true)"

Now, while you are working in Tinderbox, anytime you want to send an update to Twitter just hit enter, just make a note with your update message as the title of the note. Set 'tweet as a key attribute, and make it true (or just Quick Stamp it as true)

Watch the magic happen

So, here is what happens in practice. You hit enter, type "hello, twitter world!" for the note's title and set 'tweet' to true. The Twitterbox agent picks up this note automatically, fires off the title of the note as a Twitter update, then colors the note magenta, files it in your archives, and sets 'tweet' to false so the agent doesn't pick it up again. Seamless, beautiful, and lets you fire off quick updates without "breaking frame" and using another app or your browser.

Sure, this was possible to some extent in 4.0, but 4.1 whisks those used Tweets away an out of your site for good (and doesn't let their aliases build up like cruft under the Twitterbox agent) once they have been posted. This doesn't replace Twitterific, of course, since you don't get updates from folks you follow. But when you are really trying to work distraction-free, you don't want that anyway (and I shut Twitterific off for those times). Without knowing a lick of programming (and just a little common sense) I was able to build a poor mans' Twitterific with one simple agent.

Next on the drawing board (though this will have to wait until after Super-Duper Tuesday for sure)--a similar agent to post to my blog automagically without even using the weblog functionality of Tinderbox, using my blog's post-by-email feature.

Anyway, back to fake-Super Tuesday rehearsal data...

An Awesome Tinderbox Upgrade

Saturday, February 2, 2008 8:09 AM (permalink)

If, like me, you rely on Tinderbox to keep a honkin' big list of projects, goals, objectives and tasks, your load just got a little lighter. Here is how to move hundreds (maybe more!) of obsolete notes out of your field of vision:

Step One: Download Tinderbox 4.1
Step Two: Create a container note called "Archive" in your project file
Step Three: Create an Agent to assemble completed tasks or projects ("Completed=true", if you are using the GTD template from the Tinderbox Exchange) and set this action for the agent: "Container=Archive"

That's it. Now completed tasks (not just aliases) are whisked away out of my site, out of my project files for good. Instant sanity brought to any expanded outline view of my projects. While I wish we had this functionality sooner, adding it truly makes Tinderbox the best personal content management system I have ever used.

I Forgive Myself For Being A Lousy Blogger

Tuesday, July 10, 2007 2:17 PM (permalink)

Sure, I have been blogging up a storm here, here and here, but I have sadly neglected my personal blog here for some time. I'm sure any other bloggers reading this can sympathize--months pass without a post, and then when you finally do get around to it, you hesitate--why bother? You haven't written anything for months, so why start now? Whoever reads this has deserted you long ago, so what hope do you have of recapturing readers? Are you not, in fact, a loser?

I am not, in fact, a loser. I just finished reading Mark Bernstein's The Tinderbox Way, which is not only a deep dive into the workings and design decisions behind Tinderbox (my preferred tool for notes), but also a considered look at why we take notes in the first place, and what a personal blog really means. I have lots of outlets to write for readers, but this is meant as an outlet to write for me. Turns out, I need to write a bit today, so here it is.

Hi, my name is Tom, and I am a lousy blogger. I forgive myself.

But I will try harder!

An Actual Joyent Workflow, Redux

Monday, July 9, 2007 10:04 PM (permalink)

I get a lot of requests about fixing my Joyent workflow post, which lost all 6 of its images when my server got fried--I hadn't saved local copies of them, and the article makes little sense without them. I keep intending to do this, but in all honesty over the past few months as my travel schedule became insane I found myself gravitating to off-line tools, and eventually back to paper. I hate PDA's, and so after a few months of trying to square my hundreds of to-dos and appointments with some kind of online productivity solution, I cut out a step and stuck with a paper planner. I still transfer notes into Tinderbox regularly, but my to-dos and next actions live in my planner, which always works (even in the wifi-less Sioux City Airport, or SUX for you aviation buffs.) So, while I feel some remorse about not recreating those graphics, I haven't been able to motivate myself to do it yet. I give anyone with such motivation full permission to make some graphics and repost this on their blog, if it helps anyone!

Using Tinderbox for Qualitative Research

Thursday, March 8, 2007 3:23 PM (permalink)

Three months, 13 cities, three continents. Now that that is over with....I can get back to blogging. One thing I am sure to blog about is why you shouldn't take any of my advice on productivity, when I can't even manage to post to my blog for three months just because I spent a few nights at the Marriott instead of in my own comfy bed.

One topic I meant to get to was how I use Tinderbox to drastically cut my workload for qualitative research projects. I was reminded of this by Mark Bernstein, who wondered if anyone did, in fact, use Tinderbox in this fashion. In my case, one of the projects I did over the past few months was a coast-to-coast qualitative research project for a large public broadcasting concern, which spanned over two months in more cities than you can count on one hand. In this project, we did focus groups in several representative cities, then packaged all the data up to draw some conclusions about media usage, lifestyles and consumer behavior.

The day this project ended I had to drive to Georgia for another client, then fly off to London to give a presentation. As a result, I had very little time to go back over the data (or watch the films of the groups over and over) to distill my thoughts and draw conclusions to deliver my analysis within a reasonable time frame. Tinderbox was immensely helpful here, serving as both my "institutional memory" for both client and project, and as a remarkably efficient way to create, group and identify clusters of notes--and people--to get to the insights that the groups had to offer.

Since then, I have promised Mark I would write something up about this, since I think a lot of folks (not just researchers) could make use of Tinderbox in this fashion--really, anyone who needs to make sense of hundreds or thousands (gulp) of notes to boil them down to succinct, cogent insights and conclusions would also find this method useful. So I will get to it, honest! I am waiting eagerly for the next version (3.6) of Tinderbox, which promises to make this process even easier with the inclusion of a new "sets" feature to provide an intelligent 'tagging' functionality. Sounds wonky, I know, and I don't mean to turn this into a 'tech' blog, because it isn't. However, if you've ever had to take five hundred cocktail napkins and turn it into a ten-page article (which is how I roll, dog) then I guarantee this is more helpful to you than it sounds.

Who knows, maybe I will try to get it on the agenda at this conference, if they would take a poor, un-Ph.D.'ed slob like me.

[Tinderbox]

Possibly Related:

Okay--I'm a Mac guy, and I bought a Zune

Monday, December 11, 2006 11:37 AM (permalink)

I wanted to get a portable video player for my frequent flying, so I did a considerable amount of research and finally settled on Microsoft's Zune, despite all the rabid anti-Microsoft fervor with all the Digg-y kids out there. Now, I am as dyed-in-the-wool a Mac user as they come, as evidenced by the fact that I am writing this in Tinderbox, which (for now!) is as Mac-centric as they come. In fact, I am an outright inconvenience to the rest of my office back in NJ, who are all on a PC network and require the PC for some of our more esoteric research apps. Still, I 'cope' and do quite nicely with my MacBook Pro, Parallels, and (where necessary) Boot Camp.

But. I bought a Zune. I have a first generation iPod, so I am no luddite. Guess what, Mac fanboys, the Zune is actually pretty good. True, I have to use Boot Camp to get my Mac to recognize it (Parallels won't--yet) but in my case this is not a hardship since I already had to use Bootcamp for a couple of work apps. Frankly, despite the '5.5' appellation given to the latest iteration of iPod Video players, the '1.0' Zune has a number of compelling features that simply beat out the iPod. Here are my top 5:

1. The Screen--the "iPod Video" is no video player. It's the same screen the music iPod uses--but the tiny size is no "feature," it is an inconvenience. I ripped the complete Lord of the Rings Trilogy (Widescreen) to my Zune yesterday--try even watching a widescreen-aspect video on the current iPod video. Ow, my eyes.

2. The Radio. Why doesn't the iPod have a radio? I know I can pay even more money and get the Radio Remote, but the Zune ships with a pretty great FM radio interface, complete with RDS.

3. Zune Pass. iTunes music store has no subscription music option. Zune does. Pretty big benefit, as far as i am concerned.

4. Interface. This one, I grant, is a matter of opinion, but the Zune Interface is nice and clean, easy to use, and makes great use of the increased vertical real estate on the Zune. Besides, that scroll wheel on the iPod felt like cracking a safe with my massive music collection. I don't miss the scroll wheel at all.

5. The casing. Why, at version 5.5, does the iPod still scratch with a sneeze? This is one that much-maligned market researchers like myself could have helped to fix at version 2. You NEED cases and screen protectors with iPods, because they scratch so easily. Can't scratch the Zune, which tells me that they read all the iPod users' feedback, even if Apple didn't.

Apples to apples (no pun intended), the Zune is just a better value. Priced exactly the same as the iPod video with the same amount of hard drive space (30 Gigs), it just has more to offer. Note that I didn't even mention the Wireless functionality yet--which, admittedly, holds little use for me now, but perhaps in the future (even with a hack) I could grab my tunes off my wireless network. Doesn't exist now, but could, at least. Couldn't, with the iPod.

The biggest complaints I have heard about the Zune could easily be applied to the iPod--the draconian DRM, for one. How is the Zune's any worse than the iTunes "7-strikes" model? And the wireless feature is getting slammed by lots of pro-mac press. At least they tried! C'mon, Apple--respond with something cooler, and I will buy it.

Again, I am as big an Apple fanboy as they come. The Zune, however, is a welcome entrant--Apple has let the iPod stagnate over the years, as far as I am concered. Maybe the increased functionality of the Zune will convince Apple's product engineers that the public is ready for more robust .MP3 players.

I Want to Give Six Apart My Money

Saturday, June 3, 2006 10:08 PM (permalink)

A few days ago, Mike Rundle wrote an interesting comparison of Movable Type vs. Wordpress over on the Business Logs site. Since there are many users of both, Mike's post generated a lot of passionate comments, many of them anti-Six Apart. I'm no designer, and little more than a hobby-ish developer--my day job keeps me busy enough. But I am a licensee of Movable Type, and I have used Wordpress for various little projects, so the technical aspects of Mike's piece don't fly completely over my head. There is, however, another decidedly non-technical aspect to Mike's comparison that bears amplification.

About a year and a half ago, soon after I joined Edison, I pushed very hard to get our website (a hideous, out-of-the-box Frontpage special) redesigned to make publishing content easier. Edison has grown into a thriving and profitable business, in no small part due to an aggressive thought-leadership strategy of continually putting new studies and analyses into the market. When I took on the task of turning our website into a more effective platform for these purposes, I turned to Movable Type to handle all of the static and dynamic pages of our site. If you visit the site now, the design may be a little kludgy (which is not the fault of the person who did the original stylesheet--anything that looks bad I probably did), but the site works like a charm, is well-optimized for search engines, and is dead easy for the folks back in the office to add columns and studies to.

The success of this modest redesign in 2004 has given me a bit more leeway (and budget) in 2006 to really spruce it up, and we have engaged the aforementioned Mr. Rundle to do the job (and I can tell you, it is going to look fantastic.) We had the option of moving to a new platform, and I am very cognizant of the increased traction Wordpress has with developers and designers. I am sure there are more Kubrick-themed websites out there than people who even know who Stanley Kubrick was. We chose to stick with Movable Type, however.

Now, I can give you a few technical reasons why. We are going to launch two auxiliary blogs to accompany the Edison site redesign, and Movable Type makes administration of multiple sites under one interface dead easy. The interface itself is very professional and just "feels" more robust than many of the other options I have tried. And, frankly, I know how it works, and inertia plays a role here, too. The biggest reason we are staying with Movable Type, however, remains the same as the reason we started with Movable Type in the first place. There is a there there, as one of my colleagues at work might say.

We have had three or four reasonably serious problems with the site in the past couple of years, and whether they were due to Movable Type or not, the support staff at Six Apart solved every one of them, generally within an hour of our initial ticket. We pay for that support within the terms of our commercial license, and the fact that there is a company there with a tech support function is 100% why we will continue to use Movable Type for our site. I am no Luddite, and am not afraid of getting my hands all code-y while I monkey around with my little hobby. But, again, I am but a dilettante when it comes to web design and development. I am not arrogant enough to think that the tiny bit of knowledge I have that enables me to get this article published on the web will save Edison from some kind of MySQL disaster. But Six Apart once saved me from a MySQL disaster, and got us back online in an hour. That's money to us.

Look, I know there is a huge community of developers out there who are more than happy to help out with Wordpress. If I am building a website for personal reasons, I might use Wordpress (have done), Tinderbox (this site) or even iWeb, for crying out loud, as I have done for my personal site (ugly URLS and bloated code be damned--there is currently no easier way to get my family photos out of iPhoto and onto the Web, and I am all about easy.) I really like Wordpress, for many of the reasons Mike mentioned. I also know that there are hundreds of folks out there who are available on a contract basis to fix Wordpress problems for a fee. What you have to realize, though, is that to a small business such as ours, retainers and hourly developer fees are "variable costs." A Movable Type license is a fixed cost. Fixed costs can be capitalized, predicted and budgeted for.

I have met some of the folks from Six Apart; I have even asked Six Apart's Anil Dash to be a speaker on a technology panel I moderated last year at the National Association of Broadcasters' Radio Show. They are smart people, and seem to have a business there. That is important to us. Again, NO disrespect to the Wordpress folks--and if we wanted a hosted solution, wordpress.com might have been a real option for us. But to me, there aren't really a lot of options for small companies like ours who don't have a full-time web development staff but want the stability of a license and paid support. So, for us, Movable Type vs. Wordpress is currently a non-starter (though Movable Type vs. Expression Engine is a more interesting comparison for our purposes.)

Wordpress is great--the more I play around with it, the better I like it. But unlike many of the folks who deserted Movable Type for Wordpress, I need to pay for it. If our site goes fakakta, we can't wait a day--we can't wait an hour.

Blogging with Tinderbox

Saturday, June 3, 2006 8:16 PM (permalink)

I recently went back to deciphering Flint, which is a collection of macros and templates to turn Tinderbox into a pretty robust weblog generator. Ever since Radio Userland I have liked the idea of maintaining a weblog locally and then only needing to upload html to a remote server with no server install necessary--easy to keep my thoughts on my laptop where they belong, and very simple to publish what I want to publish. I realize that you can accomplish the same thing with a weblog client like Ecto and any garden-variety weblog app, but Tinderbox's ability to replicate a post-it board full of non-linear notes is brilliant and irreplacable. Why does this matter? Look at the popularity of tagging as an organizational scheme for modern blogs. Tagging has become popular precisely because 'chronological' and 'hierarchical' just don't cut it as organizing principles for the giant spinning cork ball of the creative mind.

Tinderbox, however, lets me link any old note to any other old note, and back again--so my notes can be organized like index cards spread out on a table, regardless of how my weblog reads. That makes it much easier for me to revisit things I might have missed, and keep "back burner" thoughts percolating for when inspiration strikes. It also lets me maintain a private weblog and a public weblog all in one Tinderbox document--a highly usable intersection of Wiki and weblog, all searchable and linked on one big canvas. Again, though there are other apps better suited for weblogging, there are none better suited for brainstorming and organizing my thoughts--and now all I have to do is drag a note from one part of my drawing table to another, and it is published (or not). When you can truly live within Tinderbox for everything, the tool itself stops being visible and starts becoming a natural extension of your thought process and not just a "blog tool."

So I took the Memorial Day weekend as a chance to really dissect Flint and customize it for my own purposes. First, though Flint is available for only a small charge, I do wish it were included with Tinderbox, since it is really necessary to use Flint (IMHO) to generate a weblog that is at least competitive with the basic server-based apps out there (Blogger, Typepad, etc.). Tinderbox, right out of the...uh...box, has a considerable learning curve if you want to turn your box o' notes into a serviceable and attractive weblog. Having said that, I am all for supporting small developers (and Mark Bernstein's support for Tinderbox is fanatical) so I had no issue ponying up another 20 bucks to make Tinderbox really hum.

Flint, it turns out, is a great kick-start to learning how Tinderbox wrangles XML--once you get your head around that, you can pretty much create any kind of web document you want. The macros and agents in Flint take care of generating the basic pages of your weblog, and since it is set up to use CSS stylesheets (divorcing the content from the presentation) it is a snap to customize how it all looks. I am happy with how it turned out--no disrespect to the default stylesheets that come with Flint, but I never feel like I own the place until I have put up my own drapes.

Anyway, I thought about putting up a detailed step-by-step guide to how I wrangled Flint into what you see here, but the process of figuring it out for myself was incredibly valuable. Really. So, who am I to deny you that. But do drop me an email if you have any questions--I'm happy to help.

Problem Solving With Tinderbox

Sunday, May 28, 2006 8:09 PM (permalink)

Tinderbox is a wonderful tool for writing, organizing information and brainstorming. I have used outliners, text files, cocktail napkins--you name it--and all have their uses. If I am really thinking in outline form (such as a presentation based around an existing report), an outliner such as OmniOutliner Pro is my tool of choice, though Tinderbox is an equally fine outliner in its own right.

My brain, however, rarely spits things out in outline form. While most of the people I work with have brains like Rolodexes, mine is more like a gigantic spinning cork ball, with thousands of yellow stickies attached to it. Ask me a question, and I spin the ball. While I might grab my mental sticky before others sift through their Rolodex, I am just as likely to come up with the capital of Micronesia as I am the right answer.

Tinderbox is awesome for organizing disconnected thoughts or complex patterns that resist simple hierarchies. It's like having a gigantic whiteboard full of Post-It notes, except they never lose their stickiness, you can find every word, and you can reuse them under multiple categories.

I use Tinderbox for problem solving because it allows for divergent and convergent thinking on the same canvas. McKinsey alumni would call this making a "logic tree"--you start with one problem or concept, then break it down into all the possible reasons or issues that comprise the problem (that's the divergent part), continuing to branch until each issue has been broken down to its core components.

Once you have done this, you can then look for ways to "close" each branch of the tree--what are the action steps to solve each problem? Often, by allowing yourself to "open up the problem" with as many little sticky notes as you want (mine are generally a lot messier than the one above) you open yourself to a greater view of the connections between the parts. You close each branch of the tree by looking for the possible causes for each of the issues on the diagram, and then look for commonalities. It is this convergent thinking stage that outliners don't handle well, but Tinderbox is fabulous at:

Often you see that even complex problems, when thoroughly broken down, can be boiled down into just a couple of central issues. The folks who live within the confines of one box or another (say, Marketing, or Sales) might only look at how to solve the problem from within their functional view. When you take the time to spread out the whole "canvas of pain" from all functions/factions, however, you might just see that everyone's problems really boil down to just two or three root causes. Then you can begin the process anew--with divergent thinking around those root causes, and convergent thinking to find commonalities in possible solutions.

Turns out, all you need is more money. Anyway, I sit through loads of strategic planning issues with my clients. "Let's think outside the box" ranks up there with "step up" and "bring something to the table" as the three most nausea-inducing business/Apprentice cliches. Let's not think outside the box. In many of the business problems I have tackled, the challenge isn't "inside the box thinking," it's a lack of thoroughly exploring all the boxes. Until you know what's really in all of them, you can't possibly think outside them.

Quite Content

Tom Webster's Personal Weblog

Tinderbox

An Unsatisfying Flirtation

Twitterbox, Updated

Twitterbox - A Twitter Agent for Tinderbox

An Awesome Tinderbox Upgrade

I Forgive Myself For Being A Lousy Blogger

An Actual Joyent Workflow, Redux

Using Tinderbox for Qualitative Research

Okay--I'm a Mac guy, and I bought a Zune

I Want to Give Six Apart My Money

Blogging with Tinderbox

More Problem Solving With Tinderbox

Problem Solving With Tinderbox

links

topics

del.icio.us

archives

2008

2007

2006

colophon