Phefland

This Blog Has Moved

2009-03-14T16:00:00.000-07:00

Please note that all blog activities from Peter Efland has moved to PeterEfland.Com

On procrastination and simplicity

2008-12-12T15:08:00.001-08:00

The web is full of tools and apps to make things easier and faster. Often, however, we find ourselves spending more time on searching around for new tools and trying to improve the process, instead of just "Getting Things Done"!

The reason often is the fear of starting a task/project. We are not exactly sure how we're going to start the task, and then instead of planning the project, it is so much easier to "just have to do one more thing" before we actually start doing the real task ahead.

The internet provides us with a ton of resources to work smarter, faster and more productive. The internet however, also provides us with even more distractions, feeding our hyper short attention disorders.

Feng Shui celebrates simplicity. As Bruce Lee once said: "The height of cultivation always runs to simplicity".

By simplifying our work process and focus on a few important projects and tasks, will help our productivity immensely.

So embrace the simple, focus, turn of the TV and the music. Close all the windows and tabs you know are not helping you do what you are sitting there to do in the first place.

Going further into the planning process and the actual doing has been written extensively about by David Allen in his "Getting Things Done" as well as another favorite "Zen to Done" from Leo Babauta and his famous and highly inspirational "Zen Habits" blog.

Easy tips to constructing a blog post

2008-11-25T16:43:00.001-08:00

Writing is a skill which can be trained to improve. However, like many other skills there are some shortcuts to writing great blog posts.

Top 4 tools to easily write a blog post:

Organize your posts in a editor like notepad. By writing all your blogposts in notepad you will never lose your posts by a internet short-cut, and you can always access your blog posts fast and easily.
A good blog editor is essential. Windows Live Write makes one of the best blog editors around. It is both very easy to use and has a number of advanced features. Windows Live Writer has a rich text editor, can easy set up your blog as you like it, and you can drag and drop pictures.
When surfing the net it is easy to find inspiration for blogposts. By using the ctrl-d function in firefox with a delicious bookmarklet, you can very fast save any highligthed text in delicious. Tag the site with "toblog" and you can in matter of seconds save all your blog ideas as you surf.
Using pictures is what cranks up a good blog post. Google pics and Flickr can be a good place to search, but by using the creative commons supporting compfight you can get much more and faster search results.

War of the Microblogs - Posterous vs. Tumblr

2008-11-23T16:19:00.001-08:00

According to a Pew Internet study, "27% of American Internet users say they read Blogs. A search on Twitter quickly show that "Social Media" is a constant hot topic, and acccording to Technorati there are 12,000 new Blogs per day. Blogging has gone mainstream and Wordpress and Movable Type deliver the backbone of many of the most famous blogs today.

However, another market is growing with explosive speed - the market of the micro-blogs. Micro-blogging has become famous with Twitter and Friendfeed, services that makes it possible to blog everything in 140 characters or less.

Posterous and Tumblr are two types of micro-blogging services focusing on making blogging as easy as possible. They each has some special feautures making them both unique and highly effective micro-blogging tools.

Posterous is a blogging service focusing on one aspect that all internet users know and can use with ease - email. Whereas blogging can be done from the Posterous site itself, the ease of use makes it possible to text from a cell phone or write an email which then automatically becomes adapted to a blog post on you Posterous blog site.
The structure and ease of use of the Posterous service means that any picture, pdf, podcast or video file attached to the blog post automatically adapts in the blog post itself on Posterous. The force and the focus of Posterous is that the site itself doesn't have to be visited to create a blog-post. Instead, all the blogger needs is to just write an email to the personal Posterous email address, where after the new blog post gets created with the contect of the email.

Tumblr is a micro-blogging service which focus on either a adobe air application or a bookmarklet where posts, videos and links etc. can be inserted directly as a blogpost in your personal Tumblr blog.

Both services are extremely easy to use, and to say that one is better than the other will probably mostly depend on whether the user is most comfortable with using emails or bookmarklets.
Tumblr used to be the favourite tool among artists, due to its highly customizable layout. Posterous, however, has an extremely fast growing user base due to its number of services which is growing rapidly.

I suggest trying both out, and see what serves best for you. Which microblogging tools are your favorites?