I just sat outside on my front porch for a few minutes for the first time since November. It’s 59 degrees and sunny here today - and we just made the list for the second most consecutive days of snow cover in the written history of the Denver area.

The snow is almost gone off the front yard, but still covers most of the back yard (the dogs are unhappy about that). But it smells and feels like spring today; it’s about time.

Today I picked up a copy of David Allen’s book about productivity and creativity, Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity“>Getting Things Done, the predecessor to the other book I mentioned here, Ready for Anything: 52 Productivity Principles for Work and Life“>Ready for Anything. Ready for Anything is quite good, but there’s terminology and references in it that rely on the reader having already experienced getting things done, so I’m going to read GTD first. Probably makes sense…

And as a productivity aid, I got a 2007 refill for the paper-based planner I used religiously a couple of years ago. I loved this planner, it was the best one I’ve ever used because it’s so oriented around prioritizing and realizing that everything cannot be done at once, and one of the reasons I like it is because it encourages you to think of tasks like rocks. (Why wasn’t I using it recently? Because I got the Windows version for my computer and because my handwriting is horrible. But having a paper-based system that I can take anywhere has its values too).

Every week you have a big glass container. In it you can put a few big rocks and a lot of little rocks. The major things you need to accomplish are the big rocks and all of the other little tasks, errands, and distractions are the little ones. Big rocks go in first, and little ones fill in the gaps. This is a visualization that makes sense to me.

However, this week I’m going to be working out of town for several days so I have a lot of things to get done before Thursday. What happens when you have too many rocks for your glass and you wind up with rocks on the table and rocks rolling onto the floor…

One of my clients asked me to create an ‘image of the week’ page for them using whatever method I thought looked and worked best. I remembered seeing the JavaScript/Ajax tool Lightbox JS in another blog recently and thought that looked pretty cool, and had the capability of showing a slideshow as well, so I got it and installed it on my client’s home page.

It worked great, unless the images were bigger than about 400px on a side. Then Firefox didn’t like it and the ‘close’ button’s functionality was lost (actually the clickable part was just pushed down in the y direction so that you couldn’t get to it to close the image. This problem didn’t occur in IE (to my amazement), just in FF and Opera.

So… back to the drawing board. I really liked the way the script functioned so I went looking for similar ones and came across Thickbox. This is another JavaScript/Ajax tool, it functions nearly identically but for my purposes this one was the better choice because it doesn’t break on large images.

Well, let me clarify - Thickbox is set by default to resize images larger than the current browser window. I tried changing this in the code, but if you don’t use it you can’t scroll up or down to see the rest of the image. So…

I put the code back to its original state and showed the result to my client. He’d originally wanted to show 800px images, too big for Firefox/Opera if I used Lightbox JS and forcing a resize in Thickbox. But he was okay with the resizing and is now happy with the results.

Here’s his page with Thickbox in action. Pretty cool and it really only took about 30 minutes to get it installed and running once I decided to use it.

An English springer spaniel won Best in Show at the Westminster Kennel Club dog show on Tuesday. My dogs (two fine springers) are quite proud today.

I wrote earlier about purchasing WHMCS for my hosting reseller site. Well, I finished my integration, my hosting site launched on Sunday and I thought I would share my final thoughts about this first experience with WHMCS.

Nothing’s changed - I still love it. I learned that there about 30 template files that have to be edited for CSS to make it fit in nicely with the rest of the site, but the edits are easy and in most cases it’s very obvious what needs to be done.

I’m pretty happy with the way the whole thing turned out except for the icons that came with the package - I think they look a little cartoonish for my site and I plan to replace them at some point when I find something I like better. My WHMCS section is under Support on the top menu bar.

The control panel for running this thing is easy to understand. We ran about six test orders through the system looking for bugs and errors and I think we found most of them. I still won’t be too surprised if someone runs across something when they try to sign up, but for the most part it’s done.

I’m really happy with WHMCS and will purchase it in a few days when the trial license runs out. On second thought maybe I should go do that right now in case I forget…

Last week I went hunting for a little script that would rotate an image and a caption with every screen refresh. Should be a simple task, no?

I found many JavaScript ones, all different. I’m not a JavaScript expert and I like implementing code that I can get my head around - not many of the ones I found fit that bill. Plus, knowing that some visitors may have JavaScript turned off I thought better of it.

I looked for PHP scripts - I didn’t find as many, but I think I really lucked out when I discovered this tiny little PHP rotation script from Sue Crocker.

I love this. You just put it where you want to show the images and bang, it runs. No problems, no confusion. You put the images and accompanying captions into a text file separated by NEXT statements like this one. Within this text file, you can assign a CSS class to the captions so that they’ll show up in an absolutely positioned space and not directly under the image, as you can see in this page in progress. It’s the Featured Flower at the bottom that’s running the script - refresh the page to see it in action.

And it works beautifully. This is one of the most elegant and simple solutions I’ve found in a while.

I just read this very long and very thoughtfully written post by Danny Sullivan regarding Jason Calcanis’ recent rant against the SEO industry (or rather 90% of it). This is a worthwhile read.

I got a new book over the weekend and have just started reading… It’s Ready for Anything: 52 Productivity Principles for Work and Life by David Allen, the productivity expert that wrote Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity.

This particular book is split into 52 very short chapters. I’m going to try to read one every day or so and share here what I find. I bought this book because I can’t stand having a ton of unfinished tasks floating around; I thought this might help me get more of a handle on things when I’m busy and not be so concerned about not doing all of them at once.