Projects in the Pipeline

I had a perfect day yesterday, going down to Huntington Beach with Lynn and the dogs. We rode our bikes, played on “Dog Beach” and generally wore ourselves out in the fresh air and warm sun (see pics on Flickr). We capped the day with dinner and movie (Atonement, which I do not recommend).

Today is a working Sunday, with the NFL football playoffs in the background to distract me. Here’s an overview of the things I’m working on and what’s coming down the pipeline:

Installing Photoshop CS3 on Lynn’s PC (done!). She’s taking a Photoshop class at Saddleback that looks like a lot of fun. I’m hoping I can pick up a few new tricks by osmosis.

Upgrading phpAdsNew to OpenAds 2.4.2 (in progress). OpenAds is the very best free ad server out there, and I highly recommend it to anyone running a website with advertising. It provides great tools for rules-bases ad serving and reporting. They recently received funding that will allow them to proceed with plans to offer hosted ad serving, but until then, this is truly the best option out there. I’m using OpenAds for most of my sites in the BigBlueNetwork.

Over on BigBlueBall, I’m preparing to make some staffing changes. In fact, if you’re interested in instant messaging (IM) or pretty much any other social networking tools, we’re looking to add to the staff. See this post on the BigBlueBlog for details.

While keeping these balls in the air, I’ll be spinning some plates, too. Not literally, but I am testing a number of sites and tools that show a lot of promise.

• Mint.com is what Quicken should be. It’s free, web-based and provides really clever ways of looking at your finances. As long as you’re not too queasy about them recording your login information to your financial accounts, it’s absolutely recommended. I may end up using Mint instead of the Quicken upgrade that I just paid $80 for!
• Jott.com makes it easy to create little notes to yourself, or even add items to your blog, Twitter, Google Calendar, the list goes on. You call a toll-free number from your phone and speak your message. Jott transcribes the notes and sends you SMS reminders or integrates with your other web tools.
• Todoist.com provides a really simple interface for managing your to-do lists. You can set up multiple projects and sub-projects, set due dates and view it on your PC or mobile phone. It’s similar to Mark Hurst’s gootodo, but free.

Finally, I’m also preparing a review of the various IM options available for the iPhone. I’m looking at both the web-based systems like Meebo and Mundu IM, as well as applications for a jailbreaked iPhone like Apollo IM and MobileChat. This one will keep me busy, but I want to get it done soon so I can apply the latest iPhone update (which hasn’t been “jailbroken” yet). I’ll be posting at BigBlueBall as soon as I’m done.