Online meetings continue to rise in popularity, in particular for companies with remote workers or distributed teams. The effectiveness of online meetings can be improved significantly by following a few simple techniques and habits. First of all, what kind and size of meetings are we talking about? One-on-one (2 people) Smaller team meetings (2-10 people) Medium team meetings, internal training or demo (10-20) Larger team meetings, company “all hands” (20+) Public facing webinar (marketing, sales, training) This guide is targeting categories 3 & 4 – these meetings are big enough that you want to run them effectively but are still…
LinkChecker is a utility written in Python for scanning and checking web page links, usually used for finding invalid or outdated pointers which need to be updated. The LinkChecker project is in a bit of flux right now because the original project (GitHub wummel/linkchecker) has gone completely quiet and presumably the original author is no longer interested in maintaining it. Luckily there is a new group of volunteers rallying around a new fork (GitHub linkcheck/linkchecker) The project has a variety of packaged downloads, but they are not all updated yet from the newest source tree. On my Mac system I…
My Tweetfave service has been running for just over 4 years now and just passed the 500K tweets mark! The usage has been pretty steady considering I haven’t done much to promote it!
What podcasts am I listening to these days? (Hypothetical question; no one actually ever asks me that…) Similar to what I’ve done in the past years, here’s a quick update. First of all I’m still using the Downcast podcast player and really like it. There are a few new non-Apple podcast players getting a lot of buzz, but I haven’t had a reason to switch yet. Here’s my current podcast subscription list. It’s still mostly technical podcasts but I’ve picked up a few maker and woodworking shows in there as well: .NET Rocks! [rss] Bootstrapped Web | For Entrepreneurs Bootstrapping…
Tonight I spent a couple hours troubleshooting a problem with my Tweetfave service and handling of links. Luckily I discovered it was a simple matter of keeping up with Twitter’s API changes. This service has been running so smoothly and the API has actually been pretty stable. I needed to dust off my PHP skills and dig in to track down and adapt to an important change. Background Tweetfave is a free service which monitors the tweets you mark as favorites (now referred to as “likes”), then sends them to you by email. Currently the system stats show over 250…