Best Practices for Leading Online Meetings

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…

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Running LinkChecker on a Mac

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is a utility written in Python for scanning and checking web page links, usually used for finding invalid or outdated pointers which need to be updated.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…

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Podcast Update and Return of Feed Readers

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…

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Tweetfave Support for Longer Tweets

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…

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