SharedPlan Connect, August 21, 2006

 

“A person with a new idea is a crank until the idea succeeds.”

 “A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way.”

– Mark Twain

Dear Reader,

 

Thanks for your interest in OpenPlanning!

 

Last month, our newsletter readers received an invitation to join our OpenPlanning Community.  Over a thousand readers did so by establishing new OpenPlanning accounts.  A week afterward, we publicly announced OpenPlanning, and we now have about 3000 users and several hundred shared projects in the repository.  The projects cover house construction, teaching plans, even filming a documentary in Afghanistan.

 

I check the repository almost every day.  I have no idea how this whole thing is going to evolve, but I’m enjoying watching the process.

 

I also acknowledge that we haven’t built the perfect solution yet.  For instance, you have probably noticed that we serve up Google Ads on the project summary pages.  Google generally does a very good job of matching relevant ads to the material on the page.  For example, check out the Afghanistan documentary project summary.  The ads down the left and across the middle of the page are Google ads, and they are pretty well matched to the project:  camera dollies, photo studio rental, video crews, etc. 

 

However, we recently replaced the Google ads on the right with ads generated by Amazon.  The intent was to provide a greater variety of information to our users.  But I don’t understand what’s keying the Amazon ads when on the Afghanistan page there are ads for iPods and a Nora Ephron book about aging.  I think we’ll switch back to Google ads.  If you have any suggestions for improving OpenPlanning or the repository, please post them in the SharedPlan Forum.

Project of the Month

A couple of people have saved some very detailed house construction projects in the OpenPlanning repository.  (You may remember that we highlighted a different one back in our December 2005 newsletter, which has now been placed in the repository.)  #4 Bending Oaks appears to be a plan for a single-family residence, and includes lots of detail on the actual construction.  Aspen Ridge is a higher-level plan for four villas, which does not detail the actual building construction, but has much more detail about the management activities associated with the construction.  (To view the actual plans, just open OpenPlanning, select File/Open Shared Project By ID and enter 555 for Bending Oaks or 542 for Aspen Ridge.)

Some Local News Coverage  

SharedPlan was recently written about in the Boulder County Business Report, a local biweekly publication.  Although the author got some product names and details wrong,* he did a good job capturing the broader concepts.  The print version also had a picture of some of our handsome staff, which we have posted in this forum thread. 

Cool Tools

I’m a big fan of the Firefox browser.  It’s faster, more secure, and has a much richer feature set than Internet Explorer (IE).  Although the new IE7 may be improved significantly (basically stealing features from Firefox), it will likely lack my favorite aspect of Firefox, namely, the extensions available for it.  Because Firefox is an open-source product, individuals can develop their own feature extensions and share them with others.  Here are my personal favorite Firefox extensions, all of which are available for free download from the Firefox site:

 

1. Nuke Anything Enhanced:  Allows you to delete any object on a web page.  Just right click on the object and select “Remove object,” and it’s gone.  Great for visually annoying graphics.
2. Flashblock:  Blocks any Flash animations.  Replaces them with a small circular “Play” button so you can choose whether you want to see them.
3. Fasterfox:  I like how it prefetches and caches all of the links on the page you are viewing, so your clickthroughs are very fast.
4. SessionSaver:  Restores your browser exactly as it was when you closed it last.  I use this when I’m doing research and have lots of tabs open that I want to come back to later.  This also has a great feature called Snapback Tab, which reopens any tab that you had previously closed in the session so you don’t have to search through a history listing.
5. Adblock:  The name is self-explanatory.
6. IE Tab:  Some pages just can't be viewed right in Firefox, like online banking sites, because they’re designed specifically for IE. When that happens, you can just click a button and it opens IE in a tab within Firefox, rather than having to open IE separately.
7. PDF Download:  Allows you to open a PDF file within your browser, rather than open the Acrobat Reader application. 

As always, thanks for reading. 

 

Tracy

(a crank, or a guy holding a cat by the tail … we’ll know soon)