Well, we did it!

After my request yesterday, nearly 100 new RSS readers signed up to this blog and I currently stand at 1051 RSS Readers as reported by my Feedburner stats.

Now this will probably dip slightly over the weekend as they normal do but me aim is to constantly keep these over 1000, and go for 2000 next.

Pretty easy really, write the content, and they will come Now wasn’t that in a film once….

Have a great weekend all and thanks!

Hi All,

If you are reading this and you do not subscribe to my RSS feed then please follow THIS LINK and subscribe via Feedburner to your favorite reader.

I set a goal at the start of 2008 to get my RSS subscribers to over 1000. Today, right now I am on 962 so I do not need that many. 1000 RSS readers is a great benchmark, and my next aim will be to push it to 5000 readers.

Again, please click on the RSS Chicklet or THIS LINK to subscribe, and enjoy my rantings!

Thanks,

Andrew..

Just thought I would let you know about a new blog from the great productivity blogger at ZenHabits.

The blog is called Writetodone and it is like a GTD blog for writers.

Being a writer myself, I find great interest in blogs such as this. One post I especially love is the post about How to Write First thing in the Morning.

This is something I try to do myself. I live a buys life, and nothing beats setting the “opportunity clock” 30 mins or an hour earlier than usual, so I awake when the house is peaceful. I grab a coffee, and sit down in front of my Mac to write my blog and other work I have to do. I find it much easier to write on a morning than late at night when I am tired. Also, I tend to be more creative on a morning and I am blessed with being a morning person.

Be sure to check the blog out and see what you think…

Just thought I would let all of you Mac users, who have not seen MacHeist to check it out as there are only 4 days left to buy this amazing package.

12 Mac Apps for only $49. Normal price of the Apps is $428.65 and 25% of your purchase will be donated to a charity of your choice.

I just bought the apps last night even though I already owned a few. TaskPaper is one of the apps which is a simple Task manager, not yet checked it out but I will and review it here on my blog.

One thing I like about blogging, and especially with WordPress is the Trackbacks that you get in the WordPress Dashboard. You can see which other sites and/or bloggers are making reference to your blog posts on their blogs. I have found some great blogs, that have linked to me and I hope that other people, and my readers have found my blog from me referring to other posts which I have read, and pointed to.

One such blog is the GTD and Tech blog from Jens Hjerrild Poder. A bit about Jens..

I am an organizational psychologist and journalist. My primary fields of work include concept development, organizational development & internet business strategy. I am currently employed by the Danish National Broadcasting Corporation as a commissioning editor.

I found a great post from Jens about my current GTD app of choice, OmniFocus. Jens goes through some basics of the app and uncovers some hidden features, like the hidden Switch Button.

Be sure to check out the post, and Jens’ blog.

I have owned the Google Story book for over a year now. Recently, I picked it up and started to read it and could not put it down.

Everybody knows Google. I have used Google as my search engine of choice since around 2000 and I had an idea of their history, but not in great detail. The book is not an offical Google endorsed book, but a book written with the help and permission of the Google management team and it is aimed to bring the story of how Google has grown from a University idea into one of the leading companies in the world.

The book is approx 300 pages. With most of it being of interest. Some of it I must admit that I scanned through as it covered aspects not of great interest to me. What I did really like where the first few chapters about how Google started. Google was founded by two friends, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, both Ph.D. students at Stanford university. They had an idea to improve the way that search was done on the Internet. They found it strange that it was hard to find official company websites by typing in the name of that company. It appeared that the existing search offerings from companies such as Dogpile and AltaVista returned sites that were related to the official companies.

What I really liked about this book was the attitude of Sergey and Larry in their quest for success. They had such a strong belief in what they were doing and they were committed to the decision that they had made. At the time of Google’s inception, Yahoo were a massive player in the search marketplace. Doors were closed in Brin and Page’s face because the assumed difficulty in taking on such a giant as Yahoo, at their own game. Never once did Sergey or Larry falter. They kept their belief in what they were doing and did not listen to the negative people around them. If they would have done, we probably would not have had the Google that we have today.

It makes me wonder how many other companies with great ideas have been stifled at the growth stage because of lack of funding due to the investors not truly understanding the opportunity. Larry and Sergey raised $25 million without even a solid plan as to how they were going to monetize the search traffic. Maybe the days are gone when you can raise that sort of cash against an idea, and I don’t think those days ever came in the UK where getting money to fund an idea is becoming harder than ever, with investors reticent to offer seed investment to grow these fantastic ideas.

So, good book, motivating, and well done to Sergey and Larry because they deserve the success that they have achieved. It shows that if you have a good ethos and culture, good product, and happy staff, then the profits will eventually come. Well, in the case of Google they certainly did!

As many of you will know, I have been following and also been a part of the beta testing for OmniFocus. Well, I am glad to announce, if you do not already know that OmniFocus is now at version 1.0, released and available to purchase from The OmniFocus Store.

Here is a snippet about OmniFocus..

Task management shouldn’t be your full time job. We’ve built OmniFocus to take a load off your mind by managing your tasks the way that you want, freeing you to focus your attention on the things that matter to you most. Finish that novel. Spend more time with your friends and family. Grow your business. Let us worry about keeping your goals and tasks, both personal and professional, in one ordered, easy to access system that you can depend on.

When time permits, I will be reviewing OmniFocus here on this Blog, but until then, try it out and Download the Demo, if of course, you use a Mac!

Hot on the tail of the New Year, and all those New Years Resolutions, it is nice to see Boots (the leading pharmacy store group in the UK) making an effort in trying to help people with the most common goals.

They have released a promotion called Change One Thing. This is aimed at the four most common New Years Resolutions, Losing Weight, Stopping Smoking, Having a Healthier Lifestyle and having Healthier Looking Skin.

If you’ve had trouble sticking to your resolutions in the past, you’re not alone. Half of us give up after just one week, usually because we’ve been unrealistic when setting our goals, try to do too much and don’t get the right support. Now in its third year, Boots Change One Thing is proof that concentrating on one thing works – we’ve helped thousands of people like you stick to their resolution. This year we’re here to help you lose weight, stop smoking, get healthier-looking skin or a healthier lifestyle. What are you waiting for? Just click on the one thing you want to change…

Now, obviously there is product placement with these four programs but I signed up just to see what it was like and must admit that what they are doing is good. They have access to questions and answers from experts, online action plans to help you, access to a community with other people sharing the same goal, as well as the ability to find an online buddy to help you achieve your goal.

All in all, seems to be a good system and a great idea.

Whilst catching up with other blog posts, just noticed a great collection of the top 100 GTD Links from BootStrapper. This is a collection of 100 links regarding Getting Things Done, and is separated into categories.

In order to implement the GTD system in your life, we’re helping you out by listing over 100 links to articles, guides, information about special events and other resources related to “Getting Things Done.” Read below to find out more.

I am happy to see that my blog comes in at number 69 on the list.

Check it out..

Well,

Short of paying $1400 for a fantastic Unique Theme from Unique Blog Designs, as done by ShoeMoney, John Chow, and Kieron, I have changed my theme to the Illacrimo Theme from Design Disease.

I spent some time looking around the web for Themes for this blog and was quite surprised how many exist, and also how many of these are quite bad. A lot of the themes require quite a bit of work to get them looking something like.

When the finances permit, I will go for a more unique theme and brand for this site. One alternative I have found to Unique Blog Designs is a service from the UK called PSD2HTML. These guys take a PSD design file and create standards compliant CSS and HTML code. One option they offer is to create a WordPress theme based upon your design. So, you can get a PSD design done the way you like it, and then these guys create you a Wordpress template for around $300. Sounds cool and I would love to hear from anybody who has used these.

I would love to hear any comments you have about my new theme and if it works OK with your browsers. I have tested it in most and apart from a problem with the WordPress MORE tag, all seems fine.