What a difference a year makes. When I first launched Kinkless.com (before I released kGTD) I had plans for content that I wanted to publish on it. Then I started reading a blog called 43 Folders written by a man some call crazy, others call crazy-making (but all call genius) named Merlin Mann. After reading his classic rant on why you should just switch to a Mac (which I would link to but my google-fu is weak today and I can’t seem to snag it) I did just that. Then I read GTD and decided to write up a little plugin to make my GTD project and context lists talk to each other.
Lego Furniture
After releasing kGTD it basically took Kinkless.com over (in a good way). After a couple months of kGTD eating up a huge amount of time and releasing several updates to the basic system, I had a realization: building a plugin this complex in Applescript is like building furniture out of legos. You can do it, but there are drawbacks. It’s modular, sure, but it’s heavy and breaks easily and isn’t always the best fit for the task. kGTD was the first thing I ever wrote in Applescript and was one of those things you only do, like eating oysters for the first time or dating that crazy girl from homeroom, when you have absolutely no idea exactly where it will lead. Sometimes it works out other times it doesn’t. Happily, kGTD more or less worked out.
I always expected kGTD to spawn a host of native OSX apps for GTD. Whether it directly inspired them or not, there is certainly a nice crop of GTDesque task management apps out there now. The one I’m most interested in is OmniFocus, unsurprisingly, but it’s great to see such a wide array of really interesting applications to choose from at this point. kGTD as proof of concept for a “real” app has worked out well and with the release of OmniFocus I think we’ll finally have an app along the lines of what I wanted back in 2005.
Getting things done
The past year has seen a lot of changes for me as I grew my own photography studio here in the hyper competitive Hong Kong market, had a wee baby with my insanely smart and beautiful wife and continued to work on my own personal productivity. During all this I chose to focus on my family and vocation first, kGTD and the website second, with kGTD releases eventually fizzling out at which time I began to focus more on the collaboration with OmniGroup on OmniFocus (not to oversell my role there, however… OmniFocus is a 100% pure OmniGroup application, and as solid and professional a product as you’d expect from them and I’ve been lucky to collaborate with Merlin and OmniGroup on this).
New Content
With the front page of Kinkless.com stagnating a bit I decided to relaunch the site so that I could more efficiently manage it (e.g. keep it spam free without spending too much time doing manual cleaning) and keep posting new material more regularly. With the shiny new hand-tweaked content management system in place, I’ll be doing just that in the most efficient way possible.
Now that the new site is up, I’m looking forward to posting more articles, videos and files that you may find useful. If like them, let me know. If you have comments on the new site style and structure, I’d love to hear those as well. Don’t forget to subscribe!
Thanks
Thanks to everyone that has been a part of kGTD and Kinkless.com over the past 18 months. I hope a lot of you stick around even as kGTD usage slowly shifts more towards OmniFocus. There’s still a lot to share.
Housekeeping notes
For those of you in the forums that have been deluged with spam in the past, I’ve implemented several new filters that should help. In fact the entire site has undergone a major upgrade behind the scenes, but that is neither interesting or worth going into here. Suffice it to say that I am no database guru and if anyone has suffered a problem with their user account, please contact me immediately and I’ll address it. During a recent forum spam sweep I also inadvertently cleaned out some useful posts, so my apologies there. Again, contact me if you have any specific problems regarding that information. Also, some of the formatting in the forum section needs to be tweaked. I’m working on that as I go. Shout if you find any nasty formatting problems. All problems can be reported using my contact page and information.
Comments
Re: Reconstruction
Congratulations on the Kinkless redesign, Ethan! I really enjoy collaborating with you and Merlin on OmniFocus, and I’m looking forward to your new content here on Kinkless.com.
Reconstruction and redirection
Ethan,
Thanks for all your effort toward kGTD. Like most who try to bring some organization to their busy lives, I’ve tried a number of strategies. Certainly GTD comes closest to the way I operate (or would like to operate). Certainly the OmniOutliner based kGTD was one of the more effective approaches. I used if for about a year and it provided some structure for my work.
Recently, I found another application, iGTD (http://bargiel.home.pl/iGTD/), that takes a similar approach. For me, it manages to establish a more compact presentation than the OmniOutliner format, while maintaining the basic philosophy of GTD.
My best regards, Don O’Shea
Re: Reconstruction and redirection
Don, thanks for the comment. I strongly believe that everyone should pick the tool that works best for them and iGTD certainly has some great features. I’m still a huge advocate for OmniFocus since it really packs in the good parts of kGTD with some brilliant new features (some of which may not make it into 1.0, but those are more icing on the cake features). iGTD has the temporary advantage of being actually available of course :)
Again, though, I do encourage everyone to pick the tool that works for them, whether that’s kGTD, iGTD, OmniFocus or even (one of my favorites) pen and paper.
Re: Reconstruction
Wow!
This is a VERY cool redesign! I totally adore the use of Calibri! The new Microsoft fonts look very pretty; I should consider using a few of them on my own website. Really great job!
I’m a 43folders subscriber myself and I didn’t know of this “switch to Mac”-post. If you find it, please, update your post and add the link! I’m currently running a notebook on 600MHz because my video fan is screwed and will start rotating and decreasing system performance when I push it too much. Switching to a Mac sounds just fine now :)
The whole website looks like a charm. This text box resizer down there and everything, just wow. Only the text box font isn’t that pretty, but hey, one can’t have everything :)
Re: Reconstruction
Christian, thanks. You are one of the ~10% of my visitors today using IE… Kinkless is still (unsurprisingly) Firefox and Safari land. To be honest, designing for IE is still a bit of a hassle, but I spent a lot of time in parallels this past week making sure it looked ok in IE6 and IE7. There may still be some problems in IE6 but I’m doing a few more tests to iron those out.
I’m not sure about the text box resizer… that might be an IE7 native widget since it’s not generated from the server. I’m on my G5 at the studio right now so can’t boot into parallels till I hit the MacBook Pro later tonight, so I’ll take a look.
Anyhow, thanks again. I sweated this design pretty hard. I had a fancy background changer for a while but settled on gray for the time being :) neutral and doesn’t compete for attention with the header image…
-e
Explorer? Go away :)
Oh beware!
I’m using Firefox (“Swiftfox” exactly) while running Ubuntu :) I used Microsoft OneNote 2007 Beta last year and still had all the fonts (which are, in fact, very beautiful). Sadly, the Lucida-fonts aren’t on my hard drive, so Calibri is still just like your third choice. I wonder how your design is intended to look like (screenshot? :))…
My own web design draft relies on a lot of tips I assembled concerning typography, so there’s a steady rhythm and all that stuff; using Calibri isntead of Verdana is now complicating things a lot since Calibri is just, well, smaller… God knows why 16px base-height aren’t always 16px…
Re: Explorer? Go away :)
Goes to show me that I shouldn’t make assumptions ;) Never judge a book by it’s cover, or user by their font… Agreed that Calibri is a pretty decent face and a heck of a lot better than the vaguely ugly verdana, imo. I’ll post a screen cap of the site in different browsers in a day or so… it’s basically parity across browsers. Getting the shadow effect “consistent” in IE, Firefox and Safari was tricky (well, safari was easy ;)
Re: Reconstruction
This is the 43 Folders post I thought of when I saw your comment about Merlin’s “rant”: 43F: Why we’re “Mac-centric,” and what it means for you. Now that I re-read it, I see there’s not so much about actually switching, per se. If this was the post you were thinking of, too, maybe your google-fu is working just fine…
Thank you so much for all of your hard work on kGTD and what looks like great design input on OmniFocus. I’ve been using kGTD since I first read about it on 43F and look forward to jumping on OmniFocus as soon as it’s ready!
Re: Reconstruction
Matt, that is exactly the post I was thinking of, thanks. I remember reading that, then looking at some pages about the Delicious Library beta and I had a revelation that I needed to switch.
More about OF soon…
Re: Reconstruction
Hi Ethan, Neat redesign of the site, although a little too gray for my taste.
Congratulations on the baby and thanks for posting the picture. And thank you for being crazy enough to write kGTD while actually having a life. I hope your family and business are thriving.
Thanks for the big spam cleanup to recover the forum. In the cleanup, it looks like some of yesteray’s posts got lost. They really did a great job of describing smart use of kGTD in the context of good GTD habits and procedures — if there’s any way to recover them, it would be a blessing.
Re: Reconstruction
Thanks Paul. I had it up as a pink version, blue and red before, but early feedback found it too intense, so I scaled back to gray for the time being. I’ll work on the color scheme a bit more later in the week. I’m working on the old DB to try and recover and reintegrate the posts that were lost.
I’ll try to post a color sample later for feedback :)
Regarding the posts, I am no database expert, this I have discovered :) I do have the posts and am trying to reintegrate them into the DB, but can’t make a guarantee that I can get this to work.
Re: Reconstruction
Congrats Ethan! I know you have spent many hours through the night trying to get the site “ready for launch.” As you’ve said repeatedly, a site is never “finished” because there’s always room for improvement.. I hope people will appreciate all the little details that you put into the site. Your Biggest Admirer :)
Thanks for fixing Search
I just discovered that searching the forums now includes discussions since the release of the current version. Thanks so much.
Re: Thanks for fixing Search
Glad someone’s getting use out of ;) I really hammered on this drupal upgrade. There are still some seriously unfinished wings of this building, but I’m getting those taken care of bit by bit every day. I’ll be adding in some more search functionality as we go. I have it installed but it’s not working smoothly yet, so not active.
Re: Reconstruction
What do you use for your website design and content management? It seems to flow together really nicely.
Thanks in advance.
Re: Reconstruction
Drupal on the backend with a from-scratch custom design.
Re: Reconstruction
I love your site design. Very clean and concise. I notice you use Drupal for your web, as mentioned above. Would you recommend any good sites for learning Drupal? What’s more, could you give a brief comparison between Joomla (or any other CMS) and Drupal, and why you think one’s better over the other? I don’t care if it’s biased. People should have their own opinions, it’s what keeps life interesting!
Also, I’ve been wanting to develop my own page. I have one, but there’s nothing on it, and I can’t usually find anything to put on it. I’m pretty introverted on the net and really in person, but I would like to contribute to the net, however, I feel that I really have nothing anyone wants to hear. Any suggestions? Not necessarily on content but on what keeps you updating your beautiful site. Forgive me if I’m asking too much and I wont be offended if you choose not to answer.
Keep up the nice work!
Re: Reconstruction
To be honest, I just read the Drupal.org site constantly when I’m developing a website. I don’t have any other resources that I use… the main drupal site is very comprehensive, though often very scattered. I tend to use google search on the drupal.org site rather than the drupal search box, for what it’s worth…
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