Restraint

We're redesigning our web site here at Beehive Media. It will be ready later this fall. As part of that process, we're going to meld this blog into the main site. And I'm going through this content to figure out what pieces of it to bring over to the new site. I'm noticing that I USE ALL CAPS AND EXCLAMATION POINTS TOO MUCH!! I get excited sometimes. I'm passionate about these things, which is why I write about them, even if it's not always that frequent. But I'll take the advice I sometimes give my daughter to "use your words" and describe my excitement rather than show it in CAPS. That is my job as a professional communicator, I suppose. But do forgive me if I sometimes relapse to my old ways.

Time Tracking Bliss

Do you need to track time for client work? Have you struggled to build your own tools, leverage existing Web 1.0 tools and/or overly complex project management platforms? Have you asked yourself, why can't SOMEONE get this right?!?!?

The time has come to declare a winner, and its name is Harvest. We just converted over to Harvest and I'm loving the web input and reporting, as well as the widget and iPhone app. While the reporting could be more robust and I REALLY wish the estimation was convertible into projects, and that we could estimate jobs using the same task lists as we track projects against, and that reporting showed estimated vs. actual....etc. It is BY FAR the most elegant, simple, quick and complete enough solution out there. Use it!

Poverty is Declining?

Who knew? World poverty is in decline as a percentage. Does this surprise you?

Simple Screenshot and Image Manipulation Tool

Here at Beehive Media we love simple solutions. I recently came across a fantastic example of simplicity and needed to share it quickly. If you ever need to create a screenshot of something on your computer, how do you do it? On a Mac, you just hold down CMD-SHIFT-3 or on Windows, you hit "Print Screen" to copy to your clipboard. Then you need to open Photoshop or something, paste, then manipulate the image. Photoshop takes awhile to open, eats up a ton of memory and for a quick and dirty image, is often not worth the trouble. In comes Skitch - a super easy way to take screen shots, mark them up, crop them, highlight things, write text on them, etc. And you can also use photos or any image from your hard drive. You can easily click and drag an image you've made into an email or post it to your personal Skitch page or any other site, via FTP, SFTP or to Flickr, etc. Great tool, easy and fast to use, etc. Thank you @ev for tweeting about it so I could discover this fantastic piece of software!

Europe and Asia-Pacific Forests Growing, Unlike Rest of World

Map Showing Failed States

Wow, this is really interesting. Not sure what it means - all of Africa, most of Asia and Latin America are in trouble, according to this. Wonder what this looked like 20 years ago?

Ad Spending Won't Match '08 Till Beyond 2013