Today, Theo took his first ever bite of solid food.  I get all welled up looking at pictures of him while I'm at work.

I can't say enough about ScribeFire.  It's a Firefox add-on that gives you an in-window blogging client.  Here are just a few reasons why it's awesome:

1. You're blogging from within Firefox, and you can move among webpages while keeping your blog post editing window open.  This comes in really handy when looking for references, quoting things, finding pictures, etc.  It also makes it really easy to fire off quick posts -- no need to open up a new window, log in, etc., etc.

2. When you copy something to your clipboard, it's automatically pasted to the "insert link" dialog.  So, for example, you go to a webpage (while keeping your editor open, see #1 above) and copy the URL from the URL bar.  Then you highlight your text and click the "add link" button.  Bingo!  The URL is already pasted there, and all you have to do is press OK.  Sweet.

3. You can write to multiple blogs from the same place.  Very nice.  Also a bit dangerous, as you could conceivably post to the wrong blog very easily.  Hasn't happened to me yet, but I do have a lingering uneasy feeling about it.

So, if you blog and you use Firefox, get Scribefire.  Go get it now.  I promise you'll thank me.

I've been attending a lot of events lately, and one thing that keeps coming up for me is that the multi-day conference / workshop format is a bit broken. My main beef: by day two (or god forbid, day three) the audience has petered out and whatever energy was there on day one has been lost.  I felt like this happened at last year's (excellent) Nonprofit DevSummit, and even at last week's incredible Open Cities Conference.  It's a bummer, because these events always draw together really awesome people, but they can often fall short in a few regards. Here's how these events typically go:

• Day 0 (evening before conf begins): maybe some late drinks with attendees as they arrive, or just heading straight to bed after travel.

• Day 1: Conference begins in the AM -- introductions and big kickoff. Woohoo! Everyone is so psyched!  Evening socializing (very important).

• Day 2: Morning attendance shows that some people have split (sometimes for good reason, sometimes to get a breather or explore a city on their company's dime) -- participation is good but waning.  More evening socializing.

• Day 3: Lame-o stragglers pick up the pieces.  Poo!

The ideal conference would keep everyone there and fully engaged for the whole time, right? So, what to do about it?  Some suggestions I've heard: only accept RSVPs if people commit to all days (not realistic); schedule some awesome speaker for the morning of day 2 or 3, to draw people along (not a bad idea); limit conferences to just one day (sometimes tough to justify travel). But this morning, I may have come across the perfect format.  Talking to John Barstow from Orton Family Foundation (about our joint project, the Community Almanac), he described how they organized their recent staff retreat:

• Day 1: Conference starts in the afternoon, to allow for morning travel.  Introductions and orientation. Excitement!  Evening socializing.

• Day 2: The real meat of the conference -- all day activities and good stuff.  More evening socializing.

• Day 3: Casual breakfast and wrap-up.  Time to decompress, process what went down, schedule any ad-hoc follow-up, then plenty of time to relax and travel home.

I gotta say, I really love this format -- there's still enough time to get real work done, and there's no lame aftermath moment.  I think I'll be scheduling my next event this way.

When I couldn't sleep the other night, I started mocking up a zippy drag-n-drop front end for Trac, based on the snappy UI of tools like Things (working title is FasTrac).  Then, bam! Bitten by a weird, seems-like-a-bug w/ jQuery UI drag and drop.  It appears that droppables aren't discoverable by draggables if the droppable has a fixed width.  I have a hard time believing that's true, yet here I am.  I posted to the jQuery UI list, but haven't heard back yet. Any ideas?  I'm sure I'm missing something super obvious... Here's a working example illustrating the problem.

I had a great crowdsourcing experience yesterday. Here at TOPP Labs, we're doing a 6-month check-in on our annual employee reviews.  What that means for me is a 30-minute interview with each of the folks on my team (about 20 in total), where we look back on the past six months to see how we're doing re: professional goals outlined in the annual reviews.  So, today and Monday, I'll be having 20 30-minute meetings, each followed by 15-minutes of write-up time by me.  That's kind of a lot to schedule. Here's how it went down:

1) First, I cleared my schedule for today and Monday. 2) "Hmm, I guess I need to ping each person to see when they can meet up.  Ugh.  Time to procrastinate." 3) "Since I'm out of the office today, it will be super annoying to email every single person from my phone.  I'll just write one email to the team list and have each person email me back times that work for them.  Nice.  Offloading the work." 4) "Wait!  Even better, I'll just ask everyone to add their own appointments to the team Google Calendar.  Now we're talking."

So in the end, I just had everyone schedule their own meetings on a first come, first served basis.  Kind of empowering to just let other people schedule two whole days for me.  Plus, the communication overhead went from a lot to zero.  Yay for crowdsourcing.

Hot off the presses: Backpack TOC Greasemonkey script.

For a recent personal project (I won't say which since that would defeat the purpose), I was in need of a new kind of authentication. My wife and I wanted to create a website where we could post photos and news for our family and friends, while keeping that information off of the broader intertubes.  With a baby on the way, we plan on having lots (and lots and lots and lots) of photos to share. Regular, account- or password-based authentication wouldn't work, because I didn't know exactly who would be visiting, so either creating one password and sending it around, or creating passwords for each individual person were not options. So, what I ended up creating was a "do you know me?" authentication system. Here's how it works:

Upon entering the site, you are posed with a challenge.  You can choose your question from a group of 5. In this case, I chose questions that anyone who was part of the family or knew us somehow would be able to answer.  For example, "where did Nick grow up?" or "boy cat's name".  I picked enough different questions, pulling info from enough different aspects of our lives, that anyone who we'd want to get in would be able to get at least one right. In this case, I was using WordPress, so I first created created a series of logins that would correspond to the questions I wanted to ask.  Then, I created a custom login screen using the Themed Login and Registration plugin.  I updated the login template, substituting the standard "login" text input with a select menu, where each option consisted of a question and its corresponding login ID. My question for all of you out there is: are there other existing examples of this kind of system?  Better solutions for implementation?  It seems like a generally useful system.  If time permits, perhaps I'll wrap this up and offer it as a WP plugin. That's it!  So far, this has worked pretty well for us, and has been a nice solution to opening up our lives to our family and friends while maintaining our privacy.

Even though I shouldn't own a car, I do, and as every car owner in NYC knows, dealing with alternate-side parking is a hassle. That, combined with my recent itch to write a small mobile app, has lead me to the following idea:  the "Dude, Where's My Car?" app for mobile.   Here's what it will do:

• When I park my car, I'll open the app, and it will prompt me to enter where I've parked.  I'll enter "Warren" under "Street" and "Smith & Hoyt" under "Between".  Or maybe I'll click on a map.  This seems like a silly step, but if you're like me, it'll come in handy four days later when you forget where you parked.

• The app home screen will show the car's location, either in text or map form.

• Then, the app will query the Alternate Side Parking Calendar, and show if alternate side is in effect for the next few days.

• For bonus points, it will send me a text or email the night before I need to move the car.

I plan on trying to make this for blackberry, since that's how I roll, but of course it would be sexier on the iPhone.  Maybe I'll try out PhoneGap and kill two birds with one stone. (I know some people have already been thinking about this problem, so I may be able to recruit some help)

It's really amazing how walking down the street with a funny hat on puts smiles on people's faces.  Today, I'm going to pretend I'm not wearing a viking hat.  I only wish I had bought the hat before I got on the subway this morning.  Happy Halloween!

Frannie and I are ready to sell our car, Dudley.  He's a great car, and we love him, but we just don't use him enough to justify the expense.  If you're interested or know anyone who might be, let me know I didn't make a website for this car like I did last time, but opted instead to post it on cars.com.