Published by Eric on 24th September 2009
For years I have hosted my own email in one way or another, sometimes in my own office, on a shared hosting server, or on a dedicated hosted server. My main requirements were to have IMAP and web access so I could easily keep all email in one place and access it from anywhere. After trying Lotus Notes, Scalix, hMailServer, and a number of other open source options for Windows and Linux, I finally gave up after discovering Google Apps.
With Google Apps, I get all the power of Gmail as if it is my my own domain email server. Even though it’s Gmail, everything I send is from solodevelopersuccess.com. The free standard version includes 25 accounts with 8gb of storage each as well as Google Calendar, Google Docs, Google Chat and Google Sites. I can even set Google Sites to be my primary web site, however it’s quite limited so I’m sticking with using a shared server account from A2 Hosting.
Read the rest of this entry »
Published by Eric on 22nd September 2009
The ABCpdf component from WebSuperGoo enables easy creation and manipulation of PDF files from any .NET language. I recently had an urgent project come up that made ABCpdf a perfect fit.
One of our clients request that the reports they used to receive by mail be sent electronically instead. This client had hundreds of locations and we had been hand collating four reports for each location and stuffing each collation into an envelope. Now I had to quickly find a way to do this programatically instead. I didn’t have time to re-write my report module to produce a set of reports for each location, I had to figure out how to create this collation by processing each PDF individually.
Read the rest of this entry »
Published by Eric on 5th September 2009
Even though I was doing well using the GTD Add In for Outlook, I was still feeling overwhelmed by all the tasks I had created. I just couldn’t seem to keep them filtered in a way that let me see only what was truly important, right now. While researching ways to handle this, I stumbled upon Priacta’s website and their Total, Relaxed Organization (TRO) training. The more I read, the more I liked what I saw, and took the plunge by purchasing their online training course. Over the next month, I implemented their system and completed their 21 day follow up exercises. TRO has one significant advantage — it can be put t use from day one by teaching not only principles, but specific step by step actions to take to quickly organize your workspace, put things off immediately and start being productive.
Read the rest of this entry »
