It’s that time of the year again and the guys at 24 ways have been delivering daily presents. Check out the three articles to date: Tasty Text Trimmer, Faster Development with CSS Constants and Flickr Photos On Demand with getFlickr. Christmas-y indeed.

And speaking of christmas presents, this Eboy poster so needs to be under the tree in a few days. It packs a lot of “Web 2.0″ (bubbles included), and if you look closely, you’ll see our logo design for Techcrunch on the left, above the Myspace logo. Awesome!

Over at the always great Adaptive Path weblog, Chiara Fox has an essay about tagging vs cataloging. And keep an eye out for her next one which she hints about on the darker side of tagging.

For the developers, there’s a good roundup of tools for intermixing Ruby and Amazon’s services over at the AWS weblog. From libraries to example projects, there’s a little bit of everything. This week we’ll be posting about our experience launching Goplan on Amazon’s EC2.

Luke has a good series of articles on being a Design Strategist (here’s part 2) over at Functioning Form which you should definitely read if you’re in the field. In fact, if you don’t subscribe to Luke’s essays, you should start by doing just that.

Over at the Texas Startup Blog, Frank Demmler has a great piece about Hiring the right people - he highlights some of the overlooked parts on the process, and more importantly, has a few good tips for starting entrepreneurs.

Back in July three of us spent 24 hours straight developing a Ruby on Rails application for the fun of it. At the time we thought it’d be fun to create a review site where anyone could post a review for anything - and we did. And we called it “Weratestuff” (go figure, huh?). Well, after a few months of judging (unfortunately the organization faced some problems), the results came in a couple of days ago.

Weratestuff took the 1st place for the best User Interface, and we’re quite happy with the outcome. We didn’t do it for the prize (even though the passes for the now past Adaptive Path User Experience Week would be awesome) but to prove that the right set of tools and people can do great things under huge constraints.

See our previous post on our railsday project from back in july.

Since we announced the Goplan beta, we’ve been getting a lot of email from people asking questions and submitting their names for the list. We honestly would love to get back to everyone individually, but given the (really high) number of requests, it looks like we’ll be unable to. This being said, this post is for those of you who want a little more information on what Goplan is, why we built it, how you can get in on the beta and other miscellaneous details.

What is Goplan?

We want to make sure everyone is on the same page as to what Goplan is. In fact, we want everyone to be on the same page on projects in general - and Goplan is exactly that: project management software focused on communication and collaboration. But, instead of feeding you marketing blabber, here’s a few examples of how you might use the application:

• If you’re working with your colleagues on a new web-application (you’re our kind of guy), you can use Goplan to keep track of project tasks, support tickets, calendar, files and chat amongst yourselves if you work remotely.
• If you’re a blogger, you can use Goplan to keep track of your ideas, posts, and digital assets (like photos or documents).
• If you’re publishing a magazine and need to keep in touch with the rest of your staff, you can use Goplan to manage the team’s input on the publication, as well as manage deadlines, production details, tasks and (if it doesn’t strike you as a distraction) to chat live with everyone else.

So in short, by easily turning features on and off, you can have Goplan as simple as possible or as sophisticated as you need it. We built Goplan because we were unhappy about the current solutions for project management out there - either they were limited (not that that’s always a bad thing) or too bulky for our needs -, and because we know people who identify themselves with that problem.

Beta details

We didn’t forget you. If you didn’t get an email to get in, its not because you’ve been left behind - we just haven’t invited anyone in yet. There are several reasons for that - we’re currently focusing on scaling the application and preparing the servers to run it on (we have some “funny” hosting stories to tell you, but that’s a whole new post). Plus, we want to focus on the user experience for a few more days to make sure you don’t get disappointed.

Screenshots, what else

If you really need to see the application now, head on to Flickr and see the Goplan beta set. We’ll be adding more screengrabs in there soon - plus, we might throw in photos from some of the bug-crunching nights we’re having (you know, instead of having vacations and other regular-people fun).

Got questions? We’ll be happy to answer them in the comments, so feel free to ask!

I haven’t posted for a while for several reasons. However, to redeem myself I come bearing news. We’ve relaunched our website, moved the blog URL and we’re about to launch Goplan publicly.

Our new website:

Being constantly unhappy about what I produce for myself (ourselves in this case), I keep thinking about whether our site is effective in terms of design, content findability and navigation. This forces me to consider our website a perpetual work in progress. However today we’ve launched what I believe is a pretty good update from the previous “version”.

We’ve dropped the old CMS I had developed and moved to a Ruby on Rails solution using RadiantCMS - a choice I am quite happy about. Also, I’ve tweaked the design and layout to facilitate content discovery, and added some new content related to our work and more importantly, how we do it. If people are interested in how the site was setup, I can post something a little more in-depth. (more…)