Well, that seemed easy. So I tried it out. Hmm, that works. Then I re-watched the ‘Introduction to Git’ video above. Hey presto, from git-to-god in six months. Impressive. I still don’t like video, can’t put my finger on it, but I love the Git. And to those people that brought us the Git and a big thank you to you.

What is the Git? Git is a fast distributed revision control system. Now I use the Git religiously. Not just for my personal coding projects, but for the documents I write, the web-sites I build, people I share knowledge with, and so on. But why do I like Git, a few things really.

Firstly, I tend to operate out of directories a lot and need to version control everything under it. What I don’t want to have to do is create an artificial master copy on a centralised server and have to periodically sync up to that. Pointless. Instead I just want everything I need to be available from within my working area – my directory.

Secondly, branching and the management of branches must be brainless activity. Git embraces and encourages branching. After reading the git tutorial I was shocked at just how easy it is to work with branches. There is just no other way of working for me. Branching in subversion is harder and hence less appealing to me, so that’s probably why I didn’t use it as much as I’d liked/should have.

Thirdly, local commits. I can commit without access to a centralised server. There is NO centralised server. Instead you have a network of peers. No need to distribute/cluster a central repository. Distributed repositories are the norm, not the exception. There is no single-point of failure that you have with subversion, instead, the risk is spread amongst your peers.

Finally, simplicity. Once you’re happy working with branches locally, you can push and pull information to and from your peers’ branches. The syntax is clear and concise. There is not difference really to what you’re accustomed to working locally.

The problem with Git and distributed revision control systems like it is industry take up. Will the build systems such as Ant and Maven, the IDEs such as Visual Studio, IntelliJ and Eclipse, and so on support the Git. I think this is happening but cannot report conclusively on the current status. However, I am starting to see many more open source projects start out with the GIT and other migrating over. Also for web site development, where you try out new stuff, roll forward, roll back, compare and contrast, numerous different solutions, Git and its easy branching solution is a great tool.

Finally, a commercial example. I use a Groove. It’s a collaboration tool primarily used for sharing documents. It has a proprietary algorithm for the effective sync’ing of large amounts of data across a network. It also is a commercial product and so there are lots of features such instant messaging, calendaring, discussions, sharepoint integration and organising stuff. However, for me, all that is redundant. All I need is fast distributed, file-sharing.

The problem with Groove is that is breaks easily (admittedly the pre Microsoft Groove 2007 version). I’ve had to install it many times in the past and that takes time. When I change machines, I have to re-install it. When it starts crashing, I have to re-install it. The sych’ing between my peers has been problematic, to the point where we are asking each other whether you have the latest update. That’s not good. Given that I only use Groove for file sharing, I believe Git would be a much better and reliable solution going forwards. It also has the added benefit of being cross platform.

When I first started using a web browser I was taught to bookmark pages and organise them into folders that are hierarchically structured into a tree-like form. For the last couple of years though I’ve found bookmarks in a browser to be a complete pain for a number of reasons:

• Firstly, I use a three browsers: IE, Safari (& with the latest webkit.org) and Firefox. Safari is my favourite, Firefox has the best tools and IE is what I use on customer sites. Firefox is what I call my default browser because it’s has everything I need to work effectively. Firebug, mouse gestures, scrapbook, foxmarks, tree style tab, piclens and delicious to name a few. If Safari could do all of these, I’d use Safari for sure, but it doesn’t.
• Secondly, I cannot stand the pain of keeping bookmarks synchronised across different browsers. I know about plugins to synchronise bookmarks across different instances of the same browser (e.g. foxmarks) but not different browsers. Also, I don’t think I would use it anyway.
• Thirdly, organising bookmarks into a tree is just not an effective way to manage large numbers of urls. Ugly and usable.

The typical way I work when moving about on the web is that when I land on a page, I have two options: save this page or not. If I choose to save this page and i have not read it, I need to record that fact as well. That is why I am big fan of tagging bookmarks and delicious (particularly since its recent upgrade and better url delicious.com) is my choosen vehicle for doing this. So here’s what I do:

• Do some stuff on the web (I’m in my default browser Firefox)
• If I want to save the current page, Command-D to bring up the delicious plugin
• I add my tags and if I’ve not read it I add a notread tag

All done in 5 seconds from the keyboard, no mouse. At the end of each week, I ruthlessly step through my notread pages in delicious and either read or delete them. I very rarely have anything from the previous week taken over into the next. And that’s it.

So, last week I visited every page I had as a bookmark in my browser and added them either to my personal wiki or delicious. Not surprisingly, I got rid of 90% of my bookmarks (note to self, tip to spring clean bookmarks within delicious). Now I have Zero Bookmarks within my browser. The first thing people say, no bookmarks in your browser, but what if you’re offline. Well, if I’m offline, I can’t access delicious but even if I could, I couldn’t access the sites at the end of bookmarks anyway. And for the local links, well, there’re in my personal wiki, which has a great home page with about 20 links to my favourite, most visited sites. Of course, my personal wiki home page is my most visited page.

So what does my browser have? Well, a couple of bookmarklets for gReader (adds the current page to my google rss reader), Twurl (converts the current page into a tiny url and lets me post to twitter) and delicious (for tagging and saving the current page).

Selecting the Wiki

My personal wiki had to be small, fast and above all work offline. You’d be amazed just how many, twikis, blikis and wikis fall short of that cut. By small, I mean in both features, footprint and essential complexity. Fast is obvious. And offline means that I can enter some stuff in the same way regardless of whether I’m online or not. Given that I didn’t want to go through the hassle of installing a local web-based application on my machine I quickly honed in on TiddlyWiki – a client-side wiki. I’d used this about a year ago and was in talks with the then head of the team Jeremy Ruston about adding server-side syncing support. It appears they added it, so now we’re good to go.

Set Up

This made be laugh. To install the TiddlyWiki just right click here and save as the file (the wiki ) to your hard drive. You done. Open up the file in your browser and you’re away. TiddlyWiki is a single, self-contained HTML page that is small, fast and works offline!

Wiki Usage

The wiki is my shop front to my world, so here’s how I use it:

• I found a home for the TiddlyWiki file on my machine and made that file my home page within my browser.
• I start creating content home pages, for work, research, personal bit’s and pieces, weekly reviews, and other stuff.
• Content home pages contain links to external sites or internal links to pages that I write.
• My personal wiki content is organised more like a forest, shallow and wide and not like a mutated inheritance tree that is narrow and deep.
• TiddlyWiki allows you to refer other TiddlyWikis (keep the links relative), so I quickly pull out work from my wiki. Don’t let your wiki get wide and deep!
• I’m not a fan of stuffing attachments into wikis. Attachments are like the weights you place around on a hot-air balloon. The more put on, the more likely your wiki will remain grounded and not take you to the places you really ought to see. I prefer to keep the wiki light and link to attachments hosted elsewhere if possible.
• Backup and multiple machines. It’s possible and there is support for this. Still fiddling about with this but given the wiki is a single file. My options abound.

With my wiki in place I am a pretty happy guy. I trashed a lot text files, stickies and gtd actions and put the good stuff in my wiki. Also, with the wiki as my home page, with searc, tagging and a well-design front page, access to my current knowledge portfolio is just a click away.

Sitting back, slightly pleased with myself, I looked started seeing redundant bookmarks in my browser. Upon closer inspection, and a little thought, I’m trying to think of a good reason why I’d ever bookmark a page within my browser. Damn, time to eliminate more waste…

I read Dave Allen’s book, Getting Things Done (GTD), about a year ago and as he it puts, GTD is nothing more than advanced common sense. I tried out his simple folder structure but further adapted it to achieve Inbox Zero. For me, when an email arrives I apply one of six verbs to it: delete, archive, respond now (ala five sentences), delegate, defer, or deal with. The deferring requires me to do nothing an leave it in my Inbox, however, my Inbox must be cleared by the end of the day. If I cannot deal with the email by the end of the day it is escalated to a task. Then it moves into my action stack (something for a later post).

However, even with this in place I was still a slave to my Inbox last week. So I did some more research and found the answer in Merlin Mann’s talk he gave at Google just over a year ago. Switch off email and check it periodically. Simple but effective. I have now regained control of my Inbox. So now it goes something like this: 1) Turn on email client. 2) Process unread emails. 3) Turn off email client. 4) Do something else 5) Goto 1 an hour later.

Right, I think I’ve got a better handle on my Inbox but why am I doing all the stuff I do? I’m sick of guessing, so on Friday I carried out my first weekly review. I looked back at the events of the previous week and in agile retrospective like fashion stepped through what I did, identified the good, the bad and the ugly, and suggested actions to make things better. The review took about 15 minutes and was the most useful thing I did last week, in fact for the last few months.

I then went a step further and thought about what my objectives are for 2008 and held the things I did last week against these. Again, another startling revelation, my accomplishments last week, although plentiful, brought me no closer to achieving my objectives. A quick re-think and re-visit to my suggested actions for this week and now I have a much better idea of what I need to do this week and how I can realistically achieve it, whilst demonstrably working towards my now clear objectives.

I highly recommend that you take the 15 minutes out of your week and do the review. You will surprise yourself, and if you anything like me, don’t you just love surprises…