So Backpack is one of those websites that’s everywhere when you read about the whole “Web2.0″ movement. While I’ve looked it over, I never really got why someone would use Backpack.
It finally hit me today that Backpack was probably a better place for me to maintain my blog To-Do lists. While I have been talking about starting to use GTD, that will take some time and I’m not sure even if I start using GTD, I want to migrate this list into GTD.
So I’ve spent some time today actually migrating my Blog To-Do list into Backpack and you can see the results here.
Having spent some time with it now, I’d say Basecamp is pretty cool but it isn’t anything I haven’t seen by now. Why do I think so? Let’s just quickly review the “big” features that Backpack talks about:
- AJAX : Which is everywhere by now, so it’s not as impressive
- Textile : While this is nice, it’s not too instinctive and can be confusing
- Sharing : Again, it’s in every Web2.0 site out there now
- Reminders : Any number of calendaring services from 30boxes to the new Google Calendar. And they all have the iCal support built in
I guess what keeps Basecamp cool is the concept of pages where you can put everything from lists to random notes in, as well as writeboards which is essentially shared workspaces. To sum it up, Backpack is cool, but it ain’t that cool anymore.
If you have seen my site page till today, you might have noticed that I have mentioned one of the things to do is to improve the current site stats I have – so that I can really see how few people ever see this blog (yeah, i can be wierd). Mainly I wanted to use AWStats for processing my raw server logs and Google Analytics (since, well who knows site stats better than the GOOG).
I haven’t been able to download my server log till yesterday. But yesterday, one of the weblogs.us forum members pointed out that wget can download the log files without any issues and incrementally too.
So some frantic htaccess tweaking later, I had wget working and AWStats processing my log files. Right now I’m missing browser stats in my log, but a small code block in my footer will handle that.
JD has switched off sub-domain logging right now, but once he turns it back on, I will be in site-stats goodness right? Well actually it got better.
This morning I check my mail and guess what I find – an invitation to google analytics :-O.. Hallelujah! The promised land has been reached 
.
So another code block goes into my footer and I will be bidding farewell to Statcounter now. It’s really good, but that 100 row limit can really start to bug you after some time.
I gonna be updating my site to-do list now, but all that’s gone happen is that 1 item is gonna go off and 4 items are getting added 
. That’s the way it goes..
This post could also be called “I am a WP Plugin whore”! 
Ok, so what happened is I have a whole bunch of posts I want to put-up, that I am either too lazy or too disorganized to complete. So I am hoping that by putting the list up on the blog, I will be guilted into doing them.
I wanted to make sure this list stayed on top of the blog, which would mean having a “sticky” post. WP doesn’t support that out of the box (which is kinda weird), so I remembered reading about Adhesive, so I decided it was time to add this plugin. So I google for the Adhesive site, and start scrolling down the page looking for the plugin installer. Then I see Geo and I’m like “hmm’ and then I see Comments-Quick Tag and I think “interesting” and before you know it, a quick 1 plugin install has turned into a 3 plugin pig-out.
I just know I am going to pay for this gluttony when it comes to migrating to WP 2.5 
Anyway, here is the list of posts I am going to add to the site (The titles are draft)
- Hacking the Windows Desktop (Mild to Hardcore)
- An Xplanet Screensaver
- paste special icons for ms office
- CoTN vs Star Wars:Empire at War
- impressions of ogame/swcombine (Read the article here)
- review garden of beasts
- being “realtime”
- firefox vs maxthon – the plugin wars
- konfabulator / yahoo widgets catching on
- hdd-health
Let’s hope I now make some progress on this list.
PS – 2006-05-15: I have obviously been making very little progress on this list and I just think that having this post sitting on top is spoiling the look of the blog (Yes, I can hear your cries of “Quitter” just fine 
). But I will be adding this list to my Backpackit page and that sits on my desktop thanks to a Yahoo Widget, so I’d say I’m still reminding myself about this list)