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Starting with a meeting six days prior to the start of Bar Camp, the crew managed to find free office space, design a logo, start a wiki, print free T-shirts for all attendees, convince Etheric Networks to donate and install a wireless hookup on a neighboring business's roof, line up enough sponsors to make the event free for everyone, and convince over 100 geeks to give up a summer weekend for hours of indoor geek talk.

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Pretty un-frigging-believable, if you ask me.

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Amazing… my little application is more popular than "Babes of Flickr". This is either a huge compliment for me or a terrible sign of our work-obsessed economy.

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Voo2do, my recent project, is up to #2 on del.icio.us/popular—just below a site that contains photos of hot girls from flickr. In order to avoid dying under the huge burden of my own ego, I am going to attribute this to the recent trendiness of task tracker applications. But it's nice to see mentions of it around the web, my favorite so far being one written in Portuguese at meiobit.com, which Google translates as:

Other mentions include Worcester-based entrepreneur Pete Caputa and my coworker Girish Bharadwaj who is hacking a windows tray client for Voo2do.

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My latest project, voo2do, is now available. If you have too much work to track it all in your head, try it out.

It's got task tracking with projects, time estimates, and priorities, plus fancy editing and sorting and colors pretty enough that you won't dread looking at your to-do list day after day. I've been using voo2do (pronounced voo-to-do) for a few months now and I'm convinced it's made me more productive.

Now let me reflect a bit on how I approached this project, and how it differed from frassle and other stuff I've done.

In voo2do, my priority from the beginning was to make something highly attractive and usable. As part of this, I wanted it to shine from the first moment you laid your hands on it, so I didn't announce it until it was fairly polished (i.e. now). This was very much unlike frassle, which focused on testing new ideas, has an excessively confusing interface, and was released piecemeal as I worked on it—and still isn't shiny.

Because the genre of voo2do—task tracking—is hardly new, the challenge was in making the tool easy to absorb and fun. I spent way more time than I ever thought I would crafting little 16×16 icons, experimenting with different color schemes, and fiddling with javascript fade effects. I made general attractiveness, ease of use, and ease of learning key goals in this project, and focused on those challenges. I also used this project as an excuse to teach myself about Ajax and other "web 2.0" gobbledeygook, so you'd better be using a recent browser.

I think I hit my target of creating an app that's useful, fun, and responsive, because I use it every single day and I don't cringe at anything. Of course, I'm biased, and I hope the early voo2do users will point out many areas for potential improvement. My own list of voo2do tasks has plenty of possible next steps.

Try it!

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For a while, I thought I needed to subscribe to some sort of design magazine in order to see beautiful examples to help me choose colors for website designs. But COLOURlovers skips the plotline and gets right to the point.

Geez. You'd think that with 1488 registered users, nearly two years of service, dozens of del.icio.us references, and all the hype about weblogs that any decent weblogging service would inspire more than 264 people to post more than once. Clearly, it's time for me to get back to work.

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OK, I'm not really going to publish a favorite footnote every week. But if I did, this one on David Weinberger's blog would be it:

*For the moment we're pretending that telecommunication services are offered in a free market. Haha.

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An astute user helped me uncover a problem in Frassle today. Unfortunately, the problem was that frassle made registration email addresses public by default, and spammers were harvesting these addresses. If you signed up for frassle, your email address may have been read by spammers. This has been fixed for the future but some addresses may have already been leaked.

The problem was that frassle published <managingEditor> and <webmaster> elements in its RSS feeds. These elements are required by the RSS 2.0 spec to contain email addresses, and frassle used your registration email address as the initial value for these. So your email address became public by default… whoops.

This was due to my negligence and I'm sorry if I've contributed to your spam problem. Since Derik emailed me, I've changed the RSS generation so that these two elements are omitted. The RSS feed should no longer disclose your email address, and I don't believe this information is disclosed anywhere else in the system. Derik also commented that he'll be changing his blog post, "Frassle Sells Your Email" (update: now "The Dangers of Email Addresses in RSS Feeds"), to clarify that this is a mistake that's been corrected. I stand by my promise to never sell your email address or personal information.