Ever wondered what the ideal heights and distances of your workspace are?

Try out the Ergotron Workspace Planner in inches or in centimeters: just enter your height en adjust your chair, desk or screen as required.

More about optimizing your workspace on Lifehacker.

No one doubts that learning something new is a good way to increase job security, productivity and overall happiness.

But in these tough economic times, it’s one of the mayor things people tend to spend time and money on. At least online:

The graph above shows the traffic boosts some online universities have been getting over the last months (although you may not be able to see it, ashford.edu has also doubled their traffic in the last months with an estimate of about 200.000 visitors).

If an online degree doesn’t sound appealing to you, simply reading a book can bring the same benefits.

Some suggestions:

I hope to order and read these this year. (Although I don’t know about the last one yet: it’s not the book I would usually read, but Andy pointed me to its site and the user story is just so funny.)

Some may already do this, whether on paper, in Excel or online, but creating todo-lists is a great way to focus on what you have to do (first) and use your brain for other tasks than remembering your agenda.

Actually, it is no replacement for an agenda. Todo-lists are the small task lists you would also write on paper, like grocery lists. You can keep writing them on paper but since we’re in the digital era, there are great replacements. One of them is the free Ta-da Lists from 37 Signals. Another well-known is Remember The Milk. But even the “famous-all-round-application” Excel does the trick for many.

The key to improve your productivity is to write everything down you need to do. This makes sure you don’t need to remember each single thing and gives you the possibility to handle task by task.

Certainly when working on projects (of any kind), you will have a todo-list for each of them. In development environments a bug-tracker partially takes care of this, but in numerous situations you’ll need to use todo-lists separately.

The basic rule you have to live by in creating successful lists, is this: split up your todo’s in as many small tasks as possible. Then take care of them one by one at the appropriate time. When using one of the mentioned online tools, you can mark them completed and they will disappear from your list (which gives some kind of satisfaction).

And don’t feel awkward if you start to create lists of lists. This is perfectly normal and provides you with a global overview while still having small tasks at the bottom level.

I believe the use of todo-lists is part of the methodology “Getting Things Done” (or GTD). I have not really thoroughly read anything about GTD, but I assume it is a useful practice (for some more than others, like with everything).

Related post on Enso.

The biggest Belgian movie theater group, Kinepolis, has had a terrible history when it comes to their website. But today I was really amazed how they scr*wed it up this time.

I must admit, I usually don’t have time to watch movies so the site may have been brand new. I tried to have a look at which movies run in my local cinema and when you click on the listing of a theater, you get a page like this.

While one would expect this is a (X)HTML listing, their web company actually managed to develop this in Flash. Let’s assume they had a solid reason for this. Maybe they were on the edge of bankruptcy and Adobe promised them a bailout in return of a commitment to Flash applications. Must be something like that.

Anyway, I want to be forgiving and look past the use of Flash. But the worst thing is it could have gone by without my notice if it didn’t try to middle-click the entries in the list. Because it’s Flash, it causes a scroll cursor to display instead of opening the movie in a new tab!

I am probably not the only person that uses new tabs a lot to compare links. Even if there are only a limited number of people with a middle-click-autism like me, it’s a sad sad sad thing for Kinepolis.

Since I still don’t know which movie I want to see, let’s have a look at what their competitors have to offer.

It was a lot of fun to track Google Analytics last year. Since I started writing this blog in mid 2008, traffic to my one-page site has been increasing.

Have a look at the visitors graph:

Can you tell when this blog was launched?

It’s interesting to see the different implications each post had. For instance, one of the first about uppercasing the first letter of a MySQL result value, has brought 313 visitors to this site (through almost as many search phrases) while the one about a Euro conversion rate feed brought none.

As a side note: close to 63% of these visitors used FireFox.

Besides that, bounce rate is at an extremely high 75%. While this is normal since the only thing this site has to offer is that once specific piece of information someone was looking for, it should be fairly easy to have visitors browse through more than one page.

If time was on my side and I would be short on work, that would probably be a fun challenge!

It’s great to use these experiences in other projects though.

If you live in Belgium, you may get a “private” call once in a while (and no, I do not mean calls from your mistress). I have no idea if it exists in other countries, but these calls appear on your phone with an unknown or hidden phone number.

Some people probably have a solid reason to hide their number and I will respect their choice. But if a business has requested their phone company to hide their number, I am clueless.

Why on earth would they do that?

I have no intention to ever pick up the phone when I receive a “private” call. Never.

If, for some obscure reason, you have such a hidden number and you cannot change it before you start calling, it may be a good idea to leave a voicemail message.

There are some companies (especially in the recruitment sector) that do not get why this may be a smart thing to do. If you are the owner or decision-maker of such a company, I have one small request: please, do everyone a favor and get another job.

Finally. May this be the beginning of common sense.

If Guy Kawasaki (yes, the one from the motorcycles) states:

Focus on function, not form. Mea culpa: I love good form. MacBooks, Audis, Graf skates, and Breitling watches.

maybe others will follow and finally wake up.

Read the rest of his post about bootstrapping here.

Because even the current president of the United States has heard of the economic crisis, I felt the need to hold a small survey with Belgian customers/colleagues/friends about their vision on what is currently happening.

While it is probably still too early to see significant effects, it’s nice to know what entrepreneurs with a similar activity think and experience.

15 people, all self-employed and active in ICT, send in their responses within the first 3 weeks of November. 5 of them are consultants with a limited amount of clients, while 10 run a company with a larger amount of customers. Because it is difficult to compare their experiences directly, I’ve split up the results:

Feedback of ICT companies on the current economic turmoil.

While the larger companies in this group tend to have a better planned long term vision and the smaller ones state to have none, they do not notice a change in their own business nor act pro-actively. A fairly large part of them notices some effect on their clients. Some doubt about hiring new staff, while others think this is the best moment to do so.

Feedback of ICT consultants on the current economic turmoil.

Although the low amount of participants makes it difficult to conclude anything, the result is aligned with companies with a larger amount of customers. Consultants receive a large part of their income from fixed budget projects and thus are not affected immediately. They also state to never plan ahead more than one year. Their clients, outsourcing companies, expect to see major changes around mid Q1 2009 when the current budgets will be replaced with (less) new ones.

I want express my gratitude to the brief and useful answers that were provided. Thank you all!

Please do not feel offended if I forgot to contact you, but do so if you didn’t answer. Shame on you!

I hope you found this useful: please let me know.

As I went through the CSS related books I ordered first, here’s another one: The Art and Science of CSS.

Since this is the first book I ever ordered published by the famous Australian web design/development community I must admit I didn’t expect it to be of the same “level” as an O’Reilly book for instance. But that didn’t turn out to be an issue at all. On the contrary: given the books structure I don’t think they could have done a better job explaining the different subjects they picked.

While the structure is in some way similar to Bulletproof Web Design, this book describes a few different common scenario’s you’ll come across. Although they are not similar to the former, I find them better explained. Where Bulletproof Web Design is suited for a broader audience, this one touches the limits of CSS support in the current browser versions (pre-IE 8).

One section that I found particularly useful was the one about Forms. It basically tells you how to fine-tune to the default Zend_Form set-up many people have been struggling with.

My opinion

I think people new to markup – layout separation, should read one of the other SitePoint books first. After that, The Art and Science of CSS is one you should keep on your desk when crafting XHTML & CSS pages.

Many freelancers and small businesses don’t like to write quotes and proposals. Depending on the project, me neither. I especially dislike getting into it. Once you get going, it doesn’t seem so bad.

In my case one of the reasons is that I like working on actual projects better. Since I have more than enough work to do, quotes mostly just get pushed back to the last hours of the day.

Lyndoman from Cornwallseo doesn’t like them either.

But don’t despair! There is someone who does. Steven from Zion (Dutch) told us multiple times he likes it at least as much as coding. And according to him, if I remember correctly, he has an extremely high success rate of 80% (where mine is below 50%). Being pickier about the projects you accept and the time you put into your quote of course has an effect on this.

But why not start www.IWriteYourQuote.com? The one that writes the quote gets 20% (with a low border for small projects) if it gets accepted. You can end up with something like Elance, oDesk or crowdSPRING, but it doesn’t have to be that big.