Another week, another new look for PigPog.

This time, it’s a completely new theme I’ve built, so there’s even more chance that I’ve broken something. It’s all a bit basic, but it feels a bit more like it’s actually ours. I’ve put all the navigation stuff in a couple of reasonably narrow bars on the right, so the content is the first thing on a page.

It’s readable, and shouldn’t be too overloaded with ads, which were two of the problems with last week’s effort. Anyway, as ever, let me know what you think – even if you don’t like it. When it’s a theme built from scratch, it should be a bit easier to change.

Ever since upgrading to Drupal 5.x, we’ve just stuck with the default theme, with just a colour tweak to make it ours. I finally decided to take a bit of time to look at other themes, and found one I quite liked – it’s called Channel Nine (no relation that I’m aware of to the Microsoft thing). I’ve made a few very small changes to the theme, mainly to change the colours.

The idea of a theme without the standard ‘masthead’ top section was quite appealing, and this one seems to cope nicely with different screen widths, too.

As usual, I’ve tried to check things, but I might have broken something – please comment here if you spot something I’ve missed.

The plan we had recently for making PigPog all about Visual Arts wasn’t really working out very well. We’ve not been updating much still, and most of what we have done has been personal stuff, not much more than catblogging. Rather than fight the inevitable, I’d made a few more adjustments to try to bring what PigPog claims to be more in line with what it is.

• We’ve got rid of all the old set categories, and now only have ‘tags’ that we stick to things ‘on-the-fly’. It doesn’t make much real difference, but at least there aren’t a bunch of unused categories listed at the top of the form when we add new entries, taunting us, and saying “These are the things you’re supposed to be writing about”.
• I’ve tweaked the Tag Cloud interface, which should now make a reasonably easy and fun way to find stuff on PigPog. It’s all still a bit time-based, but it’s nice and automatic.
• We’ve dropped the ‘Visual Arts’ tagline. It now just says “Michael and Sam”, which is about as far as we want to narrow things down.

Stuff that we may do different or change in the future:

• We’ll probably try to do more short blog posts, putting more into PigPog than Twitter.
• A new logo would be nice, but I’m not sure what. The current landscape photo was just the first thing that came to mind that matched the colour scheme, and I didn’t intend it to last.

Just a quick update, because I’d like to sleep soon, but we’ve now got all the categories in place as we want them. All the old content is now in the wrong categories, but most of it doesn’t matter anyway. The main section headings are at the top right of each page now – Do, See, Us. The old Photography content has been moved into those pages for now, but still needs a fair bit of work to tidy it all up.

The really big difference for us, though, is that we’re not trying to be a comprehensive guide to anything now. We’re just covering what really interests us. It probably means that PigPog will become a bit more personal home page than it has been recently, but maybe that won’t be such a bad thing. If we’re only writing about stuff we actually care about, we’re likely to write more, and better. It will probably mean more photos, too, since that’s more our area now.

Well, that was certainly a day of big changes for PigPog. I hate doing upgrades to the site, because all it takes is something very small to go wrong, and there’s a lot at risk. It all went reasonably smoothly, considering how much was happening.

• I upgraded Drupal to version 5.x.
• I switched PigPog to use the new default theme, and customised the colour scheme. I always feel a bit bad about not making a real custom scheme, but this way is so easy, and I’d probably never manage to make anything that matches the default theme’s simple but pretty design.
• I’ve moved the content we don’t want to concentrate on any more to a new section, so it’s not using space in the top bar any more.
• I’ve installed a new Flickr module for Drupal, which makes it a little easier to add Flickr photos to posts, and lets us do a few things with blocks too.
• I’ve tried to give GuitarPr0n its own theme back, but only with limited success.

We need to make a new logo still, and there’s a bit of work to do to make the feeds work as they should, but I’m pretty happy with progress.

Summary: Expect PigPog to change around a bit over the next little while – some things will move, and it may start to look a bit different. It’ll probably take a week or so to settle down, but we’re doing a bit of ‘rebranding’. PigPog is becoming PigPog Visual Arts, and tightening its focus to concentrate on less things, but hopefully to cover them better. We’ll be trying to make it a bit more about us, too (Michael and Sam), and putting more of our stuff out there rather than just talking about it.

If you’re interested in why we’re doing this, and what’s likely to change, keep reading…

If you’re at all regular around here, you’ll probably have noticed that PigPog hasn’t been updated very much in recent times. There’s no shortage of things available for us to cover – anything creative is our area. We have reached the conclusion that this is probably our biggest problem.

The Problem

By focusing on such a wide area, we’ve given ourselves some difficulties:

• If the site was really covering a decent amount of stuff in all the different types of creativity we claim to cover, the stuff on the front page would flow past so fast you’d never see it all. We’d be overflowing people’s RSS readers and getting new content all over their carpets.
• We’re not experts on much of this stuff. We don’t mind covering stuff we’re not really expert at, but we’re trying to cover stuff here that we’ve never tried and have no experience or knowledge of at all.
• If we’re being honest, we’re not even interested in some of these things. Neither of us really have much interest in a lot of the craft stuff we’re trying to cover, which probably makes our writing on the subject truly awful. You’d probably rather read about stuff from someone with some passion for it.
• Even if we were interested, and knew about all this stuff, we just wouldn’t have time to keep updating the site. We both work full time again now, so we only have a limited amount of time to put into the site – especially if we’re going to actually do anything creative rather than just writing about it.

Possible Solutions

So, what to do? We spent some time considering our options, and we had a few ideas:

• Keep the site as is, but get more people to help out with it. Other people could take over covering some of the stuff we know nothing about, and we could keep doing some of the stuff we can do. The difficulty here is finding people who want to spend their time writing for our site, without wanting anything much in return. Then we’d have to manage them and keep track of who was doing what and when.
• Drop the Craft section. This is the biggest problem area for us, so losing it would reduce the problem a lot. We’d still have much too much stuff to cover, though.
• Narrow the focus to just the things we’re really interested in, while keeping a few other ‘side projects’ on the go in another section. This feels like the best choice for us right now.

Change of Focus

What’s the focus going to be? Well, we kind of already gave it away in the summary at the top, but ‘PigPog – Creativity Anywhere’ will be changing to ‘PigPog Visual Arts’. Our biggest area will probably be photography, but touching on other stuff like drawing and painting (so I still have an excuse to go on endlessly about pens).

Changes

The changes will be happening bit by bit, and may take a while to complete. We’re not organised enough to have any sort of test or staging environment for PigPog, so you’ll see the changes as they happen, probably including a few tries at things that don’t quite work out.

• We won’t be deleting much, if anything at all. The content we have now in areas we don’t intend to cover in future will still be here, just not quite as easy to get to. We’ll have a link at the top of the front page to get to the ‘other stuff’.
• URLs shouldn’t change, at least as far as we can avoid it. If you have any articles bookmarked, the bookmarks should still work just fine.
• Our personal stuff – blogs and photos and such like – will come out front a little more. We’ve been hiding a bit, which doesn’t make much sense when PigPog is really about us and what we’re interested in.

Upgrading

We may take the chance to have a go at upgrading the software PigPog runs on, Drupal, to the latest version while we’re doing all this. If you arrive and see blank pages, or database errors and such like, that’s probably why. Just try again after a little while. We’ll try very hard not to break things for too long.

The Future

Well, we don’t really know how things will work out, but we hope this will bring PigPog back in line with what we love doing, which should make it fun for us again. That should mean we actually enjoy updating and adding new stuff.

Update: Almost two years later, things didn’t work out for Sam, but I’m (pigpogm/Michael) still working at Cult Pens.  We’ve kept expanding, and it’s a lot of fun.  The move to Devon has been great for both of us.

Regular readers will probably have noticed that many of our pen reviews mention and link to Cult Pens. At first, we just happened to buy some pens there, and linked to them because we liked the pens and the shop. Soon, they started giving us a little discount on our purchases in return for the linking, then they started sending us a few freebies to try out (always disclosed in the review). Well, the relationship is about to change a bit more.

Things aren’t fully settled yet – there’s an office move that’s trying to happen alongside it all – but all being well, as of the end of December, we’ll be working at Cult Pens.

Yes, both of us.

They’re hoping to move into new offices in Tiverton, Devon, and will be needing some help when they do. Between now and then, we’ll be moving from Nottinghamshire to Tiverton, into a house we need to find and rent. We have a lot to do. Probably not as much as Simon and Amanda, though

So, what does this mean for PigPog? Not all that much, we think. PigPog will still be our site. We’ll still review pens, but now we’ll have access to a lot more of them. We’ll probably be a bit short on time for a while, with the move and new jobs, but things should settle down soon. I’m sure Simon and Amanda won’t base our performance reviews and pay reviews on how positive our pen reviews are. You’ll have to decide for yourself if you still trust our opinion on pens once we’re selling them for a living, but we’ll still try to be honest about them – we don’t want to sell crap pens.

For us personally, this is going to be a huge change. We’ll be working together as well as living together, which should be fun (unlike some married couples, we like each other). We’ll be moving from here to Tiverton, renting a new house, buying some new furniture, and taking two cats on a four hour drive to some new territory. We’ll both be starting new jobs, and dealing with an office move at the same time.

Things we’ve been holding back on recently…

• We had a trip to Tiverton a couple of weeks ago, and met up with Simon and Amanda for a cross between a meal out and a tag-team job interview. Much better odds than most interviews, though – two of us against two of them
• We’ve not reviewed any Cult Pens stuff, because it didn’t seem fair to post a review without mentioning that this was going on, but at the same time, we couldn’t really announce anything until it was a bit more settled.
• The UK is getting official supply of the Pilot Capless Decimo – a thinner and lighter version of the Capless fountain pen. Cult Pens has the first stock in the UK, as an exclusive. We’ll be doing a review very soon. After reading lots about the Capless, I’m looking forward to getting to actually try one.

Oh, and we’ll still try to talk about things other than pens.

Occasionally.

Last Update: Added a link for Gretchen (one of the people who helped create the PigPog Method), to her new site – Girls Can’t WHAT? – inspiration for girls who can.

This article describes how I actually implement the GTD system using my iPaq and Microsoft Outlook, though it could be done just as well with almost any computerised lists. It’s my solution to the GTD problem of linking next actions to their project. If you don’t know what GTD is, you’d probably best start with my introduction. If you do GTD, but use paper and pen, have a look at MarkTAW’s Cascading Next Actions method – similar, but designed for paper users.

GTD is all based on David Allen’s excellent books. You’ll get far more from reading the books than from any web site.

• From Amazon US: – Getting Things Done, Ready for Anything.
• From Amazon UK – Getting Things Done, Ready for Anything.

Introduction

This article covers how I implement the GTD system – there’s quite a few other ways, which you may want to look at before reading this one.

The Problem

There’s a few problems that people have with GTD…

Actually Doing Things

GTD is great at organising what you have to do, and keeping you on top of everything, but if you don’t actually do any of the things, it’s only of limited help. Anyone who knows me could vouch for the fact that I’m probably not the best person to advise on that

If you really want my thoughts on it, see my post on GTD’s Dirty Secrets.

Weekly Reviews

A lot of people resist doing the weekly review. It’s pretty much vital for GTD that you don’t skip weekly reviews, but it’s a problem for many people. My system reduces the impact of missing one a little, but only a little. By making the review a bit easier, though, it might make you resist it less. It might not, but it’s worth a shot.

Connecting Projects to Actions

Ah. This is the one for the PigPog Method. This we can help with. Read on.

The PigPog Method

Background

I should point out before I start that the PigPog Method was produced through a long discussion between quite a few people on the GtD_Palm Yahoo! Group. It’s by no means all my idea, and in fact even the post where I started it all off was just me pulling together a few ideas I’d picked up from the group. Too many people to remember had valuable suggestions that, put together, made this method, but special thanks should go to James Cameron, Gretchen, Ricky Spears, Harold (I think?), and Teri Pitman.

The Basic Setup

Personally, I implement this using Outlook Tasks, but you should be able to apply the PigPog Method with almost any setup. It wouldn’t be a convenient system with paper, though, it really needs a computer of some sort. I’ve used the same system in the past with Palm PDAs and an iPaq hx4700. Both worked well.

For the most part, my lists are pretty close to the standard ones David Allen recommends. I keep any non-action stuff in the Memos / Notes, rather than Tasks, so Someday/Maybe goes there. My @Action lists are…

• @Anywhere
• @Home
• @Internet
• @Other
• @Waiting For
• @Work

There’s also ‘Agendas’ at the bottom of the list, for things I need to speak to somebody about.

What? Where’s the Projects List?

David Allen says we need a Projects list to keep track of all of those things we need to do that will take more than one action to be complete. That way, when we have ticked off the first action on that project, we won’t forget about it altogether. However, these things will only get picked up once a week at the weekly review. There is the risk that you’ll end up forgetting about something for up to a week, that really needed doing before. Also, I always found the ‘projects’ part of the weekly review to be annoyingly difficult and time consuming. For every project on the list, and it can be quite a few (David reckons 40-70 is common), you have to search for a matching action on one of the six (in my case – however many you have) @Action lists. If you don’t find one, does that mean you just didn’t look carefully enough, or is there really no action in your lists for this one? How do you know it when you see it? It’s not so bad if you look at the project and can remember what the next action was – then you will probably know where to look for it, and can make sure it’s there pretty quickly. If you can’t remember what the next action was, though, you could have a tricky time trying to find one.

In the PigPog Method, we get rid of the Projects list entirely. In a computerised system, it’s just not needed any more, and keeping track of it is a big waste of time. Using the example we used when forming the method on the GtD_Palm group, if your project was ‘Conquer Albania’, and the first action was ‘Place Army Wanted Ad’, the item on your tasks list would be Place Army Wanted Ad {Conquer Albania}. Your project and its associated next action are there together on the one line. This item goes in whatever @Action context list it belongs in. If you are going to place the ad on eBay, it would go in your @Internet list. Once you’ve placed the ad, you just edit the item to Responses to Ad {Conquer Albania}, and move it to your @Waiting For list.

Planning and Keeping History

If you like to plan your projects a bit further, you can put planned future actions in the notes for the task, and just copy and paste them into the subject line when you’re ready. I use a template that I inserted using Pop! (costs a little) on the Palm. You can also use TeikeiDA (free) if you know enough about Palm DAs (Desk Accessories) to be able to deal with the Japanese documentation (or if you can read Japanese), or use Shortkeys Lite (free) for Windows. Anyway, the template…

>=Outcome=
>
>=Plans=
>
>=History=
>
>=Notes=

Outcome is a statement of the desired outcome – how we’ll know when the project is complete. I’m actually completely hopeless about filling this in. Plans is for any actions planned in the future. History is for actions that have been completed, or notes of things that happened that were connected with this project – I timestamp these using another Pop! (or Shortkeys Lite) shortcut. I keep less history now than I used to – it wasn’t something I used often enough to need it, but you may be different – if so, remember to copy the information to somewhere else if you purge your completed tasks. Notes is for any other information. In the case of things like these blog entries, the notes will contain the actual article as I’m working on it. This is being typed into the Notes section of an Outlook task entitled Write {Blog: GTD: PigPog Method} right now. That way, all my work in progress is always with me in my Palm, ready to be worked on anywhere.

Advantages

The biggest advantage for me is that I never have to worry about projects not having a next action. I’m forced to think about what I’m going to do next with a project before I can update the system to the fact that I’ve just done something. That helps to keep things moving. I’m slightly encouraged to do more than one thing, as that saves changing the item as many times. The Weekly Review is less daunting, because the hardest part of it is automatically taken care of. There’s one less list to look at. When I find the item that says that I should write a blog entry about something, the notes from when I brainstormed about it are right there in the task item. When I come to review and proofread one I already wrote, the written article is right there ready.

Disadvantages

There’s only really one major disadvantage to this method – there can only be one next action. If you often have the sort of projects where you could do several different things next, depending on where you are when you have the time and inclination, this may be a problem. There’s nothing to actually stop you from sometimes making a separate action that isn’t physically attached to the project, but if you have to do that a lot, the PigPog Method may not work well for you. When you’re new to the PigPog Method, there is also the danger that you could tick off a whole Project on ‘auto-pilot’, when you only intended to tick off the action. To work around this, you can keep completed tasks visible, and purge at the end of each week, so everything gets an extra check before it’s actually gone. This also gives you a second chance to copy any history you want to keep to the calendar where it won’t get purged.

Conclusion

I find the advantages greatly outweigh the disadvantages, but then again, if I didn’t, I wouldn’t be writing this at all, would I? It takes away a lot of what I found unpleasant and difficult with GTD, and makes it all feel much more fluid. I’m a born fiddler, and I do keep trying different methods, but the simplicity of the PigPog Method has lured me back every time.

So far.

Other Resources

GTD Wannabe has made some macros especially for doing the PigPog method with Outlook – I’m honoured…

• Outlook Macro for Starting a PigPog Task
• Outlook Macro to Duplicate Tasks – I actually did this manually for a while – duplicating the task so I could check one off and keep better history – but it didn’t seem worth the effort in the long run. With a macro to do the work for you, though, it could be a good way of working.

Latest Update: The date is set – see the bottom of the post

(It’s no good – I can’t wait until tomorrow to post this – our anniversary is actually on the 13th…)

Personal stuff ahead, and it’s all mushy – you might want to skip this one if you don’t like that sort of thing.

In case you’re not aware of it already, PigPog consists of two people – I’m Michael, and my partner is Sam. Today is our anniversary – she’s been with me for ten years, and it seems like a good time to explain just why I love her so much, and why she’s so important to me.

Friendship

I once said that our relationship was more like Bill and Ted than a ‘normal’ couple – we’re best friends before anything else. We get on well together. So well, that in ten years, we’ve never really had an argument. Can you believe that? Two people who get on so well that they could be together for ten years, and never really argue? Well, it’s true. We just love to spend all of our time together, at home, out and about, anywhere. We’ve never run out of things to talk about, things to laugh about.

Humour

We’re silly, and it’s a pretty good way to be. We can spend hours just being silly and having fun together, even with nothing much to entertain us. Sam has a wonderful sense of humour – full of strangeness. There’s things we find joy in that nobody else would, and that’s a great thing to share. The delight of seeing someone yawning whilst driving in the other direction to us. The joy of seeing a dog having a poo in the morning.

Support

Sam has always been supportive to me. She’s helped me out in any way she can for as long as I’ve known her. When my work got tough, she supported me through it. When I crashed our car, and it was written off, she helped me to get everything sorted out. When my work became too much for me to deal with, she encouraged me to quit and look elsewhere for happiness. She even wrote my resignation letter for me. I think if I’d hesitated much longer, she’d have caught the bus there and delivered it for me, and that would have been unpleasant for all concerned.

Now, she goes out to work to bring in money, so I don’t have to. I don’t go to work any more – I just stay at home and work on PigPog, and whatever else I want to do. We don’t really know how long we’ll be able to manage to keep this going financially before the money runs too low, but could anyone give a better gift than not having to go out to work?

When we were both working, we made a reasonable amount of money. I usually wanted to spend it on new gadgets and toys. Not only did Sam never stop me or complain, but when I had trouble finding somewhere that stocked the VGA iPaq I wanted, she rang around shops until she tracked one down, and ordered it for me.

Creativity

PigPog is all about creativity, but long before it was, Sam was. Her creativity inspired me as much as anything else to relaunch the site as it is now. She plays and enjoys playing more than almost anyone I’ve met.

So Why…?

Yeah, I know what you’re thinking – if all this is true and she’s so damn great, why haven’t you married her yet? I think Mil Millington explains it pretty well…

>What is it with you Americans and marriage? You seem to have some kind of confusion that makes a ritual inseparable from the thing it announces. I’m sorry to be the one to break this to you, but if you don’t have a funeral, you’re still dead, OK? No, we’re never going to get married. And we’ve spent the money it would have cost us on a loft conversion.

It’s not that we don’t want to be attached, it’s just that we’re happy to be together without any legal or religious matters getting involved.

We like to stay together because we choose to be together, not because a divorce would be too much like hard work.

We kind of like things the way they are.

Oh, never mind.

If you’re still reading at this point, you probably are Sam. (And if Sam got bored and stopped reading a couple of paragraphs ago, I guess I really blew it.)

And this may be my one and only chance to be as geeky as CmdrTaco.

So.

Sam.

kneels

I love you.

Will you marry me?

(Oh and if she says ‘yes’, does anyone know a good howto for making a ring? We need to do this thing creatively)

Update: See the comments – she said yes! W00t. So, we had to go shopping today. Turned out she didn’t want something made from soldered guitar strings. I guess I have a lot to learn…

[image:1331]

Update 2: She doesn’t hang around. The wedding is now booked – Monday April 24th, at 11:30.