Cool Tools

I'm a member of Burt Lum's Bytemarks Yahoo group/mailing list. Lately there have been messages flying around about Ruby on Rails, an "open-source web framework that's optimized for programmer happiness" (and so on). I say it has to be good, if they use copy like this!

Anyway, one of the list members sent us a link for 37signals.com, which has a suite of productivity applications written in Ruby. I started playing around with Writeboard and Ta-da List this morning.

Writeboard is a collaborative writing tool you can use to compose documents as you would in applications such as Micro$oft Word, except it's free! And it saves all previous versions of your document for you! And you can send anyone a link to your Writeboard project and have them make edits or comments, and you don't have to get confused about which version is the latest version or combining one person's edits into another person's edits... and... it's free! This tool would have been oh so helpful that year when I got to be in charge of collecting everyone's revisions for my former employer's annual report - ha ha ha.

Anyway, so there's Writeboard, and then the other thing I started to play with too is Ta-da List. Basically it's a tool you use to make and store to-do lists that you can keep all to yourself, or share them with other people. Oh yeah, and this one is free too.

So I'm using Writeboard now to create and store the copy I plan to use on MochiKids.com (coming soon) (how soon, I'm not sure, but for now just enjoy the little people jumping around and winking and blinking at you), and Ta-da List to create lists to keep all my Writeboard links organized and easily accessible to me.