Matthew Lang

Back when my blog was running on Jekyll, I found solace in the amazing Hyde theme by Mark Otto. Simple, flexible and with a strong focus on the content of your blog.

Due to limitations with Jekyll I switched to Ghost a few months ago. So far everything is going great. The only problem is that many of the themes for Ghost focus on banner sized header and post images.

I ran with the Casper theme from Ghost for a few months. I like the typographical elements of the theme but I dislike the massive banner images for it. I needed a change.

Using Mark Otto's Poole base theme for Jekyll as a starting point, I started building a theme for my blog. The one constraint to the theme I wanted is that it shouldn't use any banner images for any part of the theme.

A few hours later and I have the beginning of a new theme for Ghost.

It's been a while since I flexed my creative cogs. Even though this was just a few hours work, it's still a great feeling being able to ship something. Even if it is just aa theme for my own blog.

The Daring theme for Ghost is available on Github.

I've been faced with this problem over the last couple of weeks. Read on for the answer.

When you are wondering what to do, when you are stuck, caught between a rock and a hard place, the devil and the deep blue sea...

— What to Do? by Nicholas Bate

This has to be the definitive list of books on running a successful business.

There is room for a few more but starting with the recommendations from Curtis is a great starting point.

Give me a project any day of the week.

Projects are open-ended, chosen and ours. Working on a project opens the door to possibility. Projects are about better, about new frontiers, about making change happen. When in doubt, dare.

Your job vs your project by Seth Godin

There are no shortcuts.

There’s no substitute for hours put in. Good work requires commitment and emotional investment. You can try to make shortcuts, but your audience will know. More importantly, you will know.

Do the Work by Project Exponential

Now that we know the basics of a Trello board we can start to dig deeper into the other parts of the board that can help us.

Teams

Teams are a way of organising boards so that they can belong to different groups of people. Teams are helpful for larger organisations so that boards can belong to different departments. The benefit is clear for large organisations but what about individuals like freelancers? Can they benefit from using teams? Of course they can.

When I first started using Trello I lumped all my boards into a single collection. Boards for reading lists, client work, development work and home projects. I needed to organise these boards in a better way so I set up two teams. One for my freelance work and one for personal. Using these teams, I have my boards assigned to the right team and it makes finding boards a lot easier.

Labels

Trello’s labels are a way of categorising cards. Labels consist of an editable name and a colour. When you add a label to a card a small block of that label’s colour appears on the front of the card. Opening the back of the card will show the labels and their names.

Due to the number of boards I am working with at any given time, I find the labels on the front of the cards not informative. To help I use this Safari extension that adds the label names to the front of the card as well. There’s also CSS you can add to your browser through a CSS style extension like Stylebot or Stylish.

Cards by Email

Creating cards in Trello is straight forward. What if you need to create cards for your board without being in Trello?

Each Trello board comes with it's own unique email address. When you send an email to this address it adds a card to the list specified and in the desired position. In the menu of reach board you'll find the Email-to-board settings.

Select the the list you want to append cards to. Then you can select whether you want the cards to appear at the top or bottom of the list. The formatting of the email is simple. The subject becomes the title of the card and the body becomes the description of the card.

During initial meetings with clients, I will use this feature to send cards to the board for that client. Emailing cards to the board saves me having to write up the cards later. Using email also means that once the card is away, I can keep focused on talking with the customer.

These are just some of the ways in which you can get more from your Trello boards.

A question prompted by Nicholas Bate in his Jagged Thoughts for Jagged Times series.

In the New World of Work the relentless quest to get us to communicate and communicate now, most forcefully illustrated with the increasing provision and use of so-called productivity tools such as instant messanging means there is no time to think.

And therefore there is little of worth to communicate.

I've highlighted that last section as it's got me thinking again about the value of Twitter.

I'm finding it difficult to warrant my time spent on Twitter. I rarely do anything on Twitter these days. My biggest gripe is that to gain any kind of audience you need to take part more. Which in turn means tweeting on a more frequent basis. Yet I don't like just throwing anything out there unless it has some thought to it. I could tweet more often but is it worth it? Am I just adding more noise?

Trello is a great tool for managing projects and products. Before we dig deep into Trello though I'm going to do a quick overview of what Trello is and how it works.

Trello revolves around three concepts. Boards, lists and cards. Before we move on further we need to understand what a board is. If we think of a board as a physical object then it's best to think of a Trello board as a drawing pin board. You know those boards you see in schools and universities that display announcements? That's exactly what a Trello board is. It's a place for a collection of related information. This sounds a bit vague but Trello isn't a tool used for a specific purpose.

On the board we can create lists that span the board. You can create as many lists as you need but it helps to keep the number of lists to a handful. By doing this you can fit the whole board in most of the screen sizes you use. Too many lists results in some lists being off-screen and you need to scroll to get to these. Call me lazy but that just seems like such a chore.

Finally there are cards.

These represent individual items of work. It could be a task, a feature, a todo list or a prompt of some kind. The card themselves contain a title and a description. They can also contain checklists, attachments and comments.

This is the basics of the Trello board. We didn't touch on features like calendars, email settings and labels, that's for tomorrow. It helps to have an understanding of the basic building blocks of Trello. It's just three concepts but it helps to understand these before going deeper into Trello.