In so doing, I left my Palm Treo 755p behind. And I’m now off the Palm platform for the first time in a decade.  As you might imagine, I had years of contacts and data building up on my Treo.  Critical data which I couldn’t afford to lose and that I had to move over to my new iPhone.  I was worried that this process was going to be full of gaseous pain, but it wasn’t so bad.  Here’s how I moved my data to my iPhone.

1. Sync the Treo with Palm Desktop.  This captures your contacts and calendar data off of the Treo.  In addition, it backups the memos, tasks, and photos.  Contacts and calendar are the most important elements so that’s what I’m going to focus on. 
2. I’m already a Gmail user.  I want to manage all my data with Google contacts and Google calendar.  So…download and install a trial version of CompanionLink for Google.  This will help you get your data from Palm Desktop into Google.  It’s available at http://www.companionlink.com/products/companionlinkforgoogle.html
3. Make some backups before you try the Palm Desktop sync.  Backup your Google contacts and also create .csv backup file of your Palm Desktop data
4. Configure Companion Link for Google for your GMail account, then synchronize.
5. Now that everything is in Google, configure your iPhone to use this data and then use Google Mobile Sync to sync over the air going forward.  Instructions on that are at at http://www.google.com/mobile/apple/sync.html

That’s pretty much it!

And I just read a great post on 10 Free WordPress themes.  There’s some really appealing options in that list.  Despite the fact that we’ve been digging into Thesis lately – we’re using it to rebuild this very site and I recently built Ticketfly’s site with Thesis – and we’re liking it, Thesis is a premium theme that will cost you some dollars. Are those dollars worth it?  That depends. 

If there’s one free theme mentioned in that post that I would personally recommend, it would be Thematic.  Especially if you are building a WordPress site that will have a more traditional page and subpage information architecture instead of posts. 

Here’s I typically put together a post.  Or at least how I should.

It starts with an idea for a post and those often come while I’m driving for some reason.  To capture the idea, I’ll leave myself a voicemail.  Then when I’m at my desk listening to my voicemails, I’ll stick an item on my to do list in Remember the Milk with the label “Blog post – working title goes here”.

But sometimes it comes while I’m reading something online.  In that case I’ll bookmark it in Firefox in bookmark folder called “Blog post research – working title goes here”

(Hopefully you grasp the fact that I’m replacing the term working title goes here with the actual working title)

Then a couple things have to happen.  Sometimes in a linear order, sometimes in parallel.  I need a quick and dirty rough draft.  I open up Windows Live Writer on my netbook or desktop and crank out a quick outline or super fast draft.  I then do some web surfing to find reference materials, photos I might want to use, links to go into the post, and more and save into that Blog post research folder I created in Firefox.  I use the XMarks synchronization system so if I’m switching from my desktop to my netbook, my reference materials are there.

When I need a photo, I prefer to use some a picture that I’ve taken.  But since 85% of the pictures I take these days are of my children, that’s pretty rare.  So I use the Flickr photos search tool Compfight to find a photo with a usable Creative Commons license.

I then take my second pass at my post, expanding the outline into a decently constructed piece of writing while also adding in my photos, hyperlinks, and more. 

Then I walk away.  Or at least I should.  Two hours at a minimum.  Ideally at least a day.  When I return to the post its time for a last iterative read, while also making sure I have good spelling grammar.  To be honest, I don’t do this part of the cycle enough.  With two kids, I’m always amazed when I get anything done, so when I’m done with that second pass, I like to feel good about myself and hit publish.  That is a misatke.

Finally, it’s time to categorize the post, tag it…then hit publish.

Ideally, I perform the “one to four” routine on the post.  After publishing a single post, go leave 3 or 4 comments on other blogs.  There’s a lot of reasons for this.  If you want to know more about that strategy, you should check in with Dave Peck as he’s the one who shared it with me. 

There you go. My blog post writing workflow.  What’s yours?

This is an excellent addition and will help me make decisions on whether the account is legit or not and whether I should reciprocate with a follow.  

That’s where a utility like BigDump comes in handy.

BigDump will help you restore or move a large backup of a MySQL database be staggering the import process into chunks that can uploaded over http.

You can find BigDump at http://www.ozerov.de/bigdump.php

I bring you The Vader Project – an art exhibit at The Andy Warhol Museum (naturally) in Pittsburgh where artists and designer’s reimagine Darth Vader’s helmet

The client?  HP.

The primary goal of the project?  Not to create fun greeting cards for people, but to encourage the use of ink.  The creative process around that project actually explored the use of colors that required more ink.  When you have to use more ink, then you have to buy more ink.  And thats how HP makes money on printers. 

Inkjet cartridges are to razor blades as inkjet printers are to the Gilette sensor razor.  Inkjet printers are a loss leader.  They are a device to force you to go out and buy inkjet cartridges – the product that holds the real profit margins for HP.

Tabbloid is a service that allows you to take a number of RSS feeds that you read regularly and format the RSS content in a newspaper of magazine styled layout that is delivered to you pdf email attachment every morning.  The idea being that you print it out on your inkjet and read it in your breakfast nook while you sip coffee and munch on a bagel. 

When I first saw Tabbloid, I thought it was a pretty unique service.  I still don’t think it’s half bad.  Not for me probably.  But something that I could see catching on with my parents.  And make no mistake, from HP’s perspective this is good business.  A sound strategy.  Provide something useful for people that help your bottom line.  That’s what business should be about.

I do recommend that you give Tabbloid a try.  I’m not exactly sure why it’s important for me to inform you that Tabbloid wants to force you to buy more ink, but it is.

Alternatively, try Feedly. Which is a similar service but with a screen based content delivery mechanism instead of encouraging print outs. 

But in a multi author blog, you can’t use the main RSS feed in all of your outposts.  Facebook is a good example.  Holly imports the feed of this blog into Facebook so they are republished as notes in her news feed.  Biggest problem with that is that it brings in posts I write into her news feed.  I don’t terribly mind, but every once and awhile I write a very personalized post.  Like the one I wrote last week on my most significant tweets ever.  Or when my son Jude was born.  So now Holly’s news feed that goes out to all of her Facebook friends has an item in of my most important tweets.  I’m not sure her social graph is terribly interested in that.

But you can easily remedy this by using the feed of the author archives that are built into the WordPress.  To get to an author archive page for a particular user on your blog, type in http://yourblogname.com/author/username.  You can get an RSS feed of all the posts from the author by ammeding that URL with the /feed.  So it would look like http://yourblogname.com/author/username/feed

Take that feed URL and import into your Facebook profile.  Or setup Twitterfeed with it.  Or tumblr or any other outpost you are building. 

You can see my first 16 tweets using the very cool My Tweet 16 service.

The other big Tweets in my past are from the day Jude was born. 

Going thru the Twitter archives to dig these up wasn’t as easy as I thought it would be.  So moving forward, I’ll be using Twitter favorites to mark the big Tweets from my timeline.

Happy birthday Twitter.  You’re maturing quite nicely.