The Board is a tool for scheduling project teams. Add projects, add people, then drag the people around from project to project and week to week.

The Board is inspired by the magnet board used to schedule the ballpersons staff at the US Open, where I worked for several summers during college.   I’m not sure who originally invented it, but it’s been in use for years at the Open, and is one of the most effective team planning tools I’ve every seen.

Demo

Download

Code: http://svn.wrkng.net/public/theboard/

So I gave Vienna a try, and found that I didn’t totally love the interface there, either. Vienna does offer a range of reading themes to choose from, but no single one felt just right. Lucky for me, they also allow you to write your own, using HTML & CSS.

In the end, I adapted the Broadsheet Clipping theme (originally posted by Arthur Veugelers) to my liking. The result, below, is a quick first pass — the first picture is the original Broadsheet Clipping theme, and the second is my adaptation.

Above: Broadsheet Clipping theme

Above: my adaptation, Broadsheet Wide

I wanted to make the headlines really pop for easy scanning, so I went with full-width headings, more spacing between stories, and I deemphaized the byline.

If you like it, you can download the theme here. To install, simply unzip and move the folder to /Library/Application Support/Vienna/Styles, then restart Vienna.

I’ve been using Backpack for several years now to manage my personal & business info. It’s pretty handy indeed.

As some of my backpack pages have grown, it has become difficult to keep track of all the items on each page. I found myself wishing for an automated table of contents, like the one in MediaWiki wikis. Unfortuately, no such feature exists in Backpack. Bummer!

So, I whipped up a small Greasemonkey script to do this for me. Here’s how it works:

• Install the Greasemonkey Firefox extension if you don’t already have it
• Click on this link — Backpack TOC Greasemonkey script — and click “Install”
• Update: OR grab the script directly from userscripts.org (Thanks, Whit!)
• Now, when you are viewing any backpack page, you’ll see an automated table of contents at the top of each page that contains four or more items. Each item in the TOC provides an anchor link to the corresponding element.

This is just my first pass, so it’s not perfect — one known limitation is that the TOC doesn’t update dynamically as you add or remove items from the page; you’ll need to reload the page to see the updated TOC. I am not sure how to hook into the add/delete events — if anyone wants to help with that please drop me a line.

Enjoy!

• Demo
• Download (Zip)
• SVN

Coming soon: more documentation and examples…

Overview:

• Compatible with Wordpress 2.5
• Widgets-friendly
• Very simple

Known issues:

• Currently only supports tags, not categories. This should change in future versions.

Download:

• Download Undesign v.0.1 (ZIP)
  
• SVN