1) Was frustrated by Google’s further cluttering of its search results by forcing Google Plus items into the results

2) Read Gruber’s Article about Bing now being a possible contender, but that he uses Duck Duck Go

3) Went to Duck Duck Go and searched for the first thing that popped into my head, cheese fries.

4) See the fourth result is for chilicheesefries.net, an empty domain page.

5) Never use Duck Duck Go again.

Ok, so maybe this was a little extreme. But for all the whining people do about Google (myself included), no other site has ever come remotely close in terms of delivering accurate search results.

Ingenious video from the folks over at Salesforce promoting their new task management product, Do.

I’m a sucker for task and project management apps, so I signed up a few seconds after watching this. First impressions are great, though a little sad how much they ripped off the current system I use, Asana.

From Jay On Software

Everyone knows the routine, get to work by 9 AM, sit in front of the computer, code all day, and head home at 5. Now, thanks to guys like Tim Ferris I have started to re-think how I work and what makes me productive as a software developer.

Recently, I made some big changes to my Monday to Friday schedule. For a long time, I did things just like all of the other coders I know. But during the second half of 2011, I started experimenting to see what type of daily schedule makes me most productive.

I love detailed schedule posts like this, and I think there is a lot to like about this schedule.

The main takeaway I get from it is the four hour programming block. I always knew (or assumed) that blocks of 100% programming, with no interruptions whatsoever, would be helpful to development. I never really realized how true that really was until I started experimenting with the Pomodoro technique. This basically involves making time slices of 25 minutes where you work on a single task, without interruption.

So I made a macro using the wonderful Keyboard Maestro app which takes my email offline, quits twitter, and sets my IM status to Away. And I get an amazing amount of work done in those time periods.

I bought my first house just over two years ago. I brought far too much furniture, clothes, and saucepans. I did not, however, bring my cable subscription.

Partially, it was because the cable was installed in an odd place in the living room. But that was just a tiny reason, the small excuse I needed. The amazing thing? For someone that enjoys television, I haven’t really missed cable at all.

I’ve missed it during the Oscars, the Super Bowl, and one time when my mom visited and she wasn’t able to watch the Cleveland Caveliers play.

What have I gained? Well, to start with, something in the range of $2500. Cable is amazingly expensive, even with a basic package, when you include the “necessary” add ons in this day and age, such as high definition and HD DVR boxes.

I’ve gained an amazing amount of free time, I’m sure. I still watch shows every other night or so, but there is no such thing as sitting down and zoning out in front of the television. I always have to sit down with a purpose.

My son is growing up without a television. The movie room is downstairs, which he doesn’t use (yet). He has an iPad, but only watches or plays with it for maybe 30 minutes each day.

This Wall Street Journal article sums up my thoughts nicely:

I mean, come on. How many shows about housewives are there? I like chefs, but I don’t need to see them on television 24/7. Ghost hunters? Dancing celebrities? Talent shows? “Shark Week”? Celebrity ghost-hunting talent shows during “Shark Week”? It’s too much of too little. You’re full of a lot of inescapable crap.

There’s no question that plugins are one of the strong benefits of using WordPress as a CMS.

It’s also one of its biggest challenge. Due to the fact that, in my experience, WordPress.org has never once updated their mess of a plugin directory, it can be difficult to find the best plugin. Nearly everyone wants a SEO and caching plugin on their site, but it’s hard to determine the best one (or ones) without some fairly detailed research.

Unfortunately that often leads people to just grabbing and installing a mass of plugins, or simply choosing poor plugins. All of this can have a pretty terrible effect on a site’s load time.

This article does some testing on a popular group of plugins, highlighting how much these plugins can impair a WordPress site from running smoothly.

I’ve found this to be a challenging issue to discuss with clients. They will ask me to speed up their site, and while you can go ahead and squeeze a lot of optimization from caching, image compression, efficient themes, etc, it can often come down to one plugin that causes all of the slowdown issues.