Agility Recovery Solutions, a Snackbox PR client, offers great information regarding business interruption planning. Read on to learn more.

Paul Sullivan has seen it all. A 25-year veteran of disaster recovery and business continuity management, Sullivan witnessed the growth of continuity planning among the Fortune 1000 in the 1980s. He watched, first hand, the successes and failures of business continuity plans following the events of September 11, 2001 and in 2005 throughout the most active hurricane season in recorded history. Today, Sullivan is helping small and medium-sized companies plan for and recover after significant business interruptions.

“Continuity planning has always been associated with big business,” said Sullivan, Vice President and General Manager, Agility Recovery Solutions. “We’re using the same knowledge, strategies and tactics we developed with the Fortune 1000 and implementing them among small and medium-sized businesses across North America.”

Agility Recovery Solutions, a former division of General Electric, focuses planning and recovery efforts on small and medium-sized businesses, though the company continues to do work with giants such as IBM and HP.

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Information flow. It’s a problem we experience every day, and all too often in this line of work. When information flow is halted, it is as if you’ve jumbled your index cards before a big presentation and now you don’t know exactly what you have to focus on to keep things moving. The path to an efficient workflow and timely completion has experienced a slight disconnect. In this case, you have to fumble through your information and possibly come off looking poorly to your client, which nobody ever wants to do.

So how can you manage information better? As a project begins, the information flow is reasonable; you ask questions and get answers to help you develop the project scope. Email is a great resource because you are given a digital paper trail; however, a lot of time can be spent on the phone gathering information. How do you keep that portion straight? This is where I used to jot notes on scraps of paper and text files, but ended up getting the information jumbled at some point, which usually left me with egg on my face.
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So often you may want to show a little gallery of photos on your blog or website, you have a few choices out there. Choice one would be to just do a down and dirty bit of html, <img src=” etc etc or you could go with a program that creates galleries. Those usually don’t integrate with a site too well, and often are overkill for showing the world your new car, puppy or dinner entrees.

Luckily if you have your FTP program and a few pics handy you can just traverse your directories and spit out the files in code. This can be handy for swapping the files around and even adding more down the road, it will dynamically expand the gallery.

If you want to be slick, make thumbnails with the same name, but tag like tn_ before the image name and put them in another folder, this will allow you to call something like this:

Note: This will also work for files, you can add options to filter only images if you’d like.

If your anything like me nothing is great until you’ve hacked it apart. However with OpenSource software many times your hacks and mods will be overwritten every time you upgrade to the latest and greatest. So how can one combat this task with little to no hacks?

First off let me say that I’m not knocking any software here, I know that people pour hours and hours of their heart and soul into building something that can be used by nearly anybody. But as a seasoned designer I have to gripe about CSS bloat, it’s everywhere, tags nested ten to twenty levels deep sometimes.

So if your using PHP, you can always do what I’ve done using the ob_start method (in fact it’s how I’m building the Acronyms for this site currently).

So if you want to change a few things around, this is a pretty good method to help you avoid hacking core files to an OpenSource application. The code below is what you want to place before your file starts, or your content area if you’re just looking to change some wording.

This site was built using the Wordpress CMS and carefully loved with CSS for your viewing pleasure.

Simple array in place, if you were only going to replace one word on the site you could just surround it with quotes and put it into the echo str_replace function, I find this useful to help remove extra classes and ID’s unnecessary to a CMS, makes my job easier as a designer to keep the Stylesheet well formed.

If your like me at all you have so much on your plate that it can be difficult to keep it all in frame. Over the past few weeks I’ve been trying to get everything under control with my ToDo Lists and such. I have been using several applications and will be giving my notes on them soon.

• Things
• Anxiety
• Schoolhouse (re-purposed)
• GTDTiddlyWiki (cross platform)

As I have been examining my options (and not truly GTD) I have compiled my short list of preferred apps/methods.

Things is the first Application that I decided to try out, it is currently in Public Beta so not all of the features work at the time of this writing. With a good pack of features and collaboration options this will be a great tool for the individual or team. There is also nice documentation and tutorials easily reachable within the interface, this is helpful when you are trying to overcome a slight learning curve.

Anxiety Great app, Mail and iCal integration, lightweight footprint, and can work seamlessly with your Mac if you have 10.5.

Schoolhouse I view this as useful so far as Things, it’s designed with the student in mind but you could easily think of your projects as “classes” and take it from there. With this app you can do set up Tasks, jot yourself some Notes and even attach related files to the “class” like PDF’s, Word Docs & even layered artwork. It has a lot of potential and the developer is planning a new release soon.

GTDTiddlyWiki I have to say, I’m impressed with this method so far above all, extremely light footprint, it’s based on the Open Source TiddlyWiki aimed at the GTD purpose. I’ve been using this for a few days now and find it to be a top contender even stacked against a Desktop Application. I normally prefer an app to a web-based solution but for something that people used to jot onto paper or put in a simple .txt file, sometimes less is more.

With many options out there I’d be interested in hearing how you Get Things Done, and what it finally took for you to get the ball rolling.