Everyone knows the best way to stay organized during the holiday season is to make lists. Lots and lots of lists. (OCD? What OCD?) We’ve got lists for home, lists for work…sometimes we’ve even got lists that keep track of our lists. There’s nothing wrong with that. Why, what have you heard?

One of the most satisfying thing about lists, of course, is being able to cross off finished items, and the ultimate evolution of crossing things off is the ticky box. We admit it: we love to tick.

With that in mind, we thought we’d test out some different applications and methods for keeping track of things online – both for the company and for our personal lives (which, lets face it, could use some organization). The three we tested were: a wiki, hosted on our own server; Goplan; and Backpack.

We signed up for a bunch of hosted wikis before installing our own. Some had features we liked, but all had features we didn’t, and eventually we decided it would be a good learning experience to set one up from scratch. We went with MediaWiki, the same back-end that runs Wikipedia. The installation was much easier than we expected; just a little databasing and some configuring and viola.

The learning curve for actually using the wiki was a lot steeper; it uses a sort of proprietary code which limits its functionality, and although we’ve overridden it in places, it’s still kind of a pain to update on the fly. Also: no ticky boxes. We need our ticky boxes! We tried working without them, but it’s just not the same. The lists we put up got updated once and have sat, stagnant, for the past few months.

On the other hand, we found that for things like Christmas lists, (static) link collections and biographies, the wiki is ideal. We’ve added pages for each of us and included picture links for our families, who know our shipping address but are looking for a little inspiration, and have embedded copies of our Google calendar so that anyone who visits can see what we’re up to. We’re in the process of creating link lists to compile all of our various online identities in one place. The wiki is taking off, just in a different direction from what we first envisioned. How much fun is that?

Verdict: great for what it’s great for, but not a to-do list.

We got invited to the Goplan private beta a few months ago. Goplan is a project management service (a la Basecamp) from the folks at Webreakstuff. Although it touts itself as a perfect place to manage everything from party planning to home finances, our first impression was that it would be much more useful for keeping track of business projects than personal projects. We started tracking the behind-the-scenes stuff we needed to do in order to get the business going.

Unlike other project tracking applications, Goplan is relatively bloat-free, which is perfect for a small business like us. We love the smooth interface and the ease of updating; new projects are a snap to create. Also, they’ve just released a developer API, and we’re excited to see what this could offer in the future.

There are some bugs, however, which don’t delight us. These include weird text formatting (it claims to support Textile but doesn’t actually) and an RSS feed which isn’t customizable. The RSS issue is a big one: the feed reports every little change, which makes it functionally useless; after skipping past another “task opened” and “task closed” it’s too easy to miss an actual milestone (as we’ve done several times). These are easy to forgive in a beta. Less easy to forgive? Temperamental ticky boxes. Yes, you heard right. Sometimes the subcategory ticky boxes do not properly tick. Our hearts are still healing from the trauma.

Verdict: Promising, but more business-oriented than personal.

Which brings us to Backpack. (Full disclosure: if you sign up with Backpack using the links in this article, we will get a small amount of account credit. They’re not giving us kickbacks; it’s just an affiliate program. But we will smile like monkeys and possibly do a little dance if credit appears on our account, and isn’t that worth it?) We decided to try it out, since the bottom-tier account is free. Within five days we had upgraded to a paid account so that we could add more pages. And we needed them, since we quickly decided to use Backpack for, you know, everything. We’ve got lists of things we need for the office, lists of ideas for future posts (we actually wrote this post on Backpack’s writeboard), and lists of client-related tasks. But it’s not all business: we used Backpack to keep track of the myriad accessories needed to travel with a toddler when we took our recent vacation.

Backpack’s interface is deceptively simple; the real power is in the application’s flexibility and lack of unnecessary bells and whistles. We can create one list for each page or many; lists and items can be reordered and edited painlessly, and the ticky boxes – oh, the ticky boxes.

In addition to all that, there are writeboards, image collections, notes areas and file uploads, and pages can be shared with individual people or made public with the click of a button.

Everything works exactly as it should. It’s easy to overlook just how much the application is actually doing because it does it so elegantly.

Verdict: We heart Backpack.

Technorati Tags: backpack, basecamp, goplan, mediawiki, wiki, lists, ticky boxes

We’ve been using iPhoto to collect and organize all our photos. Back when we just had a bunch of snapshots, it worked fabulously; now that we’re routinely wrangling not just hundreds but thousands of images, iPhoto isn’t quite hacking it. To be fair, no one ever said iPhoto was the right tool for the professional photographer, but since we didn’t want to shell out the bucks for Aperture, we were sort of stuck with it.

Then, two things happened: we figured out how to disable iPhoto as the default downloader when the camera is connected, and we snagged a copy of Adobe Lightroom Beta.

First things first: turning off automatic importing in iPhoto. When we first set up the computer, we didn’t think twice about using iPhoto as our image-uploading default. Once we got the DSLR and started shooting RAW, we regretted that decision. Sure, it can handle RAW files. Sort of. But since you have to open the RAW files in Photoshop anyway if you want to take advantage of all the format has to offer, iPhoto is not the ideal place for them. Also, once an iPhoto album gets a few hundred images in it, it takes an unreasonable amount of time to load. We like instant gratification. Waiting for iPhoto to get fired up was driving us up the wall.

Turns out it’s the easiest thing in the world to disable this feature once you know what you’re doing. Just open Image Capture (in your Applications folder), choose Image Capture > Preferences and choose another default application. We chose Image Capture itself; it’s quick and snappy, and it has a preset for transferring images to the Pictures folder so we didn’t even have to set anything up. Sweet!

Next, we fired up Lightroom. The dark gray interface coupled with a truly dazzling array of sidebar widgets was a bit daunting at first, but we quickly realized that the options were similar to those in the Camera Raw import screen in Photoshop CS2 – just beefed up and arranged more intuitively. The Library screen, for example, has a “Quick Develop” section at the top right: you can make basic changes to your images right there using common settings such as white balance, exposure and cropping.

You can also continue to the Develop screen, which features all the robust image correction options in Photoshop (Curves, Color Adjustment, Lens Correction, Camera Calibration, and more). This screen also has a clever new feature: at left is a menu of presets which you can mouseover to preview on a thumbnail of your selected image. A similar feature is available for the image’s history. Want to see what that picture would have looked like without the color correction? Just mouseover that entry in the history and get an instant preview. Instant! We love it when we don’t have to wait.

After tweaking your photographs to your heart’s delight, you’ve got several options: create a slideshow, print your images, or publish them to the web. I went straight for the Web screen; we’ve been consistently disappointed with Photoshop’s web publishing features, so we wanted to see what Lightroom had to offer. This is what we came up with: click to see test album.

Everything from the background colors to the company name (you can type your name in or use your own logo) can be customized to blend seamlessly with your site, and publishing an album is quick, simple and painless. As it should be. We particularly like the ability to create a Flash album; it’s ideal for putting together a collection of images from a shoot to show to a client without worrying about resizing images for copyright purposes.

Verdict: Adobe Lightroom Beta kicks ass. Which is too bad, because now we know we’ll have to buy it when it goes out of Beta…

Technorati Tags: iphoto, adobe lightroom beta, adobe, photoshop, photography

We were lucky enough to snag a copy of Publish & Prosper: Blogging for your Business from the folks behind the Blog Business Summit.

Graphically, the book’s lovely: slick and well organized, the type is easy on the eye and the images are crisp and informative. This can be hard to do with screenshots, especially in grayscale, so kudos to the design team. The title page is a clever graphical representation of a browser window, complete with stylized scrollbar. It gets its point across perfectly while not succumbing to gimmicks.

Content-wise, this is definitely aimed at the entry-level blogger. The concept of blogging is explained, and the authors give an overview of popular blogging platforms and the pros and cons of hosted blogging vs. a root install. Useful for the blogging novice, but old hat to many of us.

The chapters on design and getting started are full of good ideas, as well as some questionable ones (“Remember that blogs are meant to be more casual and relaxed,” the authors opine in Chapter 4:Designing for Readers, “and you should use soft, earthy, warm colors like orange and green,” prompting a universal groan from the Web 2.0-saturated blogosphere).

The seasoned blogger will find little useful information in much of this book, which I think is a mistake; lots of us found out about the book from the Blog Business Summit website, which suggests a certain level of blog-related savvy. True, the “Beyond Blogging” chapter has some valuable information on content on demand, microformats and mashups, but that chapter alone probably wouldn’t justify the purchase price.

Verdict: Blogging for Your Business is indispensable for anyone taking the first plunge into the blogosphere; experienced users should wait for the sequel.

The couldbe studios site: almost live. Want to be notified the moment it’s ready to go? Sign up for our handy-dandy newsletter. There’s a link in the sidebar. Nothing is stopping you.

Jumping the gun on our main site launch is the unveiling of our newest service. That’s right, folks – couldbe studios is already producing offspring. Can it be long before we start talking about diapers and preschools?

Like I was saying: Buzzverb launched today! Buzzverb is the answer to your prayers, assuming you pray for good copywriting. Who doesn’t, really? We’re excited, because it means we can flex our writing muscle for creating more than just code.

Since November is National Novel Writing Month, and in honor of our auspicious launch, Buzzverb has decided to bring you 30 days of links to the best writing resources on the web. 30 links in 30 days! Whether you’re doing NaNoWriMo or not, this isn’t something you’ll want to miss.