According to Timothy Ferriss's book, "when you spend hours completing menial tasks, it actually costs you money" because you could be spending that time doing something more profitable.

So I went on the hunt for some personal assistants to handle the simple questions and tasks that crop up in order to concentrate on the big stuff.

Two of which look more than promising,

Amazon Mechanical Turk

Amazon Mechanical Turk

Amazon Mechanical Turk is based on the idea that there are still many things that human beings can do much more effectively than computers, such as identifying objects in a photo or video, performing data de-duplication, transcribing audio recordings, or researching data details. Traditionally, tasks like this have been accomplished by hiring a large temporary workforce (which is time consuming, expensive, and difficult to scale) or have gone undone.

Nice but annoyingly they only accept US signups :-(

Ask Sunday

Ask Sunday

Personal assistants used to work only for the rich and famous. Not anymore. Sign up and have the site’s virtual secretaries do tasks for you, like schedule doctor’s appointments, set up dinner reservations or give you a wake-up call even if you are on a trip around the world.

$37 gives me 15 request I can use each month any time I need them. Plus they operate in the UK and for new signups offer the first week free. Mention my name to get me a nice discount.

Things look less cloudy already

Matilda is a project of mine that came about from the growing reality that I needed a blogging engine that could adapt and grow to my needs, and in turn use as a teaching tool to develop more manageable solutions.

I'd used Wordpress before for about 3 years, and to a point was happy with the experience but had little control over what I was getting, and whether each upgrade would install ok against the multitude of plugins I needed to have the features I wanted.

I started hunting for more options, Feather looked promising with the MERB engine but still left me with something that wasn't simple to effect and all-you-need solution.

With my previous engine Typo sucking up more server resources than a kid on an ice-cream binge it was finally a time to discover exactly how hard it'd be to build my own, which turned out to be not as hard as I first imagined; in fact it was and still is incredibly exhilarating.

What came out of all this is...

• Something that has every page cached, so it's faster to the user and a one-hitter on the database.
• Sweepers that cleanup when posts, pages, notes & links change; behind-the-scenes and automated so the Admin guy needn't worry.
• Automatic pinging to Google & Pingomatic when a new post is added to boost site traffic and keep google in the know.
• One-step integration to Twitter, Akismet and social bookmarking all embedded in the core without needing another plugin.
• Dynamic sidebars, tagging and multiple categories.
• 404 catchers to track holes in the site, especially when migrating to a new engine so those dead links in google don't infuriate future visitors to your site.
• Quick Notes and Quick Links so you can quickly record anything that crosses your mind before you forget it again.
• A simple Contact form, and all comments moderated & filtered with anti-spam Akismet, so only approved stuff ends up on your site.
• Lightning Fast Full-Text searching with Sphinx and UltraSphinx for quicker searches at little cost to your database engine.
• Prototype replaced by jQuery for quicker load times.

Ok, the entire thing took 3 months of my spare time but in terms of speed and usability it's really tight and such a strong learning tool ;-)

Source Githubbed here

Plus tutorials I've wrote that can help with you're own;

• Implementing RSS & ATOM Feeds
• Implementing Akismet
• Implementing Social Bookmarking
• Textile and MarkDown filtering
• Mongrel Clustering replaced with Thin
• Apache replaced with NGINX

photo courtesy of koller93

Along with all the other things, I couldn't let Digging and Submitting my posts go by without adding a feature for this to the Matilda engine.

The idea was simple, follow what others have done but put it in a way so it's not in-your-face and doesn't detract the user from the content.

So with some googling I found Yoast's Sociable Wordpress plugin, that basically adds a nice social bookmarking bar to all you're posts.

So with some hard work I quickly ported this over from PHP and minimized the JS needed (I really didn't want another js file sitting on my interface and slowing the loading so it had to be dynamic and off of Rails, the pages are all cached so speed isn't a problem).

After which that left me with a clean & simple partial, I then tiend that to Rails 2.1's new Locals feature which allows you to send local variables across as parameters to your partials which made things much more dynamic.

<%= render :partial => 'sociable',
:locals => {:s_url => @article.article_url_full, 
    :s_title => URI.escape(CGI.escape(@article.title.to_s),'.')}%>

Put in some escaping with the URI library, css improvements and you're done.

Spent a little bit of time over the weekend replacing the ReCaptcha anti-spamming filter I was using in Matilda with Akismet mainly because it's a little less in-your-face to the user.

Don't get me wrong, ReCaptcha was good and stopped comment spam 100% in it's tracks but the comments I got back and what I felt about it was that it was a bottleneck in the UI; and it needed to go simply to be easier for the poster.

So some quick research on the subject produced two possibilities, build my own Akismet handler or pop in JFrench's RAkismet plugin, the later being the quicker idea.

All it requires you to have is a Akismet key that can be obtained freely thru a Wordpress.com account. Put that along with you're site's URL into your rakismet.rb file, make the changes to your relevant models & controller and you're away.

So install with;

script/plugin install git://github.com/jfrench/rakismet.git

Next add it to the model's that you'll need akismet against and tell it what fields you've got for it to filter with (in case it's spam);

class Comment < ActiveRecord::Base

has_rakismet  :author => :username,
            :author_url => :url,
            :author_email => :email,
            :user_ip => :ip_address,
            :user_agent => :user_agent,
            :referrer => :referrer

Add the handlers only for the controller actions you need;

class BlogController < ApplicationController
  has_rakismet :only => [:post_comment, :post_message]

This will give you a simple .spam? method you can then call on you're new model object to check whether it's spam. On top of this add to your model extra fields to store info about the user's ip, agent and referrer which you can feed into Akismet and it's filter above to improve your chances of filtering out the bad.

request.env['REMOTE_HOST'] #ip_address
request.env['USER_AGENT'] #user_agent
request.env['HTTP_REFERER'] #referrer

Put all the changes into my Matilda CMS's GitHub repository, do need to add some buttons to clear spam quickly and mark what's ham; but all in time.

The BBC today announced that Matt Smith has been cast in the role of the Doctor in the iconic BBC series Doctor Who. Smith will be the eleventh Time Lord and will take over from David Tennant who leaves the show at the end of 2009. He will be seen in the forthcoming fifth series that will be broadcast in 2010. The fifth series will also have a new lead writer and Executive Producer in the form of the BAFTA award winning writer Steven Moffat who is taking over from Russell T Davies. Moffat will be joined by Piers Wenger who will be the new Executive Producer for BBC Wales making the show.

Following David Tennant's decision to step down at the end of 2009, the team behind the new series set about casting the new Doctor so that new adventures could be created and scripts written with Matt in mind.

The identity of the new Doctor was revealed on a special edition of Doctor Who Confidential that was broadcast on BBC One on January 3rd at 17.35hrs. In it Smith revealed his initial reaction at taking on such a legendary role and his thoughts on what direction the Doctor might now be going with him playing the part. Matt Smith said of his new role "I'm just so excited about the journey that is in front of me. It's a wonderful privilege and challenge that I hope I will thrive on. I feel proud and honoured to have been given this opportunity to join a team of people that has worked so tirelessly to make the show so thrilling.

"David Tennant has made the role his own, brilliantly with grace, talent and persistent dedication. I hope to learn from the standards set by him. The challenge for me is to do justice to the show's illustrious past, my predecessors and most importantly to those who watch it. I really cannot wait."

Lead writer and Executive Producer Steven Moffat said "The Doctor is a very special part, and it takes a very special actor to play him. You need to be old and young at the same time, a boffin and an action hero, a cheeky schoolboy and the wise old man of the universe. As soon as Matt walked through the door and blew us away with a bold and brand new take on the Time Lord, we knew we had our man. 2010 is a long time away but rest assured the Eleventh Doctor is coming - and the universe has never been so safe."

Piers Wenger, Head Of Drama, BBC Wales added "With two hearts, a ferocious mind and over 900 years of experience behind him, it's not every 26 year old actor who can take on a role like the Doctor but within moments of meeting Matt he showed the skill and imagination needed to create a Doctor all of his own. It's just the beginning of the journey for Matt but with Steven Moffat's scripts and the expertise of the production team in Cardiff behind him, there is no one more perfect than him to be taking the TARDIS to exciting new futures when the series returns in 2010."

Ben Stephenson, Controller BBC Drama added "I am delighted to see Matt take on this iconic role. It will see him continuing his relationship with the BBC following his performances in Ruby In The Smoke and Party Animals, and his upcoming role in Moses Jones. The combination of Matt, Steven and Piers will, I know, take Doctor Who onto new and even dizzier heights."

Jay Hunt, Controller. BBC ONE said "Matt Smith will be a mesmerising eleventh Time Lord, true to the spirit of the show. He is a worthy successor to David Tennant who has been utterly remarkable in the role and promises to continue to be in next year's four special episodes."

Michelle isn't too happy, something along the lines of "eww!! he's fugly! I'm not watching that!"

I was hedging my bets on James McAvoy taking the lead, well he did say he needed a break from film.

I hope for his sake David passes on a few of his traits and tidbits as he really made the role so enjoyable to watch.

:-(

Main story courtesy of BBC - Doctor Who News