adhese blog

The guys from 37 Signals were mentioned in Time Magazine. Cool! But apparently not in the European version. Couldn’t help noticing this quote from Jason Fried.

First, kill all your meetings; they waste employees’ time. "Interruption is the biggest enemy of productivity," he says. "We stay away from each other as much as we can to get more stuff done." Use asynchronous communication and software instead to exchange information, ideas and solutions. Next, dump half your projects to focus on the core of your business. Too much time and effort are wasted on second-tier objectives. Third, let your employees decide when and where to work so they can be both efficient and happy. As long as their fingers are near a keyboard, they could as easily be in Caldwell, Idaho, as in Chicago.

I guess 37 Signals does not need an introduction. Most people have at least tried one of their tools. We at Adhese have been using and enjoying Basecamp (project management) for a while and have been testdriving Highrise since the day it was released.

37 signals’ ‘keep it simple’ philosophy is great!  Tools that  are easy to use, contain the features and flexibility you expect (and nothing more) … what else could you ask for? Every now and then you run into glitches, but hey, they are solved quickly and small updates keep rolling out. Everything is clearly communicated through their blog.

Highrise allows us – as a small company – to track and manage our contacts in a fast and simple way. I know there are probabely a dozen other solutions that offer a dozen more features, but we don’t need them. The power of 37 signals’ tools is that they strip their specs down to the essentials. And it is all about these essentials. Anyway, if you have a small business like us, or if you want to do some personal project or contact management, you should try these products.

Pricing is on a monthly basis. You could discuss hours on the price they charge and how they determine the price, but let’s skip that, I don’t feel like it. The apps do not require maintenance or updates which saves us time. We at Adhese have a pretty strict philosophy on this. Don’t spend time maintaining other applications – it is a waste. If you would compare highrise’s price to an hour of work … .

What a task. Selecting a blog platform for our little blog. A couple of months ago we agreed that we needed a blog. Ok, first things first, a blogtool. We created a Wordpress.com account and that was it. Last week we found some time and so I started the blog.

One sidenote: Under no circumstance were we going to host the blog ourselves. We want to avoid the use of tools that need maintenance, we are 4 men strong and we can’t waste time updating and ugrading followed by converting and downgrading and cursing and loosing time. No way, discussion closed. We have our own services that we want to concentrate on.

Back to wordpress, nice interface, easy as 123. I was posting in a matter of seconds. Until suddenly I realized that we wanted to show ads that run on Enchanté … bad luck, wordpress.com does not allow javascript in the text widgets. Ok, google for a workaround … nopah, no workaround. I mailed the support team and explained our situation, they answered quickly, but the only solution (apart from hosting ourselves, but … discussion closed) was VIP Hosting, which we did not consider for a small blog like this .

Ok, next step. We created a Typepad account and tested the Pro solution – which we would need – Typepad seemed ok, but I had two remarks:

1. It seemed a bit slower  (and pinging the server confirmed this).
2. I was no too excited about the interface.

These two remarks made me test a third possible solution … Squarespace. And so far so good. So far we can do everything we want, it is affordable and the UI is ok. We’ll see.