Anton Zolotov

Doing

December 12, 2009

Are you ever in a situation where you have so much to do, you don’t know where to start and you really don’t want to do it? Sit down and make a list. Make the items actionable, concise, and concrete. Use verbs. OmniFocus is a great application for that, and it’s worth every penny. Then, [...]

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Two Great Tools for Scheduling Meetings

December 12, 2009

I hate meetings because they are mostly a waste of time, but sometimes you can’t get around them. Here are two tools that make scheduling meetings much easier: When Is Good and ScheduleOnce. Both work based on the same principle: the meeting organizer indicates the times he is available, sends invitations to all invitees, who [...]

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Going with Shopify

December 10, 2009

We recently made the decision to go with Shopify as our e-commerce platform for “Food for Champs”. I evaluated several platforms, such as Magento, xtCommerce, osCommerce, Volusion, as well as separate shopping cart apps such as FoxyCart in conjunction content management systems. I got hooked on Shopify because it makes sense. It was developed by [...]

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Why Basecamp and Campfire would be a Better Learning Management System

December 9, 2009

I use Basecamp from 37signals to manage all of my work-related projects, as well as some group projects for college, and I grew to love all of their products in one way or another. At our university, we use Blackboard as a Learning Management System, and I can’t say that it’s good at all. In [...]

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Dear Professors

December 7, 2009

Stop using bad PowerPoint. No student wants to go to class and stare at 40 consecutive slides with 30 paragraphs of full blown text on them while listening to you read half of it out loud. Yes, we notice. When we want to read, we get the book. If you want us to read, use [...]

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The Secret to Learning How to Program is…

December 6, 2009

… knowing where to look. This is not really a secret. The thing is that you won’t get anywhere if you don’t know your way around a system or programming language. Instead of trying to learn everything as you go along, buy a couple of books instead. For example, if you want to learn how [...]

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Assigning “first” and “last” to Blueprint CSS classes in Ruby on Rails

December 5, 2009

I sometimes use the Blueprint CSS framework for development. The problem is that if you want to generate a grid using Blueprint or similar frameworks, you have to assign a class of “first” to the first element in each row, and a class of “last” to the last element in each row. This is a [...]

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Be Nice to Everybody

December 5, 2009

One day, I was parking my car on the main road of our campus, and I didn’t have any quarters to pay for the meter. I asked one of the vendors for a couple in exchange for some $1 bills. He said “NO”. Not “I can’t because I don’t have that many left and I [...]

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