The book will have two parts. The first part concentrates on the basics of email, web hosting, websites, and file storage. The second is an overview of the major types of online service, what those services do, and how they might benefit a freelancer or a small business. If you’re struggling with getting your email or website set up, or if you’re looking for a better way to manage some aspect of your business, my book is for you. And most importantly, it will be free.

The second draft of my book is finished, and it’s in the hands of a couple of beta readers at the moment. I’d expect that the final draft will be available within a month, once I’ve had time to collect some feedback and make any changes that come out of it. If my book sounds like it might answer a pressing question of yours, and if you’d like to be one of my beta readers, please get in touch. If you’d rather wait for the final book, stay tuned.

When you run the exporter on a Mac, the output file will be saved to your desktop.

Thanks again to Josh for getting this running, and for sharing the info.

If you’ve used Status Board, and especially if you’ve written your own content for it, please let us know about it in the comments.

I’m not going to say a whole lot about it apart from the fact that it’s in free beta and it’s really easy to set up. Getting started with Handsome Stats is a matter of creating an account (username and password only), and then signing into your Google account and authorizing Handsome Stats to view your Analytics data.

What you see once you’ve connected your site to Handsome Stats

Like I’ve said, Handsome Stats isn’t about giving you full access to every last piece of information from Google Analytics. What you’ll see, though, is the most important basic information in there (number of visitors, top pages, browsers and traffic sources, bounce rate and a few more things) in a clean and attractive layout. If you’ve got someone to dig into the details for you, or if you’re someone who does details and wish you had a nice way to show that key information to, say, your boss, then this might be the answer for you. And like I say, it’s free, so why not go check it out?

You can choose to export subtasks and comments or not  If you do choose to export subtasks and comments, your export will take longer than if you choose not to export them.  If you get an error message that includes the phrase ‘The remote server returned an error: (429) Internal Server Error‘, then you’re trying to export too much stuff at once.  Try again, selecting fewer projects.  And yes, I know that’s annoying, but it’s a limitation imposed by Asana’s API.

Finally, my usual information about special characters and choosing your delimiter applies to this version as well:

Just a reminder that the exporter produces its output in tab-delimited form, not comma-delimited. This is to prevent problems if you have commas in the name or notes field of your tasks, but it does mean that your stuff will look funny unless you specify the correct delimiter. In Excel, you can do that a couple of ways – by importing the CSV file  or using Text to Columns. (These options may not be applicable to whatever spreadsheet program you’re using.)

If your project names or notes include any special characters (such as á, í, û and so on), please make sure that when you open the CSV file, you set the encoding to UTF8 so that these characters can be displayed properly.

You can download the tool here:  Asana Exporter GUI 20130330

If you have any questions or comments about the exporter, or if you’d like to get in touch with me for some other reason, you can do that here.

One final thing.  I’ve been told that people might like to donate for the exporter.  So I’m making that option available, and if you would like to donate, feel free to do that.  Don’t think I won’t be appreciative, because I will be.

One: exporting task comments is slow, especially if you’ve got a lot of tasks. There’s no way around that – it’s the way the API works. If that changes, I’ll update the program, but for now, it’s going to take time. If you’ve been using Asana for a while, and you’ve got a lot of comments, then I’m talking enough time to go make yourself a cup of tea. It does work, though, so be patient and let the exporter do its thing.

Two: Subtasks and comments will be exported, one to a row, below the main task. The first column for a subtask will be “<main task name> subtask”, and the first column for a comment will be “<main task name> story” (that’s what Asana calls activity on a task).

Three: it’s optional. If you don’t want to export this information, just don’t check the boxes to export it.

Finally, I just want to remind you all of two things: this is PC-only software (sorry, Mac users – I’d write you a version, but I don’t have a Mac, and also I’d have to pretty much write one from scratch), and it exports your data in tab-delimited format. So if you’re seeing one big column rather than the several columns you want to see, go to Data – Text to Columns, choose Delimited, and then choose tab as your delimiter (or do the equivalent thing in your spreadsheet program of choice).

All right, that’s it. Hope you find it useful, and happy Easter to you all.

Update:  This version caused some people to hit Asana’s rate limit.  It could happen to you too.  Go here for the latest version, which will let you select which projects to export.

This is what you see when you sign into Hojoki for the first time (using your Facebook or Google credentials, or by creating an account the old fashioned way). It might seem intimidating, but that’s because Hojoki is all about connecting services that you already use into one great mash-up, and then adding a few nifty tweaks to the formula.

Connecting web apps to Hojoki

Once you’ve added some services, you’re brought to your dashboard. Like Asana, Hojoki’s main organisational unit is the workspace, and when you get to the dashboard for the first time, you’ll already have a workspace waiting for you. Your new workspace will have all the info from all the services that you’ve connected to Hojoki. If you want more info, connect more services (Hojoki supports a fairly odd range of services at the moment – everything from Basecamp to Evernote to Google Apps to Producteev and Trello, and presumably there are more on the way). Your default workspace is a private workspace (which is good, because it includes all the info from all your apps), but you can create as many other workspaces you like if you want to work with people. When you add apps to a workspace you’ve created yourself, you can choose to add some or all of the apps that you’ve connected to Hojoki, and you can choose what information should be included. For example, if you’ve connected Evernote to Hojoki, you can choose which of your workbooks to share in your newly created workspace.

A workspace in Hojoki

Now, Hojoki wouldn’t be listed here as an alternative to Asana if it didn’t include task management. In fact, it does include task management, but not as you know it if you’re an Asana/Do/Producteev refugee. You can create a task that’s related to any item in your workspace by scrolling down to it and clicking Add Task, or by clicking the New button to the right of your activity stream and choosing Create a new Task. If you create a task using that latter method, it will create a task that isn’t related to any of the items in your feed, but the task will still slot right in your feed. You can assign tasks to members of your workspace (or to ‘all’, if they apply to everyone), and if you’re the organised sort, you can apply tags to tasks.

Creating a task attached to a calendar item

Once you’ve created tasks, you can comment on them in a fairly standard Facebooky way, and you can also click a task’s title to bring up more options, like the ability to mark a task complete. It’s all relatively basic, but also relatively straightforward and pleasing to use.

So, who’s it for. Big business? Hard to say, but I suspect not. Freelancers? Maybe, but not if you’re looking for a solution that will help manage your time and billing. But for personal projects, family projects and collaboration with small groups, Hojoki has the potential to be great, especially if you’re already a heavy user of some of the services it supports.  And what’s great about Hojoki, in my opinion, is the way it doesn’t bundle in services you don’t need.  Use something? Great – connect it to Hojoki.  Don’t use something?  Fine – you don’t have to see it, because it isn’t there.

Hojoki’s in free beta till the 15th of April. After that, you can choose a free account, or a paid account for $5 a month. Free accounts limit you to 5 full participants in your workspaces (although you can have unlimited guests with read-only access), and paid accounts let you have unlimited full participants.  And good news for the app lovers out there – Hojoki already has apps for iOS and Android (sorry, Windows Phone users – you’re out in the cold again).

On a related note, if you’ve been thinking about Do, now would be a good time to try them out.  Now that their API is up and running, they’ve rolled out integrations with a bunch of popular web apps, including Dropbox, Google Drive, Wufoo and Harvest.  If you haven’t heard of Harvest, it’s a time tracking app.  Now, I haven’t tried out the integration with Harvest myself (if you have, I’d love to hear what you thought of it), but I’m still pleased to see that Do is adding some smart new features.  And if they even hint of an integration with Xero, they’ll really have my attention.

Meanwhile, the folks at Asana have also been busy putting out a new feature.  Hearts.  Yep, now you can ‘heart’ a task, just as you’d like a Facebook post.  No word on export, timers, or an improved API, but if you’ve been pining for a trivial, one-click interaction that doesn’t actually require you to use words, Asana’s got you covered.

I’ve looked at a lot of task managers that specialise only in that one thing, but I’ve been talking to a couple of people recently who really need more.  Task management, for them, is all very well and good, but what would be better would be task management and CRM and invoicing, or task management and project management.  You get the idea.  So I’ve been looking into tools that provide a little more than just straight task management, and one of the things I tried was Skylight.

Skylight bills itself as ‘an all-in-one productivity app’.  It’s got a pretty long list of features, and task management is one of them.  It does project management, quoting and invoicing, time tracking, contact management and more.  For a lot of small businesses, this is probably a pretty comprehensive feature set, although if you’re looking for project managment tools like Gantt charts, Skylight can’t help you.

Creating a new business

The first step with a new account is to create a new business or get invited to an existing one.  If you’re used to any other task manager, this may seem quite weird.  Creating a new business is very quick, but configuring it is a lot more involved.  If you’re reasonably organised, though, you can get through it without too much time or suffering.  You can import lists of companies and people into Skylight from a CSV file, which is really handy as long as whatever you’re using to keep track of that info lets you export your data.  Otherwise, be prepared for a long session of entering data.  Long, but not difficult – if you get stuck at any point, the Show Me How tab at the top of the screen will offer you step-by-step assists though many of the tasks you want to accomplish.  This is important, as you’ll see.

But if you’re on this blog, you probably don’t care too much about that.  You’re here for the task management.  Well, Skylight does that pretty nicely.  Adding tasks is more difficult than it needs to be – the form is fine, but to get to it, you either need to navigate through several layers of the (fairly irritating) pop-out sidebar menu, or click the very stealthy little plus button next to All Tasks and My Tasks.  Not a problem if you know where to go, but this could have been much more obvious/streamlined.

Adding a task

Collaboration isn’t Skylight’s main feature, but it is there.  Inviting someone to Skylight is fairly straightforward – just add their name and email address, set the level of access you want them to have (there are four levels, from Administrator down to Client) and then send the invite.  The person you’re inviting will be sent an email that will invite them to create a Skylight account, and once they’ve done that, they will be given the option to either create their own business or accept your invitation.  Once they’ve accepted the invitation, they’ll need to click the very unobtrusive ‘Your Businesses’ button to be taken to the screen where they can choose to go to your company’s collaboration space.  Like so many other things about Skylight, this works pretty well, but not very elegantly, and some people may find the process confusing (Or at least, I tested this with my partner, and she found it confusing).  So if you’re using it for clients who aren’t very tech-savvy, you might want to send clear instructions of your own explaining the process before you send the invite.

Things aren’t a whole lot better once your collaborators log in.  You can assign tasks to them, and they get notifications of those tasks, but they won’t actually be able to see them unless you’ve added them to the project that those tasks pertain to.  And in fact, if you assigned tasks to them before you added them to the project, they’ll never be able to see those tasks, even after you add them to the project.  That had me stumped for some time, although I eventually figured it out, but it wasn’t a great start to my adventures in collaborating with Skylight.  Things did improve from there – it’s easy enough to comment on tasks, reassign tasks, and generally collaborate.  Uploading files and attaching them to tasks is another game of find-the-button, but it does work, and includes handy options like importing Google Documents.

Entering a block of time

One bright spot with Skylight is the time tracking.  Firstly, it exists, and secondly, it’s relatively robust.  You can either use the timers to track exact time for a task, or you can enter time in blocks.  Both systems work well enough, although the timer display doesn’t actually tell you which task you’re tracking (although presumably you’d remember which one you are working on, but still, another design failure for Skylight).

Adding time with the timer

Another major distinguishing feature for Skylight is the reporting.  Sure, adding a new report starts with the usual game of find-the-plus-button, and the next screen, where you choose your report type, is a little intimidating (and there’s no tutorial for reports, which would mitigate both of these issues), but things do get better from there.  You can choose to make a standard report (presumably useful for monthly reporting), or one that pulls live data at the time of viewing.  You can set any number of filters for your data, and choose what data to include in the report from a relatively nice drag and drop interface.  It’s not always clear from the field names what data you’re actually getting, though, so a little trial and error may be required.

Creating a new report

Once you finish creating a report, you’re given the option to save it, and then taken to view the report.  As you can see from my screenshot, I didn’t bother setting up any fancy headers and footers in my testing, but I’d imagine you could get a relatively nice result with a little work.  Saved reports can be printed, or exported to PDF or CSV.  If you’ve been using a task manager that doesn’t do exporting, this will be an exciting feature.

A finished report, ready for printing or exporting

The major downside (interface issues aside) is the lack of integration.  I use Xero for accounts, but Skylight doesn’t integrate with Xero (or anything else, for that matter), so actually getting information from Skylight to Xero would be painful at best.  And they don’t have an API, either, so there’s no option to write your own integrations or use something like Zapier.  It’s manual export or nothing.

On the whole, I wouldn’t really recommend Skylight.  It’s an interesting enough product, and it does have some nice features.  If the things that are most important to you are time-tracking and reporting, or if you’re looking for something with a bit of a CRM, you should probably at least have a look at Skylight.  But for me, the awkward interface was a big strike against Skylight, and the lack of both built-in integration and an API sealed the deal.  It might be worth revisiting if either of those things changes, though.  And if you need the features, give it a shot.  What’s confusing and frustrating to me might be perfectly sensible to you.

Used Skylight?  Love it?  Let us know how you found it in the comments.