Tag Archives: list

Master Data Management links: March

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It’s been a while since I last pulled together a few MDM related links, and I haven’t done it in March before, so here are a few sites I’ve been keeping an eye on lately. There’s a loose theme this month as well; these are a few of the MDM communities that are out there.

First up is a brand new group on LinkedIn. Created by Henrik at the end of February, this group already has 125 members and has immediately sparked some interesting discussions. (The group may be new but Henrik has been blogging for a while.)

There are plenty of other MDM groups on LinkedIn, and I’m a member of a few others, but so far none have really stood out. I’m hoping Multi-Domain MDM maintains momentum after it’s good start.

The next link is a community I’ve been a member of for a bit longer, in fact it featured in my first MDM links post! Dan was one of the earliest MDM bloggers I discovered, and is still posting on the Hub Designs Blog, so I’m not surprised this community is still going strong.

Blogging provided strong foundations for both these communities, and in some respects you don’t really need a purpose built ‘community’ site. An active blog with plenty of posts and discussions is just as good, and I’ve recently been enjoying this one:

And finally, communities are all about people, and that’s what twitter is good at. Lists make it easy to share people worth following and luckily Dan has one already, which saved me creating one myself!

Are there any other MDM communities you’d recommend?

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Remember The Milk Filofax pages

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After experimenting with Remember The Milk a bit recently, I’ve set out on my annual quest to be a bit more organised with renewed optimism… and a little project to put off doing anything on the to-do list! I’m still not ready to go paperless, so I wanted a way to print out the Remember The Milk lists. To start with I had great intentions for not procrastinating, so attempted to just buy the Filofax Print to File software. I still think Filofax are insane charging for software that would encourage me to buy more of their computer paper: I’ve had an unopened pack for ages. Sadly the Filofax UK site is broken so I tried the US site instead, which is when I discovered just how insane they really are. To start with, you can’t use the same ID on both sites, and when I tried to register again they insisted on a US shipping address… erm… for a download?

Oh well, time for a quick and dirty, and free, alternative. Quite pleased that I’ve resisted investing more time in a ‘proper’ tool to print this kind of thing (I really like PocketMod but I just end up with more disorganised with bits of paper all over the place) – saving the Remember The Milk list and a bit of HTML to lay things out, and for some blank to-do pages, was good enough. I also rediscovered a handy hole punch for completely DIY Filofax pages:

I didn’t get the layout to work with a single page, so I just cheated and used a front page:

<html>
<head>
<title>Filofax Personal (front)</title>
<link rel="stylesheet" href="filofax.css">
</head>
<body>
<div class="print-page" id="front">
<div class="filofax-page">
<!-- Page 1 content -->
</div>
<div class="filofax-page">
<!-- Page 3 content -->
</div>
<div class="filofax-page">
<!-- Page 5 content -->
</div>
</div>
</body>
</html>

…and a back page instead:

<html>
<head>
<title>Filofax Personal (back)</title>
<link rel="stylesheet" href="filofax.css">
</head>
<body>
<div class="print-page" id="back">
<div class="filofax-page">
<!-- Page 6 content -->
</div>
<div class="filofax-page">
<!-- Page 4 content -->
</div>
<div class="filofax-page">
<!-- Page 2 content -->
</div>
</div>
</body>
</html>

With a short style sheet for both.

body, html {
border: 0mm;
margin: 0mm;
padding: 0mm;
}
.print-page {
width: 297mm;
height: 210mm;
padding-top: 39mm;
padding-bottom: 0mm;
margin: 0mm;
}
#front {
padding-left: 12mm;
padding-right: 0mm;
}
#back {
padding-left: 0mm;
padding-right: 12mm;
}
.filofax-page {
float: left;
height: 171mm;
width: 85mm;
margin: 0mm;
padding-top: 0mm;
padding-bottom: 0mm;
}
#front .filofax-page {
padding-left: 10mm;
padding-right: 0mm;
}
#back .filofax-page {
padding-left: 0mm;
padding-right: 10mm;
}
.content {
height: 171mm;
width: 85mm;
}

So much for not procrastinating; I think this blog post took me longer than the printing! (The HTML source kept getting mangled by WordPress, hence the place holder comments for missing object tags where the Filofax page content should go!) I’ll book that dentist appointment and get on with the rest of the to-do list tomorrow…