5 for Friday

A name, like money, doesn't exist in the same way my hands and mouth do, but to treat names as simple identifiers instead of the textual embodiment of a whole person would put every human relationship I enjoy in peril.

From Paul Ford writing at the Ftrain. Read the whole post here.

People at the top of every profession share one quality — they get things done. This ability supercedes intelligence, talent, and connections in determining the size of your salary and the speed of your advancement.

Despite the simplicity of this concept there is a perpetual shortage of people who excel at getting results. The action habit — the habit of putting ideas into action now — is essential to getting things done.

From John Wesley at PickTheBrain. Read the full post here.

Company that I work in does some fantastic practices. I’ll give you one example.

We are publishing house, and our final clients are readers. Where do readers get our books? Of course in the book-stores! So every month we go to the book store (the biggest one in Moscow) and work there for 2-3 hours as a book consultants. We talk to customers, recommend them books. But understand me correctly - of course we recommend our books a bit more (because we are sure of their quality), but also we recommend ALL good business books even if they are published by our competitors.

This process involves all the people from the company, even our directors take part in it.

From Dimitri Linkov writing at Dimitri Linkov.

I’ve created a WordPress plugin which creates an iCal feed from your blog posts. It creates a calendar which can be added to pretty much any popular website (such as Google Calendar) or application (such as Microsoft Outlook).

I built this because I wanted to see when I made my WordPress posts, in a more graphical interface. I already used Google Calendar, so I would have loved to see my posts right in my calendar.

You can do that with my plugin - no configuration necessary! Just download it from me, upload it to your server, and then activate it in your WordPress plugins page.

From Gary King writing at King Gary. Read the remainder of this post here.

More than a year ago, I made a list of what I considered the 6 essential elements of a website widget in these web 2.0 days. It’s a simple list, but nonetheless I’ve used it multiple times when developing widgets, and it has in most cases helped to increase gains from pushing a widget. I then wanted to write about these 6 elements, but as with many of my other posts, I’m slow at finishing it.

From Stefan Juhl writing at Stefan Juhl. Read the full posting here.

Enjoy!