One of the most common needs when setting up a new web server is sending email. The safest and easiest way to do this is to connect your server to a mailing service such as SendGrid or Amazon SES. Using an external service will help you avoid pitfalls like your server IP getting blacklisted by anti-spam services. I’ve written a full tutorial over at DigitalOcean covering exactly how you set this up on your FreeBSD droplet.

After nearly a decade of working jobs doing geek stuff sitting in front of a computer all day, I started developing lower back pain. Even being active off hours wasn’t enough, so I caved and talked my boss into a GeekDesk v3. However, now that I’ve moved on and am part of a small startup team working from my home office, that’s just not a purchase I was ready to justify again.

First and foremost, I highly recommend that you download VirtualBox and Vagrant to bootstrap a development server on your Mac. That being said there are times when you’re doing a simple test or tutorial and you’d like to be able to run PostgreSQL on your local machine. I’m writing this as I found setting this up on OS X 10.10 Yosemite to be a bit of a pain, since a simple homebrew install didn’t do the trick for me.

Brett Terpstra’s interview with Rory Vaden was a gold mine, I highly recommend a listen. Here are a couple pull quotes in no particular order that I thought were nothing other than amazing: Successful people and top performers at some point learn to do the things they should be doing even when they don’t feel like doing them. This is very true. Many of the people that inspire me, are great at this, and it’s really hard to be great at doing things you just don’t feel like doing.

I decided that I wanted to be one of the cool kids that could do daringfireball.net style quick pull quote + commentary posts. Problem: My custom theme’s CSS just left pull quotes looking like plain indented text… blah, blargh, barf. I don’t pretend to be a designer today, but I want things I make to minimize eye-bleeding whenever possible. I gave myself a timebox of 15 minutes to find a workable solution and here are the fruits of that labor:

Rest begets awareness. Awareness begets prioritization. Prioritization begets caring. Caring begets achievement. This is Eddie Smith at his best. It’s also some of the best advice you can follow, but it’s really hard and seems counterintuitive at times.

I’m pretty excited about my new job that I’ve been at for about three months now. One of the great parts is the allowance for on the job time to beef up my coding skills. I wrote about the entire journey for our “Inside iDoneThis” blog; go check it out here.

Losing your favorite photos, your entire music collection, or your most important documents is something none us want to experience, yet there are still so many of us that either have an inadequate backup strategy or none at all. I’ve written a full tutorial over at Tuts+ covering exactly how you can protect yourself with Amazon S3. Check it out here: How to Backup All Your Files to Amazon S3

Mind mapping is a great way to capture your thoughts and organize them visually. By planning with a mind map you promote creative thinking and avoid forced linear thinking. And yet, mind mapping often ends up being a buzzword, with little explanation by what it means and how you’d go about making a mind map. I’ve written a full tutorial over at Tuts+ covering exactly how to get started with mind mapping.

nvALT is a powerful and fast note taking tool. It’s great for keeping running lists and creating reference documentation on–the–fly, and is absolutely essential to my daily workflow. I’ve written a full tutorial over at Tuts+ covering many tricks from tagging, markdown preview, Simplenote integration, and more. Check it out here: Superpower Your Note Taking Skills With nvALT and Simplenote