Below is a video of how I put the grocery lists together using nvALT, TextExpander and Markdown. Right after the video I’ve included a full transcript.

Here’s a quick video showing how I create and store my weekly grocery lists using nvALT, Markdown and TextExpander.

As you can see from the list I’ve been keeping grocery lists in nvALT for some time now. I use the groceriesx tag (this technique is cribbed directly from Merlin Mann), which is invoked using the TextExpander shortcut ;gx to start the name of the file in nvALT. The rest of the file name is the date I create the list, so I just use the ;ddate shortcut to get a full day, month, year date. After that I’m ready to create my list.

We’re a family of habits, so every week we have a list of food staples that we always buy. There’s no sense in writing out this list (or risking forgetting something) every week, so I created a TextExpander snippet that contains the latest list. I invoke this snippet using the ;staples shortcut. That completes a Markdown formatted bullet list of the staple items and then creates a new bullet and cursor positioned there so I can continue the list.

One our habits for better eating and lower grocery bills is to only go shopping once per week and try to buy everything we need. This means that we need to plan out a week’s worth of meals in advance. It’s handy to have that meal list stored with the grocery list. I can refer to the meals while I’m at the store and also have an archive of what we’ve eaten in the past. This is nice if one week it is a challenge to decide what to make as a meal.

To create the meal list, I use the TextExpander shortcut ;mmeals and it outputs a week calendar of meals, starting on Sunday. We eat leftovers on the second day so each meal covers two days.

Typically, we shop on Saturdays and plan our first meal of the week for Sunday. If we decide we want to make the first meal on Saturday, I have a separate TextExpander snippet that is invoked with ;altmeals and returns a meal calendar starting on Saturday instead of Sunday.

That’s how I manage grocery lists with nvALT, Markdown and TextExpander. Thanks for watching.

If you liked this video, you should also check out Mijingo’s videos on Markdown, OmniFocus and Evernote. Let Mijingo help you learn something new.

Here at Mijingo, a typical one-hour training video—from the initial brainstorming to the final exported video—could easily take 30-40 hours of work. The result of that work isn’t always a giant tsunami of sales or critical acclaim. Some products sell better than others. That doesn’t mean it isn’t good work or that there aren’t people out there whom the video helps to learn a new topic. Success, however you define it, isn’t a thing…it’s a series of things put together.

Here’s Aaron’s inspiring talk:

Running a business like this requires several different tools working together to make it happen so I don’t have to spend time doing tedious manual work and can actually use the time I have to create the learning materials and generate revenue for the business.

I’m the only one running this business. It’s just me. I don’t do Mijingo full time, so I don’t want to waste time doing tasks that can be automated or are better suited to a tool or software built by someone else.

Some tools I have used since I started publishing tutorials in 2008, others I’ve abandoned along the way in favor of new tools, and some I’m only just trying out.

Here is what I use to power Mijingo.

E-commerce: FastSpring

In August 2010, I launched mijingo.com as my storefront for training materials. This marked the release of my new ExpressionEnigne video series and shortly thereafter an ebooklet by Mark Huot. Prior to that launch, all of my videos were sold through the wonderful people at The Pragmatic Programmers. They handled all of the e-commerce, order fullfilment and downloading.

Since I was now selling the videos myself, this was all on me. As part of the launch I had to handle everything from product listings, shopping cart, checkout and payment processing and fulfilling the orders with downloadable files. Sounds simple, right?

My main goal was to sell screencasts. Building a custom e-commerce system would’ve been nice but not a good use of resource at the time. That’s why I chose FastSpring as my e-commerce provider.

FastSpring is a full-service e-commerce system that can power your store and host your downloads. It was just what I needed. Why did I choose them? I saw that Loren Brichter of Atebits (now part of Twitter) used them to sell his popular Tweetie app. I guessed that if he used them then they paid on-time. That’s all I cared about. That was good enough for me.

With FastSpring in place, instead of spending a few weeks putting together my own e-commerce system I spent the time creating a simple site and a couple of products. And then I started selling them.

A year-and-a-half later, I now realize I need to update the e-commerce system and move to something in-house. I want more control over the features and functionality. I want to keep more of the money.

FastSpring won’t grow with me in terms of what it costs to use the service and sending all of my customers to a different site to finish their order. I want to try to unify the experience as I think about building other ways for customers to access the videos beyond just downloads.

I don’t regret my decision to use FastSpring in the beginning. It mattered a lot that I focused on creating products and generated revenue for the business.

Project Management: Basecamp

I’ve been using Basecamp since it first launched. I use it every day at work and for Mijingo. I don’t take advantage of all the tools offered in Basecamp (like to-do lists) but like that I have one central place to communicate about projects and interact with authors.

Previously, I experimented using Google Docs and Google Sites for an intranet. It didn’t work for what I needed. I also tried using 37signals’ Backpack service. It was just too limited and expensive for the setup I needed compared to a basic Basecamp account.

The new Basecamp that was recently launched by 37signals fits better what I need to manage my small projects. The new single page project is exactly right. I immediately moved all my projects over to the new Basecamp. I gladly give them my money every month.

Outreach and Community Service: Campfire

Since September 2008 I’ve hosted a weekly ExpressionEngine Help Chat. The one-hour public chat is free and gathers together people who are new to ExpressionEngine and those that have a lot of experience. It is an open forum to ask questions, get help, learn about new tools and ideas and chat about whatever comes to mind.

I host this chat using the Campfire service by 37signals. I chose Campfire because it’s easy to use, can be used in a web browser and allows guests. I rarely use Campfire for anything else at Mijingo. But running the EE Help Chat is more than worth the annual cost of the service.

Customer Support: Google Mail

When I first launched Mijingo.com in 2010 I needed a way to handle customer support. I really didn’t have any experience with customer support systems. I didn’t know what I needed and I didn’t know what was available.

One of the tools that I did hear about was Tender. Tender is an online-/email-based customer service tool. It allows you to handle support requests as public or private tickets. I really liked Tender but it became too much work for me to manage the support tickets. Most of the time all I needed to do was reply to an email with a short snippet of text or to let someone know that I reset their download URLs for a purchase.. Using Tender in this way became too much of a hassle for me so I canceled.

I was having an iChat conversation with Garrett Dimon (he created the bug tracker Sifter) and we are talking about different customer support tools. Garrett said that if it’s just a single person doing customer support then there’s no reason you can’t use just email. Plain, old, boring email. He was right!

So, I moved my support to a simple email account. I have a form on my support that generates an email. No fancy ticketing system necessary.

Video Production: Final Cut Studio, iShowU, Screenflow

The original launch of Mijingo.com was on a tight budget, so I needed to produce the videos using tools that I could acquire for as little money as possible. When I did my original screencasts through The Pragmatic Programmers, I only had to record the video and audio using iShowU. I sent the raw videos over to the publisher and my friend Mike Clark was in charge of putting them together into the final product.

Doing the videos on my own meant that I was now responsible for all of the production work.

For the first series of videos I did over the Summer of 2010, I recorded the video and audio using iShowU and then edited them together in Screenflow. At first this seemed like a good idea but I quickly hit the limits of Screenflow with the amount of small edits I had to do. I also experienced a difficult time exporting the videos and at one point I thought I wouldn’t be able to launch on time.

With my lesson quickly learned, a couple of weeks after launch I purchased a new Mac Pro and a copy of Final Cut Studio. Eventually adding a second cinema display, I now had a machine and software powerful enough to handle the video editing tasks.

Both purchases were expensive but were directly funded from screencast sales and immediately put to use to create more screencasts. I still use the software and hardware today to create training videos for Mijingo.

Invoicing: Harvest

Since Mijingo is mostly a product company, I don’t do much invoicing. There are two scenarios where I do invoice: after a training class and monthly for advertisers on EEInsider.com.

For the invoicing I’ve been using Harvest. It’s a great service for time tracking and invoicing. At Mijingo I’ve only ever used the invoicing feature. There are dozens of other invoicing apps out there but I like Harvest. It’s simple and fun.

For EEInsider.com advertisers I have recurring invoices set up that I send every month when it’s time to renew an ad run. The advertisers get a nice email with the invoice and can pay via PayPal with one click.

Code Hosting and Deployments: Beanstalk

There’s not much more to say other than I love Beanstalk. I store the code for all of my websites there in Git repositories and use their deploy tool to push changes out to my server. I like Beanstalk because it’s serious about version control, a good experience and realiable deploys. It doesn’t try to be social or cute. It doesn’t try to pretend to be my friend.

Each site has two server environments set up: production and staging. Typically, I’ll have automatic deployments set up for the staging server (triggered by a git push) so I can quickly test out updates. Deployment to production is a manual deploy.

Web Hosting: EngineHosting

EngineHosting handles the hosting for everything I run online: my personal site, EE Insider and Mijingo.

I’m running on their new, snazzy, virtual server clusters and it’s really good. This site recently got fireballed and the site barely slowed and was never unavailable. I didn’t even have to switch over to a static file I created just in case.

The people at EngineHosting are smart and helpful. I can’t recommend them enough.

Finances: Quickbooks Online & CPA

Let’s get this out of the way: I hate QuickBooks. But the more I use it the more I realize how powerful it is. This was especially true during tax time when I had to gather numbers for my accountatnt. Click, click, click. There we go. Before QuickBooks it would take me hours to retrieve the same information.

Speaking of accountants: get yourself a good one. I found my current accountant through a referral from a friend that I trust.

An accountant won’t necessarily be inexpensive. What I pay my accountant to do my tax return (personal and Schedule C for my LLC) costs me the equivalient of about 5 hours of my time. It would take me and my pea brain much longer than that to do the tax return myself and I wouldn’t be making decisions or asking questions that are best for my business.

Paying a CPA to do your taxes is expensive but it’s not just about the tax return. It’s about the relationship. You never know when you’re going to need that person’s advice on something important. I’d rather have that relationship than not.

Legal

Get a good attorney you like. Don’t just pick one out of the first page of Google search results. Get a recommendation from a friend or another business owner. I asked a friend here in Austin for a referral. She asked her family attorney for a recommendation. This person put me in touch with someone she trusted that did small business law. My attorney is great and I’ve even recommended him to the friend who recommended to me the accountant. We’re even now.

Up until this point I’ve only used my attorney for incorporating in the State of Texas. But just like with an accountant it’s all about establishing the relationship. When you find yourself in need of advice, you’ll be glad you have someone you can trust.

So, that’s it. Those are the ins and outs of how I run Mijingo. Of course, the biggest part of running Mijingo is my time. A lot of it.

Going forward I am going to try to add transcripts to as many videos in the current catalogue as possible.

Up until this point, any effort by Twitter to eliminate spam seems to be not working (although it would be much worse if they did nothing), so a lot of the effort of finding and banning spammers is left to us, the users of Twitter. Depending on how much Twitter spam you get, this could be an annoying–and time consuming– task if you were set on reporting each and every spammer that replied to you. For some, the amount of spam takes the edge off the fun of using Twitter. For others, it's just unusable.

What happens when you report a spammer?

Per Twitter’s support documentation, the offending user is blocked from following you or replying to you and the account is added to the queue to be reviewed by Twitter. Twitter notes: “You may not immediately or definitely see this account suspended.”

I’ve used several different Twitter clients on OS X and iOS. Here’s a run-down of some of the clients and how many taps (or clicks) it takes to report spam. Some are better than others as you’ll see. All but one of them fall into either 3 or 4 clicks/taps to report a spammer.

To test the path to reporting a spammer, I used each of the applications and first searched for “iPad” and then reported the first spam tweet I saw.

Here’s the full report on a group of apps and the clicks or taps required. The full description of each app’s interaction is below the table, in the same order. Note that I have listed some alternative paths to reporting based on feedback from wonderful people on Twitter. Also, on iOS apps I count a tap to scroll as a tap. I don't count moving the mouse on OS X as an action.

Twitter.com

This is the same as other Twitter products, like Tweetdeck (they use similar web interfaces). It takes 3 clicks on Twitter.com to report a spammer.

1. Click on the name or avatar on the offending tweet.
2. Click the user icon menu.
3. Choose “Report [username] for spam”

Twitter iOS

From the main timeline, it takes 4 taps to report and block a spammer.

1. Tap the tweet the offending tweet.
2. Tap the user box at the top.
3. Tap the User (icon) menu.
4. Tap “Report Spam”

Alternatively, you can right swipe the offending tweet and choose the User menu, which brings you to Step 3 above. You still need to tap the User menu and “Report Spam.”

Tweetdeck

From the main timeline, it takes 3 clicks to report and block a spammer.

1. Click on the avatar of the spam tweet.
2. Click on the User (icon) menu
3. Click “Report [account name] for spam”

Twitterrific OS X

From the main timeline, it takes 3 clicks to report and block a spammer.

1. Click on avatar of spam tweet.
2. Click on Actions menu
3. Select “Block” and click

Or you can right-click on the avatar of the offending tweet, choose “Report as Spam” and then confirm. Still, three clicks.

Twitterific iOS

From the main timeline, it takes 3 taps to report and block a spammer.

1. Tap the offending tweet’s avatar.
2. Tap the Actions menu.
3. Tap “Report Spammer”

Or you can tap and hold on the avatar of the offending tweet, choose “Report as Spam” and then confirm. Still, three taps.

Tweetbot iPad

There are two ways to report a spammer in Tweetbot for iPad. Only the first is show in the video.

From the main timeline, it takes three taps to report and block a spammer.

1. Tap on avatar of spam tweet.
2. In the navigation bar at the top tap the (/) symbol.
3. Tap “Report for Spam”

You can also use the shortcut in Tweetbot to access actions on the user.

1. Tap and hold the user's avatar
2. Tap to choose “Report for Spam” option
3. Tap to confirm

Tweetbot iPhone

From the main timeline, it takes 4 taps to report and block a spammer.

1. Tap on avatar of spam tweet.
2. Tap to scroll down to bottom of screen.
3. Tap “Block or Report as Spam” button.
4. Tap “Report for Spam”

You can also use the shortcut in Tweetbot to access actions on the user.

1. Tap and hold the user's avatar
2. Tap to choose “Report for Spam” option
3. Tap to confirm

Echofon OS X

From the main timeline, it takes 4 clicks to report and block a spammer.

1. Click on username or avatar of offending tweet.
2. Click on gear menu.
3. Choose the “Report for spam…” option
4. Confirm the report by clicking “Report for Spam”

From the @ replies tab, you can report a spammer with only 3 clicks. Right-click on the offending tweet, choose Report Spammer, and then confirm.

Echofon iOS

From the main timeline on the iPhone, it takes 5 taps to report and block a spammer.

1. Tap the offending tweet.
2. Tap the user name
3. Tap to scroll down to bottom of view.
4. Tap “Block”
5. Tap “Block & Report Spam”

If you are on the iPad, there's no need to scroll, so it's only 4 taps, not 5.

Hootsuite

From the main timeline, it takes 3 clicks to report and block a spammer.

1. Click on the name or avatar of the offending tweet.
2. In the user window, click on “Report Spammer”
3. Confirm the report by clicking “OK”

Twittelator

From the main timeline, it takes 4 taps to report and block a spammer. I tried this using the free version but was prompted to buy the paid version of the app when I tried to block the spammer in the fourth step.

1. Tap the avatar of the offending tweet.
2. Tap the “Mute / Block / Notify” option
3. Tap “Report as Spammer”
4. Assume you must confirm here.

Hibari

It takes 3 clicks to report and block a spammer. I used a trial of Hibari to test this out.

1. Right click on the offending tweet.
2. Choose “Report as Spam”
3. Click “Report as Spam” button to confirm the spam report.

The Single-click Report

Only one application I’ve read about allows single-click reporting of spam. Dr Twoot by Dr. Drang. The app is available on GitHub, so you can download it and give it a try. In the README for Dr. Toot, it says:

Dr. Twoot provides one-click spam reporting.

Well, there we go.

The one-click spam reporting is a recent addition to Dr. Twoot (added in February 2012) and after a reporting mentions are removed from the Twitter stream and the offending tweet is crossed out.

What's a Click or Tap?

There are different types of clicks or taps. For example, the shortcut on Tweetbot to report a spammer is still three taps but those taps are all in the same view. It doesn't require loading new views or scrolling. Those taps are, arguably, better taps than the ones that move you through app views.

You Got a Better Tap?

If you have a better path to reporting spam for any of the apps above or have an app that does a great job at making it easy to report spam, let me know on Twitter.

OmniFocus is the task management application I personally use to keep track of my projects, tasks, ideas, todos, errands…well, pretty much my entire life lives inside of OmniFocus. It is my trusted system to keep things organized. Every screencast I create or project I undertake for Mijingo starts as a project in OmniFocus. I also keep a list of single actions that I need to take care of for my business (like “check business mailbox”, “pay American Express card”). Projects with more than one task get broken down into a grouping of actions that I usually order to be completed sequentially.

Every one of my screencast projects in OmniFocus is based off of an OmniFocus template (learn more about OmniFocus templates) that allows me to easily create a new project with a couple of clicks. Screencast production usually consists of the same tasks for each one, so the template allows me to keep from having to enter those tasks in each and every time. It is a huge time saver.

As you can see, I am a huge fan of the software. If you’re looking to learn some tips about how to use OmniFocus, check out my videos:

 
• Customizing OmniFocus
 
• Creating Project Templates in OmniFocus

I’d love to hear what you think about them and if you have anything you’d like to learn that we don’t cover yet. Drop me a message and let me know.

-Ryan

The class is broken up into about 15 modules, each one focused on a particular part of ExpressionEngine. At the end of each module there is a hands-on “lab” section of the class where students work on implementing the techniques they just learned on their own. This lab time allows the students to put to immediate use the new information and work together to solve problems. At the end of the third day we’ll have a complete sample site built in ExpressionEngine and we’ll start covering some more advanced topics, including those specific to the project the team is planning.

If you’re interested in a private training course for your organization, review the training information page and get in touch!

In this 30-page ebooklet, ExpressionEngine guru Mark Huot details steps you can take to make your installation of ExpressionEngine even more secure. Mark shares his experience from building dozens of high-profile ExpressionEngine-powered websites.

The new version brings the text up-to-date with the latest version of ExpressionEngine. This is a must-have for anyone building and deploying websites running EE, whether for yourself or for clients.

Securing ExpressionEngine 2 is about 30 pages long and you get the PDF, epub version and the HD video walk-thru for just $10.

I’m looking for smart people with something to teach. You have spent countless hours perfecting your craft and I want to help you teach others. It can be any topic related to the lives of the many web designers, developers and professionals who rely on our training materials to learn something new. Do you want to teach a programming language? A web framework? A core technique? A collection of best practices for Photoshop, Fireworks or other tools? I want to hear from you.

I put together a page of information about writing for Mijingo and what you can expect. So what do you think? Are you ready to join Mijingo as an author?.

-Ryan

My video walks through the very basics of LiveReload, including how to use the custom command functionality, so you can run a script after processing but before the browser reloads. I use my personal website, which runs the ruby tool Jekyll, as an example and set it up to build the static files (by running the jekyll command) after I save a change to a file.

Click on the four arrow icon to watch the video fullscreen and in HD

The LiveReload beta is available for free but the final version should cost around $10 and be available in the Mac App Store.