RustyBudget is a new web based application that provides a people and story management tool for multi-author blogs.
RustyBudget is essentially “a writers or editors budget”, where a blog owner and blog writers can manage story leads, including author allocation, story notes and overall task management.
RustyBudget comes from RustyBrick, a company headed by Barry Schwartz. As well as being CEO of RustyBrick, Schwartz is also the owner of Search Engine Roundtable and a writer at Search Engine Land, both highly regarded and popular blogs within the SEO and search engine communities. Schwartz comes with impeccable credentials when it comes to dealing with multi-author blogs; this is a solution that has been created from experience as opposed to being a theoretic solution to a management problem by someone who really has no idea.
RustyBudget is an interesting take on author management. The application uses accounting terms and applies them to blog management, which could throw some people at first, but hands-on it’s easy to use and simply does exactly what it promised. This isn’t a top level, complicated or incredibly deep people management tool; if you’re looking for something that calculates wages or tracks time this isn’t for you, but for people managing multi-author blogs or websites that need a way of allocating and managing stories RustyBudget is well recommended.
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Surely there’s something better than this out there…
the second link is broken
RustyBudget.com is avail: http://tinyurl.com/23te37
Sounds like a useful tool for bloggers, but damn, the poopy color scheme along with the “rusty” motif is hard to take seriously.
75% of people doing anything “online” need to leave the industry. this site is in this 75%, well within in
until the global population reach 60 billion or we move to a forty-nine hour day, no one has time for this shit
The wood paneling on the website’s header reminds me of that national lampoons movie where Chevy chase buys that station wagon with the green trim and wood paneling.
This sounds like something that could be very interesting to blog owners. It’s very hard to provide content day after day on a blog. Blog owners might also want to let some of their users provide content, rather than just letting them reply to content all the time. This sounds very useful.
tom
This actually looks like a really cool tool. I signed up lets’ see if I use it in a week.
I’ll argee with some of the commenters, the color scheme wasn’t me either, but you can’t win them all, and mission brown aside it’s a real handy tool.
This would be useful to a select few. I am not sure how mainstream this application could be as the need just is not there but I’m sure this would help out more than just a few people in the day to day management.
I can’t see any use from this product. The website blows, and their explanation of what it is and how it works is so convoluted, no one is going to be able to even figure out what this thing does.
Thanks Duncan for posting this.
Yes, the colors and the concept are a bit off.
We will be building out an API so that this technology can be implemented on your side.
This is software for serious bloggers and news sites.
Would love any feature requests and issues you find to be reported here. I will keep watching this blog post.
Thanks,
Barry
You can also change the colors for the buckets in the backend. It’s all a matter of personal preference, really.
seems weak
Looks like a cool tool, I don’t have other people blogging for me yet but I’ll keep it in mind (I hope they sort the colors out a little though).
Nice idea rusty!
Pretty sweet….And Schwartz’s good reputation doesn’t hurt a bit.
Looks like a great tool…just not too sure about the name, as the word ‘rusty’ sort of implies that it’s deficient, impaired, neglected, sluggish, stale, unqualified, or weak…which I’m sure is not the case.
Definitely will check it out, though.
Seems to be an awful lot of critique on visual design on this tool. One of the things keeping me from pushing harder with my product is not knowing the authorship industry. I have a lot of projects in play and could use contributors, but managing that makes me nervous. A tool like this is designed for that. Who cares how visually stimulating it is. All they need is the ability to slap skins on the app and they will be cooking. Cool beans.- Ryan G
Impressive Barry :0)
I see the reasoning for this, and I see some additional uses for it as well, there does seem to be a learning curve to it, but great looking tool and very very interesting to me and one of my projects.
Thanks Techcunch, for putting this out.
I like the concept, but there are a few usability issues when it comes to setting everything up. Folder management and user access is slightly confusing about what to do. It took a few minutes to figure it out, but if you’re a master blogger the tool is worth hanging in there… by the time you’ve figured it out you’ll be the one setting the accounts up for contributing authors anyways.
Specific comments…
- Because I’m weird… “add” and “update” don’t have the same design as the “cancel” button, which causes some friction when I want to cancel, but the button is faded… this makes me think I can’t click on it.
- The notes button isn’t working for me.
- Bookmarklet feature is still a little confusing and giving me a cyclic behavior.
- I’m getting a “1.” when I try to re-order topics. Goes away when I add a new topic and shows up again when I move the topic from one budget to another. Not sure what this does besides confuse me.
- Notes functionality working now… not sure I like the only options being “add” or “cancel” because once I’ve added a note, I just want to close without “cancelling”. Wording is a little weird.
- Also, would like to be able to resize and move notes box.
- Not sure “reject” is the right word when you’re basically deleting the topic for good. “complete” also makes me think I am finishing the topic, but it’s getting scratched off, not tossed completely.
- “CLR” is also confusing… I think this means clear the list, when the options are complete or reject all.
Great start… interested in seeing how it develops!