I spend a lot of my free time surfing the internet and almost half of my income comes from here. That means I’ve got a lot of contacts, but little time to IM anyone. I tend to use email a lot, even when I’m on the road.
I used to be an Outlook Express user until 2004. I was new to the whole security thing back then and frankly didn’t care whether my inbox is safe or not.
My next e-mail client was Thunderbird. I’m sure lots of you also use Outlook, Spicebird or something similar for managing your everyday tasks. Well, the opensource alternative was fine and all, but there was a big problem involved.
With webmail, your e-mail stays on the server. E-mail clients, on the other hand (if you don’t specifically tell them), ‘pull’ your mail onto the computer.
And while this may be an advantage for offline reading: what happens if you (my case here) have 3 computers and 5 operating systems?
Ease of access is the keyword here, I suppose. With my Gmail, I have all the functionality I need, and more. It’s always there, and if I get some important mail I can easily archive it or forward it, thus increasing my web productivity.
If you liked what I said and want to jump n the bandwagon, simply sign up for some webmail space: Gmail or Yahoo!Mail will suffice, but you also have Hotmail, Inbox and Spymac.
Do you use webmail? Why (not)? Tell us!
Windows 7 leaked. This new Windows version is actually planned for 2009.
It’s time for everyone to admit Windows Vista is a bad OS. Sure it works and all, but it’s still bad. Don’t tell me people couldn’t have come up with something better in 4-5 years’ time. The unofficial Longhorn release with WinFS had some potential, plus it was free of charge. Sadly it was taken down due to legal issues.
I am a Mac and Unix user and I feel sorry for the Vista users. No offence meant, but I urge everyone out there to at least give a try to Ubuntu or Leopard. Explore. See how powerful your computer really is.
Let us return to our subject. I’ve been reading a lot of articles about Windows Vienna or Windows 7 lately. Last time I heard about it was November. If I remember correctly, the developers are making huge core midifications, so this time it’s going to be something special.
According to a post by Windows 7 blogger M. Dikici, the first Milestone isn’t very impressive. The GUI is still very Vista-like (remember the first Longhorn screenshots?).
Personally I am not much of a tester, I prefer polished stuff, so let’s wait for the second release and we will probably see what Microsoft is aiming at. I expect multiple desktops and much much more stuff we see on Linux today.
The only problem is, when it comes out, will Microsoft have something to impress us with or will it just rely on its heavy user base? What do you think?
I know the title’s pretty weird. There’s a catch to it, though. Our job is to increase our web productivity, right?
You probably know this situation very well: you just finished your latest web design, and you want to take a break and just goof around a bit, which in web 2.0 geek means using a few of these sites:
- Digg
- Del.icio.us
- Stumbleupon
- Slashdot
- Propeller
(I see no purpose here in linking to them).
These are social media news sites. The biggest problem is that many of them have similar content, because popular content becomes popular universally. That is where you loose time. Digg is pretty slow, and while the other sites are faster, they’ll treat you to similar content most of the time. So the question is, how do we pick out our favourite news items from a heap of social media news sites?
Welcome to the wonderful world of RSS. Many social media sites, if not all, provide you with a full RSS feed. If I like Digg’s Linux/Unix category, for instance, I’ll subscribe to it. That will become my content of choice. But why go through all that work?
Popurls is a great aggregator with ‘the latest web buzz’. Not only has it got all the news from the sites above, there’s also a ton of other source, blogs and videos, all on one page!
I’m wasting my time professionally from now on 
Don’t you just hate it when you have to fire up your browser, navigate to your page and finally log-in every time you want to blog? When I see that TinyMCE editor window I always remember how it remains one of the most serious web productivity punches in the faces of bloggers.
I set off to find a tool which could make my one-click blogging dream come true. Some of these tools are not perfect, it also depends on the platform you use. But let’s face it, serious people mostly use Wordpress, MovableType, or Blogger (still wondering why about this one), so that is going to be the support I’ll be looking for.
Flock
If it ran as well on my MacBook as on my PC, it would most certainly be my browser of choice (I’m waiting for the upcoming release) . The niftiest feature it’s got is of course the blogging tool. Flock integrates with many Web 2.0 services, such as Youtube, Flickr etc. and last but not least, blogs. By pressing the blog button, you get a great text field where you can blog and publish your post from. It supports Wordpress and Blogger, although it sadly lacks MovableType support. There’s still support for TypePad, though note that TypePad is a service, like Blogger, using MovableType as a platform. COnsequently, I cannot guarantee It’ll work with your self-hosted MovableType blog. If you’re a Flock and MovableType user, a comment would be welcome indeed
ScribeFire (former Performancing) for Firefox
This plugin has been recommended to me numerous times. So why not try it out? It’s boasts a great deal of cool features, like multi-blogging. The main site doesn’t show what blogs are suported. WordPress, Blogger, and LiveJournal should work. After you install the plugin you can always open it by simply clicking the small ‘notepad’ button in the lower-right corner toolbar.
During my search for the best blog tool, I discovered there are many paid tools. Ecto is one of them. It doesn’t work in the browser, it’s a standalone piece of software, for both Mac OSX and Windows (pro’lly works on other OSes with Wine, though). I don’t think paying for a blogging tool is really necessary, but hey, Darren likes it and maybe you will too. It is packed with features, like multiple blog posting, offline blogging, and supports all of the blogging platforms you’ll ever need.
Where do you blog from?
