Internetling

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.

Ecto

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?

Rumors are that the Del.icio.us revamp is coming out very soon. Del.icio.us, by Yahoo, is now four years old, and one of the first social bookmarking sites I remember using.

It is based on bookmark sharing. If you find a site you like, you ‘tag’ it – add it to your del.icio.us account, and connect it with certain keywords you think are relevant to your bookmark. Your bookmarks then go public, and that way the del.icio.us site aggregates every bookmark and sorts it according to its current popularity.

I used del.icio.us for a long time to improve my web productivity, because I can use my bookmarks anywhere with this handy Firefox add-on.

The delicious team is working hard on improving tagging and bookmarking. They are also implementing a new search engine (speaking of that – del.icio.us could be a search engine on is own)! The beta preview is sadly invite-only.

In my opinion, Delicious.com (new domain there, nice) is going to become even better. It’s a fast, small and simple site, which has all the power of Digg, or Reddit, in a much more practical way (you can even use it with an iPhone).

There’s a new product in town that I’m very excited about, called Spicebird.

It was made by a very inovative startup named Synovel, based in India. It’s not even out of Beta (0.4) yet and has already reached 10 thousand downloads. I don’t know about you, but that is a lot – in comparison, I’ve got trouble getting more than a few hunded visitors per day!

Spicebird is actually a heavily modified Thunderbird, Sunbird and Xmpp4moz (IM add-on) stitched together to form the ultimate collaboration tool, something a bit like Microsoft’s Groove.

Of course it is released under open source licenses – a tri-license, to be exact. In short, it gives you a great deal of usage freedom and a price of 0$.

I found Groove to be very interesting and was dissapointed that there is no solid opensource alternative, and that’s why I think Spicebird is a great app.

The ‘front page’ features a tabbed interface, where you may add, delete and rearrange widgets of your own choice: a clock, a calendar, an rss news feed, upcoming events agenda – by being opensource I expect Spicebird to have gazillions of widgets by the end of this year, if it gains enough popularity. And that’s what I’m waiting for. Don’t forget why people still use Firefox 2.

For now, it’s got an e-mail client, a calendar and an instant messenger. You can also use it to read RSS feeds. If you’re to lazy to download it, check out the online demo video.

In conclusion, I find it to be a great idea with a lot of potential. The opensource community has already proven that it can produce tons of neat and useful apps, but what it lacks is some serious software for bussineses, just like Spicebird will soon become, in order to spread into this demanding market.

What are your thoughts on Spicebird?

I always hated web operating systems. First I tried the icky AjaxWindows, then YouOS which doesn’t seem to work, and after a while I read a Swedish article about the Xcerion operating system (from Linköping, I believe), still in development.
What I despise most is that they used a closed-source model on a web-app. You just don’t do that nowadays, if you are not Digg, god-damnit!

I mean, I’m no expert, but when every single one of these companies starts developing a whole set of Ajax apps, they’ve got a lot of work (just imagine how much work goes into developing an office suite, an instant messenger program, or a file manager), and in the end they’re still just competing websites. And who wants to work so much to get a competing website, come on!

And that’s when I discovered EyeOS.

With an online operating system, you can use your own apps, settings, documents, anywhere, any time, on any computer.

EyeOS is being developed by the EyeOS core team of the EyeOS Project company. While the main developers are the most involved people, EyeOS’ opensource model enables the community to contibute their own improvements.

Version 1.5 of EyeOS, nicknamed ‘Gala’, was released just recently. Now EyeOS has a basic Office suite (Word processor, Spreadsheet, Presentations etc.), Net tools (Browser, FTP), Personal apps (Calendars and the works!).
Of course this is not everything EyeOS has to offer, check the homepage for the complete list.

You can install EyeOS on your own server, or like me, get a free account @ the EyeOS project’s server.

A shout out to all the cool people at EyeOS!

After wasting an hour optimizing Firefox to no avail – for some reason it is reluctant to show Central European characters, I surrendered and downloaded the new Opera browser 9.50 beta, codenamed ‘Kestrel’. Being a productivity freak, I need my browser to be completely synchronized at all times. I’ve heard of the new bookmark syncing feature in Opera, which is coming with the new release, although it’s still in beta. What the heck, I tested it – and it looks very good. I encountered a few problems with site rendering (especially phpBB2 forums), and the browser crashed a few times in Leopard, but otherwise it works great, it is still the same, good ol’ Opera.

The bookmark sync option is a huge web productivity booster. Since I use 4 different operating systems (I dual-boot a PC and a MacBook), reconfiguring browsers is a real pain-in-the-[insert body part here]. I used to install Foxmarks on each Firefox browser, but I always had problems with at least one installation, if of course the Foxmarks server was up at the time.

Bookmark Synchronizing with Opera 9.50b works through the my.Opera account server storage space, which you can get for free when you sign up . The syncing feature is very cool: it syncs with all of your installed and linked browsers, even on your freaking mobile phone. It is called Opera Link.

Staying with Opera for now. We will see if the stable Firefox 3 with Weave will have a chance at converting me back.

Still looking for a good Pagerank checking tool though…