Top 10 Firefox Extensions, Plus FaviconizeTab

Lifehacker posted their Top 10 Firefox Extensions today. I have used a few of those extensions, and especially like the Foxmarks bookmark synchronizer extension.

Another Firefox extension that I use a lot is the FaviconizeTab extension. It allows for your “favorite” tabs to be shrunk in size, only showing the icon for the site. I typically do this with my Gmail and Google Calendar tabs, so that I can fit more tabs that I need the text for on the tab bar.

Posting with Windows Live Writer

Amit Agarwal at DigitalInspiration shared a list of the Top Ten Freeware Applications For Microsoft.

I had never heard of Windows Live Writer until today, so I downloaded it and am presently typing this post in the software. Windows Live Writer (WLW) is a Windows-based, WYSIWYG blog editor that works with most blogging platforms out there. The setup for this WordPress blog was very easy, taking about 30 seconds once I remembered the login information for my account.

As you can see from the screenshot, the interface is reminiscent of Microsoft Word, but is very uncomplicated. I think I’ll try using this tool for a while and continue making comments on it. The ability to work on different blogs with the same tool is very attractive to me.

HowTo: Using Gmail For Todo List Management

For the past 3 months or so, I’ve been using Google Calendar as an informal way of managing my todo list. I would create an appointment for the time when I need to be reminded of the task, and I would get an SMS reminding me of the task. This was nice, I just didn’t have a very good way of pushing back tasks, or hitting a “snooze”, or even showing that the task was complete.

I decided to experiment using Gmail for todo list management. I created a “_todo” label (to keep the label near the top of my list of labels). I created a filter so that all emails coming into my gmail account with a subject starting with “todo – ” would be automatically added to the todo label, archived, and starred. This worked pretty good, but I ran into an almost random dilemma. I received an email from a friend with a subject starting with “todo – “, and it got added to my todo list. That isn’t so good. I added the incoming email address to be my work email address which is where most of my todo list items originate.

After using this system for a few days, I realized that using a special email address for adding todo entries would work well. On my personal website domain, I have Google Apps enabled, so that I can create custom email addresses and using Gmail forwarding for those email addresses. I created a new “todo” email account, that forwards all the email it gets to my Gmail account. On the Gmail side, I have a filter that takes all email sent to the todo account and places it in the todo label, stars and archives it. That way, only someone who knows about the account can send me a todo, and I can send myself a todo through any email account and using SMS on phone. When the todo item is created, it is starred and unread. I then read the todo item, showing that it has been processed. When the item is complete, I unstar the item. I now have a list of completed tasks as well. The included picture shows how it looks.

Now for the HowTo:

1. Create a new email address with a service that allows for email forwarding.
2. Forward all the email from the new address to your current main Gmail address.
3. Create a new label for todo items.
4. Create a filter for all items sent to your “todo account” to be added to the todo label; star & archive the new item as well.
5. You can now send a new todo item to your “todo account” and have todo items automatically added to your Gmail account.

I like managing my todo list in the same place that I manage my email, although sometimes a reminder is needed when the task has a definite deadline. I still use Google Calendar for reminders to bring something to work in the morning, or perhaps to check a certain website at a certain time during the day.

RSS Bandit and Repetitive Information Overload

For the last few months I've been reading all my RSS feeds through RSS Bandit.  Whenever I come across an interesting blog, podcast or news site I usually subscribe to the feed.  This cuts down on my surfing time at the office (a good thing), but I also see a lot of repetitive information.  Every couple weeks or so I look through my feeds and discard ones that I'm not currently reading regularly.

I currently have 29 feeds, which is probably an average amount for me.  Sites like Lifehacker, Digg, Engadget and Ars Technica are ones that I usually read thoroughly.  I'm amazed at how much information is usually repeated between all these news sources.  I find that unique news can fall through the cracks because I'm quickly scrolling through 2/3rds of the new feed updates because they're repeats.  I think sites that use tagging are useful to sort of types of news, but not as good at lumping together similar stories.  A more intelligent "auto-tagging" would be useful, but difficult to implement.  A simple, but less accurate way would be to create a tagset for a blog post or other news item based on the words in the title line.  If multiple posts share a certain percentage (let's say 80%) of the words in the title of the other posts, then they can be considered to be the same post.  I know that sounds like a good way to miss even more unique content, but I'm not sure how to implement something more sophisticated that isn't going to take forever.  Starting with a spam-filtering algorithm might help match up posts better by searching the entire blog post.

After the jump, I'll post the contents my current OPML file (copy & pasting it into a text editor would probably help the wordwrapping).