My tools
Posted by Mike Mon, 01 May 2006 19:51:00 GMT
I'm trying to get back into the habit of writing by documenting my favourite online tools. Goes without saying that they are all best viewed with Firefox.
- Gmail
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A decent, free, web mail product without a practical usage limit. Gmail's search facility (delete nothing, no folders) has changed the way I use email -- no more archiving or offline storage.
The Inbox/All_Mail split is natural after a while. I try to keep the number of messages in my Inbox to a minimum; say one to two weeks of content in the first page. Star'd messages and tags are thus far not much use.
- del.icio.us
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Social bookmarking provides value (see oishii below), but del.icio.us provides a bookmarklet and Firefox plugin that makes bookmarking a snap. The daily blog posting service that sends my bookmarks to this blog is spiffy.
- Netvibes.com
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Dynamic home page supporting RSS/Atom feeds, to-do lists, weather, bookmarks, and other aggregated content. I use is almost exclusively to track syndicated content that changes frequently.
The UI is well thought out. Content can be categorized on any number of tabs, and arranged within each tab via drag and drop. Content is presented within an embedded reader.
- Rojo
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My industrial strength blog/feed reader. Not much GUI candy here, Rojo is suitable for blitzing through a large number of posts because a paragraph or two of each article is presented in the Rojo interfrace. Feeds are categorized by tag.
- remember the milk
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A recent addition to my tool box, remember the milk is a web 2.0 to-do list manager. Each list entry is categorized as personal, work, or study, can be tagged with arbitrary keywords, has a due date and associated effort. Lists can be syndicated via Atom, or iCal; reminders are sent via SMS, IM, or email. Tasks can also be added via email (no API yet).
The on-the-fly smart lists (say, all tasks tagged 'house') achieve high coolness marks.
- Yahoo Calendar
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Through no fault of Yahoo, their calendar service caused me a bit of trouble a while back, but it is still a decent product. Recurring events are easy to add, and the display is easy on the eyes. Yahoo has not updated this service in a long while, and I'm tempted to switch to google calendar if/when I can transfer my Yahoo events.
- Digg, reddit, Oishii
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Mental candy that I check a few times a day to keep tabs on what is percolating on the net. Once in a while I find a gem.
