Archive for February, 2008

Desk accessories are really important, not necessarily because they are so important in your productivity routine, but because they can look soooo good. Some of these are for your productivity, some of them are for your design buds, and some are just down right the best for the job, take a look.

Book Stand

Ah, the trusty Book Stand. As simple as it may sound, I find very few that actually make the cut. I hate ones that attach to my desk, since these usually don’t fit my comfort level, or since I read all over the place, I need to go to great lengths to fasten it to everywhere I go.

The days of my book stand miseries may now be over, since this sturdy piece stands on its own legs. I can now read while I’m eating, While I’m lying on my stomach and in any other place where I would put down my book. You can also use it to keep some reference papers handy for easy viewing. At about $9 I would say the Book Stand is quite a deal since it’s very practical and keeps your book open for you easily.

Wood Charger Station

Telephone, camera battery and misc batteries, these are the items I charge regularly, and more often than not, I spend at least 5 minutes untangling the cords. This Wood Charging Station was conceived for people like me (and possibly even you) to charge our stuff and simultaneously hide the cords.

This particular model can comfortably charge 5 items, with room for some accessories in there as well. If you have a largeish desk, it will comfortably fit on one side you can even use it as a pen holder if you need to. At $45 the Charging Station isn’t a cheap buy, but it looks great and hides the cable clutter from view.

Classic Call Bell

Gosh, I’ve always wanted one of these. Whenever I stay at hotels, the darn receptionist is always there. I never have the chance to sound these call bells legitimately. Sure, I’ve done so in the sneaky way I do when no one is watching, I’ve even actually asked receptionists if I can go for it, but never have I had the chance to put it to good use.

Well, you can get one for your desk, I’m not sure for what purpose, but it’s a cool accessory is it not? You can sound it as a reward when you finished something on your to so list, you can call your wife (ouch… sorry dear), or you can just use it to drain your anger, at $3.5 I don’t think the Call Bell is a bank breaker.

Desk Organizer

I actually use this on my desk, it’s quite handy to keep virtually anything around, and even organized. This particular Desk Organizer gives you three horizontal and three upright storage shelves, made out of that black wire mesh you so often see on CEO desks. It’s not huge, but you do need a decent sized table so you have some free workspace after you start using it.

Productivity is at its peak when you have cool organizer toys like this, so I definitely recommend this one. You can store your notes in one compartment, to do’s on another, the day’s finished items in yet another, but I can think of dozens of options. Perhaps you should buy dozens then of this $35 Desk Organizer, which I would say is quite fairly prices, since it has a nice base to go with it. If you were to assemble this from its parts you would probably get it cheaper though.

I finally decided to give Flock, a Mozilla based browser a go, and I’m very, very happy with the results so far. You can reap most of the benefits if you’re into social sites like Youtube, Del.icio.us and the bunch, but even if you’re not, it’s basically Firefox, so you can’t really go wrong.

My World

My World is the default stat page for Flock and works like the Today page for Outlook, basically an aggregation of some of the info inside your browser. It shows you a list of your recently visited favorites, RSS feeds and media feeds. You can also access any of the sidebars and search the net if you’d like. I would say it’s a pretty useful start page, but those of you accustomed to Netvibes or Pageflakes won’t be changing their start page soon.

Sidebars

The sidebar has a central role in this browser because it allows you to view the status of your social network and do a lot of other things you would normally use a web page for. You can choose to view al your accounts, the people associated with them, take a look at your favorites, RSS feeds and manage your web clips.

Accounts and Services

This two pane sidebar shows your registered accounts on the top and available supported social sites on the bottom. Supported sites are the ones that Flock can directly interact with. One site I think should definitely be in there is Digg. It makes no sense that it isn’t, since it’s possibly one of the biggest of its kind. I have a feeling that they will support it, but want to develop some nice interactivity. A green light will indicate if you are signed on to a specific service, otherwise you can easily log out and tel Flock to forget the account. That’s about all there is to this sidebar, the main benefit is that you can easily log on to all your accounts quickly. One huge design flaw is that you can not make the top pane longer. I would like to see all my services without needing to scroll, and since I don’t really use the bottom pane, it would make sense to be able to resize it.

People

The people sidebar is again, a great addition. On top, you can choose between the sites, and after that, you will be able to see the people associated with that account. You can also interact with the sites through here, checking messages, going to the friend request page and so on. The feature most useful for me is notification. If you have a friend request it will be shown right there in the browser, no need to visit the page itself. Similarly with messages and so on.

RSS

The RSS feed sidebar is almost exactly like Google Reader, easy to use, comfortable and conveniently simple. It shows you the number of unread items, and you can set it to makr posts read as you scroll through them. One thing it was lacking was the dynamism in which Google reader treats scrolling. Google Reader marks posts read when they reach the top.The Flock RSS reader marks an entry read when it comes into view, which is not the best for me. Otherwise this is a perfect RSS viewer, I’m even switching from Google.

Favorites

The favorites sidebar is pretty standard, it uses the same beautiful interface as the rest of the app, but as an additional feature it can show you your oinline favorites, from Del.icio.us for example.

Web Clipboard

This is probably the most useful feature for research and general forget-me-not-in-the-short-run stuff. It will increase your productivity a lot, since you don’t need to have an app or another tab open,just drag and drop into the sidebar. It recognizes links, images and text, and displays them in a very convenient list.

Media bar

The media bar is actually a top bar, just like a sidebar, but at the top. It shows you media streams, and will most probably be used for photos and so on. It provides a nice photo slideshow, so you may even want it open when you’re not explicitly looking at it, just for soothing’s sake.

Blog editing

Flock also has a fully featured (sort of) blog editor. I don’t really want to get into this here, but for simple blogging it is definitely enough. Blogger, Typepad and Wordpress users will be able to use it, but it is compatible with some other services as well. You can add photos, write the body, add tags and post it, but I couldn’t get it to choose categories. Perhaps a plugin can take care of that, but as is, it won’t do for me.

Misc awesomeness

There are a lot of jewels hidden inside Flock. One such example is that it natively supports simultaneous bookmarking to multiple online sites. When you bookmark a page in Flock, you can choose to add it to one or more of your online services like Del.icio.us, Magnolia and so on. All your tags and comments will be migrated as well, I tested mainly on Delicious and it works like a charm.

There’s a great system for helping first time users get acquainted with the browser. Drop down alerts (like the pop up alerts in Firefox) drift into view when a Flock-type action is available. For example, if you log in to your Youtube account, it will ask you if you want to add it to your Flock browser. It also shows you a drop down notification every time you encounter and RSS, but thankfully you can disable all further notifications. There are three buttons next to the URL bar that light up when specific options are available. The first highlights when a media stream is present, the second one shows RSS feeds, and the third one shows search engine. Whenever you land on a page with a search engine in it, it you can add it to Flock to be able to search through that engine directly in the search field. There are numerous such little things that I am finding constantly that make my life that bit more easier and productive or organized. I’m sure I will stumble on to many more.

Interface

If you’ve been using Firefox, the interface will feel like home. The skin is pretty nice, for once I chose not to change it. The biggest difference is the toolbar position and style, which looks and acts great. The toolbar on the left is the default Flock toolbar with access to places like My World, Accounts and so on (more on this later), and the toolbar on the left is the bookmarks toolbar. What I found really useful was that I could integrate buttons and toolbars right into the default Flock toolbar, like my Stumbleupon toolbar and FireFTP button. Not a huge deal, but I was surprised at this flexibility.

Final verdict

I know it sounds weird, but I am now using Flock instead of Firefox. It has everything Firefox does, plus a LOT more, especially if you use social sites. It looks good, has great added features and is a joy to browse with. Firefox plugins of course work seamlessly, and I mean, I haven’t had so much fun browsing in ages. There are some things that could still be in here natively, like Stumbleupon and Digg support, a cool FTP client, the blogging tool could be developed (especially with Flickr being so readily available) and a lot more, but these would be just the cherry on top, the foundations are amazing. I recommend Flock to anyone and everyone.

I just started using Pidgin as my client and decided to get in touch with all my readers who want to talk to me, so I have also been advertising my IM handles openly. I didn’t know this kind of spam existed, as Mark from Make Use Of says, this means dozens of spam messages eventually.

I immediately felt at ease with Pidgin, since he also showed a great way to stop this spam, using a plugin called Bot Sentry. It forces people not on your contact list to answer a question you specify before they can send you a message.

This is such a simple, but very effective way to stop these messages. A simple question like “Write down every second letter from these characters: aIsmmalwneaslogmde” will keep away bots for a while.

I found a good looking online photo recommendation service called Photoree on Freeware Genius, and thought I’d share my opinion with you guys. My final verdict was that it I like this service, and it may be useful as an alternative source of Photos, but ultimately it is not (yet) something that I will use a lot. Despite this, I have contacted the creators and told them my opinion and would like to actively help them, since I see a lot of potential in this.
After registering you can start to rate photos immediately, just simply give it a thumbs up, or thumbs down. I couldn’t totally determine the effectiveness of their method, but what I do know is that during the initial 100 that is needed to generate statistics I consistently gave a thumbs down to all pics where the main subject was a person. After the first hundred I didn’t really see any pics with a person on it, so I guess that this part is well done.

The service is useful because it gives you an alternative method of searching for photos. Sometimes the best pics I find are ones that I stumble upon randomly, and this is the kind of service that helps me in this department. Also, the interface is very nice, all pics you thumbed up are saved for you, you can view them in a good looking thumbnail interface.

The statistics is also a useful place to visit. You can see users with a taste similar to yours. After 100 photos, a user had an 85% similarity to me, and indeed, I found a lot of pics in her favorites I liked. You can of course click on her favorites and rate them. All this is done in a lightning fast flash popup, so you don’t even have to navigate away. You can also view the top authors you liked. Again, this is useful for further exploration, you can visit their Flickr page and so on.

Where I think the application could improve is the management of saved pictures. The way I would use this, is I would thumb up alot of the pics I like and then tag them. I could go through hundreds in about half an hour. Whenever I need a picture of a bridge, where there are also a lot of trees, I could just find it in my saved pics. Since I already thumbed it up I am sure to like it, and since I can go through hundreds in a short time there’s a good chance there will be one with these parameters.

Overall I became more and more fond of Photoree as I was writing this short review. I actually rewrote my verdict at the beginning because as I delved deeper, I found how this is, and could become a service that is as good for exploration as it is great for productivity and organization.

I just noticed this cool video on the Gmail Blog, it’s a review of Gmail in Russian. Why is it cool? Because the review is not shown with a screencast, instead, they built the interface out of duct tape, paint, and so on. Although I couldn’t understand what was being said, it is pretty self explanatory and looks so awesome.

I’m sorry, this has absolutely nothing to do with productivity or organization, but the way they executed this is worth seeing. I just couldn’t get the video to not break my design, so for now here’s a link to building Gmail, but I am not happy at all.

I’ve been using Adsense for a while, and I have to say that I’m not totally content with it. I think this has more to do with me than Google, my main problem is that ads in posts are not as relevant as they should be. I get a load of Excel ads, which is not really what I think I, or other visitors, are looking for.

One of the reasons for this is that I have varying content. In about a year, the overall spa of my content will stabilize, but until then it is ultimately developing and this results in a lower Adsense revenue. One great way I found to guide Google in how they serve your ads, is using special conditional HTML tags.

The basic principal is that you can encase contents inside these tags to tell Google that these are very relevant to your site, so it should take this section into account with more weight than others. You can also tell Google that a specific section is not really relevant.

The tags to use to indicate an important, relevant section are

<!– google_ad_section_start –>
<!– google_ad_section_end –>

If you want to tell Google not to take into account a part of your site, just encase it in these tags:

<!– google_ad_section_start(weight=ignore) –>
<!– google_ad_section_end –>

If you take Hack Your Day for example, you know that my main focus is productivity and organization. Every now and again though I write a bit off-topic stuff, or I just write more about a more specific topic, like 3 Excel tips a week. I can encase off-topic posts inside the ignore tag, and I can choose some specific content, like Excel related, and encase one or two. I can then go to my most relevant content, and encase it in the first tag set, to tell Google that this is indeed what my site is about.

Additionally you can do it in-post as well. Obviously you see Excel ads because I mentioned Excel 100 times in 3 posts. I can take the sections of a post which are strictly relevant to productivity and encase them in the tags that tell Google this is important, and encase the rest with the ignore tag.

This is a great tool for targeting your ads, especially for start-up blogs like mine, where there are shifts of focus in the short run.