I’ve already shown you how to use keyword navigation in Firefox, now let’s take that to the next level by creating naming schemes and putting some organization behind it. The problem is that while you may visit up to 50 sites regularly, coming up with 50 unique, short and easy to remember keywords is not that simple. Sure, you can use the site name, but typing organizationandplanning to get to Organization and Planning is not the quickest of methods.

Let me show you the method I use, which will work especially well if you’re a webmaster, have some blogs, or visit sub pages of one domain. I currently own or work on a number of websites, and I need quick access to the main pages, the admin panel, the comments section, google analytics, alexa rankings, feedburner page, and some others for all the sites.

What I do, is I simply create a keyword for the main pages I visit, for Hack Your Day this word is “hyd”, for Blogtastique it is btq. As you know, all I need to do is type hyd or btq in the url section in Firefox, press enter and that’s it. No http:// or www, nothing.

As a next step, I determine pages common to all other main pages I need to visit often. Like the Wordpress Dashboard, the write a new post page, comments section, analytics section, feedburner page and so on. When I bookmark these, I use the keyword of the main page and the sub-page together, so the “Write a post” page for Hack Your Day can be accessed by typing “hydwrite”. The one for the Blogtastique Blog can be accessed by “btqwrite”.

The great thing about this is that you only have to remember a tenth of the keywords you would normally, and they are pretty logical, so you can even guess. This system works best for reoccurring items, but you can adapt it for a different system too.

I’ve been promoting database usage for a while now, so let me add another post on top of the pile. I believe a database or your work (or personal) life is the most productive thing you could do which also helps you organize yourself and it may even increase your immediate productivity.

I’ve been writing posts for years and I think I’m in the thousand range now, not speaking of the numerous personal blog posts and so on. Ask me if I’ve ever mentioned site “X”. I’ll probably say no, or I don’t know, and in my professional life, a definite answer to that question may be needed.

I can not stress enough how great databases are. Sure you can use Remember The Milk for tasks, or Gubb for simple lists and so on, but in Access for example you can do it all. Buy a flower each day and record the species, number of pettles, attach wikipedia entries and record dates. Learn a new guitar tab each day, record the day, the website, attach the tab, the lyrics, the grade you would give yourself on it, make notes. You can create a custom format for this to suite the theme and much more. Beginning to see where I’m going?

It just feels good to see that so far this month I’ve written 98 pieces. I can see how many published posts there are out of all that, which project I wrote them for, which client ordered them and so on. On my new site, Organization and Planning there are buy boxes on the bottom. I even keep track of these, since I will want to review products in the “similar” section later too.

Overall what I love about databases is felxibility. You can create any application for any goal, add any fields you like, theme it, and so on. Advanced filtering, search and virtually any other option that web based solutions can offer are available.

The only problem is that all this can not be put online, apart from actually uploading the file somewhere. I bet this option isn’t too far either, but for now you will have to settle with the offline mode, for me that’s more than enough. Expect some more posts on database specifics soon!

I’ve always said that an uncluttered desktop is best because it gives you a sense of accomplishment, a free mind and a sense of beauty too. Icons and your wallpaper is an integral part of this, and today I found a great icon set list, with a beautful Japanese themed set named Yoritsuki icons.

Very detailed and masterfully crafted icons, although if you’re looking for meaning this is not for you. Only two “regular” icons can be found for folders, the others are of Japanese traditional items, associated with hot spring inns. I have no problem with this, and I am using these as icons for my current projects folders.

I couldn’t really find a good background image for them though, I tried them on a Bamboo wallpaper, but somehow they lost their charm, so I decide to make my own. It’s very simple, the idea was to let the icons be in the foreground, not the wallpaper image. It features a very simple bamboo like texture with one kanji on the top left. The kanji (Japanese symbol) represents destiny, in Japanese it’s unmei. Download the image using the following links, if you’d like a different resolution let me know and I’ll make one just for you! By the way, if you don’t find one for your resolution, you are inside about 4% of my viewers with different resolutions, congrats!

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Google Docs has implemented a much awaited feature, the full use of CSS in documents. This essentially means that those of you versed in CSS can create great looking documents instead of black, white and grey ones.

Color and some format options were already available of course, but you can now specify borders, you can add divs with styling, create different types of lists in seconds. Since all this is implemented in CSS, you can just specify different classes for different types of content and then encase the specific contents in divs.

This means you will format your document once, which will take you 10 minutes, and after that formatting a whole blog of text will only take about 2 sends. Considering you may want a border, a different font, a different background color and font color, and underline and so on, this is a huge productivity jump.

You can also edit the html, so essentially Google Docs has become a HTML editor with a WYSIWYG option. Tihs is awesome in my opinion, I now have full control over the visuals of my documents, making me much more likely to use Docs instead of Word for example.

I have been working quite hard in the last few days to complete and put a new site online called Blogtastique. The aim of the site is to help beginner bloggers churn out a truly quality site in a day, and to help pro bloggers manage their blogs.

With the free Basic Package we’ll install your Wordpress blog for example, recommend themes based on your content, recommend some cool plugins and generally give you some good tips about this and that. the Pro Package means we’ll make some theme customization for you, install plugins, third party applications like embedded Twitter, widgets and so on and we’ll try our best to synchronize the look of your blog with what you write about.

The Managment Package is for those of you who don’t like doing the “paperwork” that your blog generates. We’ll pre-configure your categories or optimize them for you, going through each post, we’ll create a custom theme just for you, we can check each new post for errors, we’ll moderate your comments, manage users, and generally do any task you bestow upon us.

Please take a look at this new service, I’m very excited to get started with it, if you have any questions, suggestions or want to sign up, please write to the Blogtastique team, you can find contacts in the contacts section of the Blogtastique.

I’ve been ranting on and on about how I love Notepad++, and recently I’ve started looking ore and more at, let me share a cool feature I found which lets you create keyboard shortcuts for pasting anything really. This helps my productivity to no end, especially when writing html or css code.

I use comments a lot when first creating a design so I know where I am later on too. Creating a comment in html means you have to write the following code <!-- Comment Here -->. This can get a bit tedious, especially at the beginning, when I add a comment below all my div containers, and also at their closing tag. For this reason I created a macro to paste comment tags quickly.

In Notepad++, just go to the macro menu and choose start recording. Tye the desired text anywhere on screen, in my example I wrote <!-- -->, and then go to the macro menu again, and click stop recording. You will need to go to the menu again and click “save currently recorded macro”. You can now set the key combination for it, I use a combination of the control and shift key, plus a letter usually.