If you have a domain and a webhost, you may be lucky enough to have Fantastico at your disposal. I use Bluehost with all my pages and I have it, it enables me to install applications like Wordpress, Joomla, Durpal, php Wiki and others in seconds, without any uploading and extensive customization.

You are taken through some very short steps where you can enter your username, password, and some other data which is crucial to your install. All other configurations like creating your databases are done under the hood and need no supervision. This method is great for almost any blogger, with the exception of some very advanced power-users who need extra functionality.

Fantastico for me is not really the tool for installing stuff, but for trying them out. Indeed I installed Wordpress first with Fantastico, and now I’m creating custom themes and helping people out with it through Blogtastique. There are many others to choose from though, from blogs and CRM applications, to shopping carts and discussion boards.

The backend of Fantastico is frequently updated, they lag behind release dates only a bit, about a week or so as I’ve seen in the case of Wordpress. If you want to try out some of those complicated scripts that are great for your website Fantastico could be the way to try out and implement them.

One of my first posts here on Hack Your Day was about buying a new Technica, simple 3 button mouse, and how that’s all I need. Well it was, until I had enough of always needing to change batteries. More specifically I had enough of never having batteries at hand. I went out and bought myself a Microsoft Wireless Laser Mouse 8000.

This mouse has 5 buttons, side scrolling and it has an awesome charging pad which is not the stand up thing most people have, but a simple pad you just put the mouse on. One of the best things about it hardware-wise is that it works with Bluetooth, meaning you won’t have to plug in a receiver if you have Bluetooth built in.

What really made my day productive was the software Microsoft bundled with the product. You can customize all buttons, like make the left mouse button be a shift button, or the right mouse button become an enter button. What’s even better though is the applications specific configurations.

When using notepad for example for html editing I never actually use the right mouse button. There are however three actions I do very often. Cut, paste, and delete. I have set up my mouse so that the right mouse button deletes, the 4th button (found on the top left) is copy, and the 5th button (on the top right) is paste. This way I don’t even need to touch the keyboard for many operations, saving me time, energy and making me productive.

Since you can customize this for any application you can create some new controls for Media Player, Photoshop, Word, and you won’t have to switch between these, as this is done automatically when the specific window is on focus. I have to give it to Microsoft, this is a great product!

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 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.

When I use Outlook I really hate the Trash. I have to delete a message, then it goes to the trash, and then I have to delete it from there as well and if I deleted an unread message, an ugly bracketed number will show its face there until I do so! How awful!

There is a keyboard shortcut you can use to skip the Trash altogether. All you need to do is press “Shift + Del” together, and the Trash is out of the way. You do have to tell Outlook you are absolutely positive you want this, but it’s still quicker.

That being said, I think it’s easier to have the right filters set up. I have to delete a message about once every month and I get about 300 e-mails a month.

Tip thanks to My GTD Stuff

Windows Vista tip: If you frequently use a folder but need to go through five minutes of browsing before you can get to it, this tip is for you.

Open up “Computer” from the start menu in Vista and right-click in the left menu under “favorite link”. Click on “Open favorite links folder” and you will see all the entries there. Delete what you don’t need to un-clutter the space and simply create shortcuts there to folder you need (right-click -> New -> Create shortcut).

Voilá, you now have easy access to any folders you need quickly.