If you do even a bit of website building weather for you own site/blog or for others you are destined to get the cross browser developement headache. Not only do websites look different in Firefox 2, Firefox 3, Internet Explorer, Safari, but they even look different in Windows and Linux using the same browser.

If you build a lot of sites, let me show you a setup you can use to test on multiple browsers. First of all, I gather you already have Windows installed, or if you don’t because you’re a linux user, go ahead and install it first. Once done, you can install the new Ububtu Linux from Windows itself, without the need to muck about in boot screens and so on.

Now, you have two systems installed, all you need to do is get all the browsers you can into these systems. WIndows has IE by default, so you need to install the others only. I recommend installing three browsers here, Firefox, Opera and Safari. Firefox and Opera have large fan bases, and Safari is sort of a middle ground between installing OS X.

Head on over to your linux system and if you have Ubuntu, Firefox will be on there by default. The options you have here are much mor evaried. The good news is that most problems occur between IE and all other browsers and you don’t have to think about IE in linux too much. The bad news is that there are many more browsers used. Apart from numerous smaller browsers you can install Galeon and Konqueror, many Linux distros come with these as defualt. Galeon is based on the gecko engine (like Firefox), so you won’t have many problems there.

The main difference I’ve seen with Linux vs WIndows is the differnece in text size, usually smaller in Linux. This can cause some elements to shift about, but if you have some experience with IE problems, solving these will be a cicnh.

Being a blogger means some pretty different work methods than other types of work. Just think of GTD contexts for example. If you are a blogger you have @computer and @computer and @computer, if you specialize in some area, you might also have @computer. All in all, in some cases you will need special methods, or use available options differently. Here are 5 tips for Google Reader productivity geared especially toward bloggers.

Using tags

My primary use for Google Reader is to find stories. About 60% of my posts are about things I haven’t read before, out of the top of my head, the other 40% is about interesting stuff I read about. I write for 5 blogs at the moment and all of them require special types of content. One requires longer stories, the other requires shorter stories, one requires posts about web development and css and so on and so forth. Tags are a great way for me to indicate which blog the story could go to later. This enables me to go through all new items quickly and categorize them.

The great thing about tags is that you can also use them for personal interest. If I come across a story about the new Gibson guitar, I will want to read it later, I can just label it “personal” or something similar.

Sharing is networking

Sharing is a great way to stay in touch with your readers, let them know what kind of person you are and show people what kind of stuff you like. For example, Hack Your Day is all about productivity right? Well, apart from writing the blog I also play guitar and sing, I like guitars and so on, so the best way for me to communicate that is to share these kinds of stories. I can’t really blog about them on Hack Your Day, but if someone likes the blog enough to look into the author, they’ll see what other stuff I like, they may discover that they like similar things. Due to that they may refer other people to me, they may want to work with me and so on.

The new note options also enable you to share your opinion with you shared item. Since in your notes only the post title and your notes are shown, in theory you could also cover the item like a blog post. If you’re a popular blogger your readers will be interested in anything you have to say, so giving them as much as you can will make you even more popular.

Using stars

Many people I know use stars very unproductively. They star a load of items to read later, only read about 30% of them, and then keep many starred until the end of time. If you are a blogger, Google Reader is a professional tool you can use, so use it productively, give those stars some meaning.

If you don’t use the tagging system I described or if you only have one blog the best use of stars is to indicate articles you want to cover in the future. Once you’ve covered it, be sure to remove the star though so you can get an accurate reading of how many sources you have left.

However if you do use the tag system, there really is no point to using the stars like this, since the tags serve the same purpose. Once you’ve covered the story, just remove the tag. You can still use stars pretty well though for a multitude of things. I use them to indicate upcoming applications. There are quite a few apps which I love and are either in closed beta, or are still in production and I want to wait some more with a review. In these cases I add a star so I know I need to come back and check up on them later.

Reading by importance

Many people have hundreds of subscriptions and complain that they need to go through thousands of rss items daily. You’re a blogger, going through items does not make you money and is not at all a productive use of your time! I would more accurately describe it as a total waste. I just missed about 3 days and I went through about 150 items, which means 50 a day, which I don’t see growing all that much.

The secret to productive reading is categorization by importance. I have a local news page in my RSS feed which produces around 50 items a day. These however are not important so if I have read my important onces and I feel tired, there is no need to read these.

I suggest creating three folders, “daily”, “important”, and “other”. This is the combination that works best for me, let me show you how I use them. Daily items are ones that I read every day obviously. This would be Lifehacker for example, Freewaregenious and so on. If I find that more than 50% of a site’s post are worth covering (extremely rare), they get into the daily folder.

The important folder is for sites who produce some great stories, and I do read daily, but I don’t mind if I skip some stories. These sites typically produce 20% - 30% cover worth stories. This of course doesn’t mean the rest aren’t good, they just wouldn’t fit on any blogs I write to.

The other folder all the other feeds I like, but I don’t necessarily read all the time. These could be news feeds, blogs of friends, twitter feeds and so on. These are the feeds that are very fun to read, but produce no extra worth for my blog(s).

If you use this tip you will find that you use your time much more productively. I understand that its fun to read a lot of blogs, thoughts, ideas, news, but when you really get down to it, the good old 80-20 rule applies. 20% of the items contribute to 80% of your blog, while the other  80% hardly contribute anything.

Using trends to establish what to read

Google Reader has some built-in statistics which may seem like a “just for fun” option, but you can use it to your advantage. As I’ve said above, it’s important to spend time with the truly important feeds, and usig the data in the trends page is a great way to establish importance.

The best way to establish what you need to read is to initially use stars to indicate items you want to cover for any of your blogs. In the trends section, you can then take a look at the number of stars from each subscription, the more stars, the more important.

Update frequency could also indicate the importance of a blog since this raises the chance of you giving something a star. It also enables you to take a look at how many posts you create on your own blog on average. Hack Your Day has 0.8 posts daily right now, which tells me I need to write more, I would like to raise that to 1.5 at least.

There are other types of data you can take a look at. If you email yourself (or others) all the stories you want to cover the emailed data is quite handy. You can also take a look at the most inactive feeds and simply remove them.

You can also take a look at when you read feeds most, by time of day, day of the week and last 30 days, which can give you a good overview of time management. I read the most items on Tuesday, don’t ask me why, and indeed this shows me that I am not using my time right. I want to work on blogging roughly the same amount each day, so a very flat graph would be my ideal data set, showing that I spend the same time every day. This urges me to take a look at how and when I work, so I can optimize my time usage.

Firefox 3 introduces a new bookmarking system which utilizes databases to store your history, favorites and so on, so you have much more power and control over them. Recently I reinstalled my system and decided to go with a fresh (not restored) Firefox, so I can organize myself better.

In fact, the best way I think you can go about organizing your bookmarks in a new install is if you do it the GTD way. When you arrive at a web page, spend 2 seconds and decide if this is worth a bookmark or not. Most likely the first pages you visit will be, since these will be pages you visit often anyway. In this case, just press CTR+D to bring up the bookmark menu.

Keep the name, or modify it to something more easily understandable. Remember, bookmarks are for you, so it’s ok to abbreviate, use acronyms and so on. Choose a folder and choose some tags. Tags are new in Firefox and can be put to great use. SInce I write to a load of blogs I can bring up all the bookmakrs for admin pages easily, while still keeping these in the same folder. When you’ve saved your bookmarks you can also go back and enter a keyword for them. Just right click on the entry, click on properties and enter something easily remembered and short.You can then type that into the url bar to go to the site.

The key to keeping organized is consistently following the rule to decide at each page what to do. Take the time to organize your bookmarks into tags and folders. This will create some extra work now, but after a few days of browsing you will have the most important sites covered and the work you’ll need to do from then on will be minimal while you will be much better organized.

One of the biggest problems I have with Gmail is the way you attach stuff. Gmail outperforms every other app with this exception, the time Outlook can save using drag and drop is totally lost with web based clients. gAttach is a lightweight application designed to change that, although as you will see, only in some cases.

The application allows you to use the “send to email” shortcuts in Windows to attach messages to Gmail messages (or Google Apps Mail). You select the files in Outlook, Windows Photo Gallery and most importantly the exporer interface (the Windows interface). It works much like Outlook, just select the files you need and click the email button, or send to email link via the right click context menu. A message will appear showing the attaching progress, you may need to log in, and the message will be saved as a draft. You can opt to access this draft immediately by launching Gmail, or to just save it as a draft without accessing it at once.

This is a huge, huge help in two cases. One is if you have a load of files to send someone, but you don’t want to zip them up. Even if you have 3-5 it may be more productive to use gAttach. This will save you the browsing and manual attaching you usually need to go through. The other case is when you want to create 5-6 drafts quickly with different attachments, or perhaps just save a backup copy for yourself on your Gmail server. In this case the fact that you do not need to access the interface all the time is a huge time bonus.

The only time I find that the app is of no use if you have 1-2 attachments to add and you want to send the email right away, which is most often the case for me. Since the files need to be attached, you may need to log in and the message is saved as a draft, Gmail is loaded in a new window so will need to load, this may take more time than actually just doing things through the Gmail interface.

Nevertheless, gAttach can save you a boatload of time if you have some serious attaching to do and I can heartily recommend it to anyone, it works like a charm, thanks to Freewaregenius for their great find.

This post is actually an attempt to organize myself more than anybody else, but let me share what I propose to introduce into my own life, perhaps you will like it too. My problem is that I want to do too much, and I have too little time. This is an age old problem and I think I’ve found a quasi solution to it. The problem with large multiple projects is not so much that you don’t have enough time, but you need to divide your focus between them, and this division of labor if you will is the cause of much time wasiting.

The way I am trying to solve this is not to split up days into working on all of them, but to split my week up into days dedicated to one project. This creates some problems, but also solves a lot and problems created can be remedied, at least in my case.

Currently I can split my life into about 5 different large projects. These are Hack Your Day, Guest blogging, Code a Day (an upcomming css blog), my upcoming music project and Blogtastique. Ideally I would create a separate day for each of these projects, except for Blogtastique, which requires at least two. Since I can blog about things in advance it’s ok to separate only one day, even put two blogging projects on the same day, I can just schedule posts for a later date. This means I can spend the optimum amount of time on the most time consuming tasks, Blogtastique and my mystery musical project.

You can do the same thing I have done in your life. Identify your key projects and set up different days to work on them. If you have a day job you can still apply the same method to other tasks or hobbies you have. Separating projects like this helps you focus on one at a time, keeping a clear mind and you will be able to work much more productively overall.

The negative side is of course quite prominent with Blogtastique. Since I provide services, I can hardly keep a new client in the dark for 3 days. Even if my Blogtastique days are Tuesday and Thursday, this would still be an unacceptable time lag. So the question is, how much do I keep “out of touch” with a project on unspecified days?

This can be remedied quite easily actually. I have determined that the best course of action (for me) is to make emailing a global task, since that doesn’t take much time, and leave the actual work for scheduled days. So if a new client contacts me I talk through his order with him, and I notify him on which days I will be wrking on his order.

If you have multiple projects, but you can’t separate them like this, I still suggest some kind of barrier between them. Drink a cup of team between working on separate things, go for a walk, clear your mind and start each new project with a clear mind and you will be much more productive and effective!

Productivity is something that escapes many people in the morning, and I would be the first to admit to that myself. I’m far from being the easy waker, although I tend to “fall into shape” fast once I get up. For most of us the problem lies in our sleeping schedule, which we are unable to alter, due to family, friends, our jobs and so on. Let me share some tips to enable you to wake up better and start the day quicker, with more energy and positive thoughts.

Measure how much sleep you actually need

This is a tough one and requires some time. From various sources I’ve heard that if you miss some sleep you should not sleep more the next day, but this is totally stupid. If you sleep less than usuall on one day, you’re body will try to get it back later. This means that if you want to determine how much sleep you really need, you need to spend at least a few days sleeping right, but this should be more like a week or so.

The idea is to always go to sleep and wake up at the same time for at least three days. It’s best to go to bed around 21:30 - 22:00, and don’t use an alarm clock to wake up. Repeat this two more times, and on the fourth night, determine the amount you slept, this should be the amount of sleep you need. This method is far from fool-proof, sleep is probably the most varied thing ever and a lot of factors can mix up your results, so if you feel this is not the right amount for you, repeat this for more days if necessary.

Once you have determined your needs, you will have two advantages. Once is you know exactly how much sleep you should be getting, so you can schedule yourself accordingly. Even if this amount is more than you expect, at least you can now be predictible in your sleep. The other advantage presents itself if you have a low sleep need. If you find that you only need 5-6 hours, you won’t be psychologically pressured if you know you’re only getting 5 hours this night. I find that a lot of people slep badly because they know they are only going to get a few hours, which makes them tense, which makes them stay up even more, sleep even less, and the vicious cycle continues.

Wake up at once

I’m not saying this is something I follow to the letter, but the most helpful thing you can do in the mornings is jump out of bed once your alarm goes off. Don’t set your alarm 5 minutes before the actual time you need so you can get an extra few minutes of shuteye. I mean how much do you think 5 minutes really helps? Sure, it feels good, but you’re just running away from the problem. Wake up, start doing stuff, you’ll feel better in notime and you will save some time in the mornings for yourself.

Start an activity instantly

My Mom is one of the worst wakers ever. When she wakes up she’s like a drunk, she can barely speak and so on. When I was small though and I woke her because I had a tummy ache, she woke instantly and was alert in about 2 seconds. There’s a good deal of Motherly instinct there, but you can use the same basic principle for youself.

First of all, you need a child. No, just kidding, but you need to get yourself an activity in the morning. I frequently sit down and start working right out of bed. This doesn’t mean I don’t brush my teeth and eat my breakfest, the activity just helps me to wake up at least 5 times faster.

How many times have you sat down with your coffee, just staring into nothing? This takes away a lot of time, time which most people don’t enjoy, because they’re still quasi-sleeping. Get up and do something, anything to take your mind off the fact that you’re tired.

Get yourself into the shower as fast as possible

A shower is something that will wake everyone who has had a half-proper night’s sleep, so getting in there asap may be your number one priority. I realize this takes some will power when you’re tired, but it will wake you up, you probably need a shower at some point anyway and makes you feel good and fresh.

If you alternate between hot and cold water the effect will be doubled and this will also help your skin to breath a bit, since it exercises your pores. You can also use a refreshing shower gel, or anything like that you have at home, whichever you feel most comfortable with will be the best.