People who work a lot at a computer may find that their productivity is defined by their speed typing skills. The faster you type the less time you spend doing it (or the more you can type), ultimately you do more.

If you want to find out just how fast you are, take this handy Typing Speed Test my friend Karl from Ask The Admin found a week or so ago. I would say that a score of 50 or so is average, I got 63 if I recall correctly.

If you are concerned about some health issues get a nice squishy gel hand rest and buy a natural keyboard which will suit your wrist positions better. Learning to type quickly is a must for online entrepreneurs, but you also need to type correctly, so be sure to master both aspects.

An application that is among the first 5 install is actually an extension for Firefox. FireFTP is a simple ftp client for Firefox, but is probably one of the main applications for my productivity. It enables me to upload and download files like pics for my blog easily, without having to leave my browser.

This means I don’t need to open an extra program, and I can just open it in a tab anytime, even open up multiple instances if I want. The application doesn’t provide as many features as SmartFTP, a standalone program, but if simple file transfer is all you need I can heartily recommend it.

A great feature I use is that you can set default locations for your local machine and for the ftp site. Just navigate to a location on your PC and a location on the server, go to manage accounts - edit, click on the connection tab and click on the use current button for both locations. If you backup a lot you can also sync locations, going between directories simultaneously.

I knew it existed, but I was only faced with it truly when I started writing my blog. There is a kind of spam that I think is a bit annoying, but acceptable. These are the people who own a company or web service, and go around on people’s blogs, writing quasi-useful comments with their link inside.

First of all, it is not really good netiquette to include your link in forums, or comments. It may also get filtered if a blog has a very aggressive spam filtering system. Second of all, you can enter your website in the form, and if someone likes your comment, they can click on your name and whoosh, they’re at the site. The goal would be to write an interesting enough comment.

However, I am prepared to accept “spam” like this, that is at leas half relevant. I wrote a post on managing your tasks with Remember the Milk a while ago, and recently approved the following comment:

“The logo is cute - no doubt
I was using the service untill I realized I needed something more. Now I’m with Wrike.com [http://www.wrike.com/]. It’s a very cool project management service.”

I can’t say 100% that this is spam, but I’m pretty sure, since Wrike is a pay for application. It’s also not exactly a substitute for Remember the Milk, but, it is similar. I also like the fact that the commenter actually read some of the post. I really-really dislike spam, but comments like this are acceptable, since they show you alternatives.

If you have a service you want to promote it’s fine posting a comment in every blog I think, but at least make the effort to contribute to the subject at hand. If you do, I think you should be ok, even if you put in your link, I mean I understand that services need traffic. If y”our product is really bad, no amount of traffic will save you anyway.

A type of troublesome email I’ve seen recently is fake Hallmark e-card emails. If you get one, be sure to hover over the link to the card itself. In the email I received, the link points to “http://62.183.68.110/card.exe”, hardly a legit Hallmark card.

If you get anything that isn’t directly from someone you know, or doesn’t contain any very specific info about the sender, always take care with clicking links. Even if you do click this Hallmark one, you still have to choose to save or run it, if you accidentally run into this, just cancel and you should be ok.

I wanted to contact Hallmark about this, but in the process it became clear that they know about the problem, so in the end I didn’t submit my email. Good job Hallmark for noticing and doing something, I hope they manage to accomplish something.