It’s a little hilarious, and a little sad, but I devoted this weekend to finally getting my web browsing and reading habits in order. You’d think that since EVERYTHING I do involves the internet I would have handled this years ago, but no- I was literally jumping from site to site, book-marking my links on four different computers and hitting refresh to check for new items. I can’t explain how I ended up preaching the benefits of RSS to my clients and yet never put any of it in play for myself.. I guess I’m just an idiot like that.
But those days are over. Here’s the new plan that has been put into place:
1. Google Reader: I’ve consolidated the RSS feeds of my most frequently visited/bookmarked sites. I have even included some message boards so that I can see new thread topics as they come up.
2. Google Reader Watcher for Firefox: Wait, you mean that I don’t even need to go to the Google Reader page to check for new items, it’ll just notify me in my browser when it finds something? Sign me up!
3. Delicious account: Yes, I am that far behind. After stumbling upon Tucker’s and Ryan’s pages it was really obvious how this service can and should be used- collaborative homework. I’m on board now.
4. Shareaholic for Firefox: It makes bookmarking pages through Delicious that much easier. Now I just click the green button and it takes me to the submit page. Tag, comment, save. Done.
5. Update Scanner for Firefox: No RSS feed, or want to be alerted to a change on a largely static site when it happens? Here’s your answer, and like the Google Reader extension it’ll let you know what happens without having to lift a finger. Never miss out on concert tickets again!
6. TwitterFox: I’m not completely sold on Twitter yet, and this one was more or less done as an experiment. I’m slowly warming up to it and no longer having to go to the actual site to check out what people are doing (again, it just pops up in my browser) has been a huge plus. I’ve also tied my Twitter account to Facebook, so I only need to submit one update (does anyone really “need” to ?) and it’ll travel across a few different lines. There are probably a million ways to do this but I’m ok with being on the short-bus (for now).
So there you have it. It’s really not complicated, but taking an hour or two to wrangle some of this information is going to save me thousands of hours in the future, AND I can re-create this across all of the different machines I use. I’m kicking myself for not doing it sooner.