Techpaulogy

Advanced Operators: Some of My Favorite Tools

The topic for this Advanced Operators session is a roundup of our favorite tools -- online, desktop, or otherwise (paper?). I haven't jumped in for the last few conversations, but after grabbing lunch with Justin, I realized it's been too long! So, that being said, here are some of the tools in my daily arsenal:

Blog tools

• Lijit - I am loving this new widget for my blog (look at the search box, to the right). It is ridiculously simple to setup. Basically, it is a slick interface to build a Custom Search Engine for all your web content (blog, Digg, del.icio.us, MyBlogLog, etc.), and then hook it into your blog sidebar. But it's better than Google CSE alone, as it tracks tons of stats, is readily skin-able, shows a tag cloud of popular searches... And works some magic for users who arrive at your blog via a search engine. If it detects users coming from search, it offers up other content in your network that might also be of interest (try this search, click my blog, and look above the post title -- you don't see that box if you arrive there without performing a search first).
• CLIQ - a new widget coming out of local Portland crew StepChange (with technology from Offermatica), that groups your friend's blogs together into a "CLIQ." Then it shows popular and featured content from your blog and your friends' blogs in the sidebar (based on its tracking algorithms). While it sounds really cool, it is still in private beta and getting some kinks worked out. Like what happens when you want to be part of multiple CLIQs -- I have a few friends who are already involved in another CLIQs, and can't intuitively be involved in mine too. Luckily, the support team has gotten back to me with answers to my questions, so I have been able to find work-arounds. I've been constantly searching for a Featured/Popular Post widget for TypePad, and this finally looks to be the answer! With a social flare.
• coComment - this tool keeps track of conversations you have on other blogs, and lets you know via RSS if people respond to your comments. Then, it can spit out a widget to toss on your blog sidebar, to display your conversations elsewhere.
• Last.fm - Ok, a fun on. Perhaps the best music community I've found online, it tracks everything I listen to with iTunes, Pandora, Yahoo Music Engine, Windows Media Player, and its own player (that has tons of great, free music). Then it ties together all sorts of stats, which can be used on your blog sidebar (see my photo blog -- bottom left sidebar) or on Facebook. It's also a great way to explore new music, and connect with other people who share your tastes.

Other tools

• Snag-it - This one is indispensable. It's the best screenshot tool I've found. I wrote about Snippy earlier, and have since realized that this was totally worth the cost. Not only can it capture entire web pages with auto-scroll, but it makes the print screen button about 300 times more useful -- let's you annotate and markup screenshots on the fly, before saving them as files or copying to the clipboard for use in email, Powerpoint, etc.
• RoboForm - I use this a few times an hour. It saves all my passwords and personal information, and then automatically fills forms online. I don't have to remember passwords any more, and it fills in pretty much any form the Web can throw at you (even has user-defined fields). Most importantly, it's encrypted. But it's also super portable. I sync it to my USB thumbdrive at home, and sync it to my PC at work, so it all flows seamlessly. Plus, it syncs to my Treo, so I have my passwords on the fly when I am at an Internet kiosk or a friend's house.
• DesktopSidebar - While Google, Yahoo (Konfabulator), and a number of other players have rolled out desktop widgets, I still swear by this. For people who live in a Windows world, this by far and away has the best Office/Outlook support for power users (and those of us who follow GTD practices). It puts a heads-up display of all my tasks due the next few days, appointments, scratch pads (notes), multi-snip clipboard, and pretty much anything else you'd really want on your desktop for instant use.

While this list is by no means exhaustive, there are plenty more tools I am in the midst of using, that I could write about: FeedBurner, BlogRoveR & FeedDigest (hat tip to Marshall K for these), Picnik, Wufoo, CrazyEgg, Greasemonkey... so many!

All Your (data)Base Are Belong To Us

Online databases, be warned: you are mine. I just ran across a web broswer from Kirix, called Strata, that's really a "data browser". From their site:

Kirix Strata is a new specialty browser for accessing and manipulating data from the web. View and work with data from web tables, CSV files, and RSS feeds, integrate information from web services to create personal "desktop mashups," browse and work with MySQL, Oracle and other databases.

It's a pretty slick, based on Mozilla's Gecko engine, that's well integrated into the other tools I use (e.g. Office). Beyond being able to automate report creation out of web-based tools, it lets you mashup data from different sources. I am just beginning to test what I can do to (and stats I can generate). Get excited. Does anyone else use other data extraction tools for web-apps? (For example, Selenium IDE).

And, for old times sake, All Your Base... the original video, on YouTube.

Productivity Blog Feeds Becoming Unproductive

Time to clean out the ol' RSS reader -- it's getting way too cluttered. Information overload. Sadly, it looks like this round of cleaning is going to the heart of the matter: my "productivity" RSS feeds. I was on a GTD kick a while back. In fact, more of a mission to get organized and prioritized. It worked. I now have a great system in place on my laptop and Treo, that syncs all my tasks in context with my situation (@work, @home, @mobile) so I only see the to-do's I need to be aware of in any given place. What I need to know, when I need to know it, and nothing more. A bit of attention management.

But, having gleaned most of what I wanted from the GTD methodology, I haven't touched my productivity feeds in quite some time. If anyone is looking to get organized, check out:

• Slacker Manager
• LifeHacker
• 43 Folders
• GTD Wannabe
• What's the Next Action
• Black Belt Productivity

In the meantime, these blogs are getting relegated to del.icio.us tags, and maybe persistent search (you know, so I only get the core posts and not the personal tangents).

(P.S. I am also getting tired of my current information repository -- InfoSelect. It is getting fairly outdated, and they haven't updated the Palm app in quite some time. Does anyone use MindManager, or other productivity software for keeping track of research and information?)

Make a Desktop Application out of any Web Service

I've been using a program called Bubbles for some time now, and it's been extremely helpful in my daily routine at work. In a nutshell, it takes web pages and makes desktop applications out of them.

I'm keenly focused on reducing clutter and creating contexts around my workflow (GTD influence here!), so this is a great way to keep Firefox for browsing and research purposes only, and separate all the web services I have open for long periods of time (SalesForce, AdWords MCC, SlimTimer, etc.) into their own "bubbles" -- essentially, their own programs in the task bar that can be hidden and sized independently of the browser. This way I can Alt-Tab switch between applications just like they are separate programs, without cluttering up my browser, which inevitably has 34 tabs open already...

It's especially useful in an agency environment, where I am logged into so many different client accounts, and also my own accounts. With Bubbles, I can have both open at once an not interrupt the flow.  For example, I can have our Google MCC account open in Bubbles, while I have Google Reader open in my browser to read industry news.

The Easiest (Free) Screenshot Tool: Snippy

Ever want to make a quick screenshot to send to a co-worker? Or, make a quick screen-grab to toss into that PowerPoint deck that's due in 30 minutes?

Well, the easiest tool in the world for that is Snippy. Hit F11. Select anywhere on your screen. Open an e-mail. Hit Paste. Done. You can download this simple screenshot tool for free. Doesn't even need an install. Just drop it on your computer somewhere you can find it (say, your Start Menu) and it's ready to go.

Taking RSS to the Next Level - Unleashing Your Business Data

I've been a huge fan of RSS technology since its inception -- having been a rabid Bloglines user, and more recently Google Reader (I prefer its mobile interface, which I use about an hour a day on my Treo to pull down the latest news on the way to work).

But, these consumer applications are only the tip of the iceberg for the true power of RSS. It offers a much more robust platform for information distribution, where applications like e-mail fall short. It makes content ultra-portable and functional, where before it was locked in databases behind clunky websites or software UIs. It separates content from structure -- and businesses are rapidly realizing the upside to this.

How so? Well, if my personal RSS stream's goal is to get the right information to me in an organized fashion, scale that up to a business level where a corporation can "get the right information to the right people at the right time" -- that punchline came to me via Attensa, a client that is charging forward in the Enterprise RSS space. There are so many applications for RSS in a business, just to name a few:

• Team collaboration and project management feeds (bye-bye distribution lists)
• Delivering sales data and marketing collateral to empower a distributed sales team (no more digging for email attachments)
• Persistent search and timely delivery of relevant information (stop skimming that inbox full of newsletters and Google Alerts)
• And hey, let's not forget the guys over in IT -- security features to block malicious code and provide a controlled environment for information flowing through (and behind) the firewall

The team at Attensa is hard at work on two products to enable all this. First, the RSS reader for Outlook, which is really slick. It's not your average reader. To start with, a ETech they just rolled out a new version that ranks articles based on user interest and attention (dubbed "AttentionStream") by tracking reading behavior -- on an individual and aggregate level across an organization. On top of that it's integrated and optimized for Outlook, where most of us live 9-5 M-F.  It also has a toolbar for IE/Firefox to handle RSS feeds in the wild, and syncs with your del.icio.us tags. To explore it further, you can download the software for free and give it a try.

Second, on the other side of the information distribution pipeline (well, smack in the middle, actually) sits Attensa's RSS feed server. This is where businesses can truly capture the essence of Enterprise 2.0. Through a relatively easy-to-deploy appliance (on a LAMP stack -- the most recent server release also can be implemented via software appliance or hosted solution), administrators can securely distribute, manage, and track RSS/ATOM/XML feeds from internal and external blogs, wikis, and websites. Employees can then subscribe to these feeds on a selective/filtered basis and receive the information in Microsoft Outlook, in their browser, in their instant messenger, or on a mobile device. Where ever and however the information is in the most useful context.

By combining these tools (or even just the Outlook reader) you can really take RSS applications to the next level.

Desktop Widgets - Productivity Sidebars for Outlook

After becoming a fan of David Allen's GTD, I've been in search of the perfect way to manage my calendar and to-do list of projects and action items. While my life is crazy busy in general, working for a marketing agency (search engine marketing at Anvil Media) has exponentially multiplied the need to stay on top of all the client and internal deadlines coming down the pipeline.

I made the decision to stick with Outlook as my information management tool of choice, since it's so (frustratingly) intergrated in my daily life.  Plus, it syncs with my Treo, which never leaves my side.

The question of this particular post is how to create a dashboard of all the information stored in Outlook without having to keep the Today View open all the time. Enter desktop sidebar applications, which sit docked on the edge of your computer desktop and display all the info you need to have on hand. These sidebar widgets can be setup to display upcoming meetings and the tasks due that day, so they are always on your radar. Here are my findings:

• DesktopSidebar is my favorite software of the bunch. It's free, and has an active developer community that is constantly coming up with new widgets. It integrates seamlessly with Outlook, keeping all the info I need right under my mouse. It also has the deepest level of customization of all the desktop sidebar tools -- for example, I have it set to display all my daily work tasks (@office for GTD followers) on my office computer, and all my home duties on my laptop (@home category). A major facet of GTD is contextualizing action items, so that you only see the subset of next actions related to your present situation (so you aren't distracted by tasks that are for another time and place). And, in addition to maximizing the usefulness of Outlook, it also gives you useful tools like weather and multiple item clipboards (so you can copy and paste a series of items, not just one at a time).

• Google Sidebar is the other contender in this class of software, which I had high hopes for. Since I already use Google Desktop Search, it would make sense to also use the sidebar app... Problem is, it just isn't as customizable, nor does it sync with Outlook very well (tasks only, the calendar plugin doesn't work in the newest version). If I didn't want to use Outlook, this would be the way to go -- it's simpler than DesktopSidebar, and one less application to install.

It's worth mentioning that the newest version of Outlook 2007 has a sidebar of sorts, though I've yet to test it -- and I don't have my hopes up. You can also check out Yahoo Widgets (used to be Konfabulator until it was acquired), though I've never found it to be as useful as the others. In the meantime, I'll be sticking with DesktopSidebar.