Archives for December 2007

Reducing Your Daily Clutter for 2008

Posted by Kyle Eslick on December 31st, 2007 | Category and Tags | 0 comments

With the New Year fast approaching, a lot of us have some extra time to catch up on some work or finish up some projects that we started throughout the year.  There are a number of things people can do to reduce to the clutter in your lives.   I’m going to approach this from a couple angles.   First, what you can do as a blogger, and second, some general tips to reduce your daily clutter.

Blogger Tips

  • Clean Up Your Theme - Browse through your blog themes and validate/clean up the code.   Make sure you are using all those images in your images folder.
  • Update Your WordPress Plugins - WordPress 2.3 really helps with this, but not all plugins are registered and notify you of updates.  The end of the year is a great time to go through all of your plugins and make sure they are up to date.
  • Write Extra Posts - Write up a few posts and save them as drafts for a rainy/sick day.
  • Clean Out Your Feed Reader/Newsletters - Feed readers fill up fast, and will continue to grow in the New Year.   Cancel some of those feeds that haven’t updated in awhile or that you don’t really need (unless it is this one!).  Also cancel some of those newsletters that clog up your inbox.

General Tips

  • Clean Out Your E-mail -  Create some new labels/folders, tidy up your inbox, and make sure all your e-mails are responded to.
  • Clean Out Your Add-ons - Web browsers often slow down if you build up a bunch of add-ons.  Comb through your list of add-ons and delete some that aren’t being used enough to warrant having.
  • Delete Old Software - Throughout the year we all stock up on a variety of software, much of which goes unused.   Delete this extra software to free up some system resources.
  • Defrag Harddrive - Some ambitious people may completely reformat their harddrive, but you’ll want to at least defrag your harddrive.

Anything you do at the end of each year to reduce your daily clutter?

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Technology Talk - 12/30/2007

Posted by Kyle Eslick on December 30th, 2007 | Category and Tags | 0 comments

As we continue to roll towards the New Year, the great content keeps on coming. Here are a few of the posts that I enjoyed from around the blogosphere this week:

  • ComputerWorld has posted 5 Things You’ll Love About Firefox 3.0. This post covers some of the stuff that many people aren’t talking about with the new version of Firefox 3.0.
  • Hack WordPress explains how to adjust the blogroll code to separate your categories. Most themes by default come with the old blogroll code that doesn’t give you much control over how your blogs are displayed.
  • Digital Inspiration explains why you should at least consider using FeedBlitz over Feedburner for managing your e-mail subscriptions.  I personally prefer the simplicity of Feedburner, but Amit makes some good points.
  • Social Media Trader has ranked 115 social news and bookmarking services.  Click over to see who came in at number 1.
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Best of: Internet Explorer Add-ons

Posted by Kyle Eslick on December 29th, 2007 | Category and Tags | 4 comments

[Last Updated: June 2, 2008]

For a period of almost five years, Microsoft Windows users were stuck with Internet Explorer 6.0 for their web browsing needs. Their lack of support for the browser left an opening for competition, and out of those ashes rose a Phoenix which would eventually be known as Firefox.

The success of Firefox is often attributed to being open source, or for better handling of security issues, but I’ve always felt that it was the Firefox Add-ons that really made the browser appeal to web surfers.

Once Microsoft finally got around to developing Internet Explorer 7.0, they recognized the value of add-ons and built them into their next generation web browser. There are a large number of Internet Explorer Add-ons currently available, but they are rarely given much exposure, so I decided to collect the best of them here in this post, broken down into categories for easy reference.

Downloads

  • Star Downloader - Download manager and accelerator. Chooses the best mirror sites and splits up the downloads into multiple parts for faster downloads.
Previous in series Next in series

My 'Best of' Series

  1. Best of: Firefox Add-ons
  2. Best of: Free Software
  3. Best of: Greasemonkey Scripts
  4. Best of: Thunderbird Extensions
  5. Best of: Internet Explorer Add-ons
  6. Best of: Facebook Applications
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R.I.P. Netscape

Posted by Kyle Eslick on December 29th, 2007 | Category and Tags | 0 comments

I’ve always been a big believer in competition being good for the consumer, and when it comes to web browsers, this could not be more true.  If Firefox and Opera hadn’t come along, we’d probably still be using Internet Explorer 6.0.

With that being said, I had a bit of a heavy heart as I read today that Netscape will no longer be supported, completing what was a catastrophic, yet inevitable collapse in the browser market.  When AOL purchased Netscape, it was the dominant web browser.  It is hard to believe a decade later AOL managed to run it into the ground.

Despite my love for all things Firefox, I can’t help but root for several of the other browsers, including Opera and Flock, to succeed.  Competition pushes these companies to work harder and continue to innovate, so I want as much competition as possible.   R.I.P. Netscape…..

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Best of: Photobucket Greasemonkey Scripts

Posted by Kyle Eslick on December 29th, 2007 | Category and Tags | 0 comments

If you are looking for a place to host images, there are a variety of choices, but Photobucket is probably the most popular option that is available at no cost to the user.  It is especially popular with MySpace users since they purchased the company.

While the service Photobucket offers is pretty basic and easy to use, I was pleased to see that there are a few Greasemonkey scripts available to Photobucket users to improve their experience.  In order to use these scripts, you’ll first need to make sure you have the Greasemonkey extension installed.

Photobucket Greasemonkey Scripts

Hopefully this list will grow as more useful Greasemonkey scripts are created for Photobucket.

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Collection of Internet Explorer Add-ons

Posted by Kyle Eslick on December 29th, 2007 | Category and Tags | 0 comments

With the release of Internet Explorer 7.0 came a host of new features to the browser, including the rarely talked about ability to use Add-ons.   I’ve talked a little bit about Add-ons in the past, but haven’t spent a lot of time covering the various add-ons available.   It looks like they’ve also released a few since the last time I looked.

I’m currently working on compiling a list of Internet Explorer Add-ons, but in the meantime, if you are a web developer or designer and use Internet Explorer, I recommend you check out this post by TechDune focusing on 20+ IE7 Add-ons for Web Developers and Designers.

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