Blogging Sueblimely

Image: by mybloodyself

My previous post on Thunderbird covered methods to organize and keep up with your emails. This post will show you extra techniques to use, to speed up the process further, by using a small selection of Thunderbird addins.

QuickFolders (Folder Tabs) 0.9.9.5

This is a real time saver for storing your emails if you have a lot of Thunderbird folders. Dragging your most used folders to the QuickFolders toolbar creates shortcut tabs to them. When you want to move emails to these folders, instead of having to search among the sidebar folder tree, you now just drag an email to the folder tab you wish to store it in.

Tag Toolbar

This extension displays your tags as tabs on a toolbar. Tag or untag an email quickly by clicking on the relevant tab..You can also filter the tags to be displayed by categorizing tags. For example you could add a ‘work’ category and choose to display only the tags you have categorized as work in the toolbar.

Quick Text

To save time you time if you send out a lot of emails containing the same text, Quicktext allows you to create templates for insertion into your mail. Creating multiple signatures is also possible.

Integrating other Email Accounts

It is not easy to get by without a Gmail account, because of all the Google applications that demand it although having an email address other than that of your IP is wise for anonymity sake.

To save time having to log into Gmail separately and reading two lots of emails it is simple to import Gmail into Thunderbird. You also create a backup of Gmail in the process. You can set up Thunderbird (and Outlook) to receive POP or IMAP email or to just forward all mail received in Gmail. Visit your Gmail Settings/Forwarding and POP/IMAP page to turn on these features and to read instructions for configuring Thunderbird to receive POP or IMAP emails.With POP the emails are downloaded to your compute, whereas with IMAP all mail is kept on the Gmail server which is a slower process.

If you don’t fancy setting things up manually, the Gmail IMAP Account Setup Thunderbird extension or Mozilla Webmail extension can help you. Webmail can also bring your Hotmail, Yahoo, AOL, mail.com and Libero accounts into Thunderbird.

Google Contacts synchronizes your Google Contacts with Thunderbird saving you time having to set address cards up manually.

If you know of other Thunderbird addins or methods that save time with your email reading and storing please do let us know.

My computer activities have been monitored for the last few weeks, not by some keylogging stalker but by Rescue Time, with my full permission. I was drawn to use this time tracking application by their home page claim “Clobber procrastination with Goals & Alerts and watch your efficiency grow.” The jury is still out as to whether procrastination is my problem or a need to explore what is new coupled with being involved with too many online activities,. Whatever the reason, I certainly need to improve efficiency. Rescue time takes the form of a downloadable program which sends data on your computer usage. Data is analyzed and available via your online account. Customization allows you to categorize and tag the information to suit your needs..

I am impressed with depth of information it is possible to generate, although the time required to produce such minute detail for myself may end up being counterproductive, because of the nature of my use. Categories are automatically added for recognized applications and major sites, Although categorization of applications is thorough, I visit a great number of sites that I either need to manually add categories to or reclassify to suit my needs. Being a web developer and blogger the automatic category News/Blog, for example, covers work, blogging and personal use. I need to split this up by recategorizing. To produce further classification, tags need to be added to each site visited and each application used; which means that for me, to date, many are not tagged..

Although I have recently spent a couple of hours classifying and tagging, after doing similar last week, you can see from the Rescue Time Tag Widget below how much I did not tag. This relates to a large number of sites that I have visited; sites of blogging contacts and those visited for research for blog posts and a new project I am working on. I spent time on tagging sites that I visit regularly rather than those I may not go back to again. Over time the results should be more meaningful and more patterns will emerge.. All of the results below relate to last week although data and charts can be produced for a chosen week, month, all time, the current week or today.

Tags

The following data,detailing individual applications used, is more comprehensive for me, as this is automatically produced; with no input needed. Further interpretation is needed (for example Dreamweaver and MSN Msgr has been used for work, volunteer work,blogging and personal use) but this is where categories and tags come in.

Application and Site Use

Other charts are available to make your data more easily understandable: . Your dashboard can be customized to include the charts of your choosing. For example:

Top Categories

Overview

In addition to the charts, full listings are provided. It is via these listings that you add and edit categories and tags.

The real beauty of this application is that you do not have to analyse the graphs and raw data to work out how efficient you have been or whether you are meeting desired goals. Rescue time provides ways of doing this.

It generates details of your efficiency compared to others. I don’t consider that I was particularly efficient so I need to look further into how this is calculated.

You are able to set goals and alerts by determining how much or how little time you want to spend on particular categories or tags. If you want to track these goals, you can be set up daily goal summary alerts via RSS or real-time email/SMS messages. Various widgets allow you to display information on your blog or other websites (e.g. iGoogle, Netvibes, Yahoo desktop widget) There is even a logger allowing you to manually add details of the amount of time you have spent on the phone or in meetings.

As you can see below, I have a way to go yet before I meet the targets I have set for myself.

Overall this is a very impressive application and could prove very useful if you are keen on improving your efficiency and are willing to spend some time setting it up to customize it to your needs. Setup time will vary depending on your computer usage. For me that time is most likely a fair amount longer than the average user because I am a computer nerd who uses the PC for work, leisure, news and socializing.

Rescue time is developing the application further to include such information as how your time is being spent in “general” applications such as Microsoft Word, Excel, or Outlook and by hour breakdowns of “flow” throughout a day, week, or month. Rescue Time is free for individual use but plans are also available for small businesses and enterprises which include team tracking.

Alternatives

Slife – a free desktop based application which seems to have similar features to Rescue Time. I have only just started using this and will report on it when I have had time to gather data and analyse its usefulness.

TimeSnapper, a desktop based application, which calls itself an Automatic Screenshot Journal. To get the same sort features as Rescue Time purchase of the professional version is needed although at $24.95 it is not expensive for individual use.

Please let me know if you want further details on Rescue Time or if you use a different time management application for helping you keep on track.

If, like me, you download themes or templates for future reference or while deciding on a theme for a new blog or planned update, keeping track of them can be difficult. I always create a separate folder for each theme I download and make sure there is an image of the theme in there too. It is a quick easy reminder of what the theme looks like. Rather than using the little thumbnail images that are often included in a theme I save a copy of an image from the download site or do a screenshot of a demo page. I save this image as folder.jpg which, on windows XP, gives you a good preview of the image when looking at the folder in thumbnail view – This is not so useful in Vista which hides most of the image.

When you download a theme, add on (or any other software for that matter) where extra instructions are needed (for installation or usage) create your own text file and copy and paste the information from the site into this. Give this a distinct name so you know it is your own file. (I used to call all mine sue.txt but this was a real problem when I had to restore all my files from a disastrous reformat. I had hundreds of files called sue.txt and had no idea where most of them belonged.) After this I started adding the name of the application too. I only tend to do this when I may forget where I downloaded the files from – otherwise it is as easy just to go back to the site for instructions.. To quickly create a file In Windows – right click in a blank space in the explorer file window, click on "New" and then on text file (or Word or Excel etc depending on what you want to record). Name your file. Open it and copy and paste the information you need to record then press Save and you are done. It may be enough just to add the url of the site to go to for the instructions.

I use the Firefox Download Status Bar extension. A bar at the bottom of your browser window shows the files that have been downloaded. You can open files from here (to view images, unzip, install etc) and right clicking gives you the option to go to its containing folder. This makes it easy to quickly go to the folder where you installed a download to do what you need to do with it and to create a text file as mentioned above.

Reading blogs and other websites, participating in Social Networking Sites, doing research, dropping Entrecards can create an overloaded and disorganized Firefox browser. Here are some ways you can avoid frustration, speed up your browsing and be more organized.

• Keep one lean clean, mean speedy profile free of addin toolbars, sidebars and multiple extensions for quick browsing..

• Use a different profile for visiting other sites and social networking.

(I would not recommend using this many toolbars at any one time!)

To start Firefox in profile view, where you can choose which profile to load and add new ones: Go to Start Menu/Run and type “firefox -profilemanager”. Mac users – “/Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox-bin —profilemanager” (without the “‘s) . From the profile screen you can choose to open Firefox in the Profile Manager each time you start the program. To run more than one profile at once use the Profile Switcher extension

• Keep your most used bookmarks at hand by using folders on your bookmarks toolbar. Eg – one for social networking sites, one for sites you visit regularly…

• Bloggers who take part in carnivals or regular memes (eg wordless Wednesday) or follow particular scheduled weekly posts may be interested in the Morning Coffee Firefox extension which allows you to organise favorite sites by day and open them in tabs. Thanks to Brown Baron for putting me on to this one. You could also use this to discipline yourself and not be sidetracked while working or studying, e.g. by setting weekend and weekday bookmarks.
• If you have the Greasemonkey extension installed the following scripts can speed up your browsing and make life easier:
  • Disable Text Ads – Disables inline text ads from Vibrant Media (IntelliTXT), AdBrite, Infolicious (lingoSpot), Kontera, Linkworth, EchoTopic, Targetpoint and MediaText (to date).
  • RSS+Atom Feed Subscribe Button Generator – automatically finds RSS and Atom subscription links on a webpage and insertsa feed subscription button to the top left of the page.
• It’s All Text, – speed up the process of writing in text areas (comments, forum posts etc) and do not lose what you have typed due to mishaps.
• If you are game to alter your Firefox configuration take a look at the tutorial Speed Up Firefox web browser
• Use the noscript extension to disable javascript, Java, Flash and other plugins for safe browsing as well as speed. You can choose which sites you wish to be excluded from the disable functions – It does take some setting up to do this though. Some love it, some find it annoying. If you do not want to use this all the time add it to your “lean” profile or to a new one
• It is wise to do backup or copy of your Firefox profile before editing your config or adding Greasemonkey scripts.
• It is always worth doing regular backups of your profile in case other problems arise.

Please let me know if you have any tips to speed up your browsing activities (apart from setting yourself a time limit that is – something I have rarely been able to achieve).