Productivity Archive

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Quick tips on IE8 tabs and Google Reader

By
mike
– September 15, 2010Posted in: Computing, Personal, Productivity

Seeing as I’ve had some time off recently and I’m a Bit Of A Geek, I’ve spent most of it in front of the computer :)

I use Internet Explorer 8 as my browser of choice, although I do also use Firefox as well for the excellent Firebug and Web Developer Toolber plugins, they really help with web development. Anyway, I have a number of sites I visit on a daily basis (Twitter, Facebook, Daily Telegraph, etc.), and I use have them in each tab.

When I start my daily browsing, I’m so lazy that I can’t be bothered to create a new tab and click each link from the Favourites bar, so I’ve found a way to kind of automate it. Instead of setting IE8′s home page to whatever you have set it to, set it to about:tabs. Then, when the browser launches, just click the Reopen Last Browsing Session link on the page. Hey presto, all your tabs get populated as they were when you last closed your browser. Obviously you need some open tabs to start with ;) Incidentally, use Ctrl+Q to access Quick Tabs, a visual representation of which tabs you have open, then pick a tab or hit Esc to close.

As I spend a lot of time in Google Reader (the RSS feed reader), I like to view it full-screen to maximise reading space. This is achieved by hitting two keys on the keyboard: F11 (in IE8) to go full-screen in the browser, and then f in Google Reader just to get the reading pane. These keys toggle, naturally. If you like keyboard shortcuts (who doesn’t?), just hit ? in Google Reader to get a pop-up, overlayed list of all the shortcuts you can use, e.g. s, l, j, k for star, like, next, previous respectively.

Hope this helps :)

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Google Reader

By
mike
– June 21, 2007Posted in: Productivity

Like me, you’ve probably have a couple of sites you visit on a regular basis for news, information, free code that you can just drop into your app without crediting the author, that kind of thing ;) I had more than a couple of sites to check, truth be told, and checking them on a daily basis was becoming a PITA.

Fortunately, RSS provides a way for sites to alert interested parties that their site has been updated. An XML file is published with a list of summary items containing a brief description of the new content, images, and links. An RSS reader checks this file on a periodic basis and alerts you to the fact that there is new content.

Other RSS readers are available, but after reading about Robert Scoble’s approach to RSS reading on Tim Ferris’ Four Hour Work Week blog, I thought I would give Google Reader a try (because it’s what Robert Scoble uses – I’m such a fanboy).

Google Reader does require a Google account, but all that’s just an email addy and a password. Once you’ve signed up you can start adding RSS feeds. I found the easiest way of doing this is to surf to the site I’m interested in and click the “Detect Feeds” button on my browser. From there, I just copied the URL of the feed (e.g.  http://www.mkingscott.co.uk/feed/), flicked over to Google Reader, clicked Add Subscription, pasted the URL and clicked the Add button. Google Reader then goes off, verifies the url, and grabs the first few items in the feed.

Here’s where it gets really useful: it displays a list of all your subscriptions (to the RSS feeds), and a count of how many unread items there are in each subscription. You can choose to display all feeds, or just feeds with unread items. When you read an item and scroll past it, it’s marked as read. The really cool bit is it’s all done in-browser using AJAX (don’t ask). This means that as you’re reading, new content is highlighted in your subscription list as it comes in. In other words, you could leave a browser window open all day to keep an eye on your feeds – but then you’d never get any work done ;) .

Go and give it a try, it’s cetainly changed how I get information. Be wary of having too many feeds though, try and keep it under fifty otherwise it’s just too much information. Google Reader has a stats page which can help you weed out your unread feeds if need be.