Web Worker Daily

Easing the Pain of Moving to a New Windows PC
What to Do When the Dot-Com You Want Isn’t Available
Tools for Watching Online News and Reactions Unfold
Embracing Information Overload
Firefox 3.5 Released
A Six-Pack of Gmail Hacks

Easing the Pain of Moving to a New Windows PC

Posted: 30 Jun 2009 04:00 PM PDT

Moving from PC to PC I love technology, but not when it comes to switching PCs — moving all the data and applications from one Windows machine to another is not always as easy as it could be.

I thought I’d share some tips gleaned from my latest move to a new desktop. My way isn’t necessary the best way, but it may give you some ideas when it comes time for you to make the switch. Here are the steps that I took.

Back up your data. Use an online backup service like BackBlaze or Mozy. (Solo web workers should have an offsite backup solution, anyway) I also have an external drive that does nothing but back up my computer’s data. The free built-in Microsoft Windows Synctoy took care of my syncing. Make sure you synchronize everything, including the data on any mobile devices.
Take a computer inventory. Run System Information for Windows (SIW), Magical Jelly Bean Keyfinder and Belarc Advisor. Save the output files in Gmail or someplace where you can access it from any computer. These free applications create a list of installed software, license keys, hardware inventory, network information and other details. These apps are all free.
Put the computers near each other. This makes the move easier and allows you to check what’s on the old computer and install it on the new PC and compare the setups. It’s also worth checking which apps are used frequently. While the inventory software lists all the installed applications, you might not need to exactly duplicate your setup. The key is to get the important and most frequently used tools and software installed so you can get up and running on the new machine. Then, if you find you need one of the apps you didn’t move over to the new machine later, you can install it. Don’t pressure yourself to get everything installed.
Install the applications and tools. Dig up all your software, download the ones that don’t have a CD/DVD and download updated software. Some of my software (Palm Desktop, for example) is so old that I didn’t bother using the original CD/DVD to install it. Instead, I went to the companies’ web sites to download the latest versions.
Share folders over the network. Turn on network file-sharing by opening Explorer. Find the folders you want to copy to your new computer, right-click the folder and select “Share.” Look for the option to share the folder (it’s different in Windows XP and Vista). Doing this, I shared the folder with all my work documents so that I had instant access to the documents I needed without waiting for the online backup to do its job. The online backup application then restored the rest of the files.
Copy the data from old to new.
Start using the new computer. I plan to keep the old computer nearby for a little while so if I run into something I need to customize or verify, I can look at it and update the new computer accordingly.
Set up a backup system. Whether you used one before or not, put a backup system in place. Even new computers mess up and you never know when some disaster decides to make life harder for your home. It can happen. I was in my grandparents’ house when it caught fire.

Having many of my applications and data in the cloud made this the easiest and fastest desktop transition ever.

What other ways can you ease and speed up the transition from old computer to new?

What to Do When the Dot-Com You Want Isn’t Available

Posted: 30 Jun 2009 01:00 PM PDT

Written by Charles Hamilton.

As web workers, you’ve probably had to purchase domain names, or been asked to get them by clients. Most people prefer a name ending in .com, since that’s the “top-level domain,” or TLD, that everybody knows. But that also means it can be hard to get the name you want.

From a couple of years ago on WWD: “You must get the dot-com: It doesn’t matter how great the name is, if you can’t get name.com, it’s not worth having. People will look for you at the dot-com even if you're registered at one of the other top-level domains, no matter how often you emphasize the difference.” And from last year: “For most web workers .com is still the place to be. That’s because no matter how Internet-savvy you are, it’s fairly likely that your customers still hear ‘Internet’ and think ‘dot-com.’ If you want to be found, put your site where the clicks will go.”

So, what do you do if you (or your clients) find that the dot-com domain you want isn’t available? Here are a few suggestions.

Pick a different name, especially if the organization is new. But try and keep it as short as possible. Just because domain names can be 63 characters long doesn’t mean that something that long should be used! “WePickedThisDomainNameBecauseEverythingElseWeWantedWasTaken.com” says it all.
Add dashes or numbers. Domain names can include letters, numbers and dashes. But be careful. As Mike said in the post I linked to above, “[I]f your…name is not easily and unambiguously spelled over the phone, you'll regret it.” I agree. As a former radio person, I always cringe when I hear some poor announcer having to spell a domain name on the air.
Consider buying the name from the current owner if they aren’t using it. Sites like DN Journal have lists of recent domain sales, so you can get an idea of what the name you want might be worth.
Incorporate the city or region you serve into the domain name.

Sometimes, none of the above options will work. I think that you can take the “get a dot-com at all costs” mentality too far, so you may want to consider alternatives to .com. Some TLDs are relatively well-known, like:

.net Originally intended to be for Internet service providers and other parts of the Net’s infrastructure, but it’s now unrestricted, open to anyone, and more or less synonymous with .com.
.org While most people think of .org as being for nonprofit entities, it is actually unrestricted.
.biz Limited to “bona fide business or commercial use,” but widely available.
.info Open to anyone.
Country-based TLDs, like .us, .ca or .uk, depending on where you’re located. Europeans may also register .eu names, and Asians may register .asia names.

Some TLDs, while nominally country-based, allow anyone to register a name. Many can be registered through a number of different companies. Search for “registrar” plus the appropriate TLD to find where to buy them.

.bz (not to be confused with .biz, mentioned earlier)
.cc
.fm
.gd
.gs
.im
.io
.me
.mp The folks at Chi.mp are giving these names away as part of their service, which I mentioned, and Darrell reviewed, a while back. If you don’t want to use the Chi.mp service, .mp names may be purchased separately.
.tc
.tv

There are also some specialized top-level domains that you may want to consider, such as:

.aero Available to aviation businesses and related organizations.
.coop Available to entities that are legally organized as cooperatives.
.jobs Can only be used for displaying open positions at the company registering the name. The idea is that users who want to work at Acme Widgets would type www.acme_widgets.jobs and be taken directly to the company’s available jobs page. These domains are expensive, though, so I’m not sure why companies would opt for this domain rather than, say, www.acme_widgets.com/jobs.
.mobi For sites designed for mobile devices. This TLD seems to waning in popularity, as mobile browsers and technologies for adapting standard web sites to mobile use improve.
.museum Limited to museums. The list of .museum domains is pretty short, and few of them appear to be active.
.name Intended for individuals to establish their Internet identities, in the form “first.last.name”.
.pro Open to licensed professionals only, who must provide proof of their active standing.
.tel We wrote about this service back in December. The idea of an Internet-based directory is interesting, but there are many other ways to achieve the same results, so .tel has not become popular.
.travel Only available to travel-related businesses and organizations, although their definition is fairly broad, and includes hotels, B&Bs, restaurants, and “attractions,” among other things; in other words, .travel is available for sites that might be of interest to tourists.

There may soon be a whole new set of TLDs, if a current proposal is approved. Meanwhile, there are more than enough options to find a good domain name, even if your preferred .com is not available.

What alternative top-level domains have you used? Are you satisfied with the results?

Image by stock.xchng user annaOMline

Tools for Watching Online News and Reactions Unfold

Posted: 30 Jun 2009 11:00 AM PDT

Written by Samuel Dean.

The number of useful online tools that help to sift through the masses of information posted to the Internet every minute for content worth reading is growing. In this post, I’ll discuss a good way of following how news in any particular area is developing, and a good way to keep track of what others are saying about content you put online.

Unfolding News doesn’t have quite as pretty an interface as some other tools that scour news sites and social media messaging, but it’s a good search engine for getting nearly instant updates on breaking stories. For any search topic you enter, it provides a mix of tweets, blog posts, news stories from established sites and more. You can also create an RSS feed for any search term you enter, which you can use to stay up to date as stories are published on the web.

Unfolding News bills itself as a “live search engine.” It’s useful not only for keeping track of news and how people are reacting to news, but, as this post notes, it could be useful for tracking what’s being said about a new product release and other, similar applications. The site could use a slicker interface, but it does a good job of what it sets out to do.

What if you want to track the web buzz on content you post online? I’ve become increasingly reliant on ConvoTrack for this task, as I mentioned here, and it has steadily added source sites that it tracks. ConvoTrack is an easy-to-use free web app that allows you to track online conversations on social media sites related to content that you post or read. You don’t even need to download an application in order to use it. Instead, you can just type http://convotrack.com/ before the URL (no space between the two) for any web page you want to track conversations about, and then hit Enter. So to track what people are saying about WebWorkerDaily, I would type “http://convotrack.com/http://webworkerdaily.com/” into my browser’s address bar and hit Enter.

What tools do you use for keeping track of news and reactions online?

Embracing Information Overload

Posted: 30 Jun 2009 09:00 AM PDT

Written by Dawn Foster.

As a freelancer, I spend most of my time trying to manage information overload. Like Charles, I use spaces to quarantine focused work from other distractions, and I have some tricks for efficient RSS reading, creative uses of RSS to increase efficiency, and filtering techniques to help reduce the time I need to spend consuming information. Despite this obsession with efficiently gathering information, there are also times when I actively seek out information overload.

While a fire hose of notifications and feeds can be too distracting when I’m working on things for client, if I’m looking for inspiration for a new blog post or new venture of some sort, I want to see as much information as possible in the hope that something will catch my eye and provide the inspiration that I need.

Here are a few of my favorite tools for embracing information overload. Please beware that these tools are known to sap productivity and suck up precious hours that can never be regained! Use these techniques at your own risk.

FriendFeed Notifier will send you pop-up messages every time one of your friends posts something to FriendFeed or comments on a post. For maximum information overload, make sure that you select the following options: show updates when someone comments on my posts, show updates from my home feed, and show posts and all comments. For the wimpier among us, you can choose to show updates only from a small list of friends or show posts only.

Tweetdeck or other Twitter clients with notifications turned on at full blast. I’ve talked about using reduced notifications with Tweetdeck to get targeted notifications for groups and searches, but for the full effect, you can also get notifications for the “all friends” feed (in other words, notifications for every single tweet). If you set this up right, you can get duplicate notifications for all of the tweets posted on FriendFeed and the tweets coming in through your Twitter client. I’m joking! I suggest only using one of the two options presented so far at a time, unless you really are a glutton for punishment.

Snackr gives you a scrolling RSS ticker with news from your feeds. You can even import everything from your RSS reader and have huge quantities of information scrolling across the bottom of your screen all day. I admit that would probably be a bit much. I took a subset of my feeds with my favorite tech news blogs along with a few interesting people, and I imported that subset into Snackr.

What are your tips for embracing information overload?

Firefox 3.5 Released

Posted: 30 Jun 2009 08:41 AM PDT

Written by Simon Mackie.

Mozilla has just released the final version of Firefox 3.5. As I noted in my review of the release candidate, JavaScript performance — critical for many web apps — is massively improved thanks to the new TraceMonkey engine, making 3.5 feel very fast indeed. I tried running the final release through the Sunspider performance benchmarks, and it doesn’t look like there are any major differences between it and the release candidate.

In addition to improved performance and standards compliance, Firefox 3.5 also features new privacy controls, location-aware browsing, and the ability to play video and audio content without using plugins. A quick video tour of the new version is available here.

Firefox 3.5 is a free download for Windows, Mac and Linux from Mozilla.

Share your thoughts on Firefox 3.5 in the comments.

A Six-Pack of Gmail Hacks

Posted: 30 Jun 2009 07:00 AM PDT

Written by Amber Riviere.

I use a lot of Google’s applications to stay organized and productive, but I’m especially fond of Gmail. In its standard form, it’s a fine email client that makes it easy to stay on top of that mountain of email, but with a little customization you can use it to become even more efficient. Here are six super ways to send Gmail into productivity overdrive.

1: Enable super stars.

You know how Gmail has the standard Gmail star, enabling you to highlight certain emails in your mailbox? Now you can make it a super star! Enable Superstars within Labs (found in “Settings”). Once enabled, you can select the super stars you’d like to use by dragging and dropping them within the “General” tab under “Settings.”

I use the red and yellow exclamation points to mark items that are work-related and require some action on my part (red indicates something more pressing than yellow). I use the purple question mark for pending payments, deposits and other things I’m waiting for.

2. Use advanced search and spend less time keeping things organized with labels.

I don’t really use labels/folders in Gmail, because the search functionality is so easy to use. If I need to find something related to a particular client, I just type the client’s name and find it that way.

The advanced search functionality allows you to search within a date range (say within a month of a particular date), so finding a particular email is generally easy and requires a lot less upkeep than folders, unless you set up filters to maintain this for you).

The best tip for searching is to use very specific search terms. If you can remember a particular phrase, name, or keyword that was used and the approximate date it was emailed, you’ll reduce your search results tremendously, making it even faster to locate information.

3. Save on typing with canned responses.

Canned Responses is another Lab gadget that’s really handy. If you type a lot of the same messages over and over, you can save them as canned responses so that it saves you on typing. (Celine wrote an excellent post giving some great tips on boosting productivity using Canned Responses.) Just click the canned response, and it automatically appears within the email.

Canned Email Responses

4. Save button clicking with send & archive.

Yet another Labs feature that shaves time off processing email is Send & Archive, which Jenny wrote about previously. With it enabled, you’ll see another button (”Send & Archive”) next to the regular “Send” button. When you compose a message or response, simply click it to automatically archive the entire conversation after sending your message.

Send and Archive

5. Enable in-Gmail Twittering with the TwitterGadget.

The TwitterGadget allows you to see and manage your Twitter account right within Gmail. It even has separate tabs for monitoring different types of activity within your Twitter account, like replies. Plus, you can add updates to your Twitter account right within the gadget.

Twitter Gadget

6. Use the other Google tools available within Gmail.

The best part of using Google Apps to stay organized is that all of the tools are available within one interface. You can access your Calendar, Reader, Docs and Photos right from your Gmail account. Take advantage of them and save time by not having to visit other sites.

Although I use many other online applications to stay organized, Gmail has to top the list, and with all the Firefox extensions and gadgets available to soup it up, managing email is getting easier and easier.

What are your favorite Gmail hacks? If you have a tip for increasing the speed and efficiency of managing email, please share it.