This week we wrap up our two part series on using technology to enhance your woodworking experience. And I have a follow-up story on the “Mower Grassbuster.”
Here are links to some of the things I discuss in this episode:
- Firefox web browser
- WordPress.com
- WordPress.org
- LiveJournal
- Blogger
- Photobucket
- Flickr
- Picasa
- 1Topix Forum Aggregator
- Forum Additive Firefox add-on
- TwitterFox Firefox add-on
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Good stuff as usual Dave… always entertaining AND informative! Just installed Forum Additive on my machines. Ohhh and oddly enough I had done a few searches for the grassbuster and landed on your site… interesting what search terms got me there… ;-]
Hey Dave. Not sure if you’ve tried this yet, but there are services out there that can create RSS feeds for sites that don’t supply them. Here are a few worth looking at.
http://www.profy.com/2007/09/30/7-tools-to-make-an-rss-feed-of-any-website/
Hi Dave……..both parts, very informative…….Thanks!!!!!
1. WordPress free account. If you get your own domain name (which you can do for like $7/year), you can upgrade your free WordPress account to map to that domain name for $10/year. That’s what I’ve done. You don’t get all the features that you would if you hosted WordPress on your own domain, but it’s much cheaper and gives you all the basics.
2. I need to give Windows Live Writer a shot over on my Virtual Windows (I’m using Ubuntu Linux). Meanwhile, I like to use the Firefox addon ScribeFire. Allows you to reference your tabs while keeping your blog entry screen up at the same time.
3. Community forums. Dude, you’re being so IE6.0 with woodworking forums. Time to upgrade to the Firefox of woodworking forums: LumberJocks. Here’s why:
a) They have RSS feeds which you can use for your favorite “Jocks”, or for blog entries, forum posts, reviews, project posts – or everything!
b) They have a LumberJocks toolbar for your browser which keeps all those feeds in one place, so I just follow new entries there rather than in my feed reader. My toolbar also has an email checker that will check unlimited Gmail, Yahoo or Hotmail accounts, and a drop-down menu for accessing different parts of LumberJocks.
And hey man, thanks for the mention on your ‘cast. I was wondering why my blog traffic went through the roof.
Agreed on the Lumberjocks comments Eric. But more to the point, the other forums need to update and get with the times. Good members/information, but no modern features.
Not sure if you mentioned it previously but my favorite tool to keep the web organized (if there were such a thing) is using delicious (http://del.icio.us/) instead of bookmarking sites. Bookmarking sites provides no context to later recall that bookmark whereas a tagged site (via delicious or other social bookmarking service) allows you to recall sites via some sort of context. E.g. I can find a page I found interesting years ago on inlay techniques perhaps because I tagged it as such (with “inlay” as the tag). I just checked and I have 972 pages tagged from over the years. I’d never be able to organize those as bookmarks very efficiently or effectively but of course with delicious I don’t need to. Add to that the very well integrated Firefox extension for delicious and you’d be amazed how quickly you can retrieve saved pages (with CNTL-B).
Additionally (with an Openbook firefox extension) you can easily create keyword searches as well as shortcuts for sites. I have a ton and use this as my primary navigation. For example, I simply type CNTL-L (to get the cursor the address bar) and “ww” followed by the return key and I instantly go the woodwhisperer site… or “lv” gets me to leevalley or just the letter “a” takes me to amazon. Pretty much every site I go to regularly takes me a couple of keystrokes… over time, that’s a lot of extra shop time!!! ;-]