This is just a quick video on using the Bookmarks functions in firefox to very rapidly jump to a bookmarked webpage.

You’ll need your bit.ly username and API key and then need to grab the URL for the bit.ly API endpoint for link shortenning (below), and then merge it all together…

The bit.ly API url (adapted for tweetie) is

http://api.bit.ly/shorten?version=2.0.1&longUrl=%@&login=aaa&apiKey=bbb

Replace the aaa with your bit.ly username and the bbb with your bit.ly API key.  Then copy the whole thing and paste it into the “Custom…” part of the tweetie settings screen under Link Shortening.  I ended up putting it all together on my PC and then sending it in an email to myself which I then copy/pasted on my phone.

Good Luck!

Exchange makes working with outlook easy because all the core information (emails, calendar, contacts etc) are all stored in one place on the server and then exchange takes care of pushing the right information down to Oulook as and when it’s needed.

But what if you don’t have outlook (like my friend).  What if you only have outlook installed on both your desktop computer and your notebook computer and you want to keep them in Sync?

Google to the rescue!

Google have a suite of Sync product to help with these sort of things, however there is one catch.  To do it properly you need to manage your email through Google which will just fine if you have either a POP3 email account or a IMAP email account.

One thing to consider – It’s probably a good idea to backup of your existing emails and calendar in Outlook before starting just to make sure you don’t lose anything.

Step 1

Create a Google account, it’s free and takes just a few minutes.  This will also give you a gmail email address however if you choose not use it then that’s fine also.  Start here.  If you already have a gmail address or a Google account then on to step 2.

Step 2

Tell Gmail to manage your email.  In this step you are going to give Gmail your normal email address account details.  Login to Gmail and then go into the “Settings” and then “Accounts and Imports”.  Click on the “Add POP3 Email Account” button and then follow the steps.  Gmail will now check your email for you and put all your email into the Gmail account.

Step 3

Turn on IMAP support in Gmail.  On the “Settings” page in Gmail, go to the “Forwarding and POP/IMAP” page and click on “Enable IMAP”.  Follow the instructions to setup up Outlook on both your desktop computer AND your notebook computer in the same way.  IMAP is a special email system that keeps things sync’d between a server computer (Gmail) and one or more client computers (Outlook).  If you wanted to you could point your iPhone at Gmail as well and keep in Sync while mobile.

Step 4

Sync your calendar with Google Calendar.  Install this application on both your desktop and notebook computer and set it up to Sync with your Google calendar.

It sounds like a bit of work but it should only take you about 20 mins to get it all setup.

Let me know how you go.

The problem with twitter (I think anyway) is the twitter website, it’s just not well designed for having conversations with people.  I use twitter without EVER VISITING THE TWITTER WEBSITE! I use it from my phone and from other software that I have installed.

So what’s tweetdeck all about?  Tweetdeck (available from www.tweetdeck.com) presents information in columns on your screen with each column showing different types of tweets (updates).  You can re-arrange the columns to suit, however the default is that:

• The first column shows tweets from all the people you are following, in date and time order.  It normally only shows the last 50 tweets or so.

• The second column shows tweets that are replies to you or contain your twitter username.  This allows you to see who has responded to your tweets and further see if people have re-tweeted your tweets.

• The third column shows direct messages to you, kind of like your email inbox.

Here’s the cool part, from any column you click on small icon to reply or re-tweet messages and also at the top of the screen is a big box to add your own updates to twitter.  To me this made twitter ‘make sense’, I could finally see all that was happening and specifically could see those interested in having a conversation about what I was tweeting about.

Regardless, here are the 5 keyboard shortcuts that save my alot of time:

1. Multi-Line text in a cell – ALT+Enter. This is like hitting enter in a word processor to make a new line, but in the same cell.  It’s good for column headings that are a little long and you want to control the wrapping manually.
2. Autosum – ALT + =. This is great for adding in a SUM function under a bunch of numbers.  If you go to a cell directly under a column of numbers and then hit this short cut key it will type the SUM function for you and make an assumption about the cells to add, you can then select the right cells if it didn’t make the right selection, or just keep what it selected and then hit Enter to accept the formula.
3. Quick Formatting – CTRL + SHIFT + 3/4/5.  I use this most often for formatting dates and dollars.  Having highlighted the cells you want to format you can then hit CTRL + SHIFT + 3 or 4 or 5.
   - CTRL + SHIFT + 3 (or #) is to format dates in dd-mmm-yy format.
   - CTRL + SHIFT + 4 (or $) is to format dollars as currency with two decimal points.
   - CTRL + SHIFT + 5 (or %) is to format as a percentage.
4. Select a Row or Column – CTRL + SPACE or SHIFT + SPACE. This is useful if you need to select a whole row or column, or multiple rows and columns.  Move into any cell in the row or column you need selected and then press CTRL + SPACE to highlight columns or SHIFT + SPACE to highlight rows.   Once selected you can then hold down the shift key and use the arrow keys to extend your selection as required.
5. Autofill – CTRL + d or CTRL + r.  In this case you select a group of cells and then press CTRL + d to fill all cells with what ever is in the top cell down, or CTRL + r to fills cells to the right.

Got more that I should know about?  Let me know in the comments.

It’s pretty simple: sending someone a commercial message when you do not have their permission to do so is spam. It’s a message they did not ask for or request.

The challenge of course is trying to follow the right people and then make sure you are not getting a stream full of SPAM.  There is a way I’ve discovered though that tends to alleviate this issues.  My experience is that spammers are using automation tools to send tweets to twitter on regular intervals.  It’s automated SPAM!  What I have discovered though is that most of these tweets come through the twitter API and the source of these tweets are indicated in the stream as a source called ‘web’.

Now ‘web’ also means someone who went to the twitter web site and updated their status, now to be honest anyone using twitter like that is perhaps someone I don’t necessarily want to hear from, so doing the following filters alot of the automated tweets as well as those using the web to update.

Now to do this you’ll need TweetDeck, an excellent tool for managing your relationship with twitter streams, more on this later.  Then you’ll need to modify your filter on the ‘all friends’ column by adding an exclusion for the source of  ‘web’.

Like so…

But what an ordeal!

Here’s a list of the sites I use regularly and they all had (except for 2) the same password:

• gmail
• flickr
• youtube
• friendfeed
• twitter
• yahoo
• msn/live
• digsby
• timebridge
• skype
• jaymccormack.com
• apple
• emusic
• facebook
• linkedin
• stumbleupon
• toodledo
• tripadvisor
• tripit
• godaddy
• claimid
• yammer

But of course what password, or passwords should I use for all these? Enter RoboForm. I’ve posted about this in the past, it’s a cool password management tool that remembers passwords the first time you use them and then types them for you in the future. But there’s another feature that is a random password generator that creates passwords like “VK3zz44R3&” or “t%FHBj3zN5″. Of course these are had to crack but also hard to type and remember, but with roboform that’s now a snap.

Some experiences with the process: Of all the above sites only one (tripadvisor) decided that the best thing to do after changing the password was to send it to me in a plain text email. Yay! Here I am trying to be all secure and they decide to expose my new password to the world.

Something else with twitter specifically is that because it’s integrated into so many other things I do, I have found out through out the day the number of places that that password was stored. Even wordpress knows my twitter details! So it’s been a little frustrating on that front.

Finally, the iPhone. I use beehive for IM, Tweetie for Twitter and the facebook app, the linkedin app and the yammer app on my iPhone, and each of these needed to be reconfigured. Additionally the synchronisation between my todo list app and toodledo and my travel management app and tripit. Arghhhh!

Finally I had to make one compromise. My Apple password has to be something that I remember and that I can type easily on the iPhone as any app download or purchase on the phone requires you to plug in your password. So in this case I just ramped up the password a little.

So anyway… I think i’m set now. Oh, one more thing, I’ve backed up my roboform passwords in 2 places so that (fingers crossed) i’m not screwed if my PC crashes.

I’ve been waiting for this for Gmail for a while.  I love the interface for Gmail, but get a little frustrated when I don’t have a connection, an offline version would be great.

Timebridge solves the typical back and forth issue by allowing you to suggest up to 5 time slots from your own outlook calendar and then sending invitations off to the attendees. The attendees then choose the best time slot for them (no registration required) and then once a consensus is agreed the meeting is booked and everyone notified.

It’s a nice solution to a complex problem, and just seems to work. The only thin I’m a little unhappy about is the upsell that happens. “Did you want to book a web conference?” but hey? What did you expect for free?

If you think about the average document what normally springs to mind is something like a letter or a proposal and typically you would use a word processor to write it up.  Something like Microsoft Word, OpenOffice Writer are the normal tools you think of too.  If you think a little harder though about the actual process you use for assembling a document you may be in a position where you need to move the document around your organisation/friends/family to finalise it… everybody needs to put their 2c in.  The problem this presents is that you need to manage this process, you need to send it to each person and then get their responses back into the document.  If your organisation is anything like ours then everyone does it in their own way too, some people just change the document, other’s might ‘mark up’ the changes for approval.  Some people might add comments inside the document and finally others might just respond in an email with the changes they want made, ahhhhhhhh!

Google docs is designed to make this process of collaboration easier.  When you are in a situation where more than one person is building the document then you can open up or share your document with other people and all work on it at the same time.  Thankfully Google takes care of knowing who changed what and allowing you to track back through the changes.

It does by providing a web based interface to these tools, so using only a web browser you can open up a document, make changes, save and close.

Right now Google offer three different document types:

• Documents
• Spreadsheets
• Presentations

So your basics are covered.

Now some people talk about this being a replacement for Microsoft Office, I just don’t think that’s the case.  The functionality in these applications is just not rich enough yet to compete with the offline tools.  You get the ability to do a lot of what you can do in things like Word, but not enough to through away Word altogether.  I think it’s a matter of the right tool for the right job.

If you don’t already have a Google account, you can get one right now and it’s free, and then you can start working online and sharing your documents.