PimpYourWork.com
Tired of losing that e-mail containing the link to an article that piqued your interest? Weary of sorting through your bookmarks and looking for the one-time-read-only links you’d want to delete?
If you want to save yourself the trouble and still get to read that article you saw (but can’t read due to time constraints), then you might want to check out Read It Later. Read It Later is a Firefox extension that serves as a storehouse of the links you want to read later on, sans the cluttering of your bookmarks.
Since it’s just a Firefox extension, it’s straightforward to install. …read more

PimpYourWork.com
I’ve mentioned in some previous posts that I live in a Third World country. This means that my area’s phone/internet cables can be stolen at night (presumably to be sold at junk shops) and I’ll be left disconnected from work.
Well, this happened last week.
Surprisingly, my productivity actually doubled. I was producing twice my regular output for the previous weeks of April. Is it possible that severing your connection to the net can make you more productive or is this some kind of fluke? I think it’s possible to be more productive without easy net access, and …read more

Image by Lusi, taken from stock.xchng

“One of the effects of living with electric information is that we live habitually in a state of information overload. There’s always more than you can cope with.” – Marshall McLuhan
Too much email can cause insanity. If you think information overload is restricted to your email server and client, you’re either mistaken or a much freer person than I am. Emails, whether they’re spam or not, take up so much of our time – from checking to reading and the thoughts and worries that linger after reading them.
The truth is, I’ve had enough. …read more

When we think of “cleaning up” one’s social networking profile, we often restrict this to business sites like LinkedIn. However, nowadays, many experts are recommending that you also polish your Facebook profiles.
And why shouldn’t you? Odds are, potential employers and business contacts could be looking at it (see this article from CBS News for more info). Here are some tips on how to evaluate your Facebook profile for corporate purposes:
Review all your displayed photographs.  Make sure that no embarrassing photos are in public view. This includes exposing your beer belly, dancing in a nightclub in a skimpy …read more

I’ve talked about ThinkFree before, and since then have been using it pretty much exclusively over MS Office.  It rocks.  It’s light, responsive, and really has only the things you need to get the job done.
I’ve been using ThinkFree Premium as an online office organizer, I put all the docs related to a project in there, even if TFP doesn’t open them (like images or music).  Why?  Because they will be synced.  I can jump to another computer and get to them.  And if I don’t have TF or MS Office or eve OpenOffice on that machine…no problem, I have …read more

This week online office suite company Zoho announced that they have used Google’s Gears technology and API to give Writer some offline capabilities:
Zoho announced early this morning that they’ve taken the first steps toward making Zoho Writer available as an offline app using the Google Gears tool. Initially the docs saved offline will be read only but full offline functionality is planned. Source: Zoho takes the first step towards offline apps | Office Evolution | ZDNet.com
Call me a skeptic, but I don’t think this is the best way to do the online-offline bit.  I’ve been playing with Zoho Notebook recently …read more

Sometimes you just need to stash a file somewhere.  Somewhere online, where you can get to it on another computer, or share, or back it up.  Lots of reasons.  Storage costs have dropped so much that online storage solutions have been getting better and cheaper.  That and our Net connections faster and faster.  I have 10 megs down and 1 meg up, which believe me makes a huge difference.  The added upload speed has made my WordPress installs go a lot faster.
Regardless, and back to the topic at hand, Frantic Industries has a nice look at five online file storage …read more

 There is nothing like nice graphics to make a presentation or website pop.  Sometimes, however, making those graphics is a real challenge.  When I wanted spiffy glassy or 3D buttons I would open Photoshop and start with one of my many plugins and tricks I had learned.  That was then, this is now.  Now I don’t have Photoshop.  So what do I do?  Find online alternative, of course!
This online service let’s you create shiny buttons to look just the way it’s “cool” now. Each part of the button is customizable, including the size, background, all colors and roundness of your …read more

We all know that Excel is a number crunching power-house.  I know that I couldn’t live without some kind of spreadsheet application.  Sometimes, however, you just need to crunch some numbers.  Usually I just fire up the Calculator app (my keyboard even has a quick launch button for it), but what if you need to do something a little more complex?  What if you also need to do it with other folks at the same time?  Thanks to Bryan Starbuck (a distance relative…very distant…who I met at MindCamp this weekend) I found Instacalc.
The page loads instantly and as you are …read more

Just last week the question of whether Facebook could be used as a collaboration tool on the cheap.  Now Zoho has announced that it released a Facebook application to connect to its online office suite:
Also included in the release is a central control panel where users can manage all of their private and shared documents within Facebook. As Raju outlines in a blog post on Monday, Zoho plans to release a similar feature for its regular non-Facebook suite, bringing it closer to its main competitor, Google Docs and Spreadsheets. Google’s application suite has a centralized document management center for individuals …read more