Robert Vrabel

I used to keep a documents folder on my computer which i would store reminders, snip its of text, wish lists etc. It used to be a real hassle accessing this information as i had to be at home on my machine to access anything. I transfered all my stuff into Google Docs and it has been a real treat to be able to access this information anywhere, even on my phone! The application is built just like any other suite like Microsoft Office or iWorks. It offers you the ability to store documents, presentations and spreadsheets online.

One of the best features is the ability to collaborate with people by editing a document at the same time. You will see there changes as they are made and you never have to worry about overwriting someone else’s work as it saves all pasted revisions as well.

One of the most used documents I have saved is one called “My Wish List”. Anytime I see something online or hear about something I want, I add it to my wish list with a link to the product. I share this document with my fiance and when it comes time to gift buying, she has access to all the things I want. It makes life a lot easier around the holidays when you get asked that dreaded question “what do you want?”. I never struggle with that anymore as I always have an up-to-date list to give people ideas.

Mint is like using Quicken, but is a easier approach. It takes very little work to manage your money and all of your banks, loans, and credit cards are accessed by securely logging into your accounts and downloading the information into Mint. It organizes all that data, and displays it in nice, easy to read graphs on where and how you are spending your money.

Using Mint has been a wonderful way to keep track of how much money I am spending on gas each month, or how much I am spending at restaurants. You can setup budgets and have them alert you when you exceed those budgets. The only requirement on your part is adding your accounts in and categorizing your transactions if Mint can’t figure it out automatically.

Currently Mint does not support every bank or credit card.  Almost all major ones are supported and Mint is always working on adding more in. Head over to Mint and start seeing how you are spending your money.

Flickr is simply the best way to store, search, sort and share your photos online. I love to take pictures, but getting them online and sharing them has always been a hassle in the past. Now it is a very simple process for me. I simply upload all my pictures to flickr, add them to a set, and send that link to everyone who I want to share it with. The best feature about flickr is that it stores your high resolution shots online for you. No need to downgrade your photos to store them online. If you ever want to print a photo and don’t have it on your computer anymore you can still grab it from the website to print it off.

Flickr is free, but has limitations to how much you can upload per month. If you don’t upload a lot of photos the free version will be enough to get by. If your like me and love to shoot pictures, you can sign up and upgrade your account for unlimited access. It is well worth the money for about $2.00 per month.

Tips

1. Download Flickr Uploadr for a faster way to upload and batch organize your photos. I use this tool rather than uploading images through the web browser, it makes it a lot easier.
2. Organize your photos by adding them to Sets, every event you attend and shoot pictures at create a new set and add those photos to it. Think of it as a photo album.
3. Add tags to your images. Adding tags allows you to quickly search for someones name, which would bring up all photos that person is in. The more tags you have added to a picture, the better.
4. Add your friends so you can easily see their newly added pictures. By clicking “Contacts” you will see a photostream of all of your friends pictures. Its a nice quick way to keep up with what your friends have been doing lately.
5. You can join Flickr Groups for your favorite types of photos. Love dogs? Simply join the group “Dogs! Dogs! Dogs!” to get instant access to tons of photos of dogs. There is a endless amount of groups out there, find which ones you like!

Google Calendar has been a huge part of the way my fiance and I keep track of what we are doing. We both have an individual calendar, and a calendar for things that we both are attending. We share these calendars with each other so when we login we can easily see everything that is going on between us. You can color code calendars so you can easily tell what type of event it is. I would highly recommend this for anyone who is struggling in keeping track of upcoming events. This has saved us a lot of time and has made making plans a breeze since we can access our calendar from anywhere. Needless to say without this we would probably miss a lot of things. Just head over to Google Calendar to get started.

Tips

1. Ever forget someones birthday? I know I always do. Create a new calendar called “Birthdays” and add an event into that calendar as a yearly recurring event with the event title as that persons name. Now every year you will see an event for their birthday.
2. You can add public calendars like Holidays etc. by clicking “Add” next to calendar, and click “Add Public Calendars”.
3. Don’t want to always view a certain calendar? Simply click the check box next to it to inactivate/activate it.
4. You can have Google Calendar notify you of upcoming events by phone (SMS) or E-mail by going to Settings -> Calendars, then click “Notifications” next to the calendar.
5. Want a reminder for a specific event? Simply edit the event and click “Add Reminder”

To understand Google Reader you will have to understand RSS. Like anything doing certain routines get old, and newer ways are created. Instead of going out to all of your favorite sites to see what new things are posted, why not have the news come to you? RSS works by simply subscribing to a website feed, and anytime something new is posted it gets delivered to you similar to how e-mail works. The next time you login to read things it shows all your new items and automatically marks things as read as you read them. This saves time by not having to go out to a website and try to figure out what the new information is posted. It also saves time because ALL of your favorite sites are in one spot organized however you want it. Here is a very useful picture to explain RSS.

Sign up for Google Reader before continuing. Now lets discuss how to subscribe to a feed.

Subscribing to a Feed

Using almost any new browser will display the RSS icon in the URL address. Simply click on this and add it to Google Reader. It’s as simple as that!

Tips

1. Organize your feeds by adding them to a folder. Personally, i have some folders setup called News, Gaming, Web Development, Blogs, etc..
2. As you scroll down the list you will notice the items being marked as read (the number should decrease). Anytime you see a number next to a feed name, that means you have unread items in it.
3. You can easily share stories from a feed by clicking “Share” (this will send it to anyone in your Google Address Book who uses Google Reader. Next time they login to Google Reader they will see your share) or by hitting the “Email” button which will allow you to e-mail the article to anyone.
4. Reading an article that you would consider a favorite? Simply hit the Star button next to it to add it to your favorites. You can see all of your favorites by clicking “Starred Items” at the top.
5. You can also search all of your new and past read articles by using the google powered search input at the top of the screen.

How many times have you wished you had your bookmarks with you either at work, or a friends house? Most people use the old method of bookmarks using the one built directly inside of the web browser. Lets take a different approach to see how we can store our bookmarks online so they can be accessed from anywhere.

Online Bookmarking

1. Download Firefox (explained here).
2. Install the del.icio.us extension.

Upon installing the extension, firefox will need to restart and you will see new buttons.

The new buttons are the “Del.icio.us” home button, and a button caled “Tag”. To use this, hit the del.icio.us home button and sign up for the website. Once you are signed up, you simply just hit “Tag” on a web page you want to bookmark. Upon doing this, you can type in (or select recommended tags) to categorize your bookmarks. The more tags you create, the easier it will be to find your bookmarks in the future.

Finding Your Bookmarks

Visit http://del.icio.us/yourusername to visit your bookmarks. To see an example, visit my bookmarks. You will see on the right hand side a bunch of tags, which you can click to filter the list down to those bookmarks. Now all of your bookmarks are online and can be accessed from anywhere.

Tips

1. You can hide your bookmarks so they are not open to the public. Just checkout the “settings” page when visiting http://del.icio.us/
2. You can subscribe to someones bookmarks by visiting their page at http://del.icio.us/username .
3. You can add friends to your account by also visiting their page.
4. You can recommend a bookmark for a friend by clicking “Tag”, then under “your network” select the person’s name and hit “save”.

Firefox is simply the best browser available mainly because of its large library of extensions available. Users are able to create their own extensions and submit them to be downloaded. There is a handful of useful extensions i use every day that when i use a browser without them, it kills my productivity. Here is a list of extensions i use often.

Extensions

• Validate HTML (PC) or Validate HTML (MAC)
• Web Developer Toolbar
• Link checker
• Fire Bug
• Del.icio.us Bookmarks (Article coming soon on this)
• Dragfile

Most of them are web development related but the bottom two are very useful ones. To check out the full list of extensions visit the official extensions website.

Tabs

If you are still using Internet Explorer 6 then you probably have no idea what tabs are and you should definitely listen up! How often do you find yourself with 10 different web pages open at the same time in different windows? Or maybe you just use one window but would like to have multiple web pages open at the same time to compare things? Using tabs (hit CTRL + T or apple +T) it will open a new tab directly inside the same browser window. This keeps all of your open web pages in one window as opposed to having multiple windows open.

This will be one of the many posts in the near future of websites i use on a daily basis. The main focus of these articles will be to go into detail on what features i use on the site that make my life easier and/or how those features saves me time. Lets start with Google Mail.

Anyone can use an E-mail client, but are you getting the most out of yours? Using filters inside of Google Mail can help keep your inbox neat and tidy. Lets say for example you receive e-mails from Amazon on a weekly basis. You enjoy reading these e-mails but would rather them not show in your inbox. Lets setup a filter to handle this situation.

Filters

1. Open up the settings by clicking “Settings” in the upper right hand corner.
2. Click “Filters”
3. Click “Create a new filter”
4. Inside the “From” Field put “*@amazon.com” (no quotes) and click “Next Step”
5. Checkmark “Skip the Inbox(Archive It)”
6. Checkmark “Apply the Label” and choose a label. Call this label “Amazon”
7. Checkmark “Also apply filter to x conversations below
8. Click Create Filter

Now every time an e-mail comes from Amazon.com it will automatically skip your inbox, and apply the label “Amazon” to it. To access all your Amazon mail, simply click on the “Amazon” label under the “Labels” section. Labels are different than a folder as an e-mail can have multiple labels. The benefit of this is you can get to your e-mails in multiple ways.

Experiment setting up rules for the types of e-mails you receive. By simply setting up filters to label your e-mails automatically, all of your mail will be neatly organized automatically.

Searching

How often can you NOT find an e-mail you are looking for? Well using the “Search” feature quickly brings up e-mails realitive to what you are searching for with the power of Google Search behind it. I am sure you are familiar with how good Google.com searches, now imagine that power with your e-mails!

Never delete e-mails again

Google Mail offers you tons of storage space. Never worry about deleting that e-mail from Grandma to save space. Simply Archive it and forget about it. You never know when that e-mail will come in handy in the future and its extremely easy to find it again if you have it labeled or by searching for it.

Signing up for Unknown Websites

How often do you visit a website, and don’t want to signup because you are afraid you will receive spam from them? If you were to signup for a website using yourusername+signup@gmail.com you can simply setup a filter to filter e-mails that are TO yourusername+signup@gmail.com. Using this you can automatically send spam from websites to this label as opposed to signing up for a whole another e-mail account!

Google Talk

Almost all of my friends are using Google Mail now. I am able to chat directly inside the browser when needed. Having this integrated into the browser has been a huge help in communicating, especially if you are on a computer that you are not able to install a chat client on. This also saves all of your chats in the “Chats” section on the left. You have no idea how many times i have had to reference past chats to obtain information. Of course, you can go “Off the record” if needed to NOT save past chats.

Contacts

A feature i use all the time is creating Groups with my contacts. I created a group called “Family” which when i want to send an e-mail to my whole family i just type “Family” in the “To” address and select the option i provides. Never have to worry about remembering everyones e-mails, or leaving someone out.

Conclusion

Using the concepts above using E-mail has been more rewarding than ever. I never waste time with useless e-mails inside my in box as everything is automated and with Google’s spam filters, i hardly EVER get spam inside my inbox. Don’t fight with your e-mail client, switch to Google Mail today.