My Own Pirate Radio

These days I am online an awful lot. Too much, arguably. If you’re reading this you’re probably a Web addict too. Or misguided. Or bored. Either way, you shouldn’t be reading this blog post. Do yourself a favor and close the browser window right now.

…

Still here? OK, since you’re clearly beyond recovery, I thought it might be useful to share with you the tools and process I use while browsing.

Every morning I open up Firefox, which is my current browser. (I do have the latest IE7 preview release installed too; it’s promising, but not ready for prime time yet.) I then open up all the items in my “Daily Reads” bookmark folder with one click, as shown below. “Open in Tabs” is one of my favorite Firefox features; IE7 team take note.

I read the weather tab first. In Seattle I never checked the weather, because the weather reporters were always wrong and the weather was always the same: grey and soggy with intermittent “sunbreaks”. In Toronto, the weather reporters are more accurate and this time of the year I like knowing whether to dress for sun, rain or snow. ’nuff said, we’re done with weather, close the tab and move on.

Next I visit Bloglines, which I use to track my blog subscriptions. I use Bloglines as a scanner, not a reader: I scan for headlines and text snippets that look interesting. If anything looks worth reading I right-click on the article link and click “Open in new tab”. Then I continue scanning until I’m done looking through the list of blogs I’ve subscribed to. Then I close the Bloglines tab… I’m done with it until tomorrow, or at least until the end of the day. I now have a number of new tabs ready for reading. Scanning before reading is important for me; I lose focus and get all tangential if I start reading partway through the scanning process.

Next I walk progressively through each open tab, read it, and close the tab when I’m done. Eventually I’ve either closed all the tabs or run out of time. I do put a time limit on news/blog-reading, since it’s so open-ended; I could spend all day on it otherwise.

While I’m reading I also use several other tools — bookmarklets — that I’ve installed on my browser toolbar, as shown below.

Here’s how I use the bookmarklets:

• If I hit a new blog that looks worth monitoring for a while, I click “Sub with Bloglines” to subscribe. This adds the blog to my Bloglines subscription list. Generally I’ll give a blog a week or two to prove its worth before kicking it off the list. Hmm… my list is overdue for pruning.

• If I leave a comment on a blog I use “coComment!” to track further responses. I’ve just started using this one recently. Thanks Steve Eisner and Sean O’Hagan for the recommendation.

• When I see a page that I want to archive for future reference I click “Furl“. Furl takes a snapshot of the page and caches it in a personal searchable archive. Very useful, especially if you are doing research and need to track references carefully over time. There are several other services like Furl, but it’s my favorite: fast, reliable, easy to use, free.

• I also tag some pages with Del.icio.us, using the “Tag” button in the middle of the toolbar. I do this when I want to remember the page and share the URL with others, but don’t care as much about archiving its content… Del.icio.us for recall and sharing bookmarks, Furl for research.

• Once in a while I am curious about where a given URL is cited. The “Bloglines citations” and “Del.icio.us citations” bookmarklets help me do that. I learned about this recently on Jon’s Radio.

• Finally, when I want to blog about something or check on my blog status I click on the “WordPress Admin” button. WordPress comes with several bookmarklets that make it easy to create blog posts, but my toolbar was getting crowded so I just created this simple one which links to my WordPress admin dashboard.

That’s it. With those tools I am a lean, mean, Web-addicted machine.

By the way I grabbed the images above using Wisdom-soft’s “ScreenHunter 4.0 Free” app, which I heard about from this handy list of free software utilities. There are tons of free screen-grabbers out there. This one works for me.