Wednesday, November 21, 2007
SEO
11:30PM Tamar Weinberg | Two years ago, we introduced website owners to the art of SEO with some basic tips and tricks. More »
Buy a John Howard Pinata on ebay
2:27PM Sarah Stokely |
As Crikey was pleased to point out today, some enterprising soul has put a John Howard pinata up for auction on ebay, just in time to provide “the perfect entertainment for your election night party”. They want $280 for it though, ouch.
More » 
First look at ASUS Eee PC
1:32PM Sarah Stokely | ASUS held the media launch for their mini-laptop, the Eee PC yesterday, which was the first chance Aussie journalists have had to get their hands on it.
My first impression was that it looks much smaller than I’d expected, even being aware of its 7″ screen size and sub 1kg weight. I included this picture to try to give you an idea of the size.
I’m expecting to get a review unit later this week, but here are some facts and observations I gleaned from a quick play with the unit:
The OS is a simplified version of the Xandros Linux distro
It’s running Open Office with 40 built-in apps ranging from Firefox to Skype
The Media Player can play DivX and .avi files
15 second boot time, 5 second shutdown
Onsale date is 1 December from Myer Sydney, or 2 December from Myer nationally – but if you want the black version, you shouldn’t have to wait too long.
battery time is quoted at up to 5 hours
it’s aimed at kids but its size makes it a worthwhile contender for a laptop replacement – the keyboard is small for a laptop, but huge for a PDA. :)
More » Q&A
11:46AM Sarah Stokely | Fast Company has published a Q&A with Tim Ferris, author of The 4-Hour Workweek. He’s an advocate of the 80-20 principle, outsourcing and getting away from your desk, and says “Five years from now, most white-collar workers will have digital concierges of some type.”
More » A visual guide to “Organisation 101″
11:11AM Sarah Stokely | You can’t turn around on the Internet without bumping into yet another productivity or GTD system, but today I stumbled upon a really nice walkthrough which looks like a great starting point for someone who wants to set up a system to get organised, but doesn’t know where to start.
Trent at the Simple Dollar blog has written “Organisation 101″ which is a guide to his productivity system, which includes photos and screenshots of the notebooks he uses for ideas and keeping projects on track, his filing system, and his email and calendar system.
I liked the way he takes notes online using the “open notebook” button in Firefox to open up Google Notebook in his browser. He also uses the mobile version of Remember the Milk to create lists he can access from his phone.
He also lists some principles for email management, from the the ‘process and delete it every day’ school of thinking. He also recommends the QuickText extension for Thunderbird for creating responses to common questions.
As a bonus, he even shows off his Go bag. All up, a nice starting point if you want to recommend a productivity system to someone.
Organisation 101: A Visual Guide to How I Manage the Information in My Life [The Simple Dollar]
More » 
Recover Any Password in Firefox with the Asterisk Revealer
11:00AM Adam Pash | The Firefox Asterisk Revealer bookmarklet reveals the contents of any password field (i.e., a field whose text is obscured by asterisks) in an alert box using a simple bit of javascript—particularly handy for those sites for which you’ve saved the password but long since forgotten what it is. The post itself just includes the javascript, but you can turn it into a bookmarklet by simply right-clicking your Bookmarks toolbar and selecting New Bookmark, and then pasting the javascript into the Location field. Firefox Asterisk Revealer [AKSN1P3R] More »
How to host a garden snail race
10:43AM Sarah Stokely | Kids bored enough to watch paint dry? How about watching a snail race instead? The Thingamababy blog has written up a guide to snail racing (concentric circles drawn on posterboard, or drawn with chalk on the footpath or porch if you want to race outdoors). It even provides a PDF of downloadable (tiny!) racing numbers for your snails.
A cute activity which you can use to teach kids a bit about snails and how cool they are – hopefully before they’re old enough to get squicked by the snail trail – which, Thingamababy reminds us “is just a lubricant that helps them move around”.
Gentemen, start your… snails!
How to Host a Garden Snail Race [Thingamababy via Make]
More » 
Speed up your GMail and GCal
10:08AM Sarah Stokely | Here’s a nice little tip for speeding up your GMail and Google Calendar, and it’s incredibly simple too. You can refresh the view by clicking the Gmail (or GCal) logo on the top left of your screen. This refreshes the view without reloading the page so it’s much faster. Nice to know. Thanks for the tip, Anth. More » 
Multi-Client IM on Your Mobile Device with Palringo
9:00AM Adam Pash | Windows Mobile and Symbian phones only: Freeware application Palringo brings multi-client chat to your Windows Mobile device or Symbian smartphone. There once was a time when the go-to mobile IM client was a program called Agile Messenger, but ever since it went shareware there’s been a gap for freeware IM on a lot of phones. With support for everything from AIM to Google Talk and its own mobile voice chat, it looks like Palringo is filling that gap with aplomb. Palringo is freeware, works on Symbian Series 60 phones and Windows Mobile 2003 and up. Palringo [via Download Squad] More »
