I use my blog primarily for article-length posts that I want to save.  Short, random thoughts I’ll just post on Facebook, and I’m not worried about losing track of what I wrote.  Since the longer posts tend to be a bit more rare, and since few (if any) people are going to subscribe to my blog’s RSS feed, it’s nice to have a way to bring some attention to new blog posts.  Thankfully, there are several ways to have new blog posts show up in your Facebook feed.

Facebook provides a convenient way to import a blog into your Notes.  Just go to http://www.facebook.com/editnotes.php and paste in the address of your blog’s feed.  Then whenever you post something to your blog, it will also show up as a note in Facebook.  However, if someone comments on your note, the comment will only exist in Facebook; you may wish that comments would be reflected on your blog page as well.

Depending on your blogging software, there have been attempts to write plugins that attempt to import comments on notes from Facebook into your blog.  I use WordPress for my blog, and there was a Facebook Comments plugin that served this purpose, but it no longer seems to work.

If you don’t feel it necessary to have your blog posts imported into Facebook as Notes, but you want an update to appear on your Facebook wall when you make a new post to your blog, there are plugins for that too.  For WordPress, the Wordbook plugin makes it easy to to this.  This plugin will just post a little one-line story on your Wall with a link to your blog post.  If someone wants to read it, they have to click over to your blog.

Today I’m trying a new method, using the Wordbooker plugin.  This plugin purports to show new blog posts on your Wall without importing them into your Notes.  If Facebook friends comment on your Wall post, those comments are supposed to be imported into your blog page as well.  I’m not sure how it’s going to work, so this post is a test.

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The old way to launch programs:

1. Click on the Start button.

2. Move the mouse to Programs.

3. If you’re using “Personalized Menus,” some of the Program folders may be hidden, so you have to click or hover on the two little arrows at the bottom of the list.

4. Remember which of your many folders contains the program you’re looking for. You may have to browse multiple folders and subfolders to find it.

5. Finally, once you find it, click on it to launch the program.

Alternatively, if it’s a frequently used program, you can put a shortcut on the desktop. This works fine if your desktop is showing, but if you already have one or more open windows, you first have to minimize those windows before you can click the icons on your desktop. You also have to decide in advance which icons to put on the desktop. Personally, I like to keep my desktop icons to a minimum.

Another alternative would be to create hotkey combinations (eg., Ctrl-Alt-M, Ctrl-Shift-W, etc.) for your frequently used programs. This allows you to launch selected programs without navigating through the Start menu or minimizing open windows to expose the desktop. However, in addition to deciding which programs are worthy of having hotkeys (usually only a small number of programs), you have to remember what all those hotkeys are.

I have come to prefer a specialized application launcher. My current favorite is Find And Run Robot (FARR). Another popular choice is Launchy.

These and similar apps require you to remember ONE hotkey, and it’s one that you will use frequently. You type the hotkey (in my case, Ctrl-Space), and a small window pops up, in which you start typing what you’re looking for. Don’t worry, you won’t have to type much!

In this example, “cha” was all it took for FARR to find the Windows Character Map program (if you’ve never used this, it’s a useful program for inserting special characters like ±, ½, ¿, ©, etc. in your text). Using the Start menu to launch this program requires navigating to Start > Programs > Accessories > System Tools > Character Map. At this point with FARR, all that is left is to hit Enter on the keyboard. (There is no need to finish typing “character map.” You don’t have to select it either; FARR will automatically launch the first result in the list once you hit Enter.)

If Character Map wasn’t what I had in mind, I can keep typing to further refine the results, or if the program I want is further down the list, I can use the arrow keys to select that program and hit Enter to launch it. For example, if I was really looking for Chip’s Challenge, I could hit the down arrow three times, then Enter, and Chip’s Challenge would open. The next time I use FARR to search for something beginning with “cha” FARR remembers that I wanted Chip’s Challenge last time, and this time it automatically comes to the top of the list.

Launchers like FARR and Launchy aren’t just for finding shortcuts in your Start Menu or on your desktop. They can also be configured to find other files on your computer. You can find executable files (*.exe) that don’t have a shortcut in the Start menu. You can find documents, spreadsheets, presentations, images, music, internet favorites/bookmarks, etc., and automatically open them with the associated program. For example, instead of opening Microsoft Word, then using the File > Open dialog in Word to search for a file, you can just type the file name in FARR (or Launchy), the open the file in Word all in one step. Or, if you can’t remember whether that file you’re looking for is a Word document, Excel spreadsheet, Powerpoint presentation, or Adobe PDF just start typing the filename and chances are you’ll find it quickly and easily.

Plugins and other advanced options extend the flexibility even further. For example, the “jscalc” plugin for FARR adds a powerful calculator.

All this and more is available at the tip of your fingers. App launchers like FARR and Launchy are especially popular with users who attempt to do as much as possible from the keyboard, minimizing the need to move your hand back and forth from the keyboard to the mouse. (Hint: you need your mouse a lot less than you think; especially if you use Firefox.)

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http://www.spamgourmet.com

There are quite a few varieties of “disposable email addresses.”  spamgourmet happens to be the one that I use, and I find that it works very well.

Here’s an example of how it works:

You want to sign up for that free sample of Chocolumps cereal, but you don’t want your inbox flooded with more “free offers” from everyone and their brother.

Instead of giving the makers of Chocolumps your real email address (realemail@domain.com), you give them a special “made-up” email address: chocolumps.5.keyword@spamgourmet.com.  “Keyword” is your spamgourmet username, and is the same for any address you make up.  “Chocolumps” is a word you make up on the spot when you “create” a disposable email address.  “5″ means that spamgourment will forward up to 5 messages sent to chocolumps.5.keyword@spamgourmet.com to your real email address.  If the makers of Chocolumps keep sending you more email after that, or if they sell/give your email address to someone else, any additional messages get “eaten” by spamgourmet and you never see them.  You can pick a number from 1-20, use a letter of the alphabet, or another word instead of “5.”  For example, “1,” “a,” or “apple” all allow a single email to get through; “4,” “d,” or “dog” will allow four emails to get through; hopefully, you get the picture.

The advantage over other disposable email address programs is that you don’t have to go to a separate website or login to a separate account to get your email; spamgourmet forwards it to your real email address.  You don’t have to go to spamgourmet to configure a disposable email address; you just make it up on the spot (you do have to go to spamgourmet once initially to configure your account).  If you give someone a disposable email address, then decide you want to keep getting email from that source, you can do that too, and you can make it so a particular email address only accepts email from a particular address or a particular domain (for example, allow unlimited emails from generalmills.com to your cheerios.yum.keyword@spamgourmet address, but email to that address from any other source gets eaten).

There are other features and ways to use the service; just go to spamgourmet.com and check it out.  If you are in the habit of signing up for things on the internet, I know you will find this helpful.  Did I mention that it’s free?

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