Archive for May 3rd, 2007

I use an aggregator to fetch most of the fresh information I read on a daily basis: news, blogs, weather, Dilbert. An aggregator is a program that pulls different web pages you select into one window. Take a look at the Education and Tech News window on this page.

http://www.protopage.com/educ260

Those listings are updated each time you visit the page. From that one page you can see all the headlines and easily click (or right-click Open in New Window) the headlines that interest you. Anything on the web with an RSS feed (look for one of these symbols)

can be “fed” into an aggregator.

Google Reader is more than a list of links to headlines. Within GReader you can read an abstract of the article. It keeps track of those you have read and lets you mark important items so you can easily find them in the future. You can also share your items with others.

The killer feature of GReader is its connection to the Google search database. If you want to read news about “Alvin Trusty”, you type my name into the Add Subscription box of GReader. Google finds my blog and every blog I’ve linked to or posted on. Each listing has a “subscribe” link under it. You click the one(s) to which you want to subscribe. It’s just that easy.

Many tasks require the mouse. Make sure the mouse you use has a right-click button. The next time you use Google (or whatever search engine you prefer) instead of clicking a link, do a right-click “Open in New Window”.

In Firefox it is “Open Link in New Window”. Opening a link this way preserves your entire search back in the original Google search page. How many times have you found pay dirt on the first link of a search? Depending on my search topic, I may look at 10 or 20 different pages. If the page I open is a dead end, I close that window (Alt-F4). There is the rest of my search waiting for me in the original window.

I use this method so much I once refused to switch from Netscape to IE because the Netscape right-click listed the new window option first and IE listed it as the second item in the drop-down menu. Over time I improved my mouse skills to almost make up the difference. IE still lists it second and in Firefox it is first.

TSPY=3.16 (IE)
TSPY=3.19 (Firefox)