Organization
Tuesday, July 29th, 2008
at 5:18pm
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I recently noticed a shared item from Google Reader in my FriendFeed that I hoped would solve a major issue I’ve had with keeping up with things. I have Remember The Milk for storing my To Do items and Google Calendar for keeping track of dated events. I even have a slick method for capturing events and items via my desktop launcher. I should be on top of things. But there is a piece missing.
Google Calendar allows alerts via Email, Pop-ups, and SMS. This should work out great, except that I don’t have SMS right now, I don’t keep GCal open, and I don’t have a method to notify me of new mail on my desktop. I have Remember The Milk set up to notify me via Google Talk of upcoming items, but there is still a chance I may ignore the new chat window (sometimes I get a little caught up in FriendFeed).
Snarl, in combination with Pidgin, actually provides me the best solution. I always have Pidgin running to handle various communications needs (Yahoo/AIM/GTalk/IRC/Jabber), so it makes perfect sense for my notifications system to center around it.
All I had to do was:
- Install Snarl
- Install the Snarl Extension for Pidgin, PidginSnarl
- Make sure my GTalk Account in Pidgin was set for Email Notifications
- And enjoy the Snarly goodness!
Here is a screenshot of the types of notifications I get from Pidgin now:
As you can see, I now receive notifications about new email messages, including reminders of how many new emails I have. As an added benefit, I can monitor Identi.ca and other messaging services without actually switching to the Pidgin window.
This means I spend more time on task and doing what I should be doing, and less time playin on Identi.ca. I no longer miss those important podcasts I keep adding to my calendar because I’ll get a desktop notification. I will also recieve new IM’s from Remember The Milk directly to my desktop.
Don’t forget to check out the other extensions available at the Snarl homepage (FireSnarl, for instance).
Did I explain this poorly? Do you have any experience with Snarl or Pidgin that you would like to share? How do you handle notifications to make sure you don’t miss things?
Monday, July 28th, 2008
at 1:49am
In my post, Remember The Milk: Posting Directly from Your Desktop, we covered how to add items to Remember The Milk using the popular desktop launcher Launchy. This provides us with a lightning-quick way to capture tasks and ideas without interrupting whatever we may currently be working on.
With a simple tweak, we can actually make this setup just a little more useful by allowing us to add tags to the items we are sending to RTM.
Here is the command-line we are currently using for “blat” to email RTM:
- -body ” ” -subject “$$” -to <unique key>@rmilk.com -u <gmail username> -pw <gmail pass> -f <gmail username> -server 127.0.0.1:1099
We are using “$$” here to tell the Launchy Runner plugin to pass our first argument as the subject of the email. What we need to be able to do is to specify a second argument that can be passed as the body of the email:
- -subject “$$” -body “$$” -to <unique key>@rmilk.com -u <gmail username> -pw <gmail pass> -f <gmail username> -server 127.0.0.1:1099
Notice that we have:
- Swapped the positions of the “subject” and “body” options
- We are now passing another “$$” to the “body” option
This tells Launchy to use the first argument we send as the subject and the second argument as the body. Now, we can set tags for our tasks as we add them via Launchy:
Pressing the TAB key within Launchy separates the “rtm” command from it’s two arguments. The first argument is the name of the task, and the second are the additional options describing that task.
Keep in mind that we have the choice to set other options for the task besides the tags. You can view the details in the Remember The Milk FAQ on Sending Tasks via Email.
The one caveat here is that you may only specify one option as Launchy doesn’t allow us to enter a line-break.
Was this article helpful? Do you have a better way to do this? I would love to hear from you.
Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008
at 8:39pm
FriendFeed is becoming more and more central to my online activity. I feel I have only scratched the surface of what can be accomplished with it. Even at this early stage, I know that I have accelerated the development of relationships, and the growth of my personal knowledge just by being a regular FriendFeeder.
A recent discussion started by jeff(isageek), got me thinking. I really should have tabs for web apps I want to keep tabs on right there in FriendFeed. I mean…I’m always in it anyway, might as well try to get things done while I’m there. You may remember Duncan Riley creating a slew of scripts for adding various tabs to FriendFeed, but there were a few missing that I still needed.
You can’t be productive without access to your Calendar and your Task List, so I created a couple of quick and dirty Greasemonkey scripts based on Duncan’s.
And, just for good measure, let’s go ahead and add a tab for Identi.ca:
Another script that I find I am using a lot is the FriendFeed Read Later script. I don’t see how anyone survives without it. It will allow you to mark an item as “Later” and creates a “Read Later” tab where you can view all of the items you marked. I primarily use it to follow discussions I find interesting without having to hope they resurface or searching for them. I also use this feature to mark items I may want to blog about later.
How do you keep up with your FriendFeed? How do you make sure you stay productive while using it? Enquiring minds want to know. Leave me a comment.
