Social Media Plumbing:

A post by Robert Scoble made me have another look at rooms in FriendFeed. I set things up over the weekend, and decided to document it, to maybe succeed in explaining what this is all about. Here's my situation:

• I post content on various social media sites through various tools
• I want some of that content to appear on my own website
• I switch platforms quite often, or start using them in a different way, so keeping it up to date should be easy

So I decided to start a FriendFeed room with content that I want to appear on my site¹, and use their feed widget to then display it on my home page. It still took some effort (to get the styling how I wanted it), but it's done, and here's how.

I just discovered Google's Webmaster Tools, which is a nice addition to Google Analytics: add your site (or sites), and Google will give you insight in how it sees your pages:

With the version 1.0PR of Firefox, two more noteworthy extensions have popped up!

ColorZilla

Sits quietly in the status bar, and offers an "eye dropper" style colour picker, with the option to copy the selected colour to the clipboard ready to be pasted into a stylesheet. It also offers a better zoom function. Facilitates re-creating a site look and feel!

QuickNote

After using Firefox for a while, it's hard to imagine still how "normal people" surf the web. By now, I tweaked my Firefox behaviour with several extensions.
Webdeveloper toolbar
Essential for developing web pages! The toolbar offers too many options to list all, but to name a few that I would not live without anymore:

• CSS tools: edit the style sheet of a page on the spot, great for testing and debugging. Mark links as visited or unvisited to test styles here too.

While trying to find good resources for browser compatibility, I came across some interesting services to check the output of a web page on different platforms and browsers.

• Browser Photo delivers pictures of a page in different screen sizes on WebTV, iMac, and PC (Windows 2000), for IE and NS mainly (no Mozilla...). $150 for a year unlimited checking.

In my previous job, I simply had to keep track of time spent on some project. I used SDS Time for years, simple, straightforward, and with the data in CSV format on my desktop, quite easy to fill out the company time sheets. We didn't monitor anything beyond "hours on a project", and with categories and so, I could also keep track of time spent on certain private projects and boards and so.