Web Worker Daily

Here are some interesting posts from around the ‘Net to catch up with over the weekend:

• The New Yorker: “Priced To Sell: Is Free the Future?”
• CNET: “Do URLs matter anymore?”
• Yahoo Shine: “How to improve your email etiquette”
• TheAppleBlog: “MacBook Air is the Apple Netbook, End of Story”
• PCWorld: “Blogging Is Over With”
• TUAW: “Staying Safe: securing your wireless connection”
• Smashing Magazine: “50 Free Resources That Will Improve Your Writing Skills”

Finally, here are a couple of Independence Day-related links:

• The New Yorker’s Independence Day covers
• Digital Photography School: “How to Photograph Fireworks Displays”

What are you reading this weekend?

It seems hard to improve on a standard screen capture, right? You want a copy of whatever happens to be on your screen, so you take a screen cap. But Aviary, which already has an impressive array of online photo-editing tools, has come up with a nifty screen-capping web app and a matching Firefox plugin that improve on the basics.

Here are five things that make Aviary screen capture really useful. Read the rest of this entry »

To celebrate this week’s launch of the superb Firefox 3.5, we’ve put together a collection of the WebWorkerDaily team’s favorite Firefox extensions. You can subscribe to our collection here; as we discover useful new add-ons, we’ll add to it over time. The great thing about add-on collections is that you can pick and choose which add-ons to install, so if you don’t agree with all of our choices, you can just pick the ones that you like.

Here are the add-ons that made our collection (they’re all compatible with Firefox 3.5):

• FaviconizeTab
• Long URL Please
• Better Gmail 2
• Adblock Plus
• Tiny Menu
• Download Statusbar
• Gmail Manager
• LastPass Password Manager
• Greasemonkey
• ScribeFire Blog Editor
• Read It Later
• Xmarks (formerly Foxmarks)
• Shareaholic for Firefox
  

These are our favorites, but if we’re missing any, please let us know in the comments.

Just in case you missed any of them, here are the five most popular posts on WebWorkerDaily this week:

• How to Eliminate Compulsive Internet Fiddling

Are you an Internet fiddler? Celine shares some strategies for avoiding compulsive web surfing.

• 10 Useful Firefox Add-ons for Almost Everybody

Meryl links ten exceedingly useful Firefox extensions.

• A Six-Pack of Gmail Hacks

Amber shows you six ways to supercharge your Gmail.

• Must-Have iPhone Apps for Surviving Air Travel

Taking a trip? Nancy shares some iPhone apps that will make the journey smoother.

• 4 Reasons It Pays to Track Your Time

Although tracking time can seem like a chore, it can pay dividends; Amber explains why.

Web workers, especially those of us who are self-employed, will sometimes encounter people who, it seems, take us less seriously because we don’t have a corporate cube to work in. There are two ways to deal with this.

Some web workers go to great lengths to mask that our office and home are one and the same. We can use P.O. box or mailbox suite addresses, and install separate phone lines that we can always answer with a business salutation. We might keep rigidly to business hours and avoid any reference in conversation that would reveal our office/home marriage.

Of course, there is another option. We can let it all hang out, so to speak, and freely acknowledge our home office location and its attendant benefits (and disadvantages) to the people we do business with.

Read the rest of this entry »