{"id":130,"date":"2007-03-11T22:59:07","date_gmt":"2007-03-11T22:59:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/?p=130"},"modified":"2007-03-11T22:59:07","modified_gmt":"2007-03-11T22:59:07","slug":"i-sign-up-to-too-many-websites","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/?p=130","title":{"rendered":"I sign up to too many websites"},"content":{"rendered":"

Bad news – my trusty ThinkPad T40 finally gave up the ghost last week and died. Good news – it meant I’ve got a shiny new ThinkPad T60<\/a> – the novelty of having a fingerprint scanner to use instead of a password to logon still hasn’t lost it’s appeal. <\/p>\n

I’ve been setting it up the way I like it this evening, and one thing that I’ve noticed since losing my saved Firefox passwords is how many different online profiles I’ve got. I’m thinking that perhaps I sign up to too many online gimmicks. \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n

With that in mind, I thought I’d quickly list the ones I realised I was missing first. You’ve probably heard of most of them, but maybe there’ll be one or two that you haven’t. <\/p>\n

del.icio.us – my bookmarks<\/a><\/strong>
\nBookmarking on my browser is mainly for very short-term things – a page I know I will need for the next day or so. Everything else is bookmarked online at del.icio.us. My approach tagging is a little erratic, but I can normally find what I need. <\/p>\n

last.fm – my Internet radio<\/a><\/strong>
\nI’ve only started using this fairly recently, but I’m loving it. Listen to music online without ads, and with the ability to skip past tracks you don’t like. They’ve got a big and varied database of music, their recommendations engine is pretty good, and I like the way that when you listen to your own music in Windows Media Player or iTunes they can use this to tune your profile and improve their recommendations further. <\/p>\n

Their approach to letting you access and play about with your profile data through a variety of feeds<\/a> is pretty neat, too. <\/p>\n

twitter<\/a> – what am I doing?<\/strong>
\nI’m fairly new to Twitter, and still kinda working out what I want to use it for. I think the idea is fun, and am working on some ideas for how we could use it for Solent Youth Action<\/a> to see how we could use it as another way to keep in touch with the young people that we work with.<\/p>\n

meebo – my online messaging<\/a><\/strong>
\nAll of my instant messaging accounts in one place in an AJAX-y IM within a browser. This was a godsend this week as my only IM access was being able to access different people’s machines from time to time, when installing an IM client or even entering my account details wasn’t really an option. <\/p>\n

upcoming – my diary for local events<\/a><\/strong>
\nThis is another site that I’m fairly new to, but am keeping an eye on – a way to find out about upcoming events in my local area. Some interesting events that you might not otherwise hear of get posted here. <\/p>\n

flickr<\/a><\/strong>
\nPicasa<\/a><\/strong>
\nI’m playing with photo sites at the moment to try and find a new place to put pics. For a while now, I’ve been using a blogger blog<\/a> because Picasa made it very easy to post photos with a single click. I’ve gone off the clunky interface and am planning to move somewhere else when I get some time. It’s either gonna be flickr or Picasa Web Albums… I can’t decide which yet. <\/p>\n

Google Calendar<\/a> – my diary<\/strong>
\nI sync my Outlook calendar with Google Calendar, and having it online is a nice way to let friends and family easily check at my diary. It also has a nice view where it can show your calendar with others on the same page (colour-coded so you know who’s appointments are whose). Plus on those (rare!) occasions when I obviously don’t listen when my wife tells me what she’s doing, it means I can check her diary to see why she’s out. \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n

share.opml.org – my blogroll<\/a><\/strong>
\nI keep meaning to choose feeds for a blogroll, but never get around to it. In the meantime, I occasionally remember to dump my (always changing) RSS feeds from my news reader to opml.org. <\/p>\n

blogger – my blogs<\/a><\/strong>
\nWordPress – my blogs<\/a><\/strong>
\nI’m enjoying blogging more since starting the WebSphere MQ<\/a> one – although it’s much harder to write posts for it. (Possibly because I actually take more care over what I write on it.) <\/p>\n

OpenID – my online ID<\/a><\/strong>
\nI like the idea of OpenID<\/a> – a neat decentralized way to provide a single sign-on to multiple sites. If nothing else, this week has showed me how useful that would be! But hardly any sites I use support OpenID yet, so I don’t use it very much. Looking forward to when I can, though.<\/p>\n

SchemingMind – my online chess<\/a><\/strong>
\nThe lack of a ThinkPad this last week has meant that I am behind on my chess games! I’m currently in the middle of eleven games, some with people that I work with, but some with mates from Uni that I hardly see. It’s a nice way to keep in touch.<\/p>\n

YouTube – my online video<\/a><\/strong>
\nI spend a fair amount of time watching video on YouTube – the short clips suits my attention span, and the breadth of video you can find here is fantastic. I don’t actually use my login that much, and only really log in when I occasionally play with uploading a video. Still, I thought it was worth including in any list of my most-used websites.<\/p>\n

Wikipedia – online reference<\/a><\/strong>
\nAnother site that I keep meaning to logon to more often than I do – Wikipedia is always my first source of reference for something new. <\/p>\n

Technorati – my blogs<\/a><\/strong>
\nI used to use Technorati as a way to search across blogs, but as Google’s blog search<\/a> has improved, I mainly use it occasionally check for the ranking and any new incoming links to my blogs. <\/p>\n

Yahoo! Groups – keeping in touch<\/a><\/strong>
\nI use Yahoo Groups<\/a> with On the Level to keep in touch with the other mentors. It’s a nice simple way to keep in touch with a group of people – a mailing list, shared events calendar and space to dump files. <\/p>\n

skype – my Internet phone<\/a> <\/strong>
\nI’d like to get a proper Skype phone, but in the meantime the Windows Mobile client<\/a> will do. <\/p>\n

LinkedIn – my contacts<\/a><\/strong>
\nXING – my contacts<\/a><\/strong>
\nI’m still not quite convinced the point of these sites. Still, every now and then I get an invite for one of them from someone I know and I normally accept. Perhaps it’ll come in handy if I ever start job-hunting, but in the meantime these are just yet another online list. <\/p>\n

digg – interesting stuff<\/a><\/strong>
\nslashdot – interesting stuff<\/a><\/strong>
\nThese are sites that I visit a lot but tend not to participate in very much – I guess I’m a bit of a lurker! I do at least log on to Slashdot, but that’s mainly because it lets me save my preferred view. They’re both a way to come across interesting content that you’d probably never hear of through mainstream media. <\/p>\n

Loads more!<\/strong>
\nI tend to sign up to pretty much any new site I hear of. The fact that I’ve had to go find the passwords for these in the last day or so just means that these are the sites that I’m still using more than a week after signing up. There are hundreds more that I’m not. \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Bad news – my trusty ThinkPad T40 finally gave up the ghost last week and died. Good news – it meant I’ve got a shiny new ThinkPad T60 – the novelty of having a fingerprint scanner to use instead of a password to logon still hasn’t lost it’s appeal. I’ve been setting it up the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-130","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-web"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/130","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=130"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/130\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=130"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=130"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=130"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}