This not according to me but moderate-liberal editorialist for the WaPo David Broder.

LINK

Seth

I do most of my blog reading using a web-based portal / feedreader called netvibes.

(For those of you who don’t know what a feedreader is, you’re truly missing out on one of the most helpful technologies out there. Simply put, RSS and feed readers allow you to read your favorite blogs and websites all in one application or web page. That way you don’t have to manually go to each site to read the most recent content. You just read it all in your feedreader. To find out more, read THIS article on RSS and THIS article on Aggregators (feed readers).)

Anyhoo, Netvibes allows me to export my list of RSS web feeds using a technology called OPML. I have done that and then re-imported the list right back into my Netvibe “Public” webpage, which you can view HERE.

My list is a good way of figuring out what interests me and who is influencing my thinking. You will, no doubt, notice that I am pretty influenced by many sources that are left of center, but you will see a few conservative influences as well. As you look at my list, let me say a few things about my TABS in netvibes.

First, I tend to read the tabs left to right. So the tabs to the left tend to be read more than the tabs on the right. The more time I have, the more likely that I will be reading the rightermost (is that a word) tabs. In fact, recently the tabs to the far right, God Blogs and Tech Stuff haven’t been read much at all.

Second, the Economics tab is very new, I just added a bunch of new sources today, mostly in deference to Steve and because I have a desire to know what the heck he is talking about.

BTW, one of the things I love about using netvibes is that they have one of the best iPhone implementations out there. Every night I lay in bed and read my feeds on my iPhone. Here are a couple of pics that shows the netvibes iPhone implementation.

So here are my questions:

• Do you have a feedreader? If so what do you use?
• Whats on your list?
• What do you wish I would add to my list?

I have had several people ask how I created the video demo that was featured in my The Ultimate Budgeting Spreadsheet (free to the first 50 users) post that I did a few days ago.

I used Camtasia Studio which I purchased late last year but had not put to use yet until this week. It is an AMAZINGLY powerful tool. It does Capture (get the video), Editing (which I have not done yet but mean thing like cut crop highlight…), and production (which rolled up the whole thing into a slick flash file.)

It took MANY attempts to get the video to the last form (I wanted it to be less than 5 minutes but I could not include what I wanted in that time frame so I went with the 7 minute version). But once I got the capture that I wanted it took less than 15 minutes to produce and get it onto the website (production includes a sample web page with the proper embed codes for the video.)

Camtasia Studio is not cheap. But for people like me (planning to sell software online) it is well worth the price.

Seth

I am not writing this post from a browser window. No…I am using Cool Tool #2. Blog Desk is a very lightweight windows utility for posting blogs.

It loads fast and for a quick post it might be preferred to firing up your browser…going to you web site…logging in…going to the write page.

It is not perfect…for example…it doesn’t show sub-categories…so even for this post I am going to have to go in and edit the categories. And for posting with images (although I think it can be setup to do it) I think I would prefer the Wordpress Write page. (Another reason I will be editing this post after posting.) But, those conditions notwithstanding, it is a good tool for short, quick posting of ideas that pop into you head…I have enjoyed using it.

To download it click here.

Click the image below to see a screen shot:

Seth

I have been trying to think up topics that I can do (mostly) quick and dirty posts on and yet still be useful. In that spirit I will be doing a Cool Tools series.

Cool Tools are tools that I use everyday (and that I would hate to do without). Mostly they are small utility software packages but I plan to include one hardware tool and a couple of larger softwares in the series..

COOL TOOL # 1 - Notepad++
If you are like me you use a text editor like Notepad (NP) (ships with Windows) all the time.

In fact, I would say my usage of a text editor is all day every day:

• Need to jot a quick note - fire up NP.
• Need a place to paste that text that you might need in a few minutes - fire up NP.
• Need to take notes on your work day - record your work details - fire up NP.
• Need to copy that code snippet from the web for later use - fire up NP.
• Need a place that will strip out all of the formatting from that web page or word document that’s on your clipboard - NP.
• Need a place to copy your difficult to guess password until you are sure it is safely stored in Roboform (a future cool tool) - NP.

For me, a text editor is an essential tool for my daily workflow.

But notepad (the text editor that ships with windows) is completely lame-o-stupid-oplis. In fact, the only good thing about it is that it is light-weight and fast.

ENTER Notepad++. Notepad++, too, is fast and lightweight but is loaded with tons of other useful features that are lacking in the windows version like:

• Tabbed documents. Not only can you open as many text windows as you like, but they will automatically reload whenever you restart Notepad++
• Automatic line-numbers
• Line Markers (Bookmarks) that you can mark for easy finding later.
• Excellent search and replace
• Language selection with automatic formatting. This feature allows you to tell Notepad++ what kind of text document you are currently using and it will format the text for easier reading.
• Excellent search and replace.
• A whole lot more - there are a lot of powerful features that I don’t even use.

So just run on over to Notepad-Replacements-R-Us and get yourself one of them FREE powerful text editors.

Oh yeah…did I mention it’s free.

Below is a screen shot…click on it to see more.

Seth