PLANET WWD

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

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

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.

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):

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

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

Meryl links ten exceedingly useful Firefox extensions.

gigaomeditor

This weekend is the Independence Day 4th of July holiday here in the U.S., which for many people means a three-day weekend. I’ll even be taking tomorrow off, and I almost never get days off, since my boss is a complete workaholic who thinks days off are for the weak. Oh wait, that workaholic tyrant is me, since I get to set my own freelance schedule. Some of us aren’t good at taking days off, so I have a few tips for making it through the holiday.

Lots going on in the Rails repository lately; I smell another release soon. (And no, I don’t have insider information at this point).

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.

Twitter followers have become the status symbol of 2009, but how valuable are they, really? I think we’re placing too much importance on the numbers and paying far too little attention to the actual reasons why followers can be valuable to us.

I’m not saying that you shouldn’t want to have a lot of followers. I’m saying that you don’t want to have a lot of the wrong followers. There is nothing to be gained by accumulating “empty” followers. Why? Because they are not listening to you! Your core followers — those you who actually listen to you and interact with you — are the real value of Twitter, and that’s why you should never, ever automate your Twitter account to increase follower count.

Here are a couple of ways to be more efficient when it comes to sharing your photos online from events. Like most web workers, you’re probably on many different social networks. How do you share those great photos from the event with all of your contacts on all of your social networks, without having to log in to each one separately?

Fortunately, there are ways to automate the process of cross-posting photos to many different services at one time.

Flickr

Starting a business can be a huge undertaking, but fortunately for the aspiring web worker, it doesn’t have to be. The really great thing about starting a web working business is that getting set up can be easy and low cost.

You don’t need a fancy set-up. You can get by with a few basic necessities (in most cases, a computer, an Internet connection, a web site and maybe some business cards).

When it comes to collaborative projects, there’s one area where I’ve found it particularly easy to trip up, especially if you’re working with a team you never see in person. As you put together the initial research for a project — maybe interview notes for a series of blog posts, great examples for a web site design, or the figures for a marketing plan — keeping the information organized and accessible for everyone involved can be a major hassle.

In the past, I primarily used wikis for this sort of information organization, but they really aren’t the best tool for the job. Considering how many tools can simply save web pages or otherwise collect information without requiring you to cut, paste and format it, it’s far faster to move beyond a basic wiki. And if you have a team member who isn’t particularly technically savvy, an option with a shallower learning curve than a wiki is probably good. Here are a few choices that could be useful.

Finally, a few reasonable links for the week. Thanks for sticking around.

Written by Nancy Nally.

Editor’s note: With this post we welcome Nancy Nally to the WebWorkerDaily team.  Nancy is the owner of Balalaberry Media and is the editor of its online scrapbook industry trade journal Scrapbook Update, which she founded in 2004, along with working on other writing projects. She shares her home in Palm Coast, Fla., with her geek husband and young geek daughter, who has autism.

I may not be able to make a phone call on my iPhone from 30,000 feet (yet), but I’ve still found that when I’m out of my office and have to fly, having an iPhone in my pocket is a powerful sanity-saving tool. Here are the apps that help keep my air travel running smoothly.

Written by Dawn Foster.

Listening has always been important, but now in the world of social media where conversations are amplified, repeated and spread at a much faster rate than ever before, listening has become even more critical. Many of us, particularly freelancers, don’t have teams of people responsible for customer service and support to help make sure that we are listening to our customers, potential customers and industry experts. We have to find the time to listen to what people are saying about us and react appropriately.

Written by Scott Blitstein.

Maintaining and promoting your various online personas can be a challenge. As Charles wrote recently, there are a variety of options for managing many online identities, and yesterday one of them, GizaPage, which I wrote about back in May, released several new features.

Written by Georgina Laidlaw.

Are you having a good day today? Remote working can be great, but it can also prove a lonely proposition; some days it can seem like you never leave the house, or as if no one knows or cares whether you’re working or not. For many, remote working actually means remote: The workplace of your employer is hours away; friends and/or other colleagues aren’t much closer. And sometimes it can seem as if the people who are supposed to be working with you are too busy with what’s going on in the office to actually give you what you need to do your job.

Written by Samuel Dean.

Like many of us, you’re probably getting used to the much improved version 3.5 of Mozilla’s Firefox browser. Of course, one of the primary reasons that many people use Firefox is the large ecosystem of useful extensions available for it. The speed of version 3.5 will automatically give you an efficiency boost if you’ve been using previous versions, but there is one Firefox extension that I highly recommend to speed many kinds of tasks up even more: Mouse Gestures. This is one of the few extensions that causes an eye-popping response in many new users. It’s compatible with 3.5 and easy to get started with, too.
Once you’ve installed the extension and restarted the browser, just hold down Ctrl-Shift-O (that’s the letter O, not zero) to display a Mouse Gestures sidebar in your browser. This is a list of shapes you can draw with your mouse and use to execute many kinds of browser- and desktop-specific tasks with a flick of your hand. For example, the screenshot above shows the Window Management set of gestures.

Starting the new month by sending out a couple of contracts for potential clients to look over. Life could be worse.

Written by Meryl Evans.

I love technology, but not when it comes to switching PCs — moving all the data and applications from one Windows machine to another is not always as easy as it could be.