My main personal homepage has been iGoogle for a long time. I use the tabs to keep things sorted. In those tabs are a some RSS feeds, a couple gadgets, webmaster tools and some mindless time wasters. I have to admit, I really don’t use the different things on the homepage much; they are what I am used to.

When I am sitting at my desk and trying to focus on work, it is all too easy to lend my attention to something much more interesting than what I should be doing. Going to a search site or looking at the auto suggestions when typing in a bookmark tag can easily steal your attention.

I have recently been trying out a different homepage at work. 43marks isn’t as flashy as some of the homepages out there, but flashy is usually distracting. How 43marks differs from other homepages, is how much it offers in such a simple layout. 43marks combines two things people use on a daily basis: bookmarks and search engines.

Having four options to search at your fingertips without all of the typical distractions and random links associated with some sites is a breath of fresh air. Google, Yahoo, Bing and Wikipedia are probably the most commonly used search engines. All of them aggregate the “top sites” in a different way. Type in a search term and get the results from Google; to see what Yahoo,Bing or Wikipedia simply click that tab and the results shift to the other search engine’s results.

To personalize your 43marks homepage, follow these steps:

1. Click on the the “customize yours” tab in the top right corner of the main page.

2. Enter in a user name, email address and a password twice.

3. Once you are all set up, you will have a default list of bookmarks and RSS feeds.

4. To change the bookmarks and RSS feeds, click [Manage]

5. Three options are presented to you: Manage Bookmarks, Manage RSS Feeds and User Settings.

If you want to wipe the slate clean, 43marks does give an option to delete all bookmarks.

6. In the RSS Manage RSS Feeds tab, the same option to start from scratch is available.

* A pretty easy way to add a feed is to click on the RSS icon most sites have. This will pull up a page with the feed address listed. The feed URL should look something like this – http://feeds.feedburner.com/MakeTechEasier

The RSS part works well, but if you want to change a feed from ESPN to Make Tech Easier, you need to delete the old one and add in the new name and address.

7. In the User Settings, you are presented a four options:

• Choose whether you want your page to be private or public so anyone can see your list of bookmarks and RSS feeds. If you choose public, just give our the URL to your page. Mine is 43marks.com/trevor_dobrygoski

• How you would like the RSS feeds displayed – Expanded or collapsed
• The maximum number of books marks to display in each category column
• How you want the bookmark or RSS link to open when clicked

With all of the distractions present to anyone who works online, 43marks is a great solution to wrangle the information you NEED to look at and none that you don’t.

What tools do you use to cut down on distractions when you work online?

Get Your Homepage Organized With 43marks originally published on Make Tech Easier (RSS)

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This is one of the most powerful way for a site to be discovered by the world and then become popular. Who wouldn’t like to be famous? (Digg effect, anyone?) We all know the power of having popular site(s), right? I mean, the money, the fame, the money, the money, that sort of things… That is why most Webmasters are doing their best to maximize this bookmarking trends.

The problem is, because so many people addicted to the bookmarking sharing trends, more and more bookmarking services are popping out everywhere and it has become a bit difficult to keep up with all of them. I can’t begin to imagine the tedious job of having to submit each and every of your posts/articles to each and every bookmarking services out there.

The Only Wire you’ll ever need

Luckily, many people are also having this problem, and some of them came up with a solution: OnlyWire – a bookmarking submitter service. Basically what this service do is help the user to submit his/her (or anyone’s) posts to many bookmarking services with just one push of a button.

There are several steps that users need to complete in order to use their service.

1. First is register with OnlyWire. They have two options: paid and free.

“Pay” version – use fully-supported OnlyWire “ad free” by paying $2.99 per month or prepaying for 1 year ($24.99). Pay customers are encouraged to embed the Bookmark & Share Button on your website to drive traffic and backlinks. You will also have the option to turn off OnlyWire advertisements.

“Promote” version – use fully-supported OnlyWire for FREE by adding the Bookmark & Share Button to your website or blog. You still enjoy the same functionality as the “Pay” version of OnlyWire, but promote the continued operation of the site through advertising.

2. Then you have to install the Bookmark & Share Button in your site. The term “install” here actually means copy and paste few lines of code, or for Wordpress users, use OnlyWire plugins.

3. After that, enter your Username and Password for the websites that you wish to utilize. To date, OnlyWire supports twenty social sites, including: Del.icio.us, Facebook, Technorati, Twitter and Multiply. Of course you have to register with these services first.

Up-up and away

Suppose that everything is done, you can enjoy your effort. Everytime you post something in your blog, it will be automatically posted to the social sites that you’ve set above. And, everytime your readers click on the Bookmark & Share button, the post will also be submitted to the social sites which your readers choose.

Now you can have more free time to write and worry less about the tedious job of submitting your site(s)/blog(s) to the social sites.

Share your opinion about social bookmarking and other method of popularize your site/blog in the comment below.

OnlyWire: One Bookmark Tool to Rule Them All originally published on Make Tech Easier (RSS)

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Just like speed dial, Tidy Favorites allows you to keep a thumbnail of your favorite sites on a custom page so that you can click and access the site easily. In addition, you can drag the thumbnail and place it in wherever you like and resize it to your preference. You might want to create a big thumbnail for the site that you frequent the most and a small one for the one that you seldom visit. You can even select a particular region of the site as the thumbnail image. If one page is not enough for you, you can create tabs and folders to store your bookmarks. In short, there are tons of things that you can do here and it is really up to your creativity how you want to get it done.

One thing that I like about Tidy Favorites is that regardless of which browser you use, you get the same set of bookmarks throughout. For example, if you add a new thumbnail bookmark in Firefox, Tidy Favorites will backup the bookmark to its database. When you open Opera, it will show the same set of bookmark that you saved in Firefox. As such, there is no need for you to import/export your bookmarks from one browser to another.

Click to enlarge

At the moment, Tidy Favorites only support IE, Firefox and Opera.

Some caveats

On the first run, Tidy Favorites will scan your history and automatically create a series of thumbnail of the sites that you have previously visited. I kind of dislike this function since it created a list of thumbnails that I don’t like and I have to manually removed them. I would prefer it to generate the thumbnails based on the internal bookmarks that I have saved all over the years as that is really where my favorite sites are stored.

Secondly, this application only works in Windows. I would hope that it works in Mac and Linux too. If Firefox and Opera can be cross-platform, I don’t see any reason why this application can’t, especially when it is just a simple Firefox extension.

If the developers can fix up the above issues, I am sure this will become a very handy bookmarking tool, especially for those for use several browsers in their line of work.

[Tidy Favorites]

Better Manage Your Bookmarks With Tidy Favorites originally published on Make Tech Easier (RSS)

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