I’ve been trying to find ways to increase my productivity and effectively take my life back by the horns, which for the past couple of months has spiralled out of control.

Gmail is a staple in my life. I use it and don’t think about it. I’ve not gotten to the stage where I really use the folders as I can, however that might be about to change. So I’ve been looking into other online solutions that might be able to reach that status. Traditionally I’ve tried my very best to shy away from online services except those that are backed by one of the major players, mainly because they’re not going to be charging me cash to provide a task that while isn’t necessary to have online is nice to have. You could say it’s a bit of an antithesis to Web 2.0, and in a way it actually is. You’d also expect someone like me to jump for this sort of thing, however I don’t move into this arena without a little bit of caution, simply because I don’t like to be dependant on others that can pull the plug on me at any time or worse, decide to change the terms and conditions.

NewsGator

For all those in the dark earlier this year I help redesign the excellent open source RSS aggregator Feed On Feeds Redux. I'm still completely commited to the project, however I've been extremely busy of late to be able to do anything else apart from work (I will be posting the fruits of that labour in the not too distant future), so the CSS is still in a bit of a mess at the moment, which is my fault to solve. In the meantime back to news aggregators, FOFR is not really ready yet. It's a bit on the slow side; the team is working on it but I need to take my life back now (once it's ready I'll probably move everything over to FOFR). I don't know why not many people have been talking about this particular service because I seriously rate it a great deal. It's completely free, clean interface, and actually believe it or not operate in the same way (more or less) as FOFR. You can import and export your feeds, you can move feeds into folders (and read all the feeds individually or within that particular folder), it's fast, the subscribe to bookmarklet works a charm, the favicons pop up (and can be turned off if you don't want them). Elements can be saved (or flagged depending on how you would like to term it). The only option that is missing as far as I'm concerned to be honest is the addition of tagging. I dunno if I could be bothered to tag things to be honest since I've only really gotten into tagging on my blog. Ben has recently mentioned Newshutch, which I'll definitely check out, although I have the feeling that Newgator is still far better. If only they could sort something out for linux, that would be well appreciated.

Ma.gnolia

I've been using this for a little while. I love the colours, I love the design of the site, I love the bookmarklet. Again I've not been using it for all that long, however I am getting into the habit of using it whenever I come to a website that I really like however I don't want to clutter up my firefox bookmarks, because it's get far too much. I haven't used de.lic.ious (or where ever the bloody i's go to be honest), because it looked far too basic for me. Too much text not enough form and structure to it all. Then again I've not visited the site in a good long while. Yup still a bit sparse for my liking.

Google Calander

I've only started using this today and I think it's great. It's got one single KILLER feature as far as I'm concerned. That is the fact that Google will text message me with the latest element on my calander of things to do. I can choose how far before it text messages me, however I seriously think that this is one of those features that is a complete godsend to someone like me. I've got far too much on my brain to be honest to worry about a number of things and will forget appointments, or worse (as is becoming a bit of a problem) double book things, or in the case of a couple of weeks back, triple books something. Yeah it got a bit ridiculous. This is part of the reason I'm chopping at the bits to get a PDA or the new Sony M600i.

I think I’m becoming a life hacker, hopefully the next couple of weeks will see a bit of this hectic lifestyle that I’ve been living cool down a little bit and I can actually get back to finishing off some of these projects that have been on my plate for months, some even a year.