I spend a lot of time looking at the above (there should be a Bangalore clock there too, but it fell off. Whoops). Sitting smack bang in the middle of all the various teams (sort of), I have to juggle a lot of tasks, sites, actions and all sorts of other wonderful things as the timezones shift and day passes to night for each respective area.
As I work remotely, this means a lot of action on Skype and an absolute pile of tabs open on the various machines I have here. I've never particularly liked RSS readers - mainly because I can never seem to get them to work - which means an endless amount of website opening, refreshing, you name it, I've done it (and am probably still doing it).
However.
Cynical as I am about most applications that claim to help shave some time off all your daily activities, I have indeed found something so stupendously useful that it defies description. Interestingly, I only even came to use it because I realised lots of my Feedburner subscribers started to drop like flies. Upon further investigation, I realised there was something out there called Netvibes that was undergoing an upgrade, hence all the lost subscribers. Seeing as I had quite a lot of them from this one particular source, I decided to go check it out and I'm extremely glad I did.
Of course, it's all a bit Web 2.0-ish. You can put in a humorous title (or non-humorous, if you like) at the top, even though you're the only person that can see it. I settled for this:
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"Paperghost, Defender of the Interwebs". Well, it has a nice ring to it I think. As you can see (and I apologise to anyone in advance that Netvibes is old news to), it's effectively a bunch of custom made tabs on a set of webpages you can keep on changing to your hearts desire.
Right there on the frontpage, I have a whole bunch of things that are useful to my job. English and US calendars that indicate when people have national holidays coming up? You bet. As a lot of my work depends upon being able to interact with the researchers in West Virginia, it's faintly counterproductive when I've spent most of the morning working on something passed to me from the guys in Bangalore (with the intention of passing it off, Baton style, to the team in WV) only to find that they'll actually all be off celebrating some National holiday somewhere.
I have written them out on paper (only to watch the dog eat them, which is kind of similar to what happened to my homework), I have found an endless stream of holiday websites, only to lose them / watch them get hacked / get pulled by a bored webmaster / insert disaster of choice here. This? This is fantastic. It updates automatically and I don't have to do anything.
Moving on, currency converters are useful because of the travel-from-place-to-place (and try not to die) nature of the job. Yes, I can just go here. But the problem was that I was going there, every five minutes. As we spend a lot of time attempting to analyse money trails and seeing exactly what the financial worth of certain online scams is, the only way to go is have a currency converter up somewhere. Now, I have both this tool and a whole bunch of other useful security / network applications all on one page.
This is, as you might have expected, awesome.
The Security page I've created is equally as fantastic:
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Not only is it about the first RSS reader I've used that doesn't break every ten seconds (or has a horrendously clunky interface), I can see at a glance how frequently everybody else is posting and make some key strategic decisions about what to publish and when, if someone else has beaten you to the finish line with regards a post about a new infection (with the appropriate editing then administered to the blog entry in question) and all sorts of other mysterious and arcane decisions that relate to the Witchcraft that is blog publishing.
Comics? Well, as someone who frequently dips into the comics landscape (how many security writers do you know who get syndicated on Journalista / TCJ?) I can tell you that a lot of interesting security-skimming posts appear on comic websites, especially by the comic writers and creators who often have sites of their own. It's in their best interest to keep up to date with hacks,. SEO and all sorts of other things. Hence, this:
...resulted in this blog post. Nothing long or particularly dazzling for my part - I'm simply linking to someone else and saying, "this is interesting". But it's security, and it's comics, and I don't think a lot of security-hungry readers would have seen that first hand example of SEO black hat action so that's great. I hadn't actually been reading the blog in question for a while, so I probably wouldn't have even known about it only for seeing the title pop up on Netvibes.
Finally, my "Two Point Whatever" page is extremely useful:
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After I publish something I think warrants further attention, I start promoting it on many social networking sites. I have an established presence on Myspace, Twitter, Flickr, Digg and a bunch of other places. Using this single page, I can roll out bloglinks, promote articles, keep in touch with my (many) contacts across the various portals and a lot of other things besides. In many ways, this is the most useful page of all.
So there we have it. When I signed up to Netvibes, I remember seeing a promise saying something like "This site WILL save you time". You know what, it's true. It has. Anyway, you shouldn't be reading a long blog entry like this - you have work to do....
