Keeping Your Digital House
Aug 22nd, 07 | 3 remarksI’ve been a little negligent on organization lately, so I spent most of yesterday going through old files, cleaning out the cobwebs, restructuring and moving folders, etc. It’s a job I didn’t particularly enjoy, but sometimes good things happen as a result of completing unpleasant tasks… like finding a $10 bill in an old pair of jeans you were going to donate to Goodwill. :)
This morning I found several old .psd files (designs I started) which I had long forgotten about. Many of them should easily port into Wordpress themes. Score! Although my client workload is about to increase substantially, I hope to crank out the first one by Sept 1st.
I also discovered another excellent add-on for Thunderbird, called GMailUI. If you’ve ever used Gmail, you’re familiar with its native archiving and search functionality. Thunderbird, on the other hand, doesn’t have those capabilities inherent. So for example, if you wanted to search for a message by a specific sender, you’d have to try and remember which folder you stored the email in to begin with, go to that folder, then search. A bit counterproductive, wouldn’t you say?
With the GMailUI extension, you can set your search type to ‘Expression’ and use a keyword combination to search throughout your entire folder structure. So if you wanted to find that Sitepoint newsletter from last May, you could simply type from:sitepoint into the search box, and hit Ctrl+Enter. Need to refer to an email you sent to Joe Client? Type to:joe. A Quick Search folder containing your results will appear within the folder structure. (This refreshes with each search.)
Additionally, this extension allows you to archive items with the Y key, just like Gmail. All you have to do is create a top-level archive folder, and set the options to point to that folder. Score again!
A couple more extensions I ran across that might raise your level of productivity in managing your digital house (at least where email is concerned) include:
- Xnote: Add a post-it note to any email for quickly jotting down related thoughts. This is perfect for “tagging” say, a newsletter with information that triggers a post idea for your blog. :)
- Quote Color: Set up nested style background colors for different levels of an email thread. Could prove very useful for lengthy client communications.
Hm, maybe digital house keeping isn’t so bad.
I’ve never used Thunderbird, but I know there are lots of fans. I use GMail - do you think there is an advantage to moving to Thunderbird to manage it?
Aug 22, 07 | 10:08 amHey Randa. I use Gmail too actually, but mostly for backup purposes, or when I need a web-based solution (can’t stand squirrel mail) away from home.
I’ve never cared much for web-based email though, so to me the advantage of using Thunderbird for the daily grind is the clean interface and that I can configure/skin it to my liking, and it’s so much faster than any webmail I’ve tried. (You don’t have to check any boxes to perform an action, and you can move/delete/archive messages in bulk). I also really like the tagging and templating functionality.
It’s just such a useful app… and easy. Good grief I sound like a salesgirl. Can you tell I like the program? ;)
Aug 22, 07 | 2:03 pm[...] been on a major productivity kick lately… de-cluttering my office, reorganizing my digital life, and prepping my son for the start of the school year. Client work has also been picking up, and my [...]
Aug 31, 07 | 4:39 pm