1. Tabs are your friend

Tabs are in every major browser now. Although they took awhile to get to Internet Explorer, no one has to go without now. I think browser tabs are the most obvious of these tips, but just in case, here’s a refresher.

Those little tabs you may see from time to time across the top of your browser are actually multiple browser windows. Years ago we would have to literally open multiple browser windows and have a mess of them in our task bar or whatever OS you might have been using at the time. All browsers have different ways of using or adding tabs, but one that seems universal is the fast key Ctrl+T on the PC, or Cmd+T on the mac. This will quickly open a new tab. There are also clickable buttons in many browser along the top, but I’ll let you in experiment with those. In some browsers like FireFox you’ll have to add the “New Window” button manually by right clicking the top browser bar and selecting customize. Here you can drag and drop all kinds of elements into the FireFox interface, but using fast keys will always be faster than using buttons.

Why are tabs good? Well if you are like me you usually have anywhere from 5 to 20 of them open at a time. Everything from email to Google, or all the articles you intend on reading. You can also set up most browsers to save your tab session when you close the browser, this way the next time you open your browser all your tabs reappear. You can usually find this setting in the options section of your browser.

2. Tabs part II, the middle click is your friend too

Of course the easiest way to open multiple tabs is to middle click links. One of the main reasons why some web designers should stop breaking our middle click.

Where I find the middle click most useful is when reading a list of articles. You are on a news site, the front page has 5 stories and you know you want to read them all, why not just middle click each one and open all 5. This way you won’t forget to read them and you can go through them one by one. For bandwidth heavy pages, or people with slow Internet connections this will also allow all the pages to completely loaded by the time you get to them.

3. Finding stuff; your search goes beyond Google

So you have searched for the past 5 minutes and you have finally found that nugget with the tips or secrets you so desperately need, but darn, the page is huge, where is that one single paragraph you want. This is where your browsers find comes into play, pressing Ctrl+F or Cmd+F will bring up your browsers find dialogue. Type in the exact word or phrase that Google or your favourite search engine showed on this page and you should be able to instantly jump to that section. Remember that this is not a search engine, so you need to type the exact word or phrase that Google found in it’s preview.

This tip is a real time saver for me, and I’m usually greeted with surprise when I say to someone, “Search the page”.

4. Wrapping it all up with some more shortcuts

When searching on the page the first instance may not be what you were looking for. Ctrl+G or Cmd+G will quickly jump to the next instance of that phrase or word. Ctrl+W or Cmd+W will close the tabbed window you currently have open. Closed a tab by accident? Try Ctrl+Shift+T or Cmd+Shift+T for undo, a real life saver sometimes. This last one doesn’t seem to work in IE, so maybe it’s time to switch to a better browser.

I hope these tips help some of you become a better faster surfer. Happy surfing.

Today TechCrunch blogger Michael Arrington thanked the readers of TechCrunch for helping him hit 1 million RSS subscribers. That’s an awesome number to say the least, congratulations Michael, and I would like to give my thanks for both excellent content and of course, full RSS feeds. 

Like most blogs, we continue to provide all of our content in full in the feed even though it means less visitors to the site and less page views. If someone takes the time to add us to their reader, I consider them to be among our most loyal readers even if they never actually visit our site.

This hits the nail on the head and other sites should take notice. Your RSS readers are your most loyal readers. I’m looking at you Ars Technica. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been reading a feed on my way to work and not finished reading more than the opening paragraph because the feed was truncated. Yes, if the story is very compelling I visit the site, but I am far more likely to read it on one of my many other feeds that may be covering the same story. Why is it a pain for me to visit your site? Well, 3G is fast, but Smartphones are still not as fast as a real web browser, and the pain of leaving my reader, loading up a browser and then reloading my reader and finding my place just isn’t worth the time. I will just move on to the next feed.

Before anyone mentions why sites truncate their feeds, I know it’s all about page impressions and advertising, but Arrington really hit on the fact that these may be your most valuable readers. These are the hardcore readers that will say to their less tech savvy friends, “Hey you should check out TechCrunch, it’s a really cool tech site”. You can also sneak ads into your feeds, I’ve actually clicked a few myself, and you should also rest in knowing that a lot of feed readers will still visit your site. I probably visit my feed sites more than any other sites when I’m at a computer, especially when I want to comment. Often I will bookmark a feed in Google reader and visit the site later when I’m at a desktop to comment on it.

So before you start cutting off your feeds in hopes that more people will visit your site, remember who you are cutting off. These are not your casual readers, and we use RSS for a reason. There’s a lot of competition out there and we loyal readers may find our information elsewhere.

Aw, Snap! is the message. This is just so Google. No cryptic error message, just the reality of the situation.

Update: All is well in Google land, Gmail is back, it seemed to be down for about 30 minutes for me.

A big part of Twitter is sharing cool websites or URLs. Many URLs are very long and thus take up all your characters. Twitter converts these to tiny URLs, but you have to convert them manually if you want room for your own text describing the link you are posting. TinyURL is a website that will convert a big long URL into a really short one. There are several sites that do this, and Twitter users use them all. My question is why does the URL count as part of our character limit? It’s so arbitrary and having to convert every URL I paste is just annoying. I totally get the character limit, but I don’t get the URL being counted as part of it.

How do they fix it?

My suggestion is a Javascript listener that can reset your character count once it see a valid URL in the text box. This could be abused by people starting sentences with http just to get more characters, but if the URLs were converted to tinyURLs like they are now then that would eliminate this possible abuse. Another option would be to have a separate field called share URL or website.

While they are at it they could also do something similar with the reply @ since I don’t really think the persons name you are replying too should count as part of your character limit either. If they have a really long name then you have less characters to work with. Both the URL and the name taking up characters seems really silly to me. I love Twitter and won’t stop using it unless it becomes painfully slow again but these two tweaks, especially the website URL would probably be appreciated by a lot of Twitter users.

Openmoko is open.
Open to life, desire, function, and simple beauty. Never closed, perfect, or complete. An empty vessel, ready to be filled with your ideas.

Openmoko is truly Open Source, even the physical phone is open—anyone can download the actual CAD files and design their own phone. Openmoko has a GNU/Linux OS base. This project almost has a pro hobby feel to it, something you can build, design, and program from the ground up. The current developer phone has all the bells and whistles you would expect from a touch phone.

Size and Weight
4.75 x 2.44 x 0.73 inches
6.5 ounces (185 grams)

Display
Touch Screen
2.8″ VGA (480×640) VGA Screen

Speed
ARM9 @ 400 MHz
2D/3D Graphics Acceleration

GSM
Tri band 850/1800/1900 MHz
Tri band 900/1800/1900 MHz

Power
Removable 1200 mAh battery

Memory
128MB SDRAM
256MB NAND Flash
microSD Slot

Input and Output
Input and Output
2.5 mm audio jack
GPS external connector

Hardware Highlights
Wi-Fi (802.1 1b/g)
AGPS
GPRS (2.5G not EDGE)
Bluetooth 2.0
3axis Motion Sensors (2)

Software Highlights
Openmoko GNU/Linux-based
100% FOSS on CPU
GNU/Linux development tools

(specifications are from OpenMoko website)

You can already get the developers version of the phone, and it costs around $400. You can order it in Canada through Koolu or you can order it from the Openmoko site. Koolu says due to large demand it will take 2 to 3 weeks to ship, so obviously this phone has a market.

I think it’s great to see more phones like this. It should greatly help innovation, along with Googles Android and now even Nokia’s Symbian being opened up. I will definetly keep my eye on this one, there is also a consumer level phone on the way.

See Wired for more information in Openmoko Neo FreeRunner on Sale July 4 and Design Your Own Cellphone With OpenMoko.