Friedbeef’s Tech

Keeping in constant contact with your friends online has never been easier.  We’ve now got a growing list of instant messaging, email, and online social networks that help us stay in touch. 

The trouble is, the more points of contact we have, the more time it takes to manage our online presence.

digsby is a free ambitious service which allows you to track everything in one place.  I’ve now got my Facebook, Gmail, and MSN running off digsby and I get updates from all sources without having to visit individual sites.  Think of it as RSS feeds for your online presence.

There are too many features to get into detail on this post, but here are some of my favorites:

• One combined buddy list for all your AIM, MSN, Yahoo, ICQ, Google Talk, and Jabber Accounts.
• Manage multiple conversations with tabbed conversation windows. You can drag tabs out into their own windows for important conversations.
• Gives you a snapshot of your unread messages with just one click
• Perform actions such as "Mark as Read" or "Report Spam" , and send email right from digsby
• Receive alerts of events such as new friend requests, messages, group invites, newsfeed etc. from Facebook
• Complete synchronization between computers and installations.
• You can place a widget on your blog, website, or social network profile so you can chat with visitors right from digsby.
• Manage multiple simultaneous file transfers from one simple transfer manager

and the list of features goes on and on… (as I said - it’s an ambitious project)

On my wish-list is Twitter integration as well as a web based interface as well.  Hope this is in development down the road :)  In any case it’s still a fabulous way to centralize all my online communication!

Note: digsby is still in private beta, so you need an invite code to be able to use it.  Fortunately digsby was kind enough to provide readers of this blog with 500 invites!  Just use the invite code friedbeef and you’ll be able to download digsby and get full access!

Would you use digsby as your main communication tool?  Let us know in the comments!

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If you need to do some research on selecting a new web host, it’s always good to have a look around web hosting web sites to get a feel for who’s good, and who’s not.  Just do a quick search and you’ll stumble upon many, many websites which offer ratings, and more importantly - user reviews.

Another approach to take, would be to find a website which you’d like to model - then just find out what they use for themselves…  Whoishostingthis.com is one quick way to do it… just type in the website you want to check and it will gives you the host details for any particular website.

Note to bloggers who are testing this out with their own site, and find that it doesn’t match:

Most likely it’s one of these two reasons: either the web site you requested changed their hosting provider *very* recently, or the hosting provider for this particular domain is just a reseller from a bigger hosting provider, and their results show the *real* provider instead of the reseller.

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If you liked my previous post on 5 ways to pimp Windows Explorer, you’ll love this gorgeous piece of freeware.  DMEXbar is a plug-in for Windows Explorer which turns it from a clunky system to a real powerhouse. 

Once installed, your Windows explorer will have the ability to:

• Open two explorer windows aligned side by side
• Split and reassemble large files
• Create “Hot Paths”, which are like the “Favorites” in the Internet Explorer, for simple and fast change to these directories
• Fast copying and moving of files between two aligned explorer windows by shortcuts
• Synchronize files and directories between two aligned windows
• Open DOS shell windows or run any other user-specified programs using the current directory or selected files as parameters
• Calculate the total size or used disk space of directories including all subdirectories

…and so, so, so many other features for both power and novice users.

What I really like about DMEXbar is the fact that I don’t have to use an alternative explorer, but I can just use Windows explorer like I’ve always done, and take advantage of all the new functionality when as and when I need to, and yes - it’s free.  Works for Windows 2000/XP, no Vista support yet.

Two thumbs up!

Link: DMEX Bar

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