Digital Meanderings
Meanderings of a coder

“When word of a whites-only scholarship at Boston University hit the media last fall–drawing coverage from bloggers and biggies like ABC alike–Daniel Kovach smelled opportunity. His goal: to boost traffic to the website he runs, Scholarships Around the US.” “Turn his year-old site into a $10,000-per-month cash cow”

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As an avid Billy Joel fan, I love the song “We Didn’t Start the Fire.” As a psycho, I know all the words and the historical significance of each lyric. Since insomnia has set in this evening I was tempted to create my own post linking to the historical references made in the song. But, as is almost always the case, the interweb has beat me to it! So instead of writing it myself, I will link to the Wikipedia article - We Didn’t Start the Fire.

Edit: Since I know most people are as lazy as I am, I’d like to mention a link I found at the bottom of the Wikipedia entry. A flash version of “We Didn’t Start the Fire” that shows the historical references.

God bless the US Military - Condom Waterproofing.

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Well it seems that spring has finally arrived here in South Dakota and that means spring cleaning. Since I don’t own a home nor do I rent a garage, spring cleaning has always taken on a digital flavor for me. Here are some of the things I do.

Bookmarks
If you’re like me, you tend to bookmark a lot. Especially those websites that you don’t have time to read immediately but would like to check out later. After a year of saving those websites and all the other sites that I found interesting, informative, funny or just bookmarkable I have collected tons of bookmarks. My solution? Transfer my bookmarks to del.icio.us.

del.icio.us has been around a while but here are some tips to make your life easier:

• Download the new del.icio.us extension for Firefox. This extension syncs your bookmarks with the ones stored on del.icio.us.
• Clean-up your tags. It’s very easy to add multiple, similar tags. This can be very confusing when you’re searching for something. So take some time now and consolidate your tags.
• Get rid of unused bookmarks. In this age of virtually unlimited storage it’s very easy to keep addind and adding. Unfortunately this leads to a ton of extraneous bookmarks and it adds time when you’re searching. Take some time now get rid of these unused bookmarks.

In order to keep your bookmarks more organized in the future, be sure to organize them as you go. Review your tag list before you select one. After you read a bookmarked site for the first time, decide whether to keep it or not. If you keep it, make sure the tags you’ve selected are related to the site. If you choose to delete it, delete it now!

Files
Each year hard drives are getting larger and larger. We have online storage, network storage, CDs, DVDs and more. With all this storage space it is very easy to keep everything we download from applications to documents. Do you really need all of this stuff? Nope it is just taking up space so clean it up now!

To make spring cleaning easier for years to come, organize your files as you download or create them. I recommend downloading your files to the same directory every time, but please don’t use your desktop!

E-Mail
A lot of articles of this type explain how important it is to keep your Inbox clean. If you’re using Outlook or Thunderbird this becomes extremely important. Inbox folders grow very quickly! I recommend switching to GMail. It allows for tagging which allows you to easily organize your emails. Unfortunately Gmail’s tags lead to the same problem as we encounter with del.icio.us. So make sure you go through those tags too!

Do you have any other tips for spring cleaning for the digital age? Post a comment!