Thing 13 (over half-way done!) of 23 Things on a Stick was about online productivity tools, such as customized home pages, list makers, calendars, organizers, and pdf converters. I cover a lot of ground when I’m online as it is, so I’m not sure how much more productive I want to be. My head might explode.
In any case, I examined a couple of the tools presented under this Thing, including PageFlakes and iGoogle. Both of these services allow you to create a customized start page. I looked at the intro page for PageFlakes first and decided I didn’t want to sign up for yet another account, so I moved on over to iGoogle. Because I already have a couple of personal Google Gmail accounts, all I had to do was enter my email and password for one of my accounts on the iGoogle page and I could immediately customize a home page with news, weather, time, YouTube videos, movies, politics, music, the arts, etc., etc.
I must say, for something I was leery about signing up for, I’m enjoying my iGoogle page. The links to current stories are useful and they’re from reliable news sources. I’m finding that I prefer iGoogle to checking out Reddit every day, and the beauty is that you can set it as your home page and it’ll be at your fingertips as soon as you connect to the internet. I have to assume that PageFlakes and MyYahoo! do the same.
As for the online list makers, calendars, and organizers, I prefer the old-fashioned paper versions. There’s something so satisfying about being able to scratch something off my to-do list as I finish it.
Of the pdf converters, I’ve had experience with CutePDF. It’s easy to use and very helpful when you want to post something on the web in a particular format that you don’t want people to change. The best thing is that CutePDF is a free program, which can be downloaded from the internet.