How to follow DotNetKicks.com efficiently

February 21, 2008

I’ll show here a little tip how I follow my favorite .NET-community, DotNetKicks.com (DNK). It is one of the best .NET-resources and it gets lot’s of quality content daily so staying up to speed with the site requires some effort.

Luckily, DotNetKicks offers RSS-feeds for almost every list so I fiddled around with Firefox and its nice Live Bookmarks to find an optimal way to follow what’s happening at the DotNetKicks.

The most interesting feeds or pages for me are:

  1. Published front page stories
  2. Upcoming, recently submitted stories
  3. Stories Kicked by me
  4. Stories submitted by me
  5. Kick Spy! that follows the activities in the site in almost real time.

When I put the Live Bookmarks in a folder in Bookmarks Toolbar, I can easily drag the mouse down to see with a glance if there’s anything new in any of the first three sections.

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Works great with the del.icio.us, too

By the way, this works well with many other social bookmarking sites as well.

For example, the Latest deli in the screen capture refers to my feed at del.icio.us. Similarly the Daily Live Bookmark shows my links that I visit regularly. They are links that have “Daily”-tag in del.icio.us which is flexible with rss-feeds.

The advantage is that the links are centralized and I can access the same bookmarks from work and home. When I add new links, they are automatically synchronized wherever I use them. If I’m at public computer, I can still access my bookmarks through the del.icio.us -web site.

It’s really fast to setup the regular feeds as Live Bookmarks after fresh install of Firefox. del.icio.us Complete is my favorite extension for posting links to del.ico.us straight from the Firefox:

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I hope these tips helped you to get some ideas to boost your productivity. :)

kick it on DotNetKicks.com

Leave a Comment » | .NET, DotNetKicks, Firefox, RSS, Tips | Permalink
Posted by jemm

Scott Hanselman’s Ultimate Developer and Power Users Tools -list updated for 2007

August 24, 2007

Scott has published a list of his favorite tools. Be sure to check it out!

On top of the list is mentioned the Notepad2, which is my favorite Notepad -replacement for the reasons he lists. I also like the color coding for most popular syntaxes.

I don’t use so many other tools right now, but my favorite services and extensions that I use daily are:

  • del.icio.us Complete -extension for the Firefox (for easy management of the bookmarks)
  • Firefox’s Live Bookmarks that point to the rss-feeds of some tags (like News)
  • Gmail
  • Google Reader
  • Google (duh)

    • And of course WordPress.com for hosting this blog ;)

    Sorry, Microsoft, Windows Live -services don’t cut it for me, yet. I like maps.live.com, though.

    What are your favorite tools/extensions/services that you depend on daily? Which ones do you install first when building your development environment after fresh install? Comment here or link from your own blog :)

    Leave a Comment » | .NET, Firefox, Google, Software, Tools | Permalink
    Posted by jemm