Flock Profiles and Productivity

I need a browser that enhances my productivity, not one that tempts me to stay up to date with every last Tweet

Productivity @ Home: Is Flock a Productivity Killer?

If you want to use Flock for work, but without constant notifications of new Facebook updates/Twitter tweets/etc, you could set up a second Flock user profile. In your second profile you wouldn’t login to Facebook/Twitter, and so you could continue using Flock without some of the distractions. If you have business-related RSS feeds that you follow, you could track them in your “business” Flock user profile without seeing updates for less serious feeds that you follow.

Downsides to Multiple Profiles
You can only have the browser open/working with one profile at a time. If you have a bunch of tabs open for business activities, and feel the need to veg out a bit by checking on tweets, you could not switch to the other profile without closing the browser first. To work around this, you could bookmark your tabs, switch to your “personal” profile, and open the tabs again when you resume.

By following RSS feeds in two versions of Flock, you probably won’t want to track the same feed in both profiles, because when you mark articles as read in one profile, it will still appear as unread/new in the other profile. Using an online RSS reader (Google reader, for instance) would solve this problem in that you can access it and read feeds from both profiles.

More Information

• Setting up multiple profiles in Flock
• Firefox support: Profiles (applicable to both Firefox and Flock)

I personally use both Flock and Firefox at home (and IE for checking work email), and Firefox at work.

As someone who has been known for getting distracted at times (I do realize I’m posting this at 1am EST), how do you manage your work/life separation?

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Tags: work, productivity, Flock

Flock Testing Feedback

Flock Testing Feedback

OMG that’s a lot of feedback for the newest version of Flock.  Feedback can be good, and this is feedback from people who want the product to succeed, which is great.  However, even with the conversation threading that Gmail offers, I can’t hope to add my thoughts to many of the threads.  I just don’t have the time.

I’ll have to use Gmail’s search capabilities to grep through the current emails to see if others have found the issues that I’ve seen.

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"Undo Close Tab” Firefox/Flock Shortcut

Have you used Firefox 2.x or Flock 0.9? Have you noticed the Undo Close Tab functionality? Have you always felt like you were wasting time right-clicking on a tab and selecting the Undo Close Tab option? Have you wondered if there was a better way? Should I write a declarative statement?

No more questions. Only answers:

• Ctrl+T opens new tabs
• Ctrl+Shift+T reopens closed tabs

This is by far my favorite keyboard shortcut recently. My Internet browsing is very tab-oriented, so discovering this shortcut really made my day.

What are your favorite shortcut?

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Tags: firefox, flock, browser

Diagnosing blog publishing problems – Flock Community

1. Go to about:config
2. Set flock.logging.on true
3. log/blog.log will be created inside profile directory.

Diagnosing blog publishing problems – Flock Community

Did this logging capability go away in recent builds?  I don’t see flock.logging.on in about:config for a recent hourly build (build_id: 1178956032.11530).

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Tags: flock

The Flock (2007)

IMDB: The Flock (2007)

Good news! The Flock browser is now a movie as well!

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Tags: flock, browser, movie

Flock browser phoning home?

“To see if the browser is doing something naughty/The Tell Tale console spilled the browser’s sins forever more”

The Tell Tale Browser or Is Flock Spyware? « Douglas’ Digital Domain

While browsing the WordPress Flock tags, I came across the poetic entry quoted above, which questions whether Flock is phoning home.

If they read between the lines, discerning viewers will note the hint of dislike that this particular individual has for Flock. If we for a moment set aside the insults against the browser’s character, there are some legitimate concerns being expressed which should probably be answered.

Without using Ethereal, I would guess that when Flock phones home, it is for either of the following reasons:

1. The “Gather anonymous usage statistics” box was left checked during the browser install.
2. The browser is checking for updates for the browser/extensions/installed search engines.

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Testing Flock Blogging Tool

Lotus Elise 2

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Keyword shortcuts support in Flock

One of my favorite semi-hidden Firefox feature is keyword shortcuts. When I want to search for something, I hit Ctrl+T, ? foo and Firefox will search Google for “foo”. This works because I have the Google search URL “http://www.google.com/search?q=%s” connected with the keyword “?”. This works great for me, and means that I can hide the Search Bar normally visible at the top of the browser. In addition to the Google shortcut, I have them set up for IMDB, Wikipedia, and Technorati.

I had recently been wondering if Flock supported keyword shortcuts. I found Flock Bug 1364: Add Support for Keyword Favorite Shortcuts which requests support for this functionality. From reading through the bug comments, shortcuts created through the “Add a Keyword for this Search…” context menu are recognized. However, these links cannot be edited from the Flock Favorites Manager. The request is to integrate keyword shortcuts into the Favorites Manager.

It looks like this feature request is rated as a high-priority enhancement targetted for the next major Flock Beta, so it looks like it’ll get some attention in the future.

Back in the pre-Firefox 1.0 days, POST forms could not receive keywords. Some talented Mozilla employees and/or volunteers spent some development cycles to add POST keyword support as well as the right-click “Add Keyword” context menu item. This feature just effing works. Effing works great.

I was able to use the POST shortcut support a bit at my last job, as a contract Web Developer at Shareholder.com. General client information was stored on our Intranet. To change the company information you were viewing, you had to enter or select the client name. By using the keyword support in Firefox, I could more easily view different clients. Typing “<keyword> clientcompany” would allow me to switch to a view of clientcompany’s data. Authentication information just plain worked correctly, so I was prompted to enter my username/password when appropriate. Awesome stuff.

Firefox keyword shortcuts save me time and money every day, and I look forward to seeing them work in Flock. What can they do for you?

More information on keyword shortcuts:

• Keyword Repository
• Mozilla keywords – Factbites (a pretty neat site which pulls out multiple relevant text results from pages)

Tags: Flock, Firefox

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