I tend to be a creature of habit. For example, I LOVE the Coby hamburger at Food 101 in The Virginia Highlands (1397 North Highland Ave, Atlanta, GA 30306). Whenever I eat there, I get the hamburger. They have awesome crab cakes and just about everything is fantastic but I always get the burger.
I do the same thing with other aspects of my life. Every now and then, however, I discover something that makes me regretful that I hadn’t tried it earlier (more on that later). I use Windows LiveWriter to blog. Its awesome, really. However, I have to fire it up. If my VMWare Vista isn’t running, I have to launch that. If it was suspended, that takes a minute.
I’m writing this post using ScribeFire. ScribeFire is a FireFox extension that is tightly integrated into your active browser window. You get alot of context at your fingertips that will save time when creating links to resources outside your blob (or even in your blog). It appears to have social bookmarks built in as well. I also added the del.icio.us bookmark add-in from Yahoo because it looks pretty feature-rich. Navigating to Del.icio.us turns out to be the barricade between me and my social network savvy self. With all the machine refreshes I’ve had lately, and the sheer number of computers I use every day, I am sharply beginning to realize the value of centralized, shared bookmarks.
While I still expect to use Windows LiveWriter to blog in general, providing quick access and integration with browsing is a crucial efficiency enhacement that I wish Safari had. I’ve been a Safari fan for a while now but I may start using FireFox on my mac now that FireBug is compatible with FF 3.0.
I couldn’t program as efficiently as I do without FireBug. Period. I expect my blogging will increase due to ScribeFire. While I sometimes get too busy to see what tools are emerging, failing to do so costs me and everyone around me time and money. Being diligent in purposefully discovering new options for old behaviors is a very valuable exercise. For example, I found that adding Food 101 Truffled Honey Mustard to their Coby burger is terminally delicious.

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 12th, 2008 at 7:13 am and is filed under Blogging, Programming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.