One topic that came up at yesterday’s Hoyden grogblogmeet was that for lots of people the Internet has become so confusing that they get flummoxed trying to find sites that they’re most interested in, and also that there’s so much around that they find it hard to keep track of things they’ve found before, or to organise their online life generally.

So I thought that here was a chance for Hoydenistas to share their favourite first-stop sites and online communities, and tips for managing bookmarks and snippets that you want to save from the internet, and tools that make managing sharing digital information easier with other people. In Net jargon, these sorts of things have been called “lifehacks” for a while now, meaning that they are tech-fixes that make life simpler.

For instance, in comedy there’s a lot of images sent around (headshots/posters), and heaps of people have no idea how to resize them to a slick postcard size, and they end up sending huge files on, hogging bandwidth and sometimes getting bounced because their emails take too long to download. One very simple solution? Download Picasa from Google – it has heaps of useful image indexing and editing features, but it also has a feature where you can send one image or a folder of images to someone in email, and Picasa will automatically resize the images to postcard size (or whatever size you configure as the maximum size) in the email. You have to have a GMail account for this to work, but you can always just have a GMail account for resizing pictures – send them to your primary email account and then you can forward them to whoever you need to while using a professional-looking email address.

There’s also a lot of browser extensions, especially for Firefox, that allow lots of useful shortcuts for getting stuff done online.

So, two areas:

1. What are your first stop websites/communities?
2. What lifehacks do you already use and love? What would you like to be able to find a lifehack for?

Let’s brainstorm.

Categories: technology