It occurred to me recently that I don’t really know who taught me to use computers and the internet. I can remember being told that ctrl+z undoes whatever you’ve just done and immediately realising that it was going to be the most useful keyboard shortcut I would eve know, and when I was first told what the internet and what a browser was, and I know the resources that I’ve used the most in learning how to write HTML, CSS and PHP (W3Schools.com and php.net, in case you were wondering.) But in terms of things like how to actually browse the web, what browser to use, how to best use a search engine and so on, most of my knowledge has come incrementally, from a range of different sources, and is probably the result of spending too much time sat in front of a computer.

So for a bit of a change and to try to save you from having to slowly pick these things up by spending too much of your time in front of a computer, I thought that rather than posting news and opinions on the world of information technology, I’d try posting something of a bit more obviously practical use; some web-related tips and tools for day to day life that I’ve picked up over the last ten years or so, which should be useful for people other than web-obsessed geeks.

(This is mainly based on what I’ve set up recently, having started working in a new computer at a new job— suddenly finding myself without all the bits and pieces that I consider to be my day-to-day essentials, and found myself feeling surprisingly lost without…)

Choose your web browser

I’ve already talked (actually, twice) about why I’m not fond of Internet Explorer from a developer’s perspective and why I think it’s holding back the development of the web as a whole. But that’s not what this is about.

Wikipedia reports that between 66% and 85% of users appear to be using Internet Explorer. According to the W3Schools website (a learning resource for web designers), just over half of visitors report using Internet Explorer as their web browser.

The numbers vary (because any report can only measure what visitors to a particular site are using) but the point is that there are alternatives out there, and there is a pretty clearly visible pattern in that the more technical a website’s subject matter is, the fewer visitors they report to be using Internet Explorer. This might indicate a simple lack of understanding or awareness that there are alternatives to the Internet Explorer icon that was on your Windows desktop when you got your computer, or of what the advantages and disadvantages of alternative browsers might be.

Putting aside issues like W3C compliance or reliance on ActiveX which most people aren’t going to care about, here are a few web browser features that I can’t live without.

Tabbed Browsing

It’s a long time since I’ve read anything the web in the linear fashion that I would read a newspaper, reading a whole page on the web before clicking on what I want to read next. (In fact, come to think of it, I don’t really read newspapers in a linear fashion, tending to check the front and back pages, flick through any supplements to see if they look worth keeping hold of or throwing away before I actually start reading through any of the stories.)

For a few years of web surfing, I’d instinctively shift+click on a link to something that looked interesting that I wanted to read- this opens up the linked page in a new window, so I could finish whatever I was reading, then come back to whatever it was I wanted to read next. (Particularly useful when looking at something like the front page of a news site, where there is more than one article you might want to read.)

However, when combining surfing the web with other tasks (which, when you might be at work or at home with all sorts of distractions around you), this can leave you with a lot of open windows with no real organisation or ordering. (Especially if you’re using a browser which leaves you having to deal with pop-up and pop-under windows as well…)

Tabbed browsing lets you organise your workspace much more easily, with several pages open in the same window, with tabs at the top to allow you to switch between pages. It’s a feature of most modern browsers- Firefox and Opera (both freely available for the PC), as well as Safari on the Mac and Konqueror on Linux have featured it for some time. It’s also a feature of version 7 of Internet Explorer (if you’re still using version 6, I would seriously consider changing your browser if at all possible. Pretty much anything would be an improvement!)

It’s interesting to note that the Safari browser on the iPhone allows you to have up to 9 windows open at once- effectively providing a tabbed browsing experience. With the Opera browser, you can see a small “preview” of the browser window when you hover the mouse over a tab, which can be very helpful in finding the particular window you are looking for.

RSS Feeds

RSS feeds are an increasingly popular was to keep track of news from several sources without having to check several websites.

You might already be using RSS technology without knowing it if you subscribe to podcasts with something like iTunes; podcasts use RSS feeds to let clients like iTunes know when there is a new podcast available to download. iTunes will check the RSS feed regularly, and when there’s a new podcast on the RSS feed, it will then either give you the option to download it or download it for you automatically.

The basic idea is that you get informed when there’s something new, rather than you going to a website to see if anything’s changed. The fundamental difference between RSS and something like email updates is that you’re in control— no need to unsubscribe or worry about unwanted information being sent to you, because your RSS reader will just regularly look for new items.

Extensions

Because Firefox is built with an open source approach, anyone with the programming know-how can build and publish extensions. From plugins that integrate with other software on your computer (like an iTunes controller that sits in your browser, displaying what song is playing) to plugins that integrate with other websites (like a weather forecast that sits in the corner of your browser), there’s a huge range of ways your browser can be customised to suit your own web surfing habits.

Have a browse of Mozilla’s library of add-ons and see if any of them would be useful to you.

Online Bookmarks

You may well already use the “Bookmarks” or “Favourites” function in your web browser to keep track of websites or pages that you visit regularly, or that you want to come back to read at a later time.

However, as ubiquitous computing becomes more of a reality, you might find yourself wishing that you could see a bookmark that’s saved on your home computer when you’re at work. Or maybe you are logged onto your own computer as someone else, but don’t want to log off just to log in again and get a bookmark.

One way to avoid these sorts of problems is to use an online bookmarking service. The one I’m most familiar with and probably the most well known is del.icio.us (soon to be relaunched at delicious.com), which integrates neatly with several browsers, offering plugins to save and tag bookmarks, and in Firefox a plugin that puts your Delicious bookmarks into a toolbar.

I’ve now got two tags that I use to keep my bookmarks organised; “firefox:toolbar” (which I use to put all the tags I use frequently on my toolbar- that’s things like links to the BBC website, Facebook, Google, my own blog etc.), “firefox:work” (similar, but resources that I’m unlikely to use from home.) If I need to do some work research at home, then I’m just a click away from my web browser shifting into “work mode.”

Digital Photos

Most people now have a digital camera (as many as 89% last year), but whether or not people are taking full advantage of the digital medium is another question.

The most obvious advantage of digital photography is that the cost of film is virtually eliminated; cheap reusable memory cards make it easy to take many more photographs without worrying about the cost of film, the ability to see your pictures immediately on the camera means that you can delete unwanted pictures and re-shoot them immediately, and being able to check them on a computer screen before printing (as well as being able to print them at home) makes processing pictures both easier and much cheaper.

However, the advantages don’t stop there. The costs of developing film meant that unless you kept the negatives safe in a different place from your prints, you were unlikely to have any sort of backup of your photographs. With digital photographs, the cost of keeping a backup somewhere safe in case something should happen to your computer is low and dropping- thousands of high quality digital photographs can be stored on an external hard drive which can be bought for around £50- the cost of buying and developing just a few rolls of film. Yet apparently around a third of us don’t back up the photos we take.

(On the subject of backups, it’s well worth considering what else might be on your computer that you wouldn’t want to lose- a music collection that represents hours of ripping CDs or downloading and labelling tracks, perhaps, or important information in emails, letters or spreadsheets.)

In the same way that you will probably use an application like iTunes, Amarok or Windows Media Player to organise your music collection, it’s well worth using an application to organise your photographs. Picasa is a good option, available to download for free from Google, which lets you organise your photos in folders and albums (where the same picture can appear in more than one album), assign keywords (for example, to denote who appears in photos, where they were taken etc.), and also includes some basic but very useful photo retouching tools.

A very popular online photo website (which I use) is Flickr. Also worth considering are Photobucket and Zoomr. All of them will let you store photos online for free, with premium services available for a small fee.

The added advantage with storing your photos online is that it’s easier to share them; instead of emailling them as attachments (which can cause problems, for example if recepients have limited mailbox size, or have to download them all at once at full size) you can simply share a URL.

I’ve personally found that Flickr also has a great community, with very useful photography tips, some inspiring photos and constructive criticism, and has a very slick, well designed and easy to use site. (I haven’t had as much experience of Photobucket and Zoomr, so I can’t really comment on them, but they are both very popular as well.)

Smart Playlists

40% of UK adults say they own an MP3 player, and 61% of 8-15 year olds say they use one at home.

However, actually organising an MP3 collection can be a bit of a headache. Even if you use something like iTunes or Windows Media Player, if you’ve got a small MP3 player that you can’t fit all your music collection on, you probably spend some time copying songs backwards and forwards when you get bored of hearing the same limited selection. If you’ve got a large MP3 player, you might find that you don’t really listen to most of the music on there.

One way of saving time is to create different playlists- such as Top Five lists for different moods, situations or occasions.

Normal playlists are quite straightforward- they are simply lists of tracks. You can play them in order, or you can shuffle them around. All in all, they are pretty dull (or rather, dumb.) Other than being as long or short as you want them to be, they don’t really do anything you couldn’t do with a tape or recordable CD. They aren’t “Smart”…

Smart playlists (or Auto Playlists, if you use Microsoft’s Media Player) are much more useful- rather than just consisting of a list of songs, they consist of rules. Because music software like iTunes is aware of what’s in your library and what you’re listening to, what you’ve listened to the most, or the least, and has an idea of what songs you like the best, it can be used to tailor your playlists to suit you. So, instead of going through your library, finding every song by the Rolling Stones that you like and putting them in a playlist, you could just set up a smart playlist that has a rule that means something like “include every song by the Rolling Stones.”

It’s quicker to set up, less likely to miss anything out and if you get some new Stones songs and add them to your iTunes library, they will automatically appear in your Rolling Stones smart playlist. (For an encore, by adding a few more rules you could include any solo music by the various members of the band in the playlist.)

That’s all good if you want your playlists organised by artist (or by genre, album, composer etc.), but what if you want your playlists set up by a more general, personalised category? You could make a playlist for general listening. Suppose you only want to listen to music that’s fresh to you- either that you’ve not heard for a while, or only new music you’ve recently bought? Not a problem- just set up your playlist with the appropriate rules- one rule to include anything you’ve not listened to for more than a few weeks, and another to include anything added to your music library in the last month.

To refine it further, if you have used the “rating” feature on your tracks (where you can give each track a mark out of five stars- which probably seems fairly pointless if you’ve not discovered smart playlists), you could set up a playlist that includes every track with a 3 star or more rating, to only play your favourite tracks. If you then select a track in your library without a rating and give it a 5 star rating, it will automatically join the smart playlist.

Rules can be combined too- you could set up a smart playlist that will include music from your 3 stars or higher playlist, and remove anything that’s you’ve listened to in the last week to create a rotation of your favourite songs. If you have limited space on your iPod, you could create a limited playlist, only including, say, the 200 tracks you have last heard longest ago- so each time you plug your iPod in to synchronise it, it will automatically take off the tracks you’ve heard recently and replace them with ones that you haven’t.

I personally have a set of Smart playlists I use to synchronise my iPod which has evolved into quite a complicated collection. It doesn’t play anything I’ve listened to in the past week (unless I’ve only bought it in the last month), doesn’t play anything in a special playlist containing a selection of my wife’s music which I don’t particularly like, doesn’t play any of the novelty records in my collection, or comedy or spoken word, or any of my live bootleg recordings (many of which are of dubious audio quality), or anything from another playlist which contains a selection of tracks which I only want to listen to as a part of the whole album (mostly instrumentals or interludes.) There’s even a censored version that sits alongside it which excludes any tracks which I’ve marked as containing songs which I don’t really want to come on when my iPod is plugged into my speakers somewhere. (My mum doesn’t like it when my dad listens to hip hop…)

One of the interesting twists with arranging my music this way is that I’ve realised that 4Gb is more than enough storage space for me. Sure, I occasionally want to listen to a particular track that I don’t happen to have with me, but I do have a selection of my favourite songs and albums that are always on there. Perhaps if I were more interested in carrying lots of video around with me then I’d think differently about storage space, but right now Flash memory seems to be the way forwards to me.

I hope at least some of these tips will be useful to you- feel free to add any other useful tricks or essential tools that you can’t live without on your computer in the comments section.