First, a quick update: Launchy is simpler and quicker than Executor in my experience. I’m using it happily now over Executor.
If you read more than one blog on even a semi-regular basis, you could save a lot of time by using an RSS (Really Simple Syndication) program. An RSS program allows you to read any number of blogs all from one place. An RSS saves time by making it so you don’t have to go to different websites. You can also scan through posts looking for the interesting ones and you can automatically filter out posts you’ve read before. With an RSS, I read a lot more blog posts in a lot less time. I also am able to skip to the next one quickly if I’m not interested.
Most people agree that Google Reader is the best RSS program. Its really simple to use. You can organize your feeds by tags/categories/folders. There are a good amount of customization features, but I don’t really care about that. I just use it to quickly and efficiently get to the content I really want to read. Using “j” (next post) and “k” (previous post) make going through a set of blog posts a breeze. Sometimes I’ll just scan through the titles (while in “list” mode – this shows only the title of the post and you can click on it to see the post) and pick out the ones that sound interesting and mark all the rest as read. Google Reader also works really well with Evernote…
Evernote is an amazing program that does what it sets out to do extremely well. I can clip text, pictures, video, and perhaps more from within any program (as far as I know) and press a few keys and its stored into Evernote forever. I generally tag each “note” so its easy to find when I really want to, but thats not necessary for a lot of things because the search feature on Evernote is super fast and it even searches through text in a picture (aka optical character recognition).Every piece of information that you want to remember is just a few seconds away. This is very nice and convenient.
To add to the convenience level of Evernote, it synchronizes over the web easily and automatically. Therefore, if you use more than one computer regularly, you can use Evernote on both seamlessly. Perfectly seamlessly. Its really what most programs should aspire to do.
Evernote works well with Google Reader because, highlighting a post is really easy and always works in Google Reader. Sometimes a blog will be setup to where its impossible to highlight an entire post. Evernote will even save pictures and video if you highlight it. I don’t add video because it will take me over my free transfer limit (if you synchronize below a certain amount of info, Evernote is completely free).
Next up: AutoHotKey
