You all know that I’m a really big fan of Twitter. To me, Twitter has become a way of life. Online Twittering, mobile Twittering, that’s what I do a lot.

But then, there was Plurk! Plurk seems to be the better version of Twitter. Where Twitter fails on me, keeping track in discussions, Plurk does everything I want.

Please keep track on me at Plurk via: coenjacobs and find out all the good stuff that Plurk has to offer;

• Discussions that you should use much more often!
• Karma to unlock new features etc.
• Nearly realtime updates from your friends

Yes, there are downsides. The very first is to be: not another social network. That at least was the way I thought about Plurk in the past. Lots of people seem to think like this, because my followers on Twitter don’t seem to be very likely to switch.

But this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t start Plurking. Plurk has so much advantages, that it’s good to switch. It’s very good.

With numerous extensions, add-ons and themes, you can customize Firefox in just the way you want it. Firefox has helped me in various numbers of problems I faced while trying to start working online for 100%. With it’s add-ons (which I use a lot) it suits perfect to me.

One of my favorite addons is the combination of PermaTabs and FaviconizeTab. You can see in what it results in the image above. PermaTabs locks the tabs you want to lock and (re-)opens them once you restart Firefox. FaviconizeTab minimizes the tabs you want to, which leaves you with a (convenient) small tab. I use this combination a lot with services like Gmail, Google Reader and some other online products. Try it out and you don’t want to go without it anymore!

CookiePie
Another kick ass add-on that really helped me out in numerous ways. Have you been surfing one and the same site in different browsers, just to log in at different accounts? These days are over with CookiePie! You can now lock cookies to a tab with this add-on!

Just enable CookiePie for two tabs (with the same site opened up) and log in at one tab. You will notice that you won’t be logged in at the other tab! Now you can log in using another account, at the other tab. Happy surfing with CookiePie!

Little disclaimer: unfortunately CookiePie does not work together with PermaTabs and FaviconizeTab. You can’t enable CookiePie on a PermaTab. Just enable it on a non-PermaTab tab.

Web Developer
Are you a web developer? If so, Web Developer is the plug-in you have been waiting for! It has everything, and even a little more, what you need. From highlighting div’s and tables to disabling CSS and much more. It’s all there!

Another handy function that I use a lot, is the resize function. It allows you to resize your browser to a number of pixels that you want. I check my web development projects in different screen resolutions using this plugin for instance.

Firebug
Together with Web Developer, this is the web development add-on I can’t live without! Firebug allows me to ‘walk’ straight trough my (or someone else’s) code and change it on-the fly! If you want to check how something would look like, without changing your code (HTML & CSS).

Web development has never been easier than with this add-on. It just saves me a hell lot of time while developing and I really, really want to miss Firebug anymore!

Get creative with add-ons!
Once you start, you can’t stop. What are your favorite add-ons, that you can’t work without? Let me know, I’m always interested in new, work improving add-ons to use!

But the good part is, I don’t need to go without Twitter! I can Twitter on my mobile phone, I can Twitter from the web, even from the toilet (if you’re willing to know)! So why are people calling it crap, a waste of time and what more? Because they don’t get what Twitter is all about.

My tweet announcing this article on Twitter

The key word for Twitter is networking. In the past three days, I managed to get in contact with three developers that are in need of my services. Not that I wouldn’t have come across them if I wasn’t using Twitter, but travelling halfway through the country is just a little more effort than writing a single tweet to a person you might (want to) know.

The largest benefits of Twitter
As I’ve mentioned above, Twitter is by far my most favorite tool to get in touch with people I don’t know yet, or stay in touch with my friends and contacts around the globe.

Twitter scores big time on:

1. Simplicity - I never came across a networking site, with such a clean interface.
2. Multiple purposes - You can use Twitter for anything you like. From spamming to networking.
3. Not just the web - You can send Tweets from all sorts of devices and applications.
4. Expandable - The API allows you to do nearly anything with Twitter you like.
5. It’s free - Like everything good on the internet, Twitter is still a free service.

For bloggers, it’s very useful too. can you remember Darren Rowse linking back to me, due to Twitter? To me as a relatively ’small’ blogger, that one meant so much to me. Thanks to Twitter!

Just be careful not to be ’spammy’, but a link from to time to time won’t hurt anyone.

Some downsides
Yes, even a great tool like Twitter has some downsides. For some people, the downsides of Twitter are too big to even start using it. That’s a shame. Okay, I admit, Twitter has some major problems regarding uptime they should fix. And I would really, really, love to have the IM function back online.

But I’m sure that Twitter will take care of this. At least, I hope they do. We’ve found another downside of Twitter. I can’t handle without, it’s too addictive. Perhaps some downtime is okay!

Conclusion
For the people that don’t even want to try Twitter, this post should give you some arguments why you should. Even if you spend maximum 5 minutes each day on Twitter, you will notice some improvements in your network (and before you know, you’re addicted! ).

For the people that don’t want to try Twitter, because of the downtime; please send me an email telling that. I’ll drop you a line once Twitter is to be called ’stable’ again. In return for that, you will give Twitter a try in return!

And for the people that already Twitter along, see you @ Twitter!

These 3 weeks really got me back in blogging-business and made clear to me that blogging is the factor that really adds some value to my life. Blogging in 2008 is beyond writing nice articles, hitting the big bucks with AdSense and getting popular on social media. To me, blogging has become a way of life, meeting new people and in between, writing nice articles!

But before we’re going trough the special posts of this month, I’d like to thank everyone that has supported me in the past weeks. People that cheer me up when I’m a little down, people that stayed trusting in me while my blog wasn’t updated for a while. Thanks all, I greatly appreciate it!

The beginning
I started CoenJacobs² with a little heads up on what I’m doing lately. This was the post that pulled lots of peoples attention and allowed me to promote my new RSS feed to nearly all of my readers.

After that I published the final chapter in the switching. This explained what I was up to with this new blog and pulled all my readers from WordPress.com, back to my own blog. From here, I was ready to conquer the blogosphere (again)!

Hitting the Digg frontpage (three times in a row!)
One of my goals for this new blog was to hit the frontpage of Digg. I didn’t set any goals for conversion of visitors that would come via Digg, so I wasn’t really prepared when my post about the integrity of search engines hit the Digg frontpage.

Two days later, my post about improving the Gmail experience, was a great succes on Digg. At this moment, it has over 1200 Digg and obviously it hit the Digg frontpage. But then, I just had to do it. I wrote the follow-up on that post, titled: Tricks to manage multiple accounts in Gmail. Just like the original, this was a great success on Digg and it toke care of over 20.000 unique visitors!

Linklove from a Problogger
Everyone in the blogosphere knows Darren Rowse. And this very Darren Rowse linked in one of his posts to my humble blog. He actually completed my blogging goals for this year, for which I’d like to thank him again! This is one of the things that keeps me going as a blogger, this is what I’m doing it for. Being respected as a blogger is the best reward you can give me.

This little effort for Darren Rowse, means so much to me. I still don’t have words for it to explain.

On to Juli!
These (to me) pretty impressive results, make sure that I’m on the way to the next month of blogging. We’ll see what the new month will bring me. I haven’t set any new blogging goals though…

Any suggestions for the next month of blogging, new categories, new topics to cover, are always welcome! Just write a comment, or drop me a mail in my mailbox.

For me, there was a commercial from Fortis, that got me thinking about setting goals. Life is a curve, just like your blog is. It has ups and it has downs.

Just as the life this commercial explains, a blog is also full with ups and downs. But you as a blogger, are not limited to following the curve, you can set your own paths. And that is just as important as setting realistic goals for your blog. The decisions you make, determine the rest of your blog.

Once you understand how your curves are going, you can set the way you want them to go. Take a moment to sit back and think about what you’re actually up to and what you want to become with your blog. The commercial defines this point with three keys;

1. Stop
2. Think
3. Evaluate

This goes exactly the same for a blog! Plan a moment for yourself to stop what you’re doing, think what you want to do and evaluate afterwards. These steps will be explained later.

1. Stop
Stop sounds like stopping to blog, but it’s the opposite that’s true. Taking a moment to stop what you’re doing, the perfect way to clear your mind and preparing your mind for the next step.

2. Think
Obviously, the most important step. Thinking is what keeps your mind alive, but you have to keep in mind what you’re thinking about. In this step, we’re going to take a look at what we’re doing with our blog and what we want to be doing with our blog.

This goes together with evaluating the previous steps. Did we set previous goals for our blog and did we complete the goals? For me it was obvious. I got straight trough most of all my goals in a single week, but for most people it will be a little harder to fulfill their dreams.

While you are thinking about your new goals, always keep in mind that you should set realistic goals. It’s no use to set goals that you could only dream about. If you set goals that you can never achieve, you can better spend your time more useful by improving your blog in another way.

Examples of goals that seem to be realistic to most people;

1. Raise the number of returning visitors with <(number)>%.
2. Write guest posts on <(number)> of related blogs.
3. Raise the number of RSS subscribers with <(number)> of subscribers.

3. Evaluate
If your goals were realistic, this would be an easy one. But nonetheless, this is an important step. If you can evaluate really good, your skills to set realistic goals will improve.

But, back to evaluating again. In step 2, we’ve made a list with our goals. It’s important that these goals are realistic, otherwhise it’s no use to evaluate. Enough said, on to evaluating;

1. Did you achieve the goal you have set?
2. If not: what were the factors that made you fail?
3. If true: wasn’t the goal to easy to achieve?

Once you’ve answered these questions, it will be easy to point the facts that you need to improve on. This will make it easier to set new goals, for the next period!

Conclusion
What’s important for you as a blogger, besides writing great articles that attract new readers, links and subscribers? Setting goals is, in my opinion, the best way to improve your blog is to set quality, realistic goals and evaluate the results in a good way.

I’d love to keep in touch with other bloggers about improving their blog. Let me know what your goals are and how you evaluate them!

Once my latest post about improving your Gmail experience hit the Digg frontpage, lots and lots of comments were submitted to that post. One of them was from mmilian, writing the following in the comment;

Adding some tips on managing multiple accounts would be really helpful!

That exactly is what I’m going to describe, as there where more and more people asking for some tips and tricks to do this properly. Gmail has all the tools you might need for doing this. Although there are a few remarks of which I really regret that they are still not available as features of Gmail, I’ll get back on that later in this post.

But Gmail is a perfect tool to manage multiple accounts, from different domains, even when they run on different servers. It’s also possible to fetch all your mail from Live, Yahoo or another provider, straight in your Gmail inbox. And yes, we can put all stuff we’ve learned in my previous article in practice on all of our mail! Isn’t that convenient?

Receiving email from different accounts
We have several options to fetch email from different email addresses in our Gmail inbox (Settings > Accounts). My favorite way to do this, is by configuring it in the configuration panel of my host. This is able to forward all mail that is send to a @coenjacobs.net-address, to my Gmail address.

In some cases, your current host could provide additional settings to forward all your email from that existing account to your (new) Gmail account. But that differs from one company to another.

But you can also choose to fetch the email via POP into your Gmail address. Gmail gives you the options to add a username and a password for each address you would like to fetch the emails from.

Image: Adding multiple accounts to Gmail, to receive email from in Gmail

Gmail fetches the email from the POP accounts you add from time to time in your Gmail inbox. But there is some delay in this process, that’s why I choose to do this in another way.

Once you receive email from multiple accounts it might be convenient to be able to quickly see from which account the email is from. That’s where the filters and labels are coming in hand again!

Using filters and labels with different accounts
Filters and labels prove that they are the great tools that I claim them to be, when we use them to make a difference between multiple accounts in Gmail. In Gmail it is possible to automatically add a filter to all posts that are sent to email-addresses from a specific account or domain name.

I’m doing it this way, to make a difference between my email from @coenjacobs.net-addresses and other email. See the image below to see how I’ve configured this (Settings > Filters).

Image: Filter all email send to @coenjacobs.net-addresses

This way it filters all mail send to a @coenjacobs.net-address, and in the next step we add the specific label to all email that is filtered with this filter.

Image: Add the label to all email filtered

And when we add a nice color to this label, all email will be catchy in your inbox and you will know instantly that the mail is being send to a specific account. Off course, you can apply the same trick to all accounts, but you should be aware of using too much labels as it can get pretty crowded!

Sending email with different accounts
Now we have our email in Gmail, but wouldn’t it be nice if we could actually send email from those accounts? People who send mail to my @coenjacobs.net-addresses will get a reply from my Gmail address, but you can choose to send replies on those email with your own domain!

Image: Adding multiple accounts to Gmail, to send email with in Gmail

As you can see in the image above, we can add a new email address to send email with (Settings > Accounts). And when you select another email to email from, you can choose to reply with that email address, or always reply with your default address. That’s up to you to choose!

Once you’ve added one (or more) accounts to send email with, you can now select the account you want to send an email with, from the pull-down-box in the screen when you write a new email. Standard email-address from which you will sent your email, will be the default address.

Just a few downsides to complete the post
As I mentioned in the first lines of this post, there are a few (more) downsides to managing multiple accounts from within your Gmail inbox. These downsides are not that negative to give up on using Gmail with multiple accounts, but some of them can be quite annoying.

• • First of, when you have added more than one account to send email with, you always have to be careful from which email address your email will be send. Standard (when we write a new email) it is set to your default address. In some cases you might quickly overlook this setting and send an email with the wrong account. Could be annoying, to me it is at least.
• • Second, you can’t select different signatures for different email addresses. This forced me to create an additional account for my company-email, besides my personal/blogging email. Just a little feature I would like to be added in the near future is to select different signatures for each and every email-address in my Gmail account.
• • Third, when you send an email from another account besides your default account, your mail will be sent via the default account. Your secondary email-address will be added as the reply to: address. This could be a downside, but for many people it’s not a problem ( thanks for this tip in the comments Luis! # ).

Conclusion
Gmail is a quality tool, also for managing multiple accounts, but it has some slight downsides. If you can live with the downsides, Gmail is the perfect tool for all your email needs.

If you know any more tricks, downsides or just remarks about (managing multiple accounts in) Gmail, please let me know. I’m always looking for more tips and tricks! Other comments are welcome too, as usual with my extended posts as this one.

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But, another goal has been completed today. It’s the one goal that I never expected to be completed this soon. Darren Rowse, yes the one from Problogger.net, linked on his blog to a post of mine. Actually, my posting is the subject of his new post on “How To Promote Other People’s Content and Drive Traffic to Your Own Blog“. Can you imagine what this means to me?

Darren Rowse was, and still is, one of my favorite bloggers. He is my biggest example in the world of blogging. Not only his excellent style of writing, but also his behavior is what I like about him. This ‘little’ effort for Darren is such a great motivation for a small, (re)starting blogger as I am.

What’s next?
But Darren also put me at a hard decision. What should I aim for next, now he personally completed one of my biggest goals. Off course, there are so many great blogs that I’d love to be linked from, but Problogger.net always is a special place for me. That’s why being linked from Problogger.net was a goal to me and a prove to me that I’m on the right path with my content.

Still, I should set up some new goals for me as a blogger. Digg.com and Problogger.net have furfilled some of my biggest whishes, so it’s time to think over my goals.

Setting goals is great for bloggers
This post was meant for a little heads up and some sort of thank-you-post for Darren, but it leads to a great tip for other bloggers. If you want to take your (new) blog to the next level, you have to set some realistic goals for it. Goals determine what you want to achieve with your blog.

Off course, goals for blogs are very different for all sorts of blogs, but I’m sure you can think about some goals for your own blog. Goals can be about nearly anything; getting on the frontpage of Digg, having more than 250 subscribers to my RSS-feed and so on (and on, and on…).

The most important thing you should be aware of, is that your goals are realistic. It’s no use to set a goal for yourself, which wants you to get 1000 subscribers in one week (or your name must be Skellie and you’re just starting with Anywired ).

New goals for me
As I mentioned before, I will try about new goals for myself as I didn’t expected these goals to be completed as soon. Any tips are welcome as anyone can learn from each other.

Posting your own goals can be a great way for learning about your own blog and other peoples blog!

Yesterday I decided that it was time to restructure my email. A completely stuffed inbox and reading Darren’s article about 10.000 to 0 emails in 24 hours convinced me, that it was time for some changes. If you have read Darren’s article, you will notice similarities since I used his tips, but I’ve made some personal tweaks for some reasons, I’ll explain later on.

This article is my personal review of Darren’s article, but it isn’t my intention to copy it. Darren has the habbit to keep his inbox clean and tidy, but my experience is that you will hold this up for just a few days or at most two to three weeks. After that, your inbox will grow and grow, untill it’s no use to archive email any longer, since the inbox almost exceeds the archives.

Back to Gmail
Just like Darren, I’ve switched (back) to Gmail. After the problems Outlook gave me in the past, I was looking for a solution with more flexibility. Gmail has everything I need for my online business, but Outlook was the client to have for connecting with an Exchange server. Since I’m no longer using the Exchange account anymore, Gmail is the way to go!

Gmail now fetches all the email of my email addresses and puts it in one, easy to handle, inbox. It’s largest advantage over Outlook is that all my email is available from anywhere in the world.

Filters and labels
Besides it’s flexibility and being available via the web, the filters and labels are the greatest features in Gmail. The greatest thing about it, is that they work together like a charm.

I receive dozens of emails each day, about new comments on blogs that I follow, or one of my own blogs. With a filter and a single label, Gmail puts those in one page to review them later. Now my Gmail account contains over 30 filters and about 10 labels, all to result in the ultimate goal; a clean inbox with as less effort as possible. That’s my ultimate goal and the purpose of what I’m doing.

Besides email that I expect, there is ‘fresh’ email from everyone who is trying to contact me. Total strangers, or people that I haven’t mailed with before, will pop in into my Gmail account blank.

But colleagues are a different story. For groups of people that I regularly work with, you probably guessed it already, I have some filters and a label. The colours get my attention, just like they should.

The labels and filters are the system that you can’t go without when you receive over 100 emails each day. 100 emails a day can be quite a frustration, imagine what will happen to you when you reach 1.000 mails a day like Darren does!

Archiving after labelling
Besides labelling there is another feature that I’m using often in my filters. Some mail is fun to receive, but not always important enough to pop in into your inbox. A good filter labels these emails and instantly sends them to the archive. It won’t pop in your inbox, but it’s easy to find it again.

I’m using this trick for example for; emails about new shouts on Digg.com, new friend requests on social networks and so on. I read these emails, but they aren’t important enough to interupt my work by popping in, into my inbox.

Important mail goes first
As I mentioned before, I have a label for different people. Email from people that are important to me, pop into my inbox with a label that gets my attention, or even get a star. A star is like a ‘flag’ in Outlook and some other email clients, it grabs your attention at first sight.

Stars are wonderful for;

• - Creating list of email that you need to look into again, or just still need to reply on.
• - Finding back important email, even when you’ve archived it.
• - Keeping track on conversations, that require just that extra bit of attention.

And probably even more purposes suite the stars right. Email from my girlfriend just pops in as a starred email. Anything for keeping her a happy girl, right?

Prevent unwanted mail from popping in
Gmail deals with most of the spam, but there is another threat to be found in newsletters. After I configured my filters and labels, it became obvious that newsletters are almost as frustrating as spam is. To tackle this problem, you need to start erasing it from the roots.

Newsletters that you hardly read are a waste of your time. As most newsletters provide a link to unsubscribe, that’s where you have to start your search.

But not only newsletters can be a real pain in the ass. What to think about your social networks that keep on sending you emails about new friend requests. When you visit Digg.com two to three times a day, these emails become a waste of your time and are ready to be disabled.

Gmail labs go beyond the normal features
With Gmail as a solid email-’client’, you can work the way you want to. The labs function Google recently added to Gmail, finishes Gmail totally. Gmail Labs adds little pieces of functionality that aren’t ready to be released in public yet, but can be used to test them properly.

Most of these functions work great, so I didn’t hessitate to start using them. Take a look around, Gmail Labs give you little things that I was really missing in Gmail (standardly).

Your own (creative) way of emailing
These tricks can be used by yourself, but you’re own creative way of managing your email is always the best. Perhaps you find it annoying that Gmail does not allow you to create separate folders to store your email, or anything else. But once you’re really looking for a nice way to clean your inbox, filters and labels really are the way to go!

Let me know in the comment what you think is working great in Gmail. I’m curious about new ways of cleaning inboxes, using stars, filters and labels!

Bloggers like Darren Rowse from Problogger, receive hundreds of comments on a daily basis I guess, as he runs multiple blogs. How on earth, would he be able to manage all those comments?

Darren proves the importance of comments on blogs, in the following video;

Well, first of all, Darren is a professional blogger. It’s his job, so he should have plenty of time for his comments. But he also needs to write his posts, for some blogs and he tends to have a social life too! Darren not only likes to receive comments, he also proves the fact that comments (you write on other blogs) are good for your blog in this video.

If someone spends time to write a comment on your blog, he or she would like a nice reply (that could lead to a great discussion). Once you get over 100 comments a day, how do you manage all this? It sounds like a mission impossible to me though…

Key tasks to think about once you get comments more than you can handle;

• - Moderate all comments before publishing, or just leave the anti-spam to filter?
• - Hire/ask another blogger to help you moderating/replying the comments?
• - Reply on all comments, or filter and reply to the more interesting ones?

These tips should work for lots of bloggers, but I’m still wondering how Darren is doing all this…

In the past, I’ve written numerous posts about Digg, the front page of the largest social news site and what it’s all about. Until then, I never had such a success at Digg before. So now I can write a post about my experiences and answer the question; is it worth reaching the front page of Digg?

For the amount of visitors, yes it is worth the shot. Today, I’ve reached the 2.000 unique visitors, due to the Digg front page. Too bad 90% of these new visitors, only check the post they clicked on and then close their browser. But most of the people that write a post like this one, say that this is a habit of the people that come across a site via Digg.

For the amount of comments, yes it is worth the shot. I’ve had 23 new comments, from people that haven’t commented before on my blog. Just over 10 comments have subscribed by email for receiving new comments on that thread. They will receive a email once a new comment has been posted, so they might just pop in again (and again, and again… ).

This first shot at the Digg frontpage for this blog, also added 17 new RSS subscribers to my RSS feed. People like them might want to read more what I’m posting about. 17 new subscribers don’t seem to be that much, but for a small (re)starting blog like mine, every new subscriber counts.

If we count this all up, I’d say that it’s worth the shot!