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My Essential Online Business Apps:

• Gmail – all of my emails (business or personal) head through Gmail at one point or another. Gmail serves as my filing cabinet for all things important, including files of various sizes.
• Google Reader – gotta stay current. Reader is actually my homepage, and is definitely the best online feed aggregator I’ve used to date.
• Google Notebook – throughout the day, I need to jot down quick notes. Whether they’re things I have to remember to do while writing code, things I’ve heard people talking about that I need to follow up on, or just all round average thoughts bouncing around in my head, Notebook is indispensable!
• Google Docs – I prefer writing documentation using Google Docs over any other word processor, or spreadsheet. I really don’t need many features, as I’m not a publisher – I’ve collaborated with others several times using the sharing features of Google Docs, and damn I’m freakin’ impressed!
• Blinksale – hey, I got’s to get paid! Oh, and be able to bring up what I was paid for come tax time …
• JungleDisk – well, not really an online app, but it uses Amazon’s S3 for backup – pretty sweet!
• DotProject – I use my own customized version of DotProject to track projects that I’m working on – DotProject has been around for ever and could definitely use a bit of modernizing, but it’s still damn reliable!

Apps I Used to Use:

• Basecamp – an excellent product – simple is good. I used to use this quite a bit for managing/brainstorming ideas for clients, but have recently been able to switch to Google Notebook for just about everything I used Basecamp for.
• Wiki’s – again, I used to use Wiki’s as personal development tools, be it for the design, implementation or testing of different systems. Between Google Docs and Notebook, this need has dwindled.

Stay tuned, as tomorrow when I’m working on the same bug, I’m sure my mind will wander and I’ll start thinking about what on-line applications I could use and haven’t found yet …

Turns out IE 6 (okay with IE 7 and just about every other browser on the planet) won’t reduce the height of a <div> past the font-size specified for it. Set font-size: 0 for the <div>, and IE 6 will allow you to shrink the element further.

h u g h

Here is what they look like now:

I’m in gmail all day, and–as much as I have to say I hate using the phone–I look for phone numbers all the time everyday. Wouldn’t it be great if:

See, the space is there, just give us the option to show a couple of phone numbers in the fly out.

On that note, here are a couple a good resources to get started: http://www.netregistry.com.au/news/articles/57/1/Why-you-should-get-listed-on-DMOZ/Page1.html and http://www.mr-seo.com/blog/2006/06/getting-listed-in-dmoz-not-as-easy-as.html

And then I get to thinking, wouldn’t it be great if more stores and businesses started to publish their phone numbers in their meta data descriptions, so when people do what I just did they can see that number right up front and centre?

It will only be relevant to certain business. But I’m going to start suggesting it. One thing to be careful of when trying to do this however, is to realize you don’t have full control over what Google will use to build the description. Sometimes Google will defer to DMOZ data from the Open Directory project. You can prevent this from by adding another META data tag to your site’s HEAD. Just add:

<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOODP">

So put it all together and instead of seeing something like this:

You could see this:

Google Webmaster Help center has good article on the whole SERP, description thing and how google build’s your site title and description used on its results page.

When internet conversations reduce to petulant “I’m rigtht-you’re wrong” behaviour… well I just call that good interweb fun