What tools do the HowStuffWorks writers use?

were going to tinker around with some some ideas. Yes, basically the tools we use to get our jobs done here, right, and so we're talking about things that make our lives a little easier when we're trying to research, right, publish articles, even research things for the podcast, Um and uh, I just thought maybe it'd be interesting for you guys to hear kind of a collection of the stuff that that we rely on on a regular basis. That's true. Now

we should probably start with, um, the easy stuff. Okay, sure, Microsoft Office, Yes, we use Microsoft Office extensively, so Word and Excel in particular, not so much with the power point power Point yeah, not really a power point company, Yeah, but word we we I type up all my articles and Word and I send them over to the Pallette who then eviscerates them and makes them better. And Excel. We used to track things like our our article assignments

and things like that. If our meta information is put into an Excel spreadsheet which is converted into common to limited file, which sounds it's just as exciting as it sounds. People. Um. And then that's the funny thing about this. You know, you don't really think about office as being that big a deal, but you know it's taken a lot of refinement over the years. And yeah, you know, I'm I'm a Mac person generally, I was an Immiga person before that, so I kind of I kind of came weight to

the Windows thing. I didn't even start using Windows until pretty much skipped over three, which I'm told I didn't really miss much. Well, yeah, I reluctantly started with Windows three. So I actually came from a perfect background. So Correl, you know, that was my that was my background. So when I switched over to word, I was it was

kicking and screaming. But these days, you know, I've actually gotten very much used to the way word works, and it's it's pretty much impossible to find any place other than I think a few legal firms still used word perfect, but it's still very popular and legal, and but I like Office. For the next part, I tried open Office, which is an alternative from Sun. It's free, um open source stuff, and it's got the entire suite of tools, including some of the ones that Microsoft charges extra for.

Very nice, but you know, sort of lower key if you will. They don't have a lot of the bells and whistles. Um. Same thing with like Google Docs. I've used Google Docs once or twice for some some small projects. But um, you know, for a way to really uh, to be to be really integrated in the office, you pretty much have to work work with a Microsoft Office and of course Outlook as well. Yeah, that's very important tool for us for coordinating our meetings and calendars and

things of that nature. Moving away from that basic sweet what browser do you use or browsers most often anyway? Um? Jonathan likes to pick on me because I champion some browsers he doesn't particularly like. By and large, I use Firefox um are content management system. Uh sort of has a problem with Firefox three, So I'm basically using Firefox too. But if you really want to know all this stuff,

I use UM, believe it or not. I do use Google Chrome on occasion, but I like to try different stuff because not only do I like to talk about it, but I also kind of I'm I'm a sort of a beta junkie. Yeah. So I've got a copy of Opera on my my computer. I've also got Safari for Windows. Um, I have Chrome on there somewhere. I even have Flock, which is another offshoot of my the Mozilla suite of software. I do have a question for you. Do you have Safari on there on purpose? No, I actually do. I

like so far. I was just wondering if you didn't accidentally install it when you were updating iTunes or something, even though there's a giant security hole in it. Yes, I do have a copy of Safari on there, and I think it's sort of It's sort of weird because I think all of these different browsers have stuff that nobody else has. Yeah, there's their little bits and pieces. You know, they're plug ins buying larger Y use Firefox and Firefox three is really speedy. There's no giant memory

league like there is in two. But um, you know, I do like to play around with the other ones just to see what they're like. Opera is a really nifty browser I think has been overlooked for the longest time. Unfortunately, UM and it uh, you know, it's just sort of gone by the wayside. And we also use Internet Explorer on occasion we don't want to know and there are times when I've found the Internet Explorer is is the the best browser to ow to a certain web page,

and occasionally we do use that. I rely on Firefox for most of my work. I love Chrome, but I use Firefox because, like you said, the plug ins are very useful, and we can talk a little bit about some of the plug ins we use, uh for work. But then Chrome just doesn't have that functionality yet, and I stress yet when it does have it. But by Firefox. Now I'm kidding. I really enjoy Firefox as well, but I always have both open. I mean, there's no time you're gonna come by my desk and not see that.

I'm you know, I'm always gonna have a Chrome window open and a Firefox window open with multiple tabs in each. And um, so let's talk about some of the plug ins for Firefox that help us. UM. I use. There's most of the ones I use. Collett's the one who introduced me to them, but Pillette, being the beta junkie he is, tends to adopt, use it, abandon and move on. May I tend to find one and I'm I'm sticking with this one because it does exactly what I needed

to do. So, for instance, I use a Zotero, which is one that you recommended to me, like very much. It's a it's a sort of a bookmarking indexing kind of plug in where you can, um, you can bookmark a site and it even includes site information when you when you bookmarket so it tells you when you access the site, which is important citation information exactly, yes, website c I t e. Thank you. I appreciate the clarification.

U hit me, Yeah, affair. But now the it is very useful because, as as uh one of the writers here, one of the things I have to do when I'm citing a source is I have to say when I looked at that source. Because being the Internet, things don't stay the same all the time. People can go back and change stuff. It's not like a book. When a book comes out, you know you have to wait till a new edition of that book comes out before you

see any changes. But on a website. You could theoretically cite something and then the next day the author says, oh crap, I didn't mean to do that, and go back and change it, and then it doesn't say what it said when you read it. So that never happens with us. No, of course not. So what we do is we we list when we've looked at a site, so that way you can say, well, it didn't say this. Well, you know, if you go into a say like the Internet archive, you can tell that it did say that

once upon a time. So that's one of the ones I use. Do you have any plug ins that you want to talk about, I'm just gonna add to that. Okay, sure that you may say, well, you know, when I was a student, I used end note. What's the big deal about staro? Well, unlike EndNote? So taro is free. It is completely free and it's beautiful. You can save entire copies of a web page or you can just

save a link. You can make folders, you can tag things. Um. It's very very useful if you're trying to say, you know, you can put stuff in a out your podcast and say okay wait podcast um, and then it'll bring up all the different citations you use for that. So it's it's pretty nifty in that regard. Um, let's see plug ins, plug ins, plug ins. How about DGO, d I, I g OE, yep, yep. It's um, it's pretty nifty. It's got a toolbar and it's very like delicious in some ways.

You can save copies of links, you know, a giant list of bookmarks. It's a social bookmarking tool. Um. But the toolbar the reason I use I use both of them. The reason I use dgo UM actually for an earlier podcast we recorded a few minutes ago. It's got a highlighter tool so you can highlight stuff and actually, if you make it public, other people can go on the

web page and see. As long as you have the dgo plug in installed, you can actually see the stuff that other people have highlighted are marked up um, which can or may not be useful depending on what it is they've marked up in why um, But yeah, I mean you've got you've got that of available to you, and you can go back and look at your notes and say, oh I bookmark this then, and hey, look I know highlighted this and made some notes on it. So you can have annotations on a web page, which

is very very useful. Um. I also use ever note. Yeah that's one of the ones that you you embraced and then abandoned. Correct. Yeah, except I'm actually looking at my notes now on every note came back to the fold. Yeah, I had a problem in which some of my notes were deleted. I did a fresh install before I did this, so i'm and and everything's there, so so hopefully it'll stay up. Yeah. I haven't had a problem with it yet.

But yeah, some people did have problems with it, and I think you even heard back from someone using another tool. Will get to in a minute, but um, yeah, every note allows you to to to either bookmark an entire page and inside another inside every note, which you can access offline. You don't have to be online to access every note. Um. Or you can highlight a section of a web page, can just save that, so if there's a particular paragraph you want to to refer to later,

you can do that. It's also it's very useful when you're doing stuff like um the podcast preparation, really because you can you can highlight sections of text and say, all right, well, this is something that you want to talk about this, but you don't want to have the whole website up when you're when you're going through the podcast, because it's too hard to find the information you're looking for. You can also make notes, you can highlight, you can

change text size. UM you can. It's also really really useful for screenshots. I found um and because if you do a screenshot while every note is open, you can you can uh dictate the parameters of your screenshot so you don't have to use it doesn't take a shot of the entire screen. You can you get the little borders that you can um size appropriately and take a shot of just the part of the screen you want, which saves time later on when you're editing photos. That's ah,

that's very useful for uh. Firefox that use a plug in called screen Grab, same sort of thing, does the same thing. It's you know, within the web window. Um. Yeah.

So and then one other Firefox plug in, I can talk about fox Marks, which is the synchronized bookmarks application where if you're if you're you we're using multiple machines, you know that it's difficult if you know, like you might bookmark something on one machine and then you're on another machine and you realize that it's you don't have the bookmark on that one, it's on your other computer.

That can you get really frustrating. So fox Marks is a way where you create a little, you know, kind of a bookmark account and you can synchronize bookmarks across multiple machines and access them from wherever you happen to be at the time. You know, you can also do that with Google Browser Sync. Yes, and Opera also offers a feature like that too. I was just talking about the Firefox plug in. I'm the one who has all the anti very various anti such and such biases like

anti mac bias and all that, right that doesn't actually exist. UM, let's talk about a few of the other tools I'm not. Do you have any other Firefox ones you wanted to talk about? No, I do have a web tool, so if we want to go to web, let's UM. I have something installed on my web host that I use. UM, and I'd be willing to bet the very few of our listeners have ever heard of it. It's called Tasks junior UM. It's made by a company called crowd Favorite

used to be King designed. Alex King came out with this a long time ago, and there's a pro version, uh paid version, and then this version, which is very very downscaled. It doesn't have the same feature set um. But what it is is tasks. Okay, so it's a it's a to do list, which is pretty simple, except the reason I like this particular program over things like remember the Milk, um, which is also pretty cool, um or to do dot um dot com. Think I have

to go look um now that I've said that. So anyway, the thing that makes Tasks Junior better than something like Remember the Milk, which is also pretty cool, is that Tasks Junior allows you to install subtasks. So, for example, I'm editing one of Jonathan's articles and I have to send it to a co editor, and I have to write metaphor it, and I have to upload images for it.

I can put the giant title in there. I could say, you know how the Amazon kindle works, and I could say, okay, make sure you edit the article, make sure you give it to the co editor, make sure you put it in the dropbox for someone else for the for the publisher to pick up and publish. And I can check

off those individual tasks under the heading of the main task. UM. So that's an especially useful thing because stuff like Outlook that's got the it's got a tasks list, but you don't have the ability to do subtasks, so they're all individually, you know, loose in there. UM which is UH, which is okay, and I'm pretty sure of the crowd. Favorite actually offers a hosting service where you can sign up

to do that. But if you get tasks junior um, which is essentially donation where you have to install it on your own server, and it's it's fairly easy to do, but it's really nifty stuff. UM. I use a couple of web based UH applications occasionally. UM. There was a time where I had a little bit of I was going through a transition on computers UM and UH because yours kept dying. I wasn't going to go into that. Yeah. Yeah, I'm the tech guy who kills laptops, so I'm on

my fourth one here and UH. But one of the issues is that when I get a new laptop, I wouldn't necessarily have all the software on it that I would need to do my job. And because most of our software we're working on licenses, it would mean that we have to get a new license for that machine so that we could run it legally. Right, one of those being Photoshop when we that's one of the big programs we used to edit art here and um or

at least one of the ones. I use Photoshop Elements, really Photoshop Elements, Yeah, I should be should be specific, but um, when I didn't have Photoshop Elements, I at least still had access to Photoshop Express, which is a web based photo editing software. Um, and it's really limited. Yeah, you can't do nearly as much on Photoshop Express as you could with Elements or some other uh computer desktop

based uh photo editing software. But I could do enough where I could at least make it less of a task for Polette to to to edit and upload to the articles. UM. Fortunately, I know have Photoshop Elements on this computer, so I don't have to worry about anymore. But that was that was definitely useful. Yep. Um see, I'm trying to think of other desktopy software. Well, I use uh, we can talk about maybe the I am software we use because I I use Digsby. I know

you don't you don't you Digsby do you? Oh? Here's another situation in which I have run through a gamut of stuff. I'm a trillion fan. Yeah. UM. I used digsby for a while. It is a free and open source UH chat client. It offers a lot of functions that others don't like Google Talk and Facebook Chat and my Space chat as well as it can you can link it so that you can check your You can keep a running tab on on your email accounts so Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo, mail,

um it. You can see what the you know when new messages come in. You can actually see the indications for that without having to go to those websites. You can even delete messages from your desktop without going to those websites. That's also very handy and UH. For a while I used Pigeon p I d G I n UM, which, as many of you know, I'm sure is UH. A Pigeon is a sort of a mishmash of two language is together to form a third. Well. This is an open source I AM Multi i AM protocol client UM,

sort of like a d M for the Mac. Pigeon is is available for a Lennox and Windows and it's UH. It's got a lot of the same capabilities, although it's really I am based. It's really not a male thing. I'm a bobber. Well. The other thing about Digsby that the other useful thing for me is that it allows me to check my Twitter accounts. Yes, and Twitter is another one of those tools that we use quite a bit, and it's uh. I use it to follow a lot of other tech journalists so I can keep up with

tech news as it's being broken. Um and occasionally I send out a little Twitter messages as well, so you can always track me down on Twitter and find out, you know, when I'm complaining about someone making popcorn in the office, because those are the kind of really important messages I tend to send out. Yeah yeah, For a while, I was signing up for a lot of those, um yeah, but every seems like every single day would send me another email saying hey, look at this, and I'm like,

what are you doing to me? I'm I already belonged to like fifty social networks. I can't I can't join anymore. Yeah yeah, Well then you got um Twitter and you have ji q or hi q. I've never heard anywhere announced that clerk pounds quippy cork identica. I belong to so many of these, and they're basically, um, yeah you said the right one, okay. Um, so yeah, there are pounds plexo. Yeah yeah, I was gonna say, did you

see a pounds? Um? There are tons and tons of these, And there are services like ping dot fm that allow you to broadcast one tweet to all these different services every time, or you know, you can blog to other services like Blogger and Tumbler and WordPress all the time. I don't use I don't use most of those in my day to day work. No Twitter, but I used I have used Ping to write to post to those

different things. Um. And and friend feed, which is sort of a reverse of those, where you know, you can have all those post to your friend feed and then people can comment to that, which is kind of cool. Um. And those are tools we used to network with other tech people or you know, people who have interesting contents content. Um. Yeah, Readers. I've used Google Reader. I also used NewsGator. I actually meant people who read our website. That's also cool. Yeah,

I use Google Reader as well. UM. Now I meant that we could use those two to readers people. Let's move on to readers, because I use Google Reader as well. As actually gonna mention I Google. I occasionally use that to check a billion RSS feeds at one time. Um, that's very useful. Whenever we want to see what's hot in tech or what's the latest news, you can you can check many for RSS feeds all at the same time.

And uh and yeah, it's very handy. Yeah. I like a NewsGator because it uh, you know a lot of people have a remembrance of when they weren't all that uh friendly, they had some issues with um, but now they're now they're totally above board. Now they offer RSS stuff. UM, you know, you can go online or you can They actually bought two different clients. The one for Windows is called feed Demon, it was very very popular client, and the one for Mac is net Newswire, which was a

very very very popular client among Mac users. Um. And one of the cool things about NewsGator is that if you use one of those desktop clients, you can set it to sync with the web or you know, so you can read I can catch up with tech news at home, and it knows which articles I've read, so I won't go back and go oh man, I have to go through all these again. I've already looked at these. Well, you know, that's one of the advantages is to using

the at instead. And one of the other things I wanted to talk about was job which is inbox spelled backwards. It's for for uh Microsoft Outlook. Yeah. I had this briefly, but I was having some issues. It was causing my outlook to crash and it was probably because it was interfering with some other program that I also happened to have on my computer. It's not I don't mean to say that jobny itself was defective. I think it was just not playing well with so many of the other

plugins that I already have. Well, each of us has a cocktail of software. It's different from everyone else, and sometimes it gets a little poisonous. That's the problem. But what it does is it's really neat. It indexes your email. It can tell you who's the most popular person, tells you when you're most likely to get a response based on the analysis of that email. You can look up a word and it won't pull it up. You can look for different attachments and will help you find them

five hours now. Expect a response from Strickland in five hours. Um, well, I have only one other one left, Google Desktop. I have Google Desktop on. It helps me search my computer for files if I've somehow managed to misplace them, which has happened on occasion, sometimes too great personal distress, but it also is very useful again in Outlook, UM I

can search. I can use Google Desktop to search my my Outlook for specific keywords or phrases, which comes very handy, like, for instance, I'm planning a trip to the Consumer Electronic Showcase later on actually at the beginning of next year, and this way I can quickly search through all the emails from ce S for something specific, Like I was saying, there was that one from Pioneer, and I can search Pioneer ce S and it'll pull it up really quickly, So that's very handy in my case. That was my

last one. All right, Well, my last one is UH as a tool called dropbox, and this is a plug in you can install for Mac or Windows. And this is another one of those home and work things. That's pretty neat because UH unlike services like box dot net, which I like very much, they offer. Both of these services offer free hosting for your junk UM you know, sound files or pictures or documents. UM and it's great because it's online and in the cloud, and you can

you know, store stuff there. Well, you know that's that's cool. And you know, if you upgrade, you can start storing giant stuff. You can even collaborate with other people. But what makes drop box different is that this plug in on your computer actually makes a folder pop up on your desktop or in your documents folder. So not only do you can you store stuff there, but you can actually drag and drop. Um. And so now I can

save documents. I don't like hauling my laptop everywhere I go, so if I have something I just want to take a look at, I can put it in my drop box, go look at it at home, and then you know, save any changes I make there. And it's you know, drag and drop or save and Microsoft are directly to the dropbox rather than having to save it and then upload it through the web interface. Um. But on the other hand, and box dot Net offers a uh an iPhone app which is pretty cool too. You can actually

access stuff there. And Live Mesh is something from Microsoft that I'm starting to play with. Athough there's no Mac client yet, it does offer you the opportunity to two save stuff in a similar way where you've got the plug in and it's integrated with your desktop. So that's a lot of tools. You know, I thought, you know, when we first talked about this, we were both like, I don't know if we have enough to talk about it. Yeah, we had way more than we thought. And then there's

you know, pen and paper what anyway you lost me? Yeah? I know. It's that stone age technology. And we have articles on many, many, many of these tools that we've talked about, such as how Twitter works, we have HOLP, Firefox works. You can find all of those right now at how stuff works dot com and we'll talk to you again. Really sick for more on this and thousands of other topics. Visit how stuff works dot com. Let us know what you think. Send an email to podcast

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