Spy Journal 3.0 Filtering the web for you

Lena has been working for Jethro for one and a half years now. For the past several months she has been writing technical articles for me about stuff I find on the web. In case you were wondering who the Lena was that submits posts on this site, this is a short explanation.

How we work together is I tag web pages in delicious constantly. There is a rss feed link of the latest items on the right hand side as well as easy access to the major categories. When I want to report a specific page or the details of something we use here, I add a special tag for Lena. She then reviews those items and writes an article for me on here. She does these in bulk and queues them up for me. I can then edit them and release them at my leisure (Read - when I don't have time to write one myself!)

Windows Live Writer is a desktop application that makes it easy to publish content to your blog.The software is intuitive and powerful, but, every now and then, there is something that it can't do or could be done in a better way. Overtime though developers have provided several solutions to these problems. Sarah from Microsoft's Channel 10 has written a great article introducing ten plugins for Windows Live Writer. The ten plugins she thinks are the must haves for bloggers:

1. Digg This Plugin for Live Writer:
The Digg This plugin inserts a "Digg This" button to your Windows Live Writer posts and provides seamless integration with Digg.

David Gainer writes an Excel blog for Microsoft. He often has guest posts written by insiders from Microsoft exposing cool excel secrets.

Two in particular I have noticed recently are these.

Scott Ruble, a lead program manager on the Excel team who focuses on the area of data visualization discusses how to create an intraday time series chart.

Periodically, users need to create a chart where the data occurs within a single day such as by the minute or hour. This is actually fairly easy to do but unfortunately isn’t very obvious. A typical scenario is you own a restaurant that takes phone orders and you want to reduce the wait time for customers placing an order. This is influenced by a number of factors but a big one is the number of people calling at the same time. As such, you would want to staff your phone lines with more people during the busy times. The key here is to determine when the busy times are and by how much.