Spy Journal 3.0 Filtering the web for you

I use a tag in my delicious account to identify sites that I want to share. I forgot. Here is a bunch of websites from back in January and February.

Blog and web design advice and tools from Virtual Hosting

• No More Comment Spam! 46+ Free Tools and Resources to Stop Blog Spammers
• Scientific Web Design: 23 Actionable Lessons from Eye-Tracking Studies

Skelliwag’s blogging advice

This mind map from Robin Good has to be the best this week  listing free or minimal cost online collaboration tools. Feel free to add missing tools (or contact Robin directly).

This week I have a few selected items from Amit over at Digital Inspiration.

• How to Make a Twitter Background Image with PowerPoint or Keynote
• How to Carry Your Google Reader Offline with Scoop, Supports Synchronization
• Scandoo allows you to check your website for potential misuse in comments etc by spammers. Simply type in your domain name using the site: identifier – e.g. site:spyjournal.biz.

Mostly Lisa has a photography contest – vote for your favourite photo on this page

Dana Coffey has a very good netiquette article – I fully agree with the Facebook application thing!

Xobni (an Outlook plug in I couldn’t live without now) has upgraded and has some cool new features. Their blog post is titled Xobni brings the internet into Outlook…4 ways your Outlook will never be the same. Includes integration with Facebook, LinkedIn, Hoovers and Yahoo Mail.

The Windows Live Photo and Video Blog has a nice easy all in one place list of plugins for the betas of Live Photo Gallery and Live Movie Maker including Facebook, YouTube, SmugMug, Flickr, Picasa and Drupal.

I installed Expression Blend and am going to use it to try and produce some Silverlight content if I can. I found this site to be a good source of video training for Expression Blend, and the other Expression web products. Microsoft also has a Learning Snacks page with helpful videos about Silverlight.

Time to close some tabs. Here are all the good things found since the last round up.

I completely redesigned the front end of www.rasita.biz using panels and views. What do you think? Judith is now selling reptiles as well as her cooking eCourses.

Sarah Perez posted this on live mesh wallpapers. We got them!

Are you Mesh-obsessed? Well now you can show off your devotion to the new service by displaying the Mesh logo on your computer’s desktop. You can grab the zip file for yourself from here.

Sarah also has a Q&A session on Microsoft Office Web Applications.

It’s been a while since Tim has asked me to write an article for Back to Basics. Lately I’ve been more focused on our Geek Girl Blogger series, putting together their surveys and what not. Anyway, Back to Basics!

RSS! You may ask: “RS whaty whaty?” Or, “I’ve heard of that, what is it?”… or what I personally said was “I use RSS to read stuff at my work, but I’ve got no clue what it is exactly or how it works! What is it?” haha.

So I started researching it. When writing articles for Back to Basics I often don’t know much about whatever I’ve been asked to write about, and so I have to learn it myself and then write about that experience!

Not long after starting my research on RSS, literally I’d only clicked my mouse about four or five times! I came across a video from the commoncraft show called “RSS In Plain English” – wow! There’s my understanding and content for my RSS article! All in one little video. If you want to learn how RSS can benefit you… this video is well worth your time!
RSS In Plain English…. I owe my understanding and content to the guys who explained RSS in that video.