Under the Hood With Leo Babauta
In Interviews by Skellie
This week, Leo Babauta (the full-time blogger behind Zen Habits and the Zen to Done eBook) gives us a behind-the-scenes look at his digital office.
“I use an iMac. I do almost everything online, using Firefox with a number of key extensions (Greasemonkey with a few scripts, RTM + Gmail, Morning Coffee and Save It For Later).
“I use Gmail, Google Reader, GCal, Google Docs and WordPress as my main online programs. Other key desktop apps include Cyberduck, GIMP, NeoOffice, WriteRoom and iGTD. Quicksilver, of course, is indispensable.”
Links:
January 19th, 2008
Thanks for the post, Skellie!
It’s nice to see what tools and applications effective bloggers like Leo use. It certainly is the most effective way to know by looking ” under the hood” of top bloggers and learn what makes their “engines” run so smooth and efficiently.
Thanks for posting this list and thanks to Leo for sharing it!
P.S. I had left a comment earlier but it didn’t go through. Just in case I ended up leaving 2 comments, I just want you to know that it was unintentional.
January 19th, 2008
@ Ritu: Sorry about that — I hope the problem was temporary!
January 19th, 2008
Leo is truly a busy, busy man. I find it fascinating when people who use Firefox on Macs, even when safari is supposed to run more smoothly on a mac. Though, I bet the addition of extensions play a vital part of it.
I think Google is a gateway app, once you sign up for one part of Google you end up using of it. For example, if you have a blog you start with Google Adsense, then to Gmail, then Google reader, Google Analytics…the list goes on and on. Pretty soon your sucked in, at least I make myself to be a little bit more productive this way.
January 19th, 2008
@ Boring Market: Too right — I have pretty much done a full tour of Google. I use Gmail and Reader every day (almost), have used AdSense, have a Gcal account (but don’t really use it), have used Blogger (owned by Google), use Feedburner (owned by Google)… the list goes on! Of course, I use the search engine right out of my browser.
I use Firefox on my laptop. My major gripe with Safari is that some websites don’t display as they were intended to be viewed.
January 19th, 2008
@Boring Market
It is the scripts.. I couldn’t live without the Firefox extensions I use. Safari paints a better looking page, and Firefox still crashes too often (though with “Restore Session I hardly care) but the only time I use Safari is the same as the only time I use Windows (running under Parallels): when I’ve made a change to my site and want to make sure it plays OK in those browsers.
January 19th, 2008
@ Skellie: My blog is always best viewed in Firefox, because I tailored it for Firefox and like Anthony I use other browsers (or in his case other OS) to ensure my site looks streamlined. Though, I’m always looking for ways to convert people from IE to Firefox. You’re right in which Firefox has a way to ‘correct’ sites to make them such as the webmaster intended. No, I try not to convert Safari users… there too defensive.
@Anthony: You know what would be a great web 2.0 idea is if there was a start-up that would let you view sites in different browsers/OS within one program. Just throwing it out there.
January 19th, 2008
There are a number of places that do that: http://browsershots.org is one I use for the odd ones I don’t have under Parallels.. though there’s really nothing I couldn’t have..
January 19th, 2008
@Skellie
Check those sites with Opera (because it is W3C Web Standards compliant). If it doesn’t look “as intended” there, it’s because the designer didn’t really do it right.. so what did they really “intend”?
January 19th, 2008
@ Anthony and Boring Market: Usually I test in Firefox and IE, and live in ignorant bliss about the others ;-).
January 19th, 2008
@skellie
I don’t check every page - just when I make some major change. Doesn’t hurt to run it by a few oddballs.. and of course I always run it through W3C “validate HTML”.
The “oddballs” are probably more important to me than they would be to you because of my site focus.. my readers tend to be more techy so are more apt to be using odd browsers..
January 19th, 2008
@Anthony: I guess I spoke to soon. This is EXACTLY what I was looking for, though it doesn’t let me play around with the functions this will do. Thanks! It is also exposing me to different browsers like Flock and Iceweasel, I have never heard of them before and I’ll look into them. The overall theme is that Firefox looks good on almost any OS…so far. (Still loading)
January 19th, 2008
Anyone using Linux should check out a little app called Gnome-Do. It’s based on Quicksilver and has a lot of the same functionality.
January 19th, 2008
Interesting that Babauto relies heavily on Google apps. I’m a bit hesitant to use them for anything serious (i.e. involves finance or privacy.) I once did an interview with a e-mail privacy expert and mentioned I used gmail - she said it was the least secure of all free online e-mail services. The same reservations go for gword or gspreadsheets.
Can anyone reassure me that the Google apps are suitable for private data?