23 Things: The Twelfth Tool = Online Productivity Tools

There are a number of free tools available online that are designed to help boost your productivity. This site provides a Top 10 listing of some of them, and this blog "features tips, shortcuts, and downloads that help you get things done smarter and more efficiently."

I played around with Google Docs and Spreadsheets. You can create text documents or spreadsheets and save them online, making them accessible from any computer. You can also invite other people to access individual documents/spreadsheets, so that they can edit or add to them directly. This is useful for project planning purposes.

With Google Docs, I particularly liked the fact that you can download your document as a PDF file.

Subscribing to subject feeds in Blogger

I recently received a request for assistance from someone undertaking research on the peace, security and migration implications of climate change in Africa. I post references to publications on this topic as I come across them on my other blog, Forced Migration Current Awareness, so subscribing to my site feed is one obvious way to keep track of anything relevant that might be posted in the future.

But there is a second way to monitor postings on a subject-specific basis. I include labels for each of my posts that describe the general subject focus of the various publications referenced. Readers can subscribe to a specific label to ensure that they do not overlook any titles of particular interest.

The format for label feeds is this:
http://blogname.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default/-/labelname
- Substitute the address of the blog you want to monitor, or http://fm-cab.blogspot.com
- Substitute the label name

Here are two examples:

http://fm-cab.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default/-/climate
- The format for the feed for the label "climate"

http://fm-cab.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default/-/country%20of%20origin%20conditions
- The format for the feed for the label "country of origin conditions"

Copy and paste these into your reader just like you would any other feed. And the next time those labels are used in my blog, the feeds will be updated accordingly.

By the way, this format will also work in any other Blogger-hosted blogs that use labels.