Thirty Day Challenge Preseason: Flock Settings and Tips
July 29th, 2008Full video can be found here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ID_t-omG4aY
Intro:
- If you haven’t already seen the Flock tutorials, you should take a minute to do so
- Like any other program we usually only use 10% of its power. In this video Ed will show you how to set up Flock to make it work really hard for you and that you can really leverage.
- Once you get a feel for this in your niche, you’ll see how you can become the center of that particular niche. Plus, it makes your web surfer experience just that much better.
- If you have used Firefox previously, you’ll notice that some of your extensions have automatically been transferred over to my Flock browser.
Settings (or preferences)
The biggest place you can go in any program is have a look at ‘preferences’
[MZ Insert from Flock Help:To change a wide variety of settings in Flock, open the Options or Preferences dialog. How you access the dialog depends upon your operating system:
- If you are using Windows, open the Tools menu and select Options.
- If you are using Linux, open the Edit menu and select Preferences.
- If you are using Mac OS, open the Flock menu and select Preferences.]
1. Main:
· Make sure “Show my windows and tabs from last time” is selected
· You can indicate your preferred home or start page.
· Flock provides a home page called “My world” that they put together for you. Ed doesn’t use it because he thinks there are better tools out there.
· Make sure “Show downloads” is selected. Ed says this is important
· Choose where to save files. On the Mac there is a special folder so Ed likes to use that.
· Make sure “Always check to see if Flock is the default browser on start up” is selected. For 30DC purposes, Flock should be the default browser.
2. Tabs:
· Tabs are really important
· Under “New pages should be opened in: a new window or a new tab” Select ‘new tab’
· Make sure “Warn me when closing multiple tabs” is selected. It is a life saver.
· Make sure”Warn me when opening multiple tabs might slow down Flock” is selected
· Do not select “Always show tab bar” because it can take up a bit of screen real estate
· Make sure “When I open a link in a new tab, switch to it immediately” is selected
3. Content
· Select security options according to what you want. You can block pop ups, etc.
· Make sure “Enable Digg flyout” is selected
· If you don’t understand any of these don’t worry for now
· Fonts & Colors: You can play around with this if you wish
4. Feeds
· This is very, very important
· Last year we used Bloglines. This year we are going to use Google Reader. Google Reader will change your life when you see how to use it properly. It’s all in the way you use it and Ed will show how
· Make sure for “When I click on a web feed” you have clicked “Subscribe to the feed using” and then select “Google” That means when you have a blog/site you want to keep track of, boom, one button press and it will automatically go into your Google Reader. It will allow you to process so much more info it’s insane. Ed will have detailed lessons on setting that up later.
5. Search
- Select options for ‘default’ search engine. Ed uses Google
- For “live results generated as you type from” select ‘favorites and recently visited’ You can select others according to your habits. In the US, Craigslist and ebay are useful for finding things.
- For “Include in search elsewhere” select which ones you prefer. [MZ: It looks like Ed has 'Ask, Google and Amazon' selected.]
- Now we are done with preferences/settings
Demonstration:
- To open a new tab, click the plus sign
- Go to “tubbynerd.com”
In your browser there is this little radar button [MZ: Middle button]. This indicates that this site has an RSS feed. (don’t freak out there will be a lesson on RSS feeds). This button allows you to add it to “Google Reader” with one click. There will be more on Google Reader later. - Go to thirtydaychallenge.com/blog, the little orange button is there and add to Google Reader.
- Now you need to have a Google Reader set up so if this seems like nonsense just wait until we show you.
For those who want to skip ahead, you will want a Google account. There’s some amazing new tools.
The next video will show how to use extensions and which extensions will be used in 30DC. Later you will see how to use Flock’s built-in functions