My digital life - redux

Well, I've had a bit of a play - and it's looking good for Google :)

I put together a list of what I wanted to pull together over the next few weeks (or months, knowing me...). Basics first - email, calendar, blog, online photo album. I want them all to talk to each other as easily as possible.

A few years ago, I'd've rolled up my sleeves, broke out Dreamweaver and hit Sourceforge and spent some nights topping up my monitor tan by grabbing some of the best Open Source stuff and knitting them together as best I could. Now, I just don't have time. And, to be honest, why reinvent the wheel when this stuff is already being done so well for free (or very little cost)?

So - email. I've been using Google Mail for years. I redirect a couple of 'normal' email addressed through my gmail account. Two things sold gmail to me early days, and they're the main reasons I still like it now. Spam Filtering and labels. The spam filtering has always worked really well for me. And allocating labels to emails is much easier than filtering into folders. Of course, the idea of labelling items is commonplace now with any web site worth it's salt using tags...

As for a Calendar, I use Outlook/Exchange for work. So whatever I choose has to sync with that. I'd also like to be able to set up and share calendars. Not looked into it too deeply yet, but Google's calendar will let me do both od these. Moe on this when I do a bit more digging.

Blogging is something I've always mwant to get into more, but never really got round to it. I used LiveJournal ages ago, but didn't really like it. Used Blogger before Google bought it out and quite liked it. Used it for a bit after Google bought it up (I've just deleted some rubbish posts from 2002 from here!). Then much later I set up Wordpress on my own webspace. Main reason for that was integration. Wordpress let me drop things onto the page like my last.fm widgets. But, surprise, surprise - on revisiting Blogger good old Google have upgraded blogger and you now have lot's of control over the layout - including dropping in add-ins. Lot's of flexibility to link in the other apps I'm looking at. So, as I've already gone with Google it makes sense to give blogger another go.

That just leaves and online photo album. I have a Flickr pro account, but I've never really got on with it. It seems to have all the stuff you'd need, but you know when you just don't click with something? Anyway (and I guess you can tell what's coming), I thought I'd check out Picasa - Google's photo app. Again, I played with it early days, but it didn't seem up to much. Just had another play now and it's much improved. And it obviously links in to all the other Google services.

The icing on the cake is that the Google toolbar pulls all this stuff together in a nice convenient place.

So there's my starting point. It'll be interesting to see how well all these apps sit together as I use them going forward - and how well I can link in the other sites I use regularly like facebook and last.fm...