While everyone else sitting around us thought we were probably just joking, we actually started on the idea that night.  I began building the site piece by piece using various APIs, most of them, I had never used before.  I have to admit, I became slightly obsessed trying to figure out how to get this to work.  It’s actually quite refreshing to have a project that has peaked my interest so much in a long time.  After searching for the perfect domain that was actually available, I settled on using foodtruckcorner.com and launched it 3 weeks later.

Granted, it’s not quite the finished version yet but the basic functionality is there – you can see multiple truck locations all on one page.  Most of the features I’m looking to incorporate involve some type of filtering – whether it’s for particular type of truck, trucks that are available for a particular time span or trucks located within a radius of a specific location that the user searches on.  I am also constantly tweaking my mapping ability.

So yeah, check it out if you live in the Chicagoland area.  I’m hoping once I get everything set that I can expand to other cities.

Stephen Anderson, @stephenanderson

This was also in my top 3 sessions of SXSWi.  Throughout SXSW, you definitely noticed a theme amongst the various sessions which were: “gamification” (e.g. think Foursquare) and “social media”.  His session was perfect for the last day to explain more of the underlying psychology as to the theory of what, why and how game theory should be incorporated for successful sites or apps.  The best part is that he made his slides available on slideshare: http://www.slideshare.net/stephenpa/long-after-the-thrill-sustaining-passionate-users-sxsw-version

How do we get people to fall in love with our applications?

• How do we get people to stay in love with our applications?
• By making more gamelike? – > Theme of SXSW
• It’s about motivating human, not consumer behavior
• You must understand psychology, not game mechanics.

Sustaining passionate users… through delightful challenges

Attitudes (Think about how teachers approach school subjects)

1. “Apply Yourself” – Boring subject, must apply yourself to get something out of it
2. “Sugar Coating” – Add layer of fun to boring subject, core activity
3. “Stuff is Interesting” – Going to show you why important but first, a challenge for you

Exercise: Think of mundane activity.  Now think of any game (video, board, card, etc).

• Why does this game work?
• What would this activity look like with a game’s characteristics?
• See design from different perspectives
• Move beyond “points & badges”

Example 1: Old Navy

• Hid coupon codes in easter eggs throughout website.
• Compelled user to click on many different areas throughout the site
• Once found coupon, user was given choice to keep that code or could continue looking for other ones in hopes it would find a better one

Example 2: Site made registration time a game -> Fastest time to register was 16 seconds

Set Completion

• As we get closer to completing a set, we have a higher compulsion to complete the set

Performance goals (Getting an A in French) vs. Learning challenges (Learning French)

How do you identify core challenges?

• 5 Whys
• After you peel back the layers, you find very interesting stuff

Status

• Standing relative to personal best, not just against others
• Shows up in games
• Example: Gowalla (checkins this week vs. last week)

(Play & Challenges) + (Goals & Rewards) = Game

Feedback Loop

• Example: Digital speed limit signs -> Tend to immediately slow down
• Simple triggers to change behavior

Attaching a measure to anything makes it a game ***

Translate feedback loop -> Don’t just leave with a number

Example: OKCupid

• Questions produces a “personality report”
• People keep coming back because as they answer questions, do more actions, they learn more about themselves

Rewards motivate people with more rewards

(Most) games eventually end

Sustaining passionate users… takes more than delightful experiences

What and why use services/app for last 3 years?

Providing a service that is trustworthy and of value***

Kano Model

Social Proof

Stories

Look for the game already in activity

Focus on intrinsic motivators

Session 2: Beyond Wordclouds: Analyzing Trends with Social Media APIs

Chris Busse, @busse

In this session, the speaker essentially walked everyone through how you easily parse through the twitter API to get a lot of useful insights.

APIs are the bridge between systems

Build to be minimally independent of API platform -> Get the data out and save it

Automate – >Set script for regular intervals (hourly) and save

Tweet + CRM Data = Social CRM

There’s no such thing as social media campaign -> Once you’re in it, you’re in it for the long haul

Example: “coffee” in 2 day interval in Austin

• over 100,000 tweets
• slice by “coffee” and “I’m at”
• most popular places by checkins
• when does Austin get coffee based on checkin times
• who tweeted (customer demographics)

Import data in CSV, then use PowerPoint

Session 3: Keynote: Blake Mycoskie (Toms Shoes)

1) Build giving into your business

2) If you build giving in, you don’t have to do marketing

• Build the most loyal customers and employees who will spread your business

Session 4: Steve Krug Explains It All For You

Steve Krug (author of “Don’t Make Me Think” and “Rocket Surgery Made Easy”), @skrug

Most sites don’t get tested

• $$$
• Time
• Even if there was enough money, there aren’t enough professionals

Do-it-yourself usability testing

• 3 users per round
• 3 should be plenty since you’ll be doing it again in a month
• You’ll find more problems than you can fix
• No lab or mirrors
• Set up monitor so development team can watch
• No elaborate recruiting
• Recruit loosely and grade on a curve
• Record with Camtasia/Morae/CamStudio
• No stats, no exit questions, no faux validity
• No big report – > Debrief over lunch

Download usability test script for website – > Read verbatum

Complete demo online: www.sensible.com

Works best small groups within development cyle

“What are you thinking?” – Can never ask enough

• Start earlier than what you think makes sense (Test competitors/comparables/same kind of design/functionality)
• Recruit loosely and grade on a curve
• Make it a spectator sport
• Focus ruthlessly on a small number of the most important problems (What resources do we have to allocate?)
• When fixing problems, always do the least you can do

Your motto should be…

• What’s the smallest change we can make that we think might solve the observed problem?
• Tweak, don’t redesign

Blog: someslightlyirregular.com

Session 1: Neurons Sparking! Design with the Brain in Mind

Dr. M.A. Greenstein (George Greenstein Institute), @DRG

This session focused on optimizing game design based on reward, trust and IQ systems in the brain.  I apologize if my notes for this session may seem random.  I’m trying to get the deck used in the session to include.

Working Assumption 1:

• The Inimitable 3 C’s:
  • Consciousness
  • Creativity
  • Collaboration

Working Assumption 2:

• Gaming is both good and bad for the  human brain

Stress degrades the brain

From a neuroscience perspective, there’s no multitasking, only task sorting.

3 Gaming Models:

• Posit Science
• Call of Duty
• Civilization

Novelty creates learning

• Keep things fresh and new
• Brain is good at memory
  • Once it figures things out, doesn’t get better

Children are more interested in playing games than doing their schoolwork because games give immediate feedback/reward

• Don’t get that in education
• Novelty

3 Strategies common to the way gamers and the brain sees:

1. Selective Attention
2. Face/Pattern Recognition
3. Visual/Spatial Fluency

Posit Science

• Roving targets demand “focused attention”:
• Single Pointed
• Global

Civilization

• Face/Pattern Recognition
• Age 0 to 4 – Greatest number of mirror neurons
  • Watching imitating everything to learn

Oxytocin (more produced/released)

• When we recognize people
• When we hug
• Sex (forms connection/bond)

“Action gamers who played Call of Duty 2 were 25% faster at coming to a conclusion and answered just as many questions correctly than strategy gamers.”

Session 2: Q&A with Google & Bing on Website Ranking
Matt Cutts (Google), @mattcutts

Duane Forrester (Bing), @duaneforrester

This was one of the most anticipated sessions I wanted to attend at SXSW so much that we made it a point to get there at least 45 minutes early.  I’m glad we did because we were near the front of a very long line.  For some reason, they gave this session probably the smallest room possible, despite the popularity of the panelists amongst the people that attend SXSW Interactive.  Fortunately, I ended up in the second row, right on the center aisle.

If you’ve looked into the least bit of  information about Search Engine Optimization (SEO), you know who Matt Cutts is.  If you’ve never heard of him before, he’s a Google engineer on their web spam team – he works on modifying the algorithm to make the most relevant legitimate sites pop up in the top of the search results.  I had only heard of Duane Forrester in the past month because he and Cutts got into a bit of a twitter battle after Google accused Bing of copying their search results.  The panel was entirely a question and answer session from the audience.

These were my takeaways:

Affiliates actually have to build good content site

Punishment proportionate to the crime

• Hidden links – 30 days
• Hacked sites -> Can submit a reconsideration request to get this pushed faster

Focus on creating original content/research/insight

• Think about: “What interesting thing have I made in the last 30 days”

2 Key Google Signals

• Reputation
• Topicality

There are no normal search results.

• A search for bank on east coast is going to be different for the same search on the west coast.
• What matters are conversions/traffic
  • RANK IN NOT A METRIC
• Page views, UVs, conversions, time spent on site – those are the real metrics

Recommendations

• Deep Content
• Keyword Research

Session 3: Moving the Web onto Mobile Devices (Panel)

Noah Broadwater (Sesame Street)

Kristin Long (MIGHTYminnow)

Scott Fegette (Adobe)

The content of this session was different than what I was expecting.  I was hoping they were going to address best practices when creating a mobile version of your website or an app.  I felt like the panelists focused more on limitations or issues such as no standards set by the W3C concerning HTML5, different video formats for different phones (e.g. Apple not supporting flash), and the lack of robust emulation tools that were affordable (especially with one of the panelists being a sole proprietorship).

The key takeaways I got from this session were:

• Since there are variations of video formats on different phones, you need to figure out where/what/who are you targeting? – > What is going to allow you to reach the broadest audience?
• W3C needs to set standards
• jQuery mobile (tool)
• Developing for native is very different than the mobile web
  • With native apps, you get the benefits of the accelerometer, camera and GPS.
  • You should incorporate these items
  • Allow for offline mode
  • More intuitive way of accessing data/interacting for children -> Children are very good with mobile devices over a computer mouse because it’s all touch based
• Web (Desktop) to mobile changes the experience
• Shifting environments forces you to be a content architect again
  • Make content more appropriate, accessible and fun
  • Content needs to be more concise
  • Structure content to be clickable (fat finger effect) -> Links presented differently
• Shoot and store your highest quality video and then reformat to different video formats/transcode
• VideoJS (tool)
• CSS3 Media Queries (tool)
• Kaltura (tool)

Marshall Kirkpatrick (www.readwriteweb.com), @marshallk

Dan Zarrella (HubSpot), @danzarrella

Ramya Krishnamurthy (Klout), @ramyatkj

Michael Wu (Lithium Technology), @mich8elwu

In this panel, each participant went through a short 5 to 10 minute presentation on varying techniques of how they defined who was an influencer and how you could find who they were.

First up, Dan Zarrella…

Tweetmap

• Quality is not greater than quantity with twitter followers
• The influence pyramid is upside down
• Users with lots of followers aren’t very conversational

Ramya Krishnamurthy

Influence – The ability to drive action

How do you measure influence?  Through social actions such as:

• Sharing
• Conversations
• Messages
• Lists

Network  Effect

Michael Wu

Influence – Ability to change someone’s mind

Influencer – concept involving 2 parties

Influencer has:

• Credibility (especially in specific domain of knowledge)
• High Bandwidth
• Content Relevance
• Timing
• Channel Alignment
• Target Confidence (target trusts the influencer)

Marshall Kirkpatrick

• Use twitter plus NeedleBase to discover fabulous things
• Smarter way to find followers/influencers
• Strength of relationship -> Influence

Session 2: Viral Marketing with The Oatmeal

Matthew Inman, @oatmeal

If you’ve never heard of the website www.theoatmeal.com, it’s a really funny site featuring a collection of comics and quizzes all designed and coded by one person, Matt Inman.  I actually wrote a post about his site a little over a year ago (http://blog.champtastic.com/2010/01/the-oatmeal/) so I was pretty excited to see him in person.  His topics cover everything from pigs, bears, rainbows to grammar, beer, computers, etc.  Overall, he seemed like a genuinely nice guy that is fortunate to have figured out what his passion was (being a cartoonist) and is able to make a living out of it (he makes money off his merchandise – posters, t-shirts, etc. and now his recently released book, which he is on tour now).  He mostly went through how he got started, his favorite comics and shared some tidbits of what he found worked that lead to his success.

Why the oatmeal?

• Used to play Quake -> Name was Quaker Oatmeal (eventually just dropped Quaker to be just Oatmeal)

Original creator of Mingle2 (dating site)

• Created comics to create links to dating site

Created Zombie Harmony (Zombie Dating Site)

• Crazy idea could become more popular/valuable than huge corporate sites (match.com) – > ranked higher in SERP

Desired to no longer work for someone else

Power of one guy – he designs, writes and codes entire site by himself

Likes to pick things that are relatable

Keep it short with lost of visuals (most effective comics)

Keep yourself out of your message with viral campaigns

• Make it a blank slate to protect future possibility

He found StumbleUpon*, Digg and Recruit most useful sites to spread his popularity

Comics prefaced with “How to”, “Why”, “When” – draws people in

Finding a gripe and articulating it

In comic, “Eat Some Sea Bacon” (http://0at.org/sea-bacon/)

• Basically making fun of Peta
• Peta didn’t realize he was making fun of them and linked their site to his so he changed his site that if you were referred by Peta, you were actually taken to this comic instead: Why We Should Be Eating Horses Instead of Riding Them

If you want to purchase his book, How to Punch a Dolphin in the Mouth, you can do so on amazon.com: http://www.amazon.com/Reasons-Punch-Dolphin-Useful-Guides/dp/1449401163/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1300391025&sr=8-1

Session 3: Future of Collective Intelligence: Location! Location! Location! (Panel)

This was a panel featuring representatives from Nokia, Pepsi & Foursquare.  I think there were high hopes for this session, especially when it included one of the co-founders of  Foursquare, Naveen Selvadurai.  Unfortunately, of all the sessions I attended at SXSW, I think this was one that I was most disappointed with.  Based on the twitter messages that were going on during the session, people expected topics about the future of  check-ins and potential privacy issues were going to be addressed but were not.

The only real information I got out of this session was when they did a crowd survey and most people said they did not check in to their office.  I’m assuming most people don’t because there is no incentive to do so.

As far as using check ins for business, the only practical use the rep from Pepsi saw was from an operational standpoint.  Meaning, they would use checkins to keep up to date on the location of their delivery trucks.

I’ve never seen so many people leave a room as soon as the Q&A session begun.

Anyhoo, these are the sessions I attended:

Session 1: Using Twitter to Improve College Student Engagement
Dr. Rey Junco, @reyjunco

As one of the niche sites I work on is specially related to the college market, I thought this would be a valuable session to attend.  The content was a little different than I had expected since it was more geared to engaging students in an educational setting, not for general business.  I still found it interesting nevertheless.  The speaker was definitely quirky but in a good way.  He was kind of like one of those professors that borderline being really cool and really cheesy at trying to relate to his younger audience.

While the studies in this session were mostly concentrated around twitter, facebook was discussed briefly in the beginning.  One interesting point I thought that was brought up was that time spent on facebook is a negative predictor of how much one is engaged in facebook.  Positive predictors are actually events, comments and viewing photos.  In fact, less engaged students spend more time on facebook.  Apparently, getting metrics on facebook is difficult and faculty was more interested in integrating twitter over FB.

The study conducted 2 experiments:
Study #1: In the experimental group, students were actively told to engage with twitter by the faculty.  In the control group, students were actively told to engage in ning by the faculty.

Study #2: Students receive no active encouragement to use twitter
Rather than spend a huge chunk of my time writing up the activities and results of each of these studies, I found you can actually download some of the slides used in his presentation and even more detailed information about the experiments on his blog: http://blog.reyjunco.com/

Twitter Improves Student Engagement and Grades

The studies found that faculty must use twitter to:
1) Engage with students
2) Integrate course content
3) Encourage collaborative learning

Another takeaway I thought that was interesting about this session was a specific technology used during the study.  The software was called Leximancer and it was used to link concepts across the various tweets of the students and faculty used in the study.

Session 2: Designing For Silence : Using Email for Good
Michael Jackson Wilkinson, Posterous, @whafro

I thought this was an interesting session to attend since we send a lot of email to our users and you always wonder what’s the right amount of emails to send before it becomes detrimental to your business.  You have to remember that not only are you sending emails, but everyone’s inboxes are being filled with groupon, livingsocial, facebook, twitter and all sorts of sites you might be signed up for.  So how do you keep your company emails from being lost in all the clutter and so that your users don’t end up unsubscribing from your emails all together.

“Strive to make noise only when it improves the silence.”

Bac’n (pronounced: bake – on)

• Spam you sort of want to get. (haha)
• Examples: Amazon purchase confirmations, twitter direct message notifications, etc.
• Insight: Not everything everyone follows (such as every friend on facebook) is equal.

Things you can do to modify current email interactive with users before you see diminishing returns:

Bundling

• Allow users to elect to wrap multiple notifications into oneExample: Daily digests versus instant notification of each interaction

Bundling Wisely

• What should you bundle?
• One idea: Customize on the frequency for each person or group of people.
• Generally users give you clues on how frequently they want to interact with service such as how often/when they login

Highlighting Favorites

• Reorder email content based on frequency of views
• How much time are they spending on certain items

Since You’ve Been Gone

• Give users a nice recap of things that have happened since they last visited the site
• Example: Most active things others have been viewing
• Example: What were the last 5 things I viewed the last time I was at the site.  You can have the browser store these items.

Overall Lessons:

1. Don’t forget the important stuff

• Don’t leave out the detail to get users to go back to the site.  Generally backfires and ends up annoying users more than helping your site.
• Example: Facebook photo comment notifications don’t tell you which photo your friend commented on

2. Don’t beat around the bush

• If there is an action required, make sure it’s clear to the user
• Be clear with what you want users to do with transactional email messages
• Example: Big button for link you need users to take action upon

3. Meta data

• Keep app or company name in the from line
• Keep the from line to 20 – 25 characters
• Specific subject lines

4. Effective messages are designed messages

• This doesn’t necessarily mean they need to be the best looking emails
• It more means that you should consider the hierarchy of what you want the user to do

5. Be careful with promos

• Keep it so there is not more promos than content or that promos do not confuse user on what to do

Session 3: Metrics-Driven Design
Joshua Porter, @bokardo

This was probably in my top 3 sessions of the entire conference.  The great thing about this session was that the presenter gave everyone a link at the very end where people could download his slides: http://bokardo.com/talks/metrics-driven-design (I wish I had known this otherwise I wouldn’t have been furiously trying to write down every word).

These are the key things I took away:

Optimization asks: What works best in the current model?

Design innovation asks: What is the best possible model?

Metrics are simply the numbers that measure the effectiveness of your business.

• Example: “Must improve conversion by… “

5 Reasons Why Metrics are Designers’ friends:

1. Metrics reduce arguments based on opinion
2. Metrics give you answers about what really works
3. Metrics show you where you’re strong as a designer (and weak)
4. Metrics allow you to test anything you want
5. Clients love metrics

With metrics, you are measuring how you are moving people along the usage life cycle.

There are 5 types of metrics:

• Acquisition
• Conversion
• Engagement
• Satisfaction
• Emergent

Acquisition Metrics

• CPA – Cost Per Acquisition
• If your CPA is higher than your lifetime value, you’re in trouble
• Acquisition vs. Referral
  • Example: DropBox
  • Paying too much for Google AdWords
  • Created 2 sided incentive program for referrals where both the referrer and referree benefit
  • Extremely successful
  • Increased signup permanently by 60%
• Performable acquisition metrics include:
  • Comparative metrics
  • Revenue by channel
  • Revenue by keyword
• Email lists then to be extremely valuable

Conversion Metrics

• Example: Twitter redesigned their sign-up flow
• Looked at their most active users and re-engineered what they were doing
• Made their site very topic based
• They added a 2nd page – a category list where people can self-select what to follow

Engagement Metrics

From most traditional down:

• Hits
• Page Views
• Visits
• Unique Visitors
• Returning Users
• Registered Users
• Customers
• Frequency
• Time on site
• Daily active users

Cohort Analysis

• Break up users into segments based on when they started

Prevention: Facebook Deactivation

• Added “These people are going to miss you” section
• Change accounted for 1 million people NOT leaving

Satisfaction Metrics

• How likely would you recommend our company to a friend of colleague? (Net Promoter Score)
• Score = % Promoters – % Detractors
• Mint.com did not have a high viral score but had a high NPS

Emergent Metrics

• Not obvious at first by more over time
• Example: FriendFeed
  • They discovered magic number is 5
  • Introduced a way to easily add friends
• Example: Blogger
  • Realized most critical piece/metric was the number of posts

Principles of Metrics-Driven Design

1. Optimize in small steps; innovate with daring leaps.
2. No design survives contact with the user.
3. Small improvements, taken together, yield amazing results.
4. Testing is empowering, reversion is cleansing.
5. Metrics are not creative: human beings are.
6. All team members are responsible for the user experience.
7. If metrics aren’t actionable, they aren’t useful.
8. Design is never done.

Since this is my first time at South By Southwest (SXSW), I figured it would be a good idea to write about my experiences for others who are contemplating going in the future and also, make sure I don’t forget anything that I picked up during my trip.  If you’ve never heard of SXSW, it’s an interactive, film and music conference and festival every year in Austin, TX.  As someone who works for a .com and made the first 7 years of my career as a web developer, I came here specially to attend the interactive part. Let me sum up the last 4 days with one word: exhausting. And that’s with skipping the first full day!

Our technology team has what we call “Think Days”.  Essentially, it’s one full work day every other week where the developers are allowed to research any topic that may or may not be related to the current projects that they are assigned.  The best way that I can explain SXSW is that it’s Think Day on crack.  It’s definitely a place for information overload but in a good way.

During the day, you have a number of choices of different sessions that you can choose from at various locations in downtown Austin.  It’s a little bit of a challenge to pick which session is the right one for you.  It reminded me alot of what it was like to pick classes during my undergrad days.  Since some of the locations were much farther than the others, you had to decide if you had enough time to hop between locations and if it was generally worth the time and effort.  I found that the shuttles that were supposed to take you to the various hotels was not very efficient so I kept my sessions down to only three locations.  There were definitely more than a few that were at one location that I wish I could have attended but it would have basically cost me 2 additional sessions, one before and after, with just the time it would take to travel back and forth.

Despite that, overall, I would definitely recommend going… and it’s not just because it was a nice break from the Chicago winter.  It was quite an experience.   For someone who likes to be creative and whose job is to come up with new ideas, whether it be for new ways to improve existing products or to come up with totally new ones, it felt fantastic to be surrounded by people who shared similar interests (i.e. big geeks) and were able to stimulate my mind with a thousand new ideas that I can take back to my company.

Because there’s way too much information to share for one, it’s probably best if I split up my writeup of each day as a separate post.  Some days were better than others but I can say without hesitation that every single session generated some new thought.

Oh and one more thing, I used Twitter more in the last few days (you can follow me at @okaychamp) than I have in the first so many months that I have had an account.  It was without a doubt the communication channel of choice for the conference without even being sponsored by them.

The 4 most popular web browsers are: Internet Explorer, Firefox, Google Chrome and Safari.  Internet Explorer is the most dominant at 60% of the market (which is much lower than I was actually expecting), followed by 20% Firefox, 8% Chrome and 7% Safari.  The latest versions of all 4 of these browsers allow you to add extensions.

As a web developer, extensions have become very important with helping me get through everyday things – mostly with debugging (i.e. finding issues).  These are a few notable ones that I find the most useful.

1. Firebug (Firefox and Chrome)

Firebug is definitely one that’s catered for developers.  For front end developers, it’s great to inspect HTML and modify the style and layout of a page in real-time.  For other developers, it’s great for debugging javascript.  (Again, don’t worry if those last two sentences mean nothing to you.)  Now, I’m not condoning this BUT I’ve found a non-developer use for photo websites where they purposefully try to prevent you from downloading their images.  Using the tool, you can use the “inspect” function to hover over the images and expose the web address for the photo (i.e. the location for the .GIF or .JPEG) so that you can copy it into another window, open and download the image directly.

2. Screen Capture (Chrome) and Screengrab (Firefox)

Both of these are nice screen capture extensions.  Yes, you can take screenshots by pressing CTRL + PrintScr (or ALT + PrintScr for a specific window only) but these are much better.  For one thing, they allow you to choose between just capturing the visible content (which CTRL + PrintScr only allows), the whole page or even just a specific region.  Screen Capture also has an additional feature that allows you to highlight/underline certain areas in your screenshot.

3. FireFTP

First, FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol.  FTP clients are used to copy one file from one host to another.  So whether you have your own web hosting account or you are trying to access someone else’s, a FTP client lets you move files to and from that host.  FireFTP is nice because you don’t have to install another standalone FTP client, such as SmartFTP or WS_FTP.  Instead, you can easily open it directly as another tab right in your browser.

4. Web Developer (Firefox and Chrome) and IE Developer Toolbar (IE Versions 7 or Less)

This one is probably not for the non-developer.  However for us code monkeys, it’s great for allowing real-time CSS and HTML editing.  You can display the ruler to measure specific areas on the page.  You can toggle certain features like cookies, javascript, images, etc.  You can have it display all sorts of information about the anchors, ids, class names, tab index, etc.  It makes it easy to clear your cache, cookies and other private information.  You can use it to resize your browser window to a specific size.   You can validate your HTML, CSS, Feed; validate if you are 508 compliant even.  It’s definitely a time saver for things that might have previously required you to go line by line through the code.

For IE 8 users, you don’t need to install a separate toolbar.  It automatically comes as part of the browser.  You can find it under “Tools” -> “Developer Tools” or just press F12.

5. HttpWatch (IE and Firefox) or HttpFox (Firefox)

This one also is mostly for developers also.  It’s great for monitoring how your website loads.  If you were ever wondering if a certain element was slowing your site down, you’ll be able to see exactly in the order that it is loaded on the page and how long it took.  You can also see other details in the headers and cookies.

Earlier this year, I signed up for Amazon Prime when I found out that students could sign up for a free year.  It wasn’t until I moved recently to a new city, where I no longer have regular access to my car (it’s at my parents’ house in the burbs), that I have fully taken advantage of it.  If you’ve never heard of Amazon Prime, basically, it’s a $79 membership for Amazon.com for free 2-day shipping and $3.99 1-day shipping for all eligible retailers.  I purchase almost anything that I can possible now on Amazon: socks, cooking pans, movies, a Keurig, pen refills, a computer chair, an umbrella, a USB wifi adapter, a SD card for my camera, face lotion, etc.  Like my boss said, “I would buy my groceries through Amazon Prime if I could.”  It’s been totally awesome for Christmas shopping also, considering not only does Amazon have better prices than most in-store and online retailers, but I get free 2-day shipping and I don’t have to worry about figuring out how to carry all these presents on the train (since I just ship them directly to my mom and dad’s).

After my free year is up, I’m pretty sure I’m going to renew my membership.  With just a couple purchases, it pays for itself.

Have fun!