Syzygy

I’m back from my little internet break. I was talking to a friend just the other day who had no idea I was even gone because he reads the site in his feed reader. I had briefly considered putting up an actual post back in September for that very reason but never got around to it, so I apologize for that.

In case you never saw it, on about September 14 I had placed a notice at the top of the page that said:

I’m going cold turkey from the Internet (other than for work, school, and FellowSites). I’ll be back on November 1. Cheers!

Sorry I didn’t say more about my break, but I really needed to just quit everything and didn’t have time to explain. The scientific community is still up in the air about whether Internet Addiction is actually a classifiable disorder, but if anyone has it, I believe I do. It got so bad a couple months ago that I needed some intervention.

So I did what I had to do. As I said in my site notice, I still used the internet for work, school, and FellowSites. Everything else, though, including my feed reader and all my social networks, I really did quit cold turkey. I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t an occasional visit to Wikipedia or Answers.com, but for the most part I stayed away from everything else and didn’t touch my feed reader once during the six weeks I was “offline”.

So, here we are in the first week of November, and, as promised, I’ve cautiously returned to the interwebs. I’ve finally approved the handful of MySpace, Facebook, and LinkedIn friend requests I received during the break (thanks everyone for your patience) and caught up on reading all my close friends’ and family members’ blogs. As soon as I can figure out why Trillian is acting funny I’ll be signing back on to the major instant messaging networks. I’ve set up my feed reader again, but kept it pretty lean this go around. I don’t intend for things to get as bad as they were ever again.

When I was thinking about taking the break, a friend remarked that it can take six weeks to form a new habit. I think I succeeded in developing some new behavior patterns and intend to continue practicing them. In other words, I think my break was successful.

One thing I did miss quite a bit during my break was blogging and sharing things with all of you. I read a few good books and had a few noteworthy experiences during the break, so you can definitely look forward to more updates here in the coming days and weeks.

I’ve blogged before (here and there) about keyword searches in Firefox. Keyword searches are great because they allow you to perform searches right from your address bar. Simply type your keyword (e.g. I use g for Google, a for Answers.com, wp for Wikipedia, &c.) followed by search terms and you’ll be magically whisked off to your search results. You can set up your own keyword for any site by right-clicking in any search bar and choosing “Add a keyword for this search” from the context menu. By setting up my own keyword searches, I’ve completely eliminated the need for the little search box to the right of my address bar, and, in fact, have removed it from my browser altogether.

Recently I discovered a service that takes this feature to the next level. YubNub, as the service is called, bills itself as a “(social) command line for the web,” and boy does it deliver. You can try the service out right away by going to the YubNub website, but it really becomes useful if you set it up directly in your address bar. I’ve got my Firefox address bar functioning as a YubNub command line, and I’ll mention later a few ways (and what I think is the best way) to do that. But first let me tell you more about the service.

Continue reading “My setup: YubNub” →

(Hat tip: Grooveshark Blog)