Five Best Personal Landing Pages

Five Best Personal Landing Pages

Not everyone has the time or inclination to build and maintain a full-fledged web site. If you're just looking for a simple way to unify all your online profiles, these personal landing pages are a perfect fit.

Photo by datarec.

Earlier this week, we asked you to share your favorite personal landing page. A personal landing page is a small-scale web site that directs visitors towards your other profiles on the web, a central page you can direct people to, instead of writing and linking a laundry list of your online presences—your Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, Last.fm, and other profiles.

If you're looking to set up a personal landing page to unify your online presence without the work of setting up and maintaining your own web site, the following services can help. Read on to see the most popular personal landing pages.

Note: For the screenshots below, we took snapshots of real profiles from all of the services, as discovered by Google searches or provided as examples on the main site of each service. Since the services are customizable, don't assume that all personal landing pages from that particular service look exactly like the sample screenshot. Visit the service web site for more information and to see how you can customize your own site.

Unhub (Free)

The Unhub service isn't as much a personal landing page as a personal landing bar. When you give people your Unhub profile URL, what they see is an Unhub bar across the top of the browser pane and your featured site below it. Unlike most personal landing page services which limit you to well known social networks and services, Unhub lets you link to anything you want. If you want the bar to have your Amazon wish list, your YouTube profile, a link to your Wikipedia page, and then links to a couple virtual portfolios of various work you've done, you can do that. You select the site Unhub will bring the user's focus to and which sites will be displayed across the Unhub bar. Unhub includes a URL shortening tool and site analytics to help you see which links get clicked the most and which profiles interest your visitors. You always have to point Unhub at something, even if it's just your Facebook profile page. If you're looking for a service that serves as a one-stop information board for your visitors, you might consider some of the other personal landing pages in this week's Hive Five.

Card.ly (Free)

Card.ly, as the name would imply, is a business-card-styled personal landing page. You can tweak your Card.ly profile with all sorts of customizations, scaling it from a simple set of social network icons people can click to a full-fledged mini-portal, with a profile, personal quotes, and additional information about you. Card.ly has a demo account, available here, where you can play around with the themes and settings to get a feel for the service before you sign up.

Flavors.me (Free)

Flavors.me is a personal landing page that emphasizes style and presentation over an abundance of widgets. The Flavors.me layout is designed to showcase a photograph or piece of artwork with a small bio and a set of links layered over it. Although the design is simple, the creative variations user come up with are quite interesting. You can browse through a directory of profiles here to get ideas. Simple and punchy design aside, Flavors.me sports a user-friendly, drag-and-drop interface that makes it quick to get a site up and running. You can check out our review of Flavors.me here.

Chi.mp (Free)

Compared to other contenders in this week's Hive Five, Chi.mp takes customization to another level. Instead of merely allowing you to swap out pictures or select which links you want to include, Chi.mp lets you build multiple profiles and highlight what's important to you. You can make a professional profile to share with colleagues, a personal profile to share with friends, and as many variations as you need for different situations or projects. In addition, you can emphasize some of the content you share over other content. Say you want to emphasize, for example, your Twitter feed over other shared content like your Flickr photos, Chi.mp lets you promote the Twitter feed to appear more prominently.

ClaimID (Free)

ClaimID has the least splashy personal landing page offering in this week's Hive Five. The emphasis at Claim ID isn't about expressing your artistic side, or wildly differentiating yourself from the crowd, but instead on showcasing the services that are important to you. Customization is limited, but it's easy enough to create a long list of all the services and web sites you want to share. ClaimID is tied into the OpenID service, so if it's important to you to show people that you've actually been verified as the person you're claiming to be, and that your links actually point to the real profiles of John Q. Smith, then you may want to consider ClaimID's personal landing page, despite the lack of eye candy.

Now that you've had a chance to look over the top five contenders for best personal landing page it's time to cast your vote in the poll below:

Which Personal Landing Page Is Best?survey software

Have a favorite personal landing page that wasn't featured? Let's hear about it in the comments. Have a tip or trick for making the most of a personal landing page? We want to hear about that too. If you have an idea for a future Hive Five send us an email at tips@lifehacker.com with Hive Five in the subject line.

Send an email to Jason Fitzpatrick, the author of this post, at jason@lifehacker.com.

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Five Best Personal Landing Pages

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Five Best Personal Landing Pages

 

Earlier this week, we asked you to share your favorite personal landing page. A personal landing page is a small-scale web site that directs visitors towards your other profiles on the web, a central page you can direct people to, instead of writing and linking a laundry list of your online presences—your Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, Last.fm, and other profiles.

If you're looking to set up a personal landing page to unify your online presence without the work of setting up and maintaining your own web site, the following services can help. Read on to see the most popular personal landing pages.

Note: For the screenshots below, we took snapshots of real profiles from all of the services, as discovered by Google searches or provided as examples on the main site of each service. Since the services are customizable, don't assume that all personal landing pages from that particular service look exactly like the sample screenshot. Visit the service web site for more information and to see how you can customize your own site.

Unhub (Free)

The Unhub service isn't as much a personal landing page as a personal landing bar. When you give people your Unhub profile URL, what they see is an Unhub bar across the top of the browser pane and your featured site below it. Unlike most personal landing page services which limit you to well known social networks and services, Unhub lets you link to anything you want. If you want the bar to have your Amazon wish list, your YouTube profile, a link to your Wikipedia page, and then links to a couple virtual portfolios of various work you've done, you can do that. You select the site Unhub will bring the user's focus to and which sites will be displayed across the Unhub bar. Unhub includes a URL shortening tool and site analytics to help you see which links get clicked the most and which profiles interest your visitors. You always have to point Unhub at something, even if it's just your Facebook profile page. If you're looking for a service that serves as a one-stop information board for your visitors, you might consider some of the other personal landing pages in this week's Hive Five.

 

Five Best File Encryption Tools

File encryption is your best bet if you want to keep The Man, foreign spies, or your annoying roommates out of your files. Here's a look at five of the most popular encryption tools Lifehacker readers use to lock down their files.

Image a composite of photos by Anonymous Account and flaivoloka.

Earlier this week we asked you to share your favorite encryption tool. We tallied up your votes, and now we're back to highlight the five most popular tools for the encryption job.

GNU Privacy Guard (Windows/Mac/Linux, Free)

GNU Privacy Guard (GnuPG) is an open-source implementation of the famed Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) encryption tool—you can read the very interesting history of PGP and how GnuPG came to be here. GnuPG is a volume and individual file encryption tool with support for a dozen encryption schemes, paired keys, and expiring signatures. GnuPG doesn't only provide rock-solid local file encryption; it is, thanks to paired encryption and public key servers, a great tool for encrypted communication. Please note, regular old GnuPG is a command line tool. Check out the list of graphical wrappers and application plug-ins for various operating systems here. The screenshot above is from Cryptophane, a graphical Windows interface for GnuPG.

Disk Utility (Mac, Free)

Disk Utility is a diverse tool that handles almost any disk-related tasks you'd need on OS X. The utility is capable of creating secure disk images and file volumes encrypted with AES 128-bit or 256-bit encryption. Like most native Mac utilities and applications, Disk Utility and the accompanying encryption blends seamlessly into the OS X experience and makes mounting and unmounting encrypted volumes a breeze. If you've never created an encrypted disk using Disk Utility before, take a look at our previous guide.

TrueCrypt (Windows/Mac/Linux, Free)

TrueCrypt is a free, powerful, and on-the-fly disk encryption tool. With TrueCrypt, you can create secure encrypted virtual disks or even encrypt entire drives. TrueCrypt is an on-the-fly encryption tool, meaning files are decrypted as you access them and modify them and then encrypted when not in use. Thanks to various optimization tricks and full utilization of the power of modern processors, working within a TrueCrypt volume feels no different than working on a regular unsecured disk. TrueCrypt not only offers strong and transparent encryption—it also offers the ability to create hidden volumes within encrypted volumes for even more secure (and obscured) file protection.

7-zip (Windows, Free)

Compared to some of the heavyweights in this Hive Five (like GnuPG and TrueCrypt), it might be easy to dismiss the popular file compression tool 7-zip as a lightweight. 7-zip fills a perfect niche for many people, however, by offering simple ZIP container-based encryption. If you're not interested in encrypting a ton of files or maintaining an entire encrypted volume, but you still want to make sure important documents like tax returns or other Social Security bearing documents are locked up tight, 7-zip sports strong AES-256 encryption. Create a new compressed archive, throw your files in it, and slap a password on. Your files are strongly encrypted and stored right alongside your regular documents.

AxCrypt (Windows, Free)

AxCrypt is a free encryption tool for Windows. Once installed it integrates with the Windows shell and offers simple right-click encryption and decryption of files with AES-256 encryption. Your entire interaction with AxCrypt can take place exclusively from the right-click context menu. In addition to integrating with Windows and offering easy encryption and decryption, you can also use the tool to create self-extracting archives to securely transport files or transfer them to a friend—no AxCrypt installation necessary at the other end.

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Use a Daily Log to Keep Yourself Focused on Productivity

Everybody wants to be more productive, and you can find loads of tools and systems designed to help you do just that. But how do you measure your productivity in any given day? That's where a daily log comes in handy.

Keep a Log of Everything Useful You've Accomplished

You might be tempted to simply use your to-do list's completed items view to track what you've accomplished, but you'd be fooling yourself—between co-workers bugging us, unexpected problems arising, and just plain old procrastination, the difference between what we check off our daily to-do list and what we actually do can be huge. A lot of the things you accomplish may never make it to your to-do list.

This is where the daily log can help you understand what you've actually done for the day in comparison to what you had planned for the day. It's not difficult—simply keep a log of everything that you've accomplished for the day, preferably adding notes quickly as you go along. Made it through a boring meeting without sleeping? Log it. Finally sent in that that TPS report, cover sheet included? Log it.

You might be surprised at the outcome, especially when you give in to procrastination—your to-do list might be telling you to start that big, important project, but your daily log will detail how you cleaned everything in your house instead of tackling it.

Keep Your Daily Log Simple

You can use any tool to create a daily log—it doesn't matter whether you prefer pen and paper, a ubiquitous capture system like Evernote, vim on the command line, or a simple notes application—they can all accomplish the job, and what you choose only depends on what works best for you.

The only really important factor to consider when setting up a daily log is how easy it will be to add new items to the list—if the barrier to entry is too high, you'll find yourself forgetting to add anything at all. As someone who spends most of his time with a computer at least nearby, here are some of my preferred methods.

Use the .LOG Notepad Trick to Generate a Daily Log

There's a little-known trick built right into Windows' default Notepad application that will make it so whenever you open the file, a timestamp is generated on a new line at the bottom of the file, and the cursor is automatically placed below it, ready for your entry.

Simply create a new text file, and add the text ".LOG" (without the quotes) on the top line of the file. Save the file and re-open it, and you'll see the new timestamp added to the bottom. This little trick can save you a lot of time and make it simpler to keep track of your daily accomplishments.

Pin the Log to the Taskbar for Easy Access

Now that we've created a simple text file to keep track of what we're accomplishing, you'll want to make sure that your daily log is front and center so you don't forget to add to it.

You can easily pin a specific document to your Windows 7 taskbar by creating a new shortcut to Notepad.exe, and then adding the full path to your text file as a parameter. Open up the shortcut properties and assign a new custom icon to the shortcut, preferably something that stands out and reminds you to keep your daily log. Once you've finished creating the shortcut, right-click and use "Pin to Taskbar" to put the icon onto your Taskbar.

Use a Hotkey to Quickly Add Notes to Your Log

If typing notes into a Notepad window takes too much time for your taste, what with the saving the file each time and all, you can create a simple AutoHotkey script that makes it easier to add to your daily log with nothing more than a keystroke. (If you're not familiar with AutoHotkey, check out our introductory guide to get started.)

Create a new AutoHotkey script, or paste the following into your existing script, making sure to edit the path to the DailyLog.txt file to point to the same location as your own daily log.

^!l::
current=%A_Hour%:%A_Min% %A_DD%/%A_MM%/%A_YYYY%
InputBox, UserInput, Daily Log, What did you accomplish?, , 380, 170
If Not ErrorLevel
{
   FileAppend,%current%`n%UserInput%`n, C:\path\to\DailyLog.txt
}
Return

Once you've created a new script with the code above, you can simply use the Ctrl+Alt+L shortcut key (you can tweak the shortcut to your liking if you'd prefer something different) to pop open the dialog in the screenshot above, type in what you accomplished—don't forget the cover sheet on your TPS Report—and then hit Enter to append your accomplishment (with timestamp) to your log file.

Review Your Daily Log

Keeping a daily log doesn't do much good unless you periodically review it. Personally, I like to use Notepad directly to add my notes so I can see what I've accomplished recently—you'll be more motivated to accomplish something useful if you've gone through half the day without getting anything done that's worth writing down.

It's also a good idea to add a reminder to your calendar to periodically check through your log and see what you've actually accomplished for the week, or month, and then check the completed items on your to-do list. It's a great way to gauge the effectiveness of your to-do list, and help you tune things for higher productivity.

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EPA Found that Gas Mileage Improved 7% to Record-Breaking 22.4 MPG In 2009 Car Fleet

EPA Found that Gas Mileage Improved 7% to Record-Breaking 22.4 MPG In 2009 Car Fleet: "
Photo: Flickr, CC

The numbers on the fuel economy of the U.S. car fleet are out, albeit a year behind. But the news are rather good: The EPA report for 2009 shows an improvement of 7% in fuel economy, or 1.4 MPG, bringing the average to 22.4 MPG (kind of a sad record, when you think about it). Another piece of good news is that the ratio of cars to trucks has been shifting back in favor of cars. It has declined 'to 40 percent in 2009 models, a decrease of 7 perce...Read the full story on TreeHugger

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Maker Faire Africa 2010 Begins!

Maker Faire Africa 2010 has begun in Nairobi, Kenya. This is the second of what is becoming an annual event, an event that seeks to shed some light on the inventors, innovators and artists creating practical and interesting ideas – mostly from Africa’s informal sector.

This year, besides having jua kali creators from Kenya, we also have makers from Uganda, Rwanda, Ghana, Malawi, Nigeria and South Africa. It’s a great turnout, and continues the tradition from Ghana last year.

We’re seeing all kinds of incredible ideas brought to life. Here are a couple:

A customized bicycle, with an accessory that lets you charge your phone via dynamo:

A robotic porridge cooking machine, made by a Malawian inventor:

Artistic sunglasses, made from locally available materials:

More pictures in the Maker Faire Africa group

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