How to Shut Down Websites That Distract You

You sit down on the computer to complete that urgent sales report but you are distracted by an email from a colleague asking you to check the most disliked videos ever posted on YouTube.

You open that video on YouTube, watch it for five minutes and then switch to Facebook to check for any updates. The cycle continues and you soon realize that you wasted an hour at work Wilfing while the task at hand (the status report) remains incomplete.

Sites like Facebook, Google News or Twitter are certainly not bad for health but our constant urge to check sites for new content certainly distracts us from actual work leaving us less productive and at times, inefficient.

There's help at hand. You can either temporarily block websites or you edit the HOSTS file in Windows and permanently block websites that you think waste your time.

Then there are extensions like LeechBlock that will prevent you from browsing websites that you alone specify. It's like a self-imposed restriction to help you concentrate on work. You can specify the time periods and even the days of the week when access to particular sites should be restriced.

Sites to block can be specified using wildcards (e.g., *.blogspot.com) and exceptions (e.g., +labnol.blogspot.com).

Learn to Create a Firefox Search Plugin in Less Than 2 Minutes

Almost every blog has a site search form where you just type in the search query and press enter to digg through the archives of that blog . The only drawback here is that you first have to visit the site homepage to locate the search box. And there's also a possibility that the site has no search form at all. This tutorial will show you a very simple Firefox hack that allows you to search any blog straight from the Firefox search bar without having to visit the actual blog . And there's something for IE users as well. Related: Firefox Search Bar Hacks First the not-so-good approach though it works with IE: Type the following query in the Google IE toolbar or in the Firefox Search Box with Google selected as the default engine: site:labnol.blogspot.com adobe captivate This query will retrieve all documents about Adobe Captivate on Digital Inspiration. You can replace labnol.blogspot.com with any site URL that you intend to search. You may have know the above trick already but i

How to Download Contacts from Facebook To Outlook Address Book

Facebook users are not too pleased with the "walled garden" approach of Facebook. The reason is simple - while you can easily import your Outlook address book and GMail contacts into Facebook, the reverse path is closed. There's no "official" way to export your Facebook friends email addresses or contact phone numbers out as a CSV file so that you can sync the contacts data with Outlook, GMail or your BlackBerry. Some third-party Facebook hacks like "Facebook Sync" (for Mac) and "Facebook Downloader" (for Windows) did allow you to download your Facebook friends' names, emails, mobile phone number and profile photo to the desktop but they were quickly removed for violation of Facebook Terms of Use. How to Download Contacts from Facebook There are still some options to take Friends data outside the walls of Facebook wall. Facebook offers the Takeout option allowing you to download all Facebook data locally to the disk (include

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