It’s Sunday again. It’s been a week since we’re in 2008 already. What have you done so far by now? Have you determined your ultimate goal/vision? Keep in mind that they should be realistic and achievable. I also spent my days doing housekeeping of my virtual belongings. Let’s go through them..

Email
Clean up your emails. To make my life easier, I use MS outlook and create multiple profiles to download my email from multiple gmail/yahoo/my website email account directly to my notebook, but at the same time, I’d leave a copy there for backup purpose. It can save your time a lot, since you’re only opening 1 application instead of opening and signing in to multiple accounts. Furthermore, you can sort your emails based on date, sender, email thread and etc. You can also group them into different folders, set ‘out of office message’ and etc.
Suggestions :
1. If you have multiple email accounts and you’re still reading and composing your email from there, I strongly suggest you to download your email into MS Outlook or other email clients such as Eudora and Lotus Notes. You can find the instructions on how to download your emails to this email client all over the net, but I found this piece of info for Yahoo Mail and Gmail users quite useful for you. Basically the instruction is almost the same for all emails, and it can be applied to your own blog/website email as well.
2. If you’re using email client, do archive older emails that you’re no longer using.

Newsletter/Opt In
I opt in subscribing to hundreds of newsletters mostly from internet marketers, bloggers, SEO experts, and downloading countless of reports. Over the time, you’ll know which one is good or bad, which one is your favourite reader, and which one provides the most useful content or which one is trying to sell you products.
Suggestions:
1. Unsubscribe from newsletters that you feel less useful or outdated
2. Read and utilize the downloaded reports and ebooks to keep you ahead

Your system
Newsletters, free ebooks and reports are the most items residing in my notebook. In addition to that, if you opt to keep templates, graphics, songs and movies that you downloaded, it would easily fill up your hardrive very fast. And at the same time, without you knowing it, it would also be downloading unwanted ‘visitors’ such as viruses, malwares and spywares, waiting to ‘destruct’ your computer internally.
Suggestions:
1. Group your stuffs according to topics, subjects or anything that is suitable
2. Backup your work especially important documents such as your articles, scripts, codes and etc
3. Upgrade your anti virus definition periodically
4. Upgrade your windows if there is any update, but for legal copies only
5. Do not visit unwanted sites or websites that offer illegal items such as pirate movies, crack software. If you do, you need to download them carefully
6. Run system utility such as defragment and scan disk
7. Utilise your windows backup and restore function

RSS
I’ve been using Google Reader for almost 8 months since switching from Bloglines. I like it very much especially the function to display the content when we’re offline (with Google Gears ). Similar to emails, newsletters and reports, you’ll end up with a long list of hundreds of websites that you’re subscribing to. If you’re using Google reader, you can subscribe to their blogs
to get more tips to better manage your RSS
Suggestions:
1. Unsubscribe from unwanted blog/website
2. Categorize your subscribed content according the topic
3. Shared the useful content with your spouse or friend

Your bookmarks/favourite website
My bookmarks spread mostly in Delicious, Google Bookmark and also in local bookmark at my web browsers bookmark; IE and Firefox.
Suggestions:
1. Categorize them based on topic or whatever is suitable
2. Move ‘less frequently used link’ to a new folder
3. Use Google Browser Sync for Firefox to sync up your FireFox bookmarks across multiple computers. Besides that, Lifehacker has an article on how to sync up your Firefox bookmarks.
http://www.google.com/bookmarks - accessible from google toolbar
4. If you’re using Del.icio.us and FireFox, you need to  install FireFox add on to access and manage your bookmarks from your browser

Your Websites/database
It is time to evaluate and assess your website if it is providing enough income that’s worth your effort.
Suggestions:
1. Reduce or sell your blogs/websites that are not providing decent income, or you would have no time to manage them anymore. Sitepoint is the great place to start from on this.
2. Make sure your blogs/websites are valid HTML, CSS, XHML, XML and WML. You can validate your websites at W3Schools, it is my favorite coding reference
3. Do site housekeeping periodically, to ensure it is running at the most optimum level
4. Measure the performance of your website. One useful tool that I recommend is YSlow
5. Check, repair and optimize your MySQL database from PHPMyAdmin

Some note: Remember the blogger gathering that is scheduled next Saturday that I had mentioned last week? Sorry, I would not be able to make it. I’ll be in Penang at that time on work purpose.

I had just noticed that Microsoft has launched its own webmaster central tool last November.

I’m slightly behind in getting the latest update about Microsoft Live Search or Yahoo search due to the less ‘participation’ of this search engines in my websites . All 3 main search engines now has its own webmaster tool, even though they all have different tools and the functions. Google has a famous Google Webmaster Central and Yahoo with Yahooexplorer and Microsoft with Live Webmaster Central

Basic Functions

~adding sitemap
~validate robots.txt
~number of pages indexed
~search results against specific keywords.

Back to Live Webmaster Central, the features are basically less than Google Webmaster, but I can consider it better than Yahoo Site explorer. It also has a function to validate robots.txt file, but it seems to work differently from what was inside Google Webmaster. This format below is validated in Google Webmaster successfully but not here . I guess I need to read more about robots.txt standardization later.

Line #7: Disallow: /*?
Warning: MSNBOT doesn't support wildcard characters.

Line #3: User-agent: Mediapartners-Google*
Error: * and another agent can't be specified on the same line.

Adding website to this tool is simple, it works the same like Yahoo and Google’s tool. 1 important feature that is missing here is statistics. It should show at least which page is indexed, not only the number of pages indexed.

Overall

Google Webmaster is still leading Microsoft Live Search and Yahoo Search in terms of functionality offered inside. It is still a long way to go for Live Search Webmaster to catch up with Google Webmaster. Google Webmaster has its functionality added or enhanced from time to time, and hopefully Live Search Webmaster will follow Google’s step. I don’t see Yahoo Siteexplorer getting any enhancement or additional function on recent months.

Search Engine comparison

If you’re interested to know more about main search engines, Aaron of SEOBook has made a very interesting comparison on that.

Screen capture

Here is the screen shot of what was inside this tool. Have fun.