Lately, I’ve been enjoying my mornings with reading ‘lifehacking blogs’, such as the popular Lifehacker, lifehack.org and Zen Habits, which give short and tips and tricks for living your life to the fullest. I can recommend reading about for example ‘How not to Multi-task‘, ‘Live the life of a Champion‘ and how to ‘Clean your home in 19 minutes‘. It seems like they have tips for anything in your offline life, and often also for getting more productive online.

Some of the best tips I’ve found in there are to find goals for your life to help motivating the changes you need, never bring work to home, but work on creating your future, and get rid of things that clutter your life. So find or remember your goals now, and find the way to practice them, and use them to create or do something productive you can show - if you don’t have any ideas of what to do in the area there’s always sites online you can look at to help you with simply getting ideas or to brainstorm by yourself or in groups, there’s tools for everything.. You can find tips for that in other posts on this blog, or at the Lifehacking blogs I linked to at the start of this.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about improving my Spanish, so when I stumbled upon the site SpanishSense, which contains lessons with voice dialogs, podcasts and help material I became pretty excited. One thing I really like about the site is how they allow you to embed lessons in your own site, to spread the word and build a community where everyone can help eachother in the learning process. According to the site, they also have Chinese lessons, but I’ll wait with looking into that for now - after all, it’s easy getting those new languages confused with the five I already know (six if you count beginner spanish that I didn’t practice for 2-3 years). You can try one of the SpanishSense lessons (introductions) by using the player I put in this post…

Another thing I did to find ways of improving my Spanish was to add a tab called Spanish to my iGoogle page - which of course gave quite a few widgets to use, including a dictionary, Babelfish and news in Spanish.

In other news, I’m looking around at a lot of Web 2.0 sites lately, getting some invites here and there (often found through Mashable), getting updated on new web API:s through ProgrammableWeb while in the process of starting one new site and one new blog. Meanwhile I’ve learned more about Google maps API (including the AJAX version), tiny mce (there must be ways of doing it better, but since it’s popular I guess they’re on to something), Community Server (I’m not very impressed), Dapper, Yahoo! pipes, Google trends and some add-ons for Firefox and Thunderbird. Next is to learn some more about the Google Mashup Editor and perhaps OpenKapow for the site I’m creating. Together with Dapper and Yahoo! Pipes I believe those tools can make wonders…