astro posted on April 05, 2010 18:17
Maybe I’m really better suited to be a day trader with mounted monitors keeping an eye on stock price fluctuations. But alas – I’m a bona fide member of the SMB community and as such, I’ts incumbent on me to monitor the conversations across the day. Today I share a secret on how I monitor major SMB technology sites for news – you can do this to.
First, I suggest you download and install the Firefox browser. Then search for the following Firefox add-ons: “Auto Toggle Tabs” and “Reload Every” and install these applications.
When you launch Firefox, create eight tabs to view these web sites:
1. SMB Nation (www.smbnation.com)
2. Redmond Channel Partner (www.rcpmag.com)
3. Everything Channel (www.crn.com)
4. VarGuy (www.varguy.com)
5. MSP Mentor (wwww.mspmentor.com)
6. Business Solutions (bsminfo.com)
7. Channel Pro SMB (www.channelprosmb.com)
8. RAM Techinsight (www.techinsight.tv)
Next, lock these pages as your home pages with this command: Tools, Options, General, Use Current Pages. Then set the auto-toggle timings for every 15-seconds (you can select a different duration such as 30-seconds, etc.). The command for this is Tools, Auto Toggle Tabs, 15 seconds. Finally, make the pages refresh every 10 seconds by right-clicking on each of the eight pages and selecting Reload Every, Reload Every 10 secs.If you do not reload these pages, you'll possibly be viewing historica data and miss out on the new stories. For example, VarGuy and MSP Mentor have much news during the day and in the past, as I developed this technique, it turns out I was reading "yesterday's news!"
You now have a “day trader” screen where these important SMB news sources will cycle all day on your monitor and you’re in the SMB know! I suggest you dedicate an older PC and monitor to this function and you can view from your work area. At SMB Nation, we literally have a mounted monitor performing this function.
Happy monitoring folks!