We've got inboxes over here, inboxes over there, boards here, there, tweets, docs, posts and shares. It's almost too much to keep straight. Fortunately, there are little helpers out there. I've found two I love, and I'll show you how to use them. One is free, the other is in closed beta, but there are invites below! If you've got other suggestions, please feel free to share them in the comments.

Greplin: For Finding Your Stuff

Greplin is the way I find that one online thing I'm looking for. It's a fast search engine that can index a whole bunch of common cloud services many of us use. Once it's done crawling for the first time, you don't have to wait for a second. You type in your search query, and Greplin brings back an organized list of everything in your cloud-life that matches.

It can search Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs, Google Reader and Google Contacts (as well as the professional Google Apps versions). It searches Dropbox, of course. It searches Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and LinkedIn. It's got Delicious and Pinboard. It has Yahoo Mail. It even searches Reddit. And these are all free. Premium users can search Evernote, Yammer, Salesforce, Basecamp, Highrise and Campfire. All of these services in one search.

Some of them you have to unlock by inviting friends. That's okay. Invite your friends. They'll thank you for it.

Here's Greplin in action:

Yes, you're reading that right. My Greplin has (at press time) 1,106,324 documents in it. Every search is instantaneous, though. I can filter the results by service (Twitter, Google Reader, whatever) as well as by type of content: events, files, links, messages, notes, people and streams. Clicking on each service on the left sidebar tells you its status and how many items are indexed.

Greplin's premium service is $4.99 a month or $49.99 a year. But basically every consumer service, and even the Google Apps service, is available for free. Evernote is in premium, and that's a very tempting hook for power users. But it's amazing what the free version of Greplin can do. In addition to the Web version (which works on mobile), there's a free iPhone app, and it's killer.

What About Sensitive Stuff Like Logins & Passwords?

User names, passwords, ID and credit card numbers are hard to remember, too, and we need to use them often online. But it's not a good idea to keep those in a cloud-hosted service like the ones Greplin searches. It's best to keep those in a secure service if you're going to store them on your computer at all.

Today I found out about Dashlane, which will do just that. It's a desktop application for Mac and Windows that will remember all your sensitive info so you don't have to. It's also just a convenience; it plugs into your browsers and lets you fill in Web forms with your saved information automatically. It's like 1Password, which is available for Mac, Windows, iOS and Android, but the features are a little simpler.

I've taken it for a spin. It's easy to set up, and it's very secure. It lets you store your contact info, various forms of ID, credit cards and Web accounts. It's also good for shopping online and lets you speed through the checkout process. When you're filling out a form on any Web page, boxes that Dashlane can fill in have a little gazelle (or whatever its mascot is) icon. You click it and drop the info in. No need to remember it or even type it out.

Dashlane is not quite open to the public, but here's a link for RWW fans to get it now! I've been using it all day, and it makes everything faster.

What other services do you use to keep yourself sane online? Share them in the comments.

Wait a minute. Plain English legal language? Started by a court? For free? Yes, this is for real. And the site is nicely designed and easy to use too. It is about time, and shall we say sets a new high bar for similar kinds of public information sites from their government.

According to this column by Gail Kerr in The Tennessean, in addition to the site, six of Nashville's larger law firms have split up the various legal specialties and agreed to offer pro-bono legal services. Both are worthwhile efforts and I hope more states follow with similar acts in the future.

Yesterday's update not only allows a large team to control the page, it allows transfer of ownership. So if one person created your page but someone else needs to be in charge of it, the creator can transfer that power. The Google+ interface is a little busy, so here's a step-by-step guide for how to change managers of a Google+ page.

Here's how to add managers or transfer ownership:

1. On your Google+ page, click the gear icon in the top right corner of the screen and select "Google+ Settings"

Note: Google's new top nav bar is taking a rather long time to roll out. For now, some users will see a "Settings" link on a gray bar instead of the gear on a black bar. Don't worry, they're in the same place and they do the same thing.

2. Select "Managers" from the menu on the left side

3. Add managers using their email address

Google points out that email addresses add another layer of security when adding managers, but it also gives people the option of accepting the invitation with a different email address/Google account than the one you selected.

4. To transfer ownership, click the link in the top right corner

That's all there is to it. Now you can add anyone on your team who needs the ability to manage your Google+ page.

Add Google+ Your Business to your circles to receive regular tips from Google.

Oh, and don't forget to encircle ReadWriteWeb on Google+.

The trick is to file an impersonation claim. That's the only one Twitter responds to in a timely fashion. This means you have to make a credible case that you or your brand is being impersonated, and the account has to have violated Twitter's inactive account policy. But if you have your ducks in a row, you can have that account in your hands in under a week. Here's how.

Yes, in some cases, that's a big caveat. But it's much easier to get a domain name than a trademark, and you need to establish that the name or brand you're after is indeed yours. You're going to need an email address giving you a credible claim. Having a website, even if the domain is just forwarding somewhere, won't hurt.

For example, the Twitter handle I wanted was @emotikon, which is the name of my musical projects. I own emotikon.co, so I used an email address from that domain throughout this process.

Step 1.5: If you already have a Twitter account with an alternative name, and you just want to change its name to the one you want, skip step 2.

Step 2: Register A Dummy Twitter Account With That Address

Sign up for a new Twitter account using the email address from step 1. The handle can be anything you want. When Twitter liberates your account, they're going to merge it over to the dummy account, so you're saving a step by giving them an existing account to use. I called mine @emotikonTEMP.

Step 3: Report The Account for Impersonation

The form you need is at support.twitter.com/forms/impersonation. Choose the bottom option, "I am being impersonated." When you click that button, more options will appear. Choose the one that applies.

Once you've chosen the right option, a contact form will appear. Fill that out with all the relevant information and be sure to use the email address that clearly establishes your claim to the name. The optional Twitter username is the one from step 1.5 or 2. It says it's optional, but it will save you a step.

Step 4: Wait A Little While

After you submit, you'll get an auto-reply right away. Before too long, a human on the Twitter Trust and Safety team will follow up with you if there are any problems with your submission. If everything is in order, after a perfectly reasonable amount of time, you'll get the glorious email.

After that, the account is yours! When you log in to the account you listed in step 3, it will have the name you've been waiting for.

Victory is mine.

— emotikon (@emotikon) December 13, 2011

Thanks to J.B. at Fusible for showing me how this works. I can't believe it, but it really does!

First, you need an account. Go to Calepin.co and register your user name. It's early; you can probably get whatever you want. Next, log in with Dropbox. Calepin will create a folder in your Dropbox that it will watch for text files written in Markdown. When you click the big 'Publish' button on the Calepin site, it will publish all the documents as a blog at [user name].calepin.co. Here's mine, for example. The blog's appearance is spare and relaxing. It's a great place to just stick your thoughts up on the Web. Don't know what a Dropbox or a Markdown is? Don't worry. You'll quickly get the gist.

What The Heck's A Dropbox?

If you don't have a Dropbox account, you'll want one. Think of Dropbox as a folder on your computer that syncs to the cloud. Our editor-in-chief, Richard MacManus, just wrote a great tutorial about cloud storage services that will teach you all the reasons you'd want Dropbox or something like it.

As you'll see in that post, there are several choices, but I recommend Dropbox, especially if you want to use Calepin. You can use Dropbox.com to manage it from the Web, but it's also a free desktop application that lets you treat it just like a normal folder on your computer that syncs automatically. You get 2GB of space for free, and that's plenty for a blog.

Ready to sign up now? I did refer you, so you could consider signing up through my referral link (winky face), so I can get a little more space in mine. If you don't want to indulge me, just go to Dropbox.com to sign up.

Markdown? That sounds scary.

I promise Markdown isn't scary. It's an easy, human-readable way to format text for the Web. Daring Fireball's John Gruber invented it. For our purposes here, all you need to know about it is that it's much cleaner and easier than HTML. But it's important to know that Markdown understands HTML. If you forget how to do something in Markdown, you can always do it the old-fashioned HTML way. Here's an example of what Markdown looks like:

To write:

Hello, there! This is an introduction to Markdown. It's really easy to use, and I promise you'll LOVE it!

This is all you need:

**Hello, there!** This is an introduction to [Markdown][1]. It's *really* easy to use, and I promise you'll ***LOVE*** it!

[1]: http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/

Isn't that nice and easy to read? It's also really powerful; you can do pretty much anything you'd need HTML to do, and Calepin will turn it into Web-ready HTML without you having to worry about it. You can learn everything you need to know in Daring Fireball's Markdown tutorial. I write all my RWW posts in Markdown, and I write faster, less stressfully and with fewer errors than I ever had in HTML before.

Now Put Them All Together!

To post to your Calepin blog, you just write up your post using any plain text editor you want and save it as a .md file in the Calepin folder in your Dropbox. Want to use images? No problem. You can at least insert an image using Markdown, or you can just use HTML if you need more control over it. You can host the image on a free service like Imgur, or you can even put it in your Dropbox public folder. Either way, just grab the URL and put it in your blog post. Then log in to Calepin.co and click the big 'Publish' button, and your posts will go right up on the Web.

That's it! You've got a blog. Mine's jonm.calepin.co. What's yours?

Calepin is powered by Pelican, an anagram of "Calepin" that is also an open-source weblog generator written in Python. If you're interested, you can view or fork the source code on Github. Future features include a few themes, as well as respect for a /theme folder for your own, and custom domains.

Oceans of thanks to Merlin Mann, the Internet wizard who turned me onto Calepin. He recently made fun of me on this podcast. Back To Work is a show that will teach you about writing, the Internet and getting better at stuff. I listen every week, and you should too.

With us in mind, Google sent along a list of free Web services it offers to help us manage our holiday workload. As a Google Apps team ourselves, we at RWW will certainly be using some of these strategies. Here are a few suggestions of how you can use Google's vast toolbox of free Web gizmos to manage your workload and make your holidays more relaxing.

And if you have to be apart from your friends and family over the holidays, you can use Google's Hangouts to spend time together virtually:

It's very kind of Google to give us all these services for free (in exchange for our eyeballs). What other tools do you use to keep your work and life straight over the holidays?

Funny old photo via Flickr Creative Commons.

One of those disappointed users was Web developer Emmanuel Pire. Not content to see the beloved sharing feature go away, Pire built a replica of it on his own server and wrote a script that adds a "Share" button to the new Google Reader interface. This workaround doesn't restore the functionality 100%, but it comes pretty close.

Finally, it's worth noting that the following instructions will not restore the "Note in Reader" bookmarklet or the "Share with note" button. For many users, the back-and-forth comments on shared items was a central part of the social experience. That's still missing, but the sharing part can be restored. It actually works quite well.

How to Get the "Share" Button back

To restore the "share" button in Google Reader, follow these steps:

1. Go to this page using Chrome or Firefox and hit the green "Install" button in the upper right. (You'll need to have Greasemonkey installed on Firefox first.)
2. Go to Google Reader. You should now see a "Share" button in the upper right (not where it used to be, but this'll do). There's also a box in the left column that lets you add friends. Note: This feature will only work if your friends also install the script.
3. Click on the "Share" button in the upper right (you may need to have an item open to see the button). You'll be asked to set a password and confirm your email address. Do both of these things.
4. Email your old Google Reader friends and excitedly ask them to join you. They'll all need to install the script and follow these steps as well. You might as well just send them a link to this article.
5. Once everyone is signed up, you can search for them in the "Add friends by email" box on the left. If they're taking their sweet time, you can bug them via email from this box as well.
6. As you find and subscribe to people, you may want to add them all to a folder. Create a new folder called "Friends" or "Shared Items" and be sure to put everybody's feeds in there.
7. Use Google Reader just as you used to, hitting the new "Share" button each time you come across something you'd like your friends to see.

Again, this workaround only brings things about 90% back to normal. Some things, like building an inline commenting feature, are a bit trickier for a third party developer to implement. As an alternative, you can always hit the "+1" button to publicly share it or you can hit the "Share" button to send the item to your newly-resurrected Google Reader network.

So how does this work? Pire realized that the old sharing feature was essentially a glorified RSS feed to which others could subscribe. His hack generates a feed containing any item on which you click "Share" and then allows your friends to subscribe to that feed. He requires users to set a password so that others can't inject items and effectively share them on your behalf.

We tried it out with a few of our old Reader pals and it comes pretty close to replicating the original functionality. Give it a try and lets us know in the comments what you think.

Since they have tens of thousands of followers, it "would be hard to fit everyone into their actual offices," says the intro video. It is an intriguing use of the Hangout feature. You don't have to be a Stanford student, or even enrolled in the class, or even know something about AI. All you have to do is add Norvig to your Google+ circle, ask your question on their YouTube channel now and tune in tomorrow.

Stanford has been offering many online classes, like other universities around the world. The class is more fully described here in this post on IEEE Spectrum.

We're longtime fans of NaNoWriMo here at RWW. Editor-in-Chief Richard MacManus documented his NaNoWriMo experience back in 2003, at the dawn of our site, and we checked back in after NaNoWriMo 2008 for its 10th anniversary. With the fun starting tomorrow (surprise!), Google Docs has offered some tips about how its free, cloud-based document suite can help us all win at NaNoWriMo.

But the ability to work from anywhere without worry is a huge bonus for Google Docs. Any effort to use the Web to encourage more creative writing is all right by us, so we're glad to pass along our take on how Google Docs can help us all write a novel this month.

Write While You're On The Go

If you have a smartphone or tablet, you can write your novel from anywhere by visiting docs.google.com in your mobile browser. Here's how it works:

Android users also got a handsome update to their native Google Docs app, but iOS users can get their words in using the mobile site. Remember, every word counts, so even if it's just a sentence that pops into your head at the supermarket, it's vital to write it down.

Track Your Progress and Manage Versions

Google Docs lists a revision history of your document on the right-hand side. This will help you keep track of the work you've done each day, and if you end up regretting some huge rewrite, you can always step back.

But try not to do too much of that; the key to winning NaNoWriMo is to stop editing yourself and just keep moving the cursor to the right (or the left, if your language swings that way).

Make It Visual

No, pictures don't count towards your 50,000 words, but sometimes you've got to illustrate, and Google Docs makes it easy. It added some new features last month, like drag-and-drop images, that make visually sprucing up your novel a snap. Another new feature is format painter, which helps quickly change the style of highlighted text, useful for working on your story's formatting.

Just Write It.

Of course, the only way to write your novel is to do it, so don't spend too long tweaking your settings. Keep making the clackity noise on your keyboard, and you'll get to 50,000 this month. Don't worry. It's so worth it.

Learn more about National Novel Writing Month at NaNoWriMo.org, and sign up to start writing your novel! You can also follow @NaNoWriMo on Twitter and commiserate with all the other slogging writers using the hashtag #NaNoWriMo.

Are you writing a novel this month? Share your NaNoWriMo profile in the comments!

Storify.com on the desktop is the place to start. You can use Storify to capture a momentous event online, or you can ask a question and curate the best answers. Its uses are almost limitless. I've gotten so much out of it as a blogging tool, and I know you will, too.

Storify rolled out a gorgeous update to its interface yesterday, and now is a great time to start using it. In yesterday's Big Question, we asked, "What's your favorite way to use Storify?" We got some answers, but they were mostly gripes and questions. So I thought I'd offer some suggestions.

Here are a few ways I've used Storify. I hope they'll inspire some cool new ones. Some are just for fun, but others made for great work. Storify is totally embeddable and SEO-friendly, so it's well worth learning as a tool for making your site more social and letting your audience participate.

Storify Breaking News

In the Twitter Age, news unfolds in real time. Some believe that the Twitter-ification of information is harmful, but I couldn't disagree more. Twitter condenses bits of info so that they flow smoothly, rather than in chunks. One tweet is not the story; the whole stream of tweets is.

When an error propagates on Twitter, the correction propagates just as quickly. The real-time, right-now nature of Twitter is just a snapshot. Over a period of time, a whole story emerges. And its not just the story of what happened; it's also the story of how it happened, how we got there and what we learned along the way.

When I noticed Gmail was down on September 23, I tweeted my observation and then started Storifying what I saw. With the torrent of tweets going by, how did I catch the ones I wanted? Great question. I used the Twitter ★ button. Whenever I saw a tweet I wanted to include, I faved it, which made it easy to grab from the Storify favorites tab, which now looks like this:

Storify uses drag-and-drop to move messages from the service tabs - Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, SoundCloud, Flickr, Instagram, Google, RSS, and more coming soon! - into your story. Favorites are a great way to pull out the posts you want, so that they're all right there in Storify and easy to find and drag.

I grabbed the best replies to my tweet as well as other messages about the outage that streamed by. I threw together a breaking news intro, and I just embedded the Storify below the fold. That way, I could just work on the Storify, and every time I clicked 'Save,' the RWW post would be updated with the new messages I added.

It wasn't the most serious story, but it did great, and that's because it was fun! I did the usual, boring updates at the top of the post about what was officially going on, but the Storify part showed what it was like, the experience of the Gmail outage as we Gmail users felt it.

Ask Questions, Storify Answers

Yesterday, a developer emailed me to show me a cool QR code maker he made. I wanted to write about it, but I didn't know how. It wasn't news, and I didn't think a whole review of this one pager was warranted, as neat as it was. So I asked myself, "What is it about QR codes?" Then, I realized I should just ask my Twittizens and my Circlemates!

Now, here's where you stop me and say, "But Jon, there is no Google Plus tab on Storify." And I will reply, you're right, BUT! The Storify folks told us that's coming soon, for one thing, but there are also passable work-arounds in the meantime.

In addition to posts from around the Web, Storify lets you add text and images yourself, and you can add hyperlinks to text. For my Google Plus responses, I decided to put a link to the whole thread in, which pulled in the QR code image I attached to the Plus post, and then I just copied and pasted the text of the answers below, making the names into links to people's Plus profiles. It doesn't look great, but all the info is there:

As an alternative, our community manager, Robyn, used screenshot images of Google Plus posts in her Big Question Storify yesterday. It looks much better, but the text isn't really on the page. That has some SEO and accessibility issues, but it looks better. And my text way was a lot more geeky work. For a service that isn't built into Storify yet, one must decide between these trade-offs.

And hey, Google Plus? If comments had their own permalinks, that would be really nice. Just sayin'.

Anyway, after a great day of collecting, I put together this post by setting up the questions and then embedding the Storify of the RWW community's answers.

Storify And Share Your Favorite People

If you've been following along at RWW, you know that #FollowFriday is my favorite Internet holiday. On Web 2.0, or whatever version this is, sharing people is the best way to find new sources of information and fun.

But #FF tweets disappear into the ether. Storify is a great way to gather up all your #FF recommendations and share them in one place. Check out this Storify post I did on #FollowFriday, July 15, in which I shared my Internet heroes.

How Do You Storify?

There are so many more ways to use Storify to preserve great moments on the Web, and I've hardly thought of them all. Do you have any examples you'd like to share? Post them in the comments!

Follow RWW on Storify

If you own more than one Apple device (or plan on it) and want to set up iCloud, here's how to get started.

Apple pushed out iTunes 10.5 yesterday, ahead of today's iOS 5 roll-out. The first thing you'll want to do is update iTunes, if you haven't already. Then, connect your iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch to your computer using USB. Don't worry, this is the last time you'll be required to do this, as iOS 5 includes wireless software updates and syncing.

When iTunes is finished updating, go into Preferences --> Store --> Automatic Downloads. Check off the types of iTunes Store purchases you want to sync across devices. You can do this for music, apps or books currently. Note: This is just for new iTunes purchases. Other content like calendars and photos will sync independently of the iTunes Store. Also, this is not the same thing as iTunes in the Cloud (also called iTunes Match), which backs up your entire music library online. That costs extra.

2. Activate iCloud From Your Mobile Device(s)

Once iOS 5 is installed and your device is restored and restarted, it will prompt you to set up iCloud for the device. After you've agreed to activate iCloud and tapped a few options, you'll need to confirm your email address.

Then go into your device's settings, where you'll see a new menu option for iCloud. From here you can choose which data you want to sync using iCloud. Options include Mail, Contacts, Reminders, Bookmarks, Notes, Photos and Documents.

You can also opt to back up the content on your device to iCloud. Apple gives 5GB of storage for free and offers upgrades ranging from 15GB for $20 per year to 55 GB for $100 per year.

3. Go to iCloud.com

Once your device is set up, head to iCloud.com and log in (you may have to verify your email address). This is the Web-based portal from which you can view your content and use tools like Find My iPhone. Activating this feature for iPhones, iPods and iPads is highly recommended, as it will help you track the device down should it ever go missing.

From here on here, whichever types of content you selected will be seamlessly synced across devices. Depending on your settings, every photo you take on your iPhone will automatically download to your iPad next time it's connected to WiFi. Likewise for apps download, contacts updated, calendar events added and so on.

You can also use iCloud to wirelessly back up your entire device, just as you've always been able to do locally via iTunes. Instead of storing the backup on your local hard drive, you can push everything to Apple's servers, which hopefully won't go down the next time you need to restore the device.

To manage which types of content are synced via iCloud, you can always go back to the device's settings to toggle options on and off.

Drag this link ----> Plus Hunt up to your browser toolbar and click it whenever you're on a web page. You'll be able to see what people said on Google Plus about that page, thanks to Topsy. (And thanks to RWW's Resident Hacker Tyler Gillies, who helped me fix the javascript for that when I got stuck.)

This Topsy index of Google Plus is just the first of all kinds of services we'll likely see built on it. Topsy is also the best place to do archival search of Twitter, too. It's better than Twitter and it's better than Google.

The new Topsy feature isn't perfect, though. There's no RSS feed for your Google Plus search results, which is a real shame, and the "influencer search" is all based on keyword use. I'm not sure how fast the index is built, either, as Topsy isn't using an API to build its index - it apparently is just looking at public messages directly.

Interested in archiving Google Plus messages? Check out the open source ThinkUp app from Expert Labs, which yesterday added Google Plus archiving and analytics. Very nice.

Let's keep the cool hacks and feature coming!

Batac calls it "not beautiful, but simple - and it should work." Indeed it does, it works very well. It's evidence too that powerful, fun and useful things can be done in simple ways. Thanks for making this AJ!

Above: That's what it looks like when a person looks like their dog, the relationship gets described in a report online and then I push the Share on Google Plus bookmarklet.

Whether Google Plus is the fastest growing social network in history or a fast-cooling over hyped and pointless fad is, for now, a matter of perspective. For those of us who do use the service though, it is often far more engaging than any other alternative. You can find me on Plus here.

I found this via Sarah Vela and it was made by AJ Batac.

You like bookmarklets? Here's an experimental one that will search for whatever URL you're on in Topsy's new Google Plus index - to see what conversations have happened on Google Plus about that URL: Plus Hunt

Disclosure: Google Plus bought my love by including me in its recommended users list, artificially inflating my number of social contacts and changing the way I experience and describe the service. All because I'm so handsome, I presume that's why they listed me.

Well, great! The possibilities are endless! I want to automate everything! Where to begin? How about with some tasks that are important, not merely nifty? For instance, does posting your whole life into the cloudy ether ever make you worry about losing your data? Read on to learn how ifttt can back that stuff up for you automatically from behind the scenes.

A Little Background

A "task" on ifttt follows the "If this then that" format. For creating tasks, ifttt has "channels" for many of the Web services we use. The "this" part of the task is called a "trigger," and each of the channels has a set of triggers for the common things you do with that service, like "If I post a photo to Instagram." The "that" part of a task is called an "action," which each channel also lists for its service, like "then save it to my Dropbox." When you create a task, you link a trigger in one channel to a task in another channel, and away you go: "If I post a photo to Instagram, then save it to my Dropbox." Tasks check your services for new data every 15 minutes, but you can refresh them manually.

It's a little trickier than writing a sentence, though. Each trigger and task must be defined by various "addins" that point to variables like your user name on the service, the title of a post, the caption of a photo, the URL, etc. We can show you how to set up the basic task, but you'll have to figure out how to grab just the right data for you.

Fortunately, tasks can be saved as "recipes," so they can be shared. Below is a guide to the kinds of tasks you can create for backing up your online life with some links to existing recipes for inspiration. Clicking any of the links will take you to the full ifttt page that explains that piece of the puzzle in detail.

How To Back Up Your Photos

Ifttt currently offers channels for three major photo services: Facebook, Flickr and Instagram. Each of these services works a little differently, but they can all be backed up to Dropbox using ifttt.

Here are the triggers for each service that can be used to save photos:

Facebook:

• You upload a new photo
• You are tagged in a photo

Flickr:

• Any new public photo
• New public photo tagged
• New public photos (for batch uploads)
• New public favorite

Instagram:

• Any new photo by you
• New photo by you tagged
• New liked photo

To back up your photos on ifttt, find the triggers above that suit you, then set up tasks for those triggers to engage the "Add file from URL" action in Dropbox. Just make sure your trigger uses the addon to get the photo's URL, and you should be all set. Here are some example recipes:

Download Facebook Tagged Photo
by pavelbinar

Download any photos of me to dropbox
by liamegan

Save all Instagram photos to Dropbox
by tealtan

Faves to dropbox (for Flickr)
by hartsell

How To Back Up Your Tweets and Blog Posts

Ifttt has channels for Posterous, Tumblr, Twitter and WordPress, so it can be used to back up your posts from any of those services. You can save your posts as files in Dropbox, or you can save them as notes in Evernote. Here are the triggers you can use from these channels:

Posterous:

• New post
• New post tagged

Tumblr:

• Any new post
• New text post
• New photo post*
• New like

* Note: Tumblr has triggers for every single kind of media post. It would be crazy to link them all here. Instead, just go to the Tumblr channel page to find them.

Twitter:

• New tweet by you
• New tweet by you with hashtag

WordPress:

• Any new post

You can save posts from any of these triggers as files in Dropbox by adding on their URL, or you can grab the the actual post as a note in Evernote. Here are some recipes for inspiration:

Archive your tweets on Evernote
by redwanhuq

Blog archive (for Tumblr)
by caffeinefusion

Next page: How To Automatically Save Articles to Read Later

How To Automatically Save Articles to Read Later

Throughout the day, you might find articles that look interesting on Twitter or Google Reader but you don't have time to read them. You can use ifttt to save those articles for later automatically just by liking or starring the Google Reader item or a tweet containing a link. You can even set up RSS triggers to feed any blog in the world straight into your read-later services. Here are the triggers:

Twitter:

• New favorite tweet
• New link from any friend
• New link from you

Google Reader:

• New liked item
• New starred item

RSS feed:

• New feed item
• New feed item matches (for keyword or phrase triggers)

Ifttt has actions for both Instapaper and Read It Later, which means you can set up triggers to save articles to them automatically when you favorite them from Twitter, Google Reader or straight from RSS. If you don't use either read-later service, you can save articles as text in Evernote. Here are some example recipes:

Google Reader Star to Instapaper
by btpayson

Send Google Reader Starred items to Read It Later
by m3r

Reader Star To Evernote
by nuochan

Link In "Favorite" Tweet Sent Directly To Instapaper
by jimmaiella

How To Back Up Your Check-Ins and Statuses

If you want to keep a diary of your check-ins and statuses for posterity, you can use triggers from Foursquare, Facebook or Twitter to save updates as Google Calendar events. Here are the triggers you'll need:

Foursquare:

• Any new check-in

Facebook:

• New status message by you

Twitter:

• New tweet by you
• New tweet by you with hashtag

Using these triggers, you can make these updates save automatically as events in Google Calendar. If you have your Google Calendar sync down to your computer, it's a way of locally backing up your status updates and saving them like journal entries. Here are some recipes to get you started:

Dear Diary, a running log of where I am
by alexander

Save a timeline of facebook statuses to G Cal
by liamegan

Go Make Your Own!

Backing up your social life is just the beginning of what you can do with ifttt. For more inspiration, browse the recipe list. Here's the full channel menu, so you can see what services are connected. Don't see your favorite? Contact the ifttt team and tell them what you'd like to see.

Already chomping at the bit? Click right here to start making a task.

Have you created any cool ifttt recipes? Share them with us in the comments.

Remember when we were little and played the license plate game? Or when vans came with a single DVD player as a factory-installed option? They seem so quaint now. How did we ever survive?

This isn't Tippins & Crew first cross-country trip: they have done many over several summers. But it is the biggest caravan and probably the best organized, given their past experience. And it makes sense, given the family: when I visited their home in the East Bay earlier this summer, there was so much hardware strewn around their living areas I thought I was in Best Buy, or at least one of the better equipped computer labs that I have worked in. The living room contained Tippins' office, a large screen TV, and several video boxes such as a DVR, an AppleTV, and a few other devices. But now they have packed up all their gear and are on the road, crossing somewhere over the Texas border hopefully tonight.

So far the Eastward Ho experience hasn't had any big issues. "The Arizona desert is really the only place so far that we struggle with connectivity," said Tippins. And everyone is very self-directed, which helps to keep the device conflicts to a minimum.

So if you are contemplating such a journey, consider these battle-tested travel tips from Tippins.

• Everyone has their own screen, now a DS isn't exactly on par with a 17-inch MacBook Pro, but still it can keep the little ones engaged for hours.
• Power management is key. "In the beginning we used a DC inverter, wired to the cigarette lighter. Once we wired the inverter straight to the battery, which worked fine. We learned not to use the auxiliary cigarette lighter outlet. We burned out the master relay in the van and had to change that (a fuse) along the way, to get our blinkers, ABS, and air conditioning back." After using a more industrial-strength under-the-seat inverter for several years, now they use a special charger that looks like a coffee mug and has two AC outlets, and plugs into the lighter port.
• Walkie-talkie radios are helpful too, though Tippins uses a self-installed 25W Kenwood UHF mobile unit in 2 cars with a repeater in car 3. Communication that won't fail is essential if you have multiple cars and you get separated by a few miles and you want to coordinate your rest stops. A cell phone isn't fast enough to say, "Quick, turn here."
• Software. Bring plenty of games and DVDs for the kids, goes without saying. Analog fun also never goes out of style. A pad and a box of colored pencils or crayons each keeps all aged children happy.
• Multiple broadband accounts are useful. Use tethering options or Mifi to share them amongst your brood.