googl-ade
November 15th, 2007 | Published in etc
I’ve got to do a presentation on Google Analytics tomorrow and it’s been taking up a lot of my time and attention over the past week. So much so that I’ve felt this stab of irritation every time I’ve sat down to read a few feeds that aren’t work related or go through personal mail.
Along with this, I’m tiring of NetNewsWire. Not because it’s bad or anything, but if I want it to sync between machines, I’m left with either slow-as-hell sftp, slow-as-hell .Mac, or flaky Newsgator syncing. So I’ve been spending more time with Google Reader, trying to internalize the keyboard shortcuts.
So I finally picked my work identity apart from my personal one using Firefox and the work-related Google account I had to set up anyhow. Initially I had thoughts of just using Camino for work, but there are some Firefox extensions I depend on for work, like It’s All Text.
Two Firefox things made it pretty easy:
LifeHacker’s bit from earlier this year reminded me that multiple profiles in Firefox are doable.
Paolo “Kaosmos’” ProfileSwitcher makes it easy to switch from profile to profile without running the Firefox profile manager from the command line. It offers the opportunity to either run two profiles simultaneously or close one and open the other.
If you run separate profiles simultaneously, you get two Firefox icons in the dock, and two discrete sessions: cmd-` only works on the windows of one session, and quitting one instance does nothing to the other. The windows of each reflect the bookmarks, privacy settings and add-ons of that profile only.
Now my work and personal identities more segregated, and there’s no cookie confusion if I move from a work-based Analytics session to a personal Gmail session, or a personal Reader session to a work Analytics session. Google gets very crabby about cookie juggling.
[Safari People: rooSwitch Lite does a sort of profile management, presumably by swapping out preference files. ]