Every now and then, one of my readers asks me how I manage my time. How do I do all of the things that are required to get the FlashReport up and running each day, and also work at a full time job?  (For those readers who have not tuned up by biography page, I work as a Public Information Officer for the Orange County Sheriff’s Department.)

This seems like as good a time as any to tell you about how it all works. First and foremost, it simply wouldn’t be possible to do the FR each day if it were not for the fine website development team at Cloudspace, the firm that helped me to "stand-up" this website. 

There are really two aspects to updating the FR. The first happens each and every morning.  I am up at the wee hours (well, 5:45ish or so) and that is when I sift through over 60 webpages looking for relevant items on California politics.  As I do this, thanks to the innovative software designed by Cloudspace, when I find stories on these sites, a simple right click on the mouse on that link, and it is "stored" for my use when I am done surfing the web.  After selecting the stories, I open a special website where all of the links I have selected are displayed.  The cool software already has done some formatting – so if I have a link from the LA Times that says "Governor wins re-election" it will show up in my program as "LAT: Governor wins re-election" (it can tell from the website address what prefix to put). Then I add some titles and/or photos, and easily rearrange the links in the order I want them to show – and press publish!  It’s as simple as that.

**There is more – click the link**

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This entry was posted on Monday, March 20th, 2006 at 12:00 am and is filed under Blog Posts.