One Computer - Many Work Environments

NOTE: Currently this tip works for Windows only.

When dealing with either multiple personas (I'm not just Xackr) or multiple clients it can be problematic to quickly set up your work environment if you use a lot of web-based tools. Firefox can easily be customized to open and be ready to go with your workset, but what happens when you use the same tool such as Gmail, Facebook, or Google Calendar for several of your identities or clients?

One way to address the problem is the use of a portable USB hard drive and PortableApps versions of software. An alternative, albeit a slower one, is to use SD cards one per instance. I use both for different reasons with my USB drive being my backup of my SD Cards.

So we take a standard USB portable drive, I have a Seagate 250GB Go Drive I got on sale for $35. I prefer the Seagate brand, just because over the years I've had other brands die on me. Now we take that drive and we partition into multiple partitions using the Disk Manager (right click on My Computer-> Manage->Disk Management). Find the USB drive in the list.  If the existing partition takes up the whole drive and you have Vista you can shrink the volume, if you can't shrink it - just delete it and start over. You want to create a partition for each of the instances you'll need. Drives have to have a letter so you'll max our at at 26 and you'll probably see system problems if you add much more than 10. If you have 10 online personas you really should consider cutting the computer off and going outside and getting some sunshine. Just an idea. When sizing the drive keep in mind the amount of data you'll want to store if you are going to save photos, docs, etc. related to that instance.

So now you have several partitions. On ONE and only ONE of these partitions you will install a set of PortableApps including Firefox (and Thunderbird and Sunbird if you like). If you want to fast track it, you can download and install the portable apps suite. I also HIGHLY recommend Keepass password keeper. When dealing with complexity, you should get in the habit of opening your password manager FIRST and using it everytime you sign up for an online service.

If you are a web application developer, you can also install XAMPP or XAMPLITE to have an on demand Apache/MySQL/PHP/Python development environment on EACH of the partitions. PortableApps can handle starting and stopping the service with a control panel.

Now you are ready to configure FireFox with your BASE add-ons. Install all your standard ones, I use NoScript, Firebug, Greasemonkey, etc. Add any additional apps you want to use across all partitions into your PortableApps configuration. Once that is done, copy the first instance to the other ones you want to use.

To really expedite things, add a shortcut to the different LaunchPortableApps.exe to your QuickLaunch bar. Once there open the shortcuts up and rename them to something more recognizable.

Once that's done, you can open each FireFox instance and set it up to open with a bookmark folder that contains your most frequently used online tools. If you have developed the good habit of adding each password as you go to Keepass, you can also check the remember me or have FireFox remember the password without fear of finding yourself struggling to remember the password later on.

There are certain apps, such as SecondLife, that are NOT available in a portable form. For SecondLife you simply build a command file (also known as a batch file) that passes command line options to the viewer to startup as that person. You can even, if you have the horsepower, configure it to run multiple viewers on a single machine (yeah you CAN do that).

Soon I'll show you how to customize each instance of PortableApps, so you will know instantly where you are.

Overall, being able to run a preconfigured Firefox for multiple personas/clients should save you a tremendous amount of "getting ready to start" work effort.

One caveat. You can only run one instance of FireFox on the local machine at a time. So to change browsers you will have to EXIT the current instance of FireFox and start a new one. Unlike Flash Drives and SD cards, startup time is negligible on a USB 2.0 hard drive.

One last major benefit is when you travel, you can now easily carry everything on just the drive and use it on any Windows computer. Backing up your work is as easy as copying the contents of the drive to another USB drive.

Enjoy!