Well folks, the hope of this being a post a day has been marred by a web host outage and a fried hard drive. Such is life.
Before digging into it, you should read Stuzz’s comments on the previous post here. He provides some great tips and keyboard shortcuts.
Today’s observations – You can really go to town customizing Opera, its slightly overwhelming. It’s been helpful to have Stuzz along as an Opera mentor. Using new software requires learning a new way of doing things and that my friends takes time, energy and dedication. But hey – I’m still here, persevering and that counts for something. 
The words of the day? OperaLink and Chat.
Not a lot to say about OperaLink, it’s a sync much like Chrome and Firefox have and I don’t really use either of those services. I did turn it on though and can confirm it synced my bookmarks. It’s handy that you can turn on or off what you want synced, for instance – passwords were unchecked by default, which seems like a sane security approach.
The Chat the Opera browser comes with also runs in the same window as the browser tabs and like when I ran the Mail this way, again I had to rip it out to its own window to use it. I’m pretty set in my IRC ways and have always favored IRSSI to a GUI chat client, mostly because it’s impossible to close a chat window by accident. That being said, as GUI IRC clients go, the Opera client is more than adequate.
In closing, day 3 wasn’t as rich an experience as I hoped due to some hardware woes. I am in Puppy Linux now on my netbook and need to figure out how to get Opera installed on it. Once it’s installed, I’ll post day 4′s findings.
See you next time.
Opera Link:
Indeed Opera Link does what it says and is what it does. If I may list the items which can be linked: bookmarks, bookmarks bar, typed history, speed dial, notes, search engines, content blocker rules, passwords. As long as link is turned on, it will automatically work in the background and sync the data to all versions of Opera you have installed on your desktop(s) and mobile(s) (however, mobile only syncs a few of the items).
One other thing that FF and Chrome may or may not let you do is view/edit all your link items on the web as well – http://my.opera.com/community/login/?service=link
Also, for better or worse, now that you’ve signed up to use Opera Link you now have available to you your own blogs, photo sharing, friends etc in the My Opera community http://my.opera.com/community/ (look me up
)
Chat:
I don’t think there’s anything hidden hear I can illuminate for you. It connects to servers, joins rooms and sends and receives text. As with all other parts of Opera, help is a [F1] press away like – http://help.opera.com/Windows/11.60/en/chat.html
One thing I’m not sure on is why you feel the need to get mail and chat windows out of the way of other tabs? There’s quite a bit that can be done with Opera tabs: moving, pinning, stacking, tiling. Perhaps one of these might be better than creating a separate Opera window? If you get too many tabs, the Window panel is a tree-like view of all you have open, and can normally be a good way to organise things.