If you like to turn off Facebook chat, click the chat icon in the lower right corner of your Facebook page and select ‘Go Offline’.
None of your Facebook friends can IM you as your name won’t show up in their friends list even though you are logged in. And this setting is preserved for future sessions as well.
Related: Put Facebook Chat in Firefox Sidebar
· Put Facebook Chat in Firefox Sidebar & Talk from Any Web Page
· Know When Facebook Friends Secretly Delete You As a Contact
As the WSJ screenshot suggests, Mouseless Browsing adds unique numbers next to every hyperlink on the current web page – that link could either be in the form of text or even images.
Now if you want to click any of the hyperlinks to visit the target web page, just type the corresponding number with your keyboard and hit Enter.
The extension also works with search boxes and regular web forms. Here are some examples from BBC News and the CNN home page.
While you may think that this will only add clutter to web pages, that’s really not the case. Everything can be customized including the style of these "unique numbers" that appear next to web links.
In fact you could can URLs (with wildcards like *techmeme* or *google.com) to automatically suggest sites where this feature should be enabled or disabled by default.
· Display Windows Clock On Your Desktop With a Keyboard Shortcut
· Speed Launch: Set Aliases for Documents, Programs & Websites
StumbleUpon toolbar has this nice "Stumble" button that, upon clicking, takes you to some random but interesting website. Click the button again and you’re transported to another site and the cycle continues.
Now if you don’t have StumbleUpon installed in your browser, try this easy hack that lets you channel surf the web on the lines of StumbleUpon but using public del.icio.us bookmarks.
Let’s say you love exploring web pages that are specifically about Photoshop. In that case, simply click the link below or drag-n-drop that into your browser bookmarks bar as a bookmarklet.
http://delicious.com/tag/photoshop?random=1
If you like to only explore popular content related to Photoshop, use this bookmarklet:
http://delicious.com/popular/photoshop?random=1
The trick is simple – if you add the ‘random’ parameter to a delicious page, it takes you to one of the bookmarks that’s already saved on that page.
Just replace the word ‘photoshop’ in the above links with any other topic – say web2.0 or lehman or sarahpalin.
There’s something more. If you are looking to explore completely random sites via delicious that may or may match your interest, use these links:
http://delicious.com/recent?random=1
http://delicious.com/popular?random=1
The former will take you one of the bookmarks that was recently saved on delicious while the latter will limit surfing to only sites that recently got popular on delicious.
Also see: Use StumbleUpon without the Toolbar
· Auto Discover Great Websites Without Installing StumbleUpon Toolbar; Works In All Web Browsers
· New del.icio.us Bookmarks Extension for Firefox Uses Status Bar
· Read Latest News & Articles Related to your Delicious Tags with Jaxly
There are at least two know workarounds for reading The Wall Street Journal Online for free – one involves changing referrer to Google News while the second is through Digg search.
Now here’s another but more simple trick that will give you full-text access to all subscriber-only articles available on The Wall Street Journal website including old archives.
If you see that ‘key icon’ next to a story, that means you only read a preview of that article and the full article will become available only after you login. Let’s see how you can bypass this:
The URL of all news stories published on WSJ.com follow a particular pattern:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122176966568653611.html
This URL structure is maintained even when stories move from the front page on to the archives where they become available only to WSJ subscribers.
Now if you like to read the above WSJ story in your browser, just prepend the following text to your story URL:
http://mobile2.wsj.com/device/article.php?mid=&CALL_URL=
Now your new URL would look something like this and this, as you expected, points to full article and not just the preview.
http://mobile2.wsj.com/device/article.php?mid=&CALL_URL=http://www.wsj.com/article/SB122176966568653611.html
The above method should also work for the Asia and Europe editions of Wall Street Journal since they also follow the similar URL structure.
Here’s another working example:
Original (limited) version: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122177625215054207.html
Full Text: http://mobile2.wsj.com/device/article.php?mid=&CALL_URL=http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122177625215054207.html
If the above step sounds confusing, just skip them and drag this link into your browser bookmarks bar -
So you have see the new "I’m a PC" ad campaign from Microsoft that’s aimed squarely at the popular "Get a " campaign of Apple.
In case you missed watching those brilliants ads, go to microsoft.com/windows (not YouTube) as the video quality here is far better. You can download all the videos here.
There’s another very interesting part of this campaign where you may see your photograph on the Microsoft website or it may even show up on a screen in Times Square.
To participate, go to lifewithoutwalls.com and simply upload your picture or record a short video using the webcam. Once approved (no offensive or adult content is allowed), you’ll see yourself on the Wall of Windows users – Microsoft will email you a link with the exact location of the photo.
Now Microsoft is running these ads in Times Square for the next three weeks (see live screens below) and your picture could show up on the Times Square screen at any point during that time.
Reuters screen on Times Square – Live Camera
Live NASDAQ screen on Times Square
There’s no need for you to fly to New York for catching a glimpse as you’ll automatically get the photo of your Times Square appearance in an email. Not bad.
Who’s the guy on the home page (the guy that looks like John Hodgeman)? That is . He is an actual software engineer at Microsoft.
Google News used to be a search engine but since last year, they started hosting stories from news agencies like the Associated Press and Agence France-Presse as these services, unlike Reuters, don’t have dedicated websites to publish their own content.
This is probably a very successful experiment because according to bloglines, more than a million blog posts have cited Associated Press stories that are actually hosted on Google News. Similarly, there are over 3,000 articles on Digg that again link to news stories hosted on ap.google.com.
The Associated Press and other newswire agencies may have never seen that kind of exposure had they not done a syndication deal with Google but there’s a small problem – all wired news stories published on Google News have a very short life-spam and expire after 30 days.
That means if you link to some current Google News story from your web page today, that link will return a 404 only after a couple of weeks and all your site visitors will see is this message.
Broken links are an absolute no both from the perspective of visitors and search engines. It may therefore be a good idea to link to CNN, NYT and other news websites where those stories will stay forever.
· BBC Builds a News Aggregator To Show Related Web Content
· Google Earth Does a Yahoo! 3D News Globe With New York Times
· Visualize Breaking News Stories on a Rotating 3D Globe
· After Valleyvag, TechCrunch Too Has Stopped Internal Linking
· Both gPhone and iPhone Get Equal Love from Techmeme Crowd
Bollywood superstar Amitabh Bachchan, who is also India’s best known blogger, recently revealed some details about traffic flowing through his blog.
Amitabh has been blogging at bigb.bigadda.com since April this year and following is a summary of his blog stats:
While these are extremely impressive figures for sure, it does hint that only a very small fraction of India’s 1 billion strong population may actually be reading blogs online.
At the same time, stars like him have definitely helped popularize the concept of blogs here.
Sometime back, Google introduced speech recognition in YouTube that enables you to search for words spoken in the video and you could also directly jump to the portion where that word was said.
Initially you had to install an iGoogle gadget to experience YouTube’s speech recognition but now there’s a dedicated search page for this at Google Audio Indexing - this not just enables you to find spoken words in videos but also share that video portion.
If you like to share a clip where that word was found (or uttered), just click that ‘people’ icon in the YouTube Video player and you’ll get a direct link to that particular video segment.
http://labs.google.com/gaudi?q=obama&start=0&num=10&longId=-5906960400639115923
Like Blinkx, Google too has developed its own speech recognition system (called GAudi, for Google Audio Indexing), which powers both Google Audio Indexing and the Google Elections Video Search gadget.
Google Audio Indexing currently searches only videos related to US Elections that are uploaded on the YouTube political channels.
· Tazti - Free Voice Recognition Software for Web Search & iTunes
A Technorati report suggested that only 36% of the blog posts are written in English while the rest are published in Japanese, Chinese, Italian and other languages.
While this data may be slightly old, it does hint at the multilingual nature of blogosphere and how we miss majority of the published content by limiting subscriptions only to RSS feeds that are written in English.
Now if you like to expand your daily information sources and read feeds published in foreign languages, Mloovi could be an ideal service for you.
1. Mloovi translates blog feeds from one language to another using Google Translate.
2. The translated version is available as a feed so people can directly subscribe to it in any news reader.
Founder Mike Robinson says that Mloovi is also available as a widget for blog publishers - this will help non-English speaking visitors to directly subscribe your blog in their own native language without using language translation.
For instance, here are links to this feed in Hindi, Russian, Korean, Chinese and Arabic. You only get partial summaries because of Google Translate API limitations but they should still be good enough for getting a basic idea about the full post.
Related: Google AJAX Language Translation Tutorial
· How to Translate PDF & Word Documents with Google Translation
· Translate Word Documents Quickly with Windows Live Translator
Compression tools like PPTMinimizer come handy in situations when you have to email documents that are too large for your email program. These tools can reduce file size by optimizing the embedded graphics without affecting quality.
Now the new version of PPTMinimizer can compress Microsoft Word documents as well in addition to PowerPoint files. It also works with presentations created in StarOffice and OpenOffice.
PPTMinimizer is portable so you can carry the whole program on a USB stick. They’ve also included an Outlook add-in so you can compress and email documents / presentations in minimum number of steps.
If you like to grab a copy of PPT Minimizer for free, go here and key in your email address - they’ll send you the license keys via email.
The above giveaway is valid only for the next few hours so if you miss the deadline, here’s another option - just put a comment below. Balesio has given 10 additional licenses for DI readers that will be distributed once the official giveaway is over.
The moment you see an interesting website, you save it to your bookmarks for future reference.
Thus, with time, you have created a huge list of favorites that’s not just long but is spread across different places like Firefox, delicious, Google Bookmarks, Opera, etc.
Though backing up favorites is easy but are they worth anything if the underlying web page changes or disappears off the web completely ?
You definitely don’t want to miss access to all these food recipes that you have painstakingly collected on the Internet over the past couple of months.
Now you could either save web page manually using these web clipping tools or a much better option is Iterasi - they have come up with a very elegant solution where you just have to upload a file containing all browser bookmarks and they handle the rest while you take a coffee break.
Iterasi create an archive of all web pages associated with your bookmarks and saves them permanently into your account so you always have access to all your favorite content. And the price is perfect - $0.
Archive Web Pages Automatically at Regular Intervals
There’s some more - Iterasi can also archive different versions of your favorite web pages as they change over time. For instance, if you CNN is your favorite website, you can do a "Daily" check and a new copy will be uploaded to your account each day so you can see changes across time.
Iterasi can either accept your local browser bookmarks or you can pass your del.icio.us credentials and it will fetch all your online bookmarks. For this to work with other online bookmark service like Yahoo! Bookmarks, ma.gnolia, Windows Live Favorites, etc - you’ll have to first export them local in the standard bookmark format.
If you ever used bookmarks to save links, this is definitely something your should not miss. Available on both Mac and Windows version of Iterasi.
· Build Your Own Internet Archive With Iterasi; Now on Firefox 3
· Archive Web Pages Automatically at Regular Intervals with Iterasi
· EverNote Web Clipper Now Captures Complete Web Pages
AdSense publishers will soon have access to extremely detailed stats about ads via Google Analytics reports.
You’ll know about web pages that get more clicks, revenue generated per page, CPM rates, top referring sites, etc. For more, check this story on AdSense and Analytics integration.
The screenshots were inadvertently published on TheGoogleCache.com and were cached by different newsreaders. Here are more screenshots from the same source that give exciting hints about what’s coming next. (click to enlarge)
There’s a new AdSense section added to the Analytics Reports that displays complete statistics about how visitors interact with Google Ads on your site and how have the ads performed over time.
This report gives a consolidated view of AdSense earnings made along with information like clicks per page, CTR, CPM and total number of ad impressions.
This Analytics report will give an overview of how your AdSense earnings have changed over time (like your site traffic in Google Trends).
This report is similar to the ‘Top AdSense Content’ report but that was for the entire site and this is on the page level.
Let’s say site abc.com and xyz.com have linked to a page on you are website and you are getting referral traffic. With the AdSense Referrer report, you’ll know the exact revenue that you are making from visitors that are coming to you via two different sources.
All these new AdSense - Analytics reports will also be very useful if you plan to have a site / blog with multiple contributors and their payment is a fixed percentage of AdSense Revenue generated from articles that they have written. No complex Excel sheets required anymore.
· AdSense Click Tracking Data in Google Analytics Is Coming Soon
· Counting Google AdSense Clicks with MyBlogLog
· How Many Google AdSense Ads Did You Click Today ?
· Do You Maintain Multiple Google Accounts ? Solve That Headache of Logging In and Out
Facebook and MySpace may be the hottest social networking sites around but there’re so many other online social networks that are also very popular and cater to some special interests. Let’s take a look:
Muxlim - It is like MySpace for Muslims but family-friendly and free of any nudity or adult content that may offend the Islamic community.
MyChurch - This is online community of Christian Churches. Each Church on MyChurch has a profile page that allows its followers to join and then the church members can also inter-connect with each other. Ministers can also post sermons as audio podcasts on MyChurch.
Eons - Eons is a social community for people who have crossed the age of 50. One of the most active groups on Eons is ‘50+ Singles Group’. From the founder of Moster.com.
CafeMom - This is a hugely popular social networking site but just for moms - you won’t even find a gender column on the sign-up page.
Dogster - A social network for pet dogs and dog owners. Like Facebook gifts, you can "leave a bone’ when you are on any dog’s page to show your appreciation. Doggy Space and My Dog Space are other social communities for dog lovers. Cat owners can flock to Catster and My Cat Space.
Geni - This is more than just another family tree builder. You begin by adding your own name to the tree, followed by relations who are then invited to complete their details and also join own your private ‘family’ network.
First Wives World - This is a social network for anyone who has been affected by divorce, directly or indirectly. Members include divorced women, children of divorced parents, family members of divorcing women and so on.
Totspot - This is a social network for new born babies and kids maintained by their parents. If you are expecting a child, you can also join but keep the birth date same as the expected date given by your doctor. Totspot will also keep a record of other members who have recently viewed the profile page of your child.
Resources for further reading:
Video: Social Networks in Simple English
Google Page Creator is awesome - anyone can build a good looking website in minutes using the built-in templates or they can write pages externally (say in Dreamweaver) and upload them to Creator.
And everything is free - there are no ads on your pages and Google takes care of all the web hosting bills. But as they say, all good things come to an end, and so is Google Page Creator getting replaced by Google Sites.
While Google Sites and Google Pages have common feature (like the WYSIWYG AJAX editor), they are still quite different. For instance, you can’t upload HTML pages to Google Sites and are therefore limited to using one of the built-in themes for your site design.
The second issue is that if you make a Google Site public, the associated ’site activity log’ also becomes public - most website publisher will have reservations sharing this data with unknown visitors. Lastly, all external hyperlinks are ‘nofollow’ if that means anything to you.
Here’s a roundup of some website building services that are free and non-technical.
1. Office Live Small Business - While the name may suggest that the service is only for small business owners, just about anyone can create their website here.
Website Builder inside Office Live Small Business
Office Live is easy and filled with goodies - you have tons of professional web templates and color themes to choose from, there’re ready-made modules for common tasks like web forms, photo galleries, live maps, email newsletters, etc. plus you can also upload office documents to the website.
Everything is free including web hosting and server space.
2. Weebly - This is powerful but very user friendly and easy web page builder where you start with a blank canvas and build the page by dragging elements that include text, videos, pictures, maps and more.
Geeks can write their own HTML and add them to Weebly pages. There’s support for Google ads as well so you can even monetize sites created inside Weebly. Another advantage - site publishers download their full site with pictures and CSS as a zip file. Free users gets 100 MB of free storage space and there’re no bandwidth limitations
3. Snap Pages - This is Flash based website editor that is very beautiful and may be a perfect place if you looking to create a small website for sharing some photos and your calendar. The options are slightly limited for non-premium users as they can’t create new pages.
4. Edicy Pages - It’s a new website creation tool that is just perfect for the techie crowd who wants more control over their site layout.
Start by picking a design from the template gallery and then you may completely change the look and feel of your site by editing the blog template similar to WordPress themes or Blogger template. It also supports JavaScript code and like Google Sites, Edicy tracks all changes made to a site.
5. Synthasite - This is again an easy yet very powerful tool for building websites but unlike competition, Syntasite is completely free. Images uploaded to Synthasite can be diretly edited in Picnik just like you have in Flickr. The tool also lets you embed Google AdSense ads in web pages much like Weebly.
Some more site builders worth checking out are WebOn, WebSketch, Viviti, Wix and Webs.
Onion Map has a great collection of interactive 3D maps of some of the most world’s popular cities.
You can zoom and move around the place just like Google Maps but this is lot more clean and interesting. Foreign tourists will also find these maps very useful since all the major city attractions, hotels & restaurants, shopping joints, etc. are very clearly marked.
RSS feeds have completely changed the way we consume information on the web. You no longer have to visit The New York Times or CNN every hour of the day to check news headlines because the feed reader is doing that for you behind the scenes.
The only problem is that not all web content is available via feeds. For instance, Amazon, eBay and Google Product Search (Froggle) are good places to find discount deals on books and electronic gadgets but unfortunately, none of these shopping sites publish feeds.
Problem: Let’s say you are looking for some discount deals on iPod Nano. An option here is that you open Google Products page and search for iPod Nano. If you don’t find the right price, repeat the same cycle next day. This may sound easy but imagine doing this for ten other products on five different shopping sites. Tedious, right?
Solution: What we can do here is build a simple spreadsheet in Google Docs that will monitor prices across all these search pages and will present them in a table so you don’t just track prices but also compare them at the same time.
To get started, you need access to Google Docs and some basic knowledge of XPath. Don’t let this scare you - XPath is a simple way to access information contained inside HTML web pages. For instance, if you want to know about all URLs that are mentioned on any web page, the XPath expression would be //a[@href]. Some more examples:
//strong means all the items in the web page with strong html tags
//@href means all the items in the web page with href element, i.e., the URLs in that page.
If you feel that writing XPath expressions is a tricky job, get the XPath checker add-on for Firefox that will help you easily determine the XPath of any element on a web page.
This is the search page for ‘ipod nano’ inside Google Products. As you may noticed already, the result title is formatted with CSS class "ps-large-t" while the the product price using the class "ps-larger-t" - you can easily find these class names via Firebug or from the HTML source.
Now we’ll create a table inside Google spreadsheet that will have the name, price and URL that will link to that product listing in Google Docs. You can use the same approach to get product data from other sites like Amazon, eBay, Buy.com, etc.
Here’s how the final spreadsheet looks like - all this is live data and will update automatically if the corresponding information is updated on Google Products.
As you may have seen in the previous tutorial on Google Docs, there’re built-in spreadsheet functions to help you easily import external data into Google Docs. One such useful function is ImportXML that, like ImportHTML, can be used for screen-scrapping.
The syntax is =ImportXML("web page URL", "XPath Expression")
Coming back to the spreadsheet, in order to fetch the price of ‘ipod nano’, we type the following formula:
=ImportXML("www.google.com/products?q=ipod+nano","//b[@class='ps-larger-t']")
You may replace ‘ipod nano’ with any other product name like ‘harry+potter’, ‘nikon+d60′, etc.
To enter this function into Google Docs, click an empty cell, press F2 and paste. See this Google Docs movie:
Similarly, for the product name, we use this formula:
=ImportXML("www.google.com/products?q=ipod+nano","//a[@class='ps-large-t']")
And for the URL (product hyperlink), the formula is:
=ImportXML("http://www.google.com/products?q=ipod+nano","//a[@class='ps-large-t']//@href")
You need to concatenate this with ‘http://www.google.com’ since Google Products uses relative URLs. This can be easily fixed by adding another column with the formula
=HYPERLINK("http://www.google.com/"&B3,"click here")
Related: Import data from HTML Web Pages into Excel
You don’t have to check this Google Docs Spreadsheet manually to see if prices have since yesterday - just select publish followed by "Automatically re-publish when changes are made" and subscribe to the document in your favorite RSS reader.
The author is an Excel whiz kid and blogs at Pointy Haired Dilbert, a virtual gold mine of tips related to data manipulation & visualization through Excel and other spreadsheet programs.
· Save Web Pages to Google Docs
· Zoho Will Help Backup All Your Google Docs Documents Locally
· Google Docs - The Perfect Tool To Live Blog any Event
· Monetizing Non-Content Web Pages with AdSense Ads Can Be Hard
· Read any Web Document Directly in Google Docs - Similar to Gmail
Most web hosting providers do not allow customers to use server space for storing file backups and there have been instances where personal files were deleted from the server without any warnings.
See "Never Use a Web Server for Online Backup."
Dreamhost, the company the hosts this site, was no different (see #6) but have recently changed policies and now allow customers to use their web servers for online backup.
Now to save your personal files like music, photos or videos on Dreamhost servers, you’ll need to create a new FTP user that is only to be used as an off-site backup - you cannot have websites associated with this ‘backup’ user.
Dreamhost gives 50 GB of disk space for your personal files and in case you exceed that limit, the cost is about 10¢ per GB per month.
Something important here - Dreamhost won’t keep a backup of your backup so please do not consider this option as a replacement of say, Mozy, Carbonite or Amazon S3. It’s just another safe-house for your files and sort of a guarantee that your web host won’t delete the personal files.
For people who love to carry software on a USB drive, here’s something you have been waiting for.
Carsten has created a portable version of Google Chrome that has all the features available in the the main browser but requires no installation - just unzip all the files and start Chroming.
This portable Google browser can run directly from the USB stick on any Windows computer and all user settings including web history, cookies, etc. will also get saved to the same folder on the stick.
To download, go to Carsten’s site (English). Portable Chrome is tested on Windows XP SP3 and Windows Vista SP1 machines.
Also see:
The Inspiration Behind The Logo Design of Google Chrome
Create Separate Profiles in Google Chrome for Family Members and Stay Extra Safe
This may be just another coincidence but there are some elements that seem to be common between the logo designs of Google Chrome and that of ThinkFree.
It’s not the official Thinkfree logo but is part of the installer that ships with the desktop version of Thinkfree Office 3.
Philipp Lenssen and Flickr members have come up with these illustrations to hint that the inspiration for Google Chrome logo may have come from Simon and Pokemon.
Earlier, Harry McCracken wrote about some similarities he found between the logo design of Google Chrome and that of Windows Vista - "No, the Chrome and Windows Vista logos are not true twins, but they’re both round and shiny, with the same color scheme–red, green, yellow, and blue."
Am sure these all are mere coincidences but the Thinkfree designers probably aren’t too happy about this and have made a ‘parody’ video on how the Google Chrome logo was designed.
Also see:
Open Websites in Google Chrome from Firefox
Create Separate Profiles in Google Chrome for Family Members and Stay Extra Safe
Google Chrome Features that we miss in other Web Browsers
