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
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
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
Open web pages or even hyperlinks in Google Chrome from Firefox itself.
If are using Firefox along side Google’s browser, this "Open in Google Chrome" extension might come handy - it lets you send web sites and links directly to Google Chrome from Firefox.
It can also be configured to always open certain web pages in Chrome - e.g. *google*, gmail, etc.
Download open-in-google-chrome.xpi on to your desktop and then drag it inside Firefox 3 much like what you did for Send to Google Docs.
Restart Firefox. Then go to Tools -> Add-ons -> Options and browse for the chrome.exe file on your Vista / XP / Windows 2000 machine.
In Windows XP, Google Chrome installs under \Documents and Settings\
The Google Chrome Firefox extension can also be configured to open a group of website(s) directly in Chrome even if you try accessing them from Firefox.
For instance, you may add "yahoo" to the list and any site that has yahoo in the URL would open in Chrome automatically. That includes "maps.yahoo.com", "news.yahoo.com", "yahoo.com" and even "bbc.com/news/yahoo-shares.html" so be careful while picking these wildcards.
Credits: Grayson Mixon wrote the excellent IE View Lite add-on based on the IE View of Paul Roub. I just made some very minor changes to Grayson’s code to make it work with Google Browser instead of Internet Explorer. Therefore all credits for the extension go to Grayson as it is entirely built upon his code-base.
This is hilarious though am not sure if it fits into the Google Easter eggs category:
Sorry, Google does not serve more than 1000 results for any query. (You asked for results starting from 990.)
In case you didn’t notice the flaw, that second (or first) ‘o’ dropped out of ‘Google’.
To reproduce this Google bug on your machine, search anything on Google and then append "&num=100&start=990" to the Google URL without quotes.
For instance, if you search for "pajamas media", then your Google URL would look like:
Original: http://www.google.com/search?q=pajamas+media
Modified: http://www.google.com/search?q=pajamas+media&num=100&start=990
Some CSS guru may help you figure out the reason behind this but the hack was initially discovered by Brian Brown at SEOmoz.org.
Related: Guess the Most Expensive Part of Google Homepage
