bharath | TECHRENA dot Net

GreaseMonkey Gets Official Support For Google Chrome

February 4, 2010 by bharath

If you are an enthusiastic fan of GreaseMonkey user scripts in Firefox browser and haven’t switched to Google Chrome for the only reason that Chrome doesn’t support GreaseMonkey user scripts, well probably you need to think again.

Either you have missed our elegant tutorial on how to enable GreaseMonkey user scripts in Google Chrome, or you haven’t been following the news off late.

Well, Google Chrome 4 now officially supports GreaseMonkey, according to Chrome official blog.If you still use an older version of Chrome, may be it’s the right time you should update your browser to the latest version.

Google Chrome Greasemonkey According to Aaron Boodman, Software Engineer in Chromium project, (who is also incidentally the original author of Greasemonkey Firefox add-on), as of now there over 40,000 scripts available on userscripts.org alone.Keep in mind that Google Chrome may not yet support all the user scripts, he expects that 15%-25% of scripts may not work in Google Chrome browser.That’s understandable since Chrome is no Firefox and that most of the scripts are written for use on Firefox.Install Greasemonkey scripts normally as you do in Firefox and enjoy the browsing in your own style.

Sony Ericsson Aspen (GreenHeart) Launched

September 7, 2010February 2, 2010 by bharath

Sony Ericsson has today officially announced the launch of Sony Ericsson Aspen, Windows Mobile 6.5.3 powered Smartphone.

This is the latest addition to Sony Ericsson’s GreenHeart™ portfolio (focusing on reducing the impact of the mobile phones on the environment).And also this is the first SE Windows Mobile powered handset to include a ‘front facing’ QWERTY keyboard (like Nokia E72 and BlackBerry devices).

“Sony Ericsson Aspen™ is the business phone with a conscience, perfect for any consumer or company who want to make a green choice in their daily work life.” Said Quentin Cordier, Global Marketing Manager, Sony Ericsson. “An affordable GreenHeart™ phone with the latest version of Windows Phone, the Sony Ericsson Aspen™ has a rich user interface and powerful productivity tools. But it’s not all about work, stay in touch with the fun parts of life with Media Browser and PlayNow ™, with simple access to social networks and quick and easy access to media files. Find the fun with a-GPS, Google Maps™ and snap pictures with the 3.2megapixel camera.”

Aspen supports quad-band GSM/EDGE with either HSPA 900/2100 or 850/900/2100 radios, it has Wi-Fi (and of course Bluetooth).Aspen also has a built-in A-GPS support and comes with Google Maps for navigational purposes.Human curvature design makes it to fit into the palm of the hand.

SE Aspen is scheduled to be available in the markets in 2010 Q2.Specifications of Aspen are listed out in the table below.

Specifications:

Size	117 x 60 x 12.45 mm
Weight	130 grams
Memory card support	SanDisk microSD™, up to 16 GB
Operating system	Windows Mobile® 6.5.3
Talk time GSM/GPRS	Up to 10 hours
Camera	3.2 megapixel camera4x digital zoom Multishot Self timer Smart contrast
Connectivity	3.5 mm audio jackA-GPS Bluetooth™ technology Google Maps™ Micro USB connector Modem Synchronisation USB mass storage support USB support Wi-Fi™
Screen	65,536 colour TFT2.4 inches 240 x 320 pixels (QVGA)
Colours	Iconic BlackWhite Silver

Sony Ericsson Aspen Pics:

More Pictures:Link

Price And Availability:

Sony Ericsson Aspen is released and is available in markets worldwide at $325 (e-bay) and is priced at Rs. 14,999 INR in India.

How To Disable Orbit Downloader 404 Error Redirect Page

February 2, 2010 by bharath

If you have installed Orbit Downloader in your browser as built-in download manager, you might have observed Orbit downloader 404 redirect page appearing whenever any webpage you open returns a 404 error.This may be annoying at times and you may want to disable this unnecessary redirect.The redirect page automatically opens up whenever browser navigation error occurs.

Orbit Downloader 404 landing page

Let’s see how to disable this Orbit redirect page in your browser (Firefox, Chrome, Netscape,Opera, Maxthon)

Solution:

Open Orbit Downloader Preferences from the menu.

Prefences in Orbit menu

In The Preferences, go to "Monitoring” tab, and uncheck “Let Orbit suggestions on browser navigation error”.

Uncheck Orbit Browser navigation error

And Click ‘OK’ to save your preferences.

Google Chrome Gains Market Share To Stand @ #3

February 2, 2010February 2, 2010 by bharath

According to the published by web metrics company NetApplications.com, Google Chrome managed to gain market share both from Internet Explorer and Firefox.

The superfast browser from Google has a market share of 5.20% as of January, 2010 overtaking Safari (4.51%) and Opera(2.38%).Remember Chrome has a share of just 1.62% in March 2009.

The following table shows the comparison of market shares of different browsers as of March 2009 and January 2010.

Month	IE	Firefox	Chrome	Safari	Opera	Opera Mini	Others
March 2009	68.46%	23.30%	1.62%	3.63%	2.12%	0.23%	0.65%
January 2010	62.18%	24.41%	5.20%	4.51%	2.38%	0.59%	0.72%

The worst affected being the IE, which lost almost 6% of market share since March 2009 to 62.18% in January 2010, whereas Firefox ended up at 24.41% even though Firefox lost its share slightly by 0.2% as compared to 24.61% in December 2009.

Full data:Link

New Launch: Click-To-Call Phone Numbers In Google Mobile Ads

February 6, 2010January 29, 2010 by bharath

Google Mobile Blog has announced the launch of new feature in Google mobile ads (ads under Google mobile search results).

Phone numbers that come in the web search results under the mobile version of Google search are now made clickable.This means that you can directly contact the local business people that you are interested via a phone call directly from Google search results.

This feature now makes sense because Google search results are now “Location based” .What it means is that suppose if you are interested in contacting a restaurant that has several branches, you will only see the phone number of the branch that is most nearer to you from the data based on your location (Otherwise,what’s the point in calling the restaurant branch that is in another city ?).

This I would say definitely a nice implementation from the ‘G’ engineers.

If you are an Adwords advertiser for mobile ads and want to include clickable phone number of your business in Google mobile ads, read this post from Adwords blog.

P.S:This feature is cuurently available only in smart phones like iPohone, Andriod etc..

[Read about my post on Google IME which was released yesterday.]

Google Transliteration IME In 14 Languages (Exclusively For Indian Languages)

January 29, 2010 by bharath

Now you can easily type text in your own language in a more simpler fashion using Google Transliteration IME (IME- Input Method Editor).Google has officially launched the Google Transliteration IME in fourteen (14) languages, most of which are Indian languages.

[See the complete list of supported/available languages at the bottom of this post]

From now on, you don’t need softwares like Baraha, Lekhini or Aksharamala to type in your language.

With Google Transliteration IME, the user needs to download a very small piece of software for any if the 14 available languages and this opens up a the language tool bar for the desired language.Great thing about this is that you just need to type letters in English and it’ll automatically translates (or suggests translation) into your preferred language.

You can select the input language from the language tool bar as shown in the screenshot below:

Selecting Telugu from Language Toolbar

Now open any application (ex. notepad) and type in English and you can see the word being translated to your selected language or showing list of possible words with your input.

[Here I have used Telugu as the input language, by downloading Google Transliteration IME for Telugu]

Google Transliteration IME Telugu input Techrena

The same procedure can be followed for other languages too.

IME edit in Hindi screenshot

[Sorry folks, I know only Hindi and Telugu other than English 🙁 ]

Download Google IME (For Windows XP, Vista, Windows 7 , 32-bit only)

Supported Languages:

Arabic,

Bengali,

Farsi (Persian),

Greek,

Gujarati,

Hindi,

Kannada,

Malayalam,

Marathi,

Nepali,

Punjabi,

Tamil,

Telugu,

Urdu

You can also use bookmarklet to directly type in your language in your web browser, which I’ll cover in a later post.For now, you can read about Transliteration feature in Gmail.

Reader New Feature: Track Changes In A ‘Website Not Offering Feeds’ Using Google Reader

March 2, 2010January 28, 2010 by bharath

The Problem:

Your favourite website doesn’t offer updates via feeds.So you can’t follow the latest changes in the site.

The Solution:

1.There is popular Page2RSS, that creates RSS feeds for any webpage whenever there’s an update to the page.

2.Now Google Reader has also implemented very similar feature that let’s you keep track of the changes in any website as RSS feeds in the reader.

How To Do This?

Open Google Reader and click “Add Subscription” just enter the URL of the website (or webpage) that you want to keep track.Google Reader will automatically generate the feed for it (if it can’t detect any RSS feed).

That’s it, you can now see the changes/ updates of that website in your Google reader feed items.

For some sample feeds generated through this, read this post from Google reader blog.

Using reCAPTCHA In Your Website To Prevent Comment Spamming

January 27, 2010 by bharath

Webmasters should always be conscious about the comments that they get in their sites.Spam comments in any form would affect his own website probably more that what he might have expected and sometimes even may get injected with spam content inside the website domain (read this example).

Webmasters are the responsible for comments on their site and sometimes comments also are considered as the site content.Spammers might leave their site links in the comments which may contain malware or other disgusting content that may be annoying to the typical reader of your site.This is particularly too for blogs.Thankfully, there are plugins like WP-SpamFree (my favourite).

I have come across another possible solution to this comment spamming problem when I came across this post from Google webmaster blog.

Using reCAPTCHA

recaptcha example

CAPTCHA, (short name for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) is a technology that allows us to make sure only humans can post comments or interact with other features of your website.

reCAPTCHA, is a free service owned by Google allows you to use CAPTCHA technology on your site for free.Just signup for reCAPTCHA, get an API key and use this key to setup reCAPTCHA on your site.If you are using WordPress, just install this WordPress CAPTCHA plugin and configure reCAPTCHA for your blog with your API key.

reCAPTCHA Email Protection (Mail hide):

reCAPTCHA also offers “Email Protection” for free.It works this way:

You may have to reveal your email address somewhere on the web and then the spammers through automated programs try to get access to your email and bombard your inbox with loads of spam mails.

When you use reCAPTCHA Email Protection enabled for your email, you email address will be shown fully only to users who enter the code through CAPTCHA, others will see it hidden like this one for example:

john …@example.com

To expand that email address, users have to go through CAPTCHA that filters automated programs.

Watch:

Google News Launches ‘”Recrawl” Feature To Crawl Publishers Sites More Frequently

January 27, 2010 by bharath

Google has just announced a new “recrawl” feature in Google News that sends Google newsbot to visit the publisher sites more often than ever.

What does this mean?

This means that if a news publisher site publishes a new article in a day and later corrects the article for any mistakes,typos, incorrect references, wrong headline or even if publisher updates the URL, Google news will make sure that it includes the most recent version of the article in its news section.

google-bot spider

Excerpt from official Google blog post.

From the moment we discover a new article, we’ll keep revisiting it looking for changes. Since we’ve noticed that most changes to articles occur just after they’re published, we revisit articles most frequently in the first day after we’ve found them. In some cases, we’ll even revisit articles we had trouble crawling the first time around. After that, we visit them less often.

The readers will no longer see broken links or outdated headlines, broken links in the news section.Publishers would be greatly benefited by this new move as Google newsbot keeps tracking the article almost live.

That’s a very welcoming change in Google news crawling, it would be more useful for bloggers if Google implements such a feature for blogs.

Find Out Number Of Email Subscribers To Your Site Feeds In FeedBurner

January 22, 2010 by bharath

FeedBurner is the service I use for serving RSS feeds of my blog to our readers as most of the others, FeedBurner being the most popular feed service in town.One feature that I most like in FeedBurner is its ability to offer RSS feeds via Email to those who have subscribed to the site RSS feeds by entering their email address.

FeedBurner keeps sending your newest posts as emails to the subscribers using your email address as “from” address whenever you add new content to your site.

But how to keep track of the number of users who have subscribed via email to your feeds?

Well, the number that FeedBurner shows in “Subscribers’ list isn’t actually the total no of email subscribers, keep in mind that it also includes those who have subscribed using other RSS readers and news aggregators.

I just dug into this to know how to find the real number of email subscribers of my blog feeds.

Thankfully FeedBurner does show this number but this may not appear to common FeedBurner users like me at first sight.Ok, let me show you where in the world you find this number.

STEPS:

Go to Publicize Tab from your feed stats dashboard.

Click ‘”Email Subscriptions” link under “Services’ menu

Find “Subscription Management” link under this menu

Under Subscriber Management section, you can see the “Total Subscribers”.Now this is the number we wanted, this is the actual number of email subscribers of your feeds.

You can also search your subscribers list or you may export your subscribers list as CSV (Comma-Separated Values) file.

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