bharath

New In Gmail : Customizing Messages for Offline Use

by

Gmail team has announced today that, those who are using Gmail Offline (By enabling it from the Labs features) can now no longer need to download the entire mail messages for offline reading. From now on, one can choose which messages to get downloaded to your offline folder (for example you may not need all those chat conversations when you are cheeking your mails offline for official or other important mails), the new option does allow you to select messages to be downloaded from your labels, and the messages received during particular duration and chat conversations with selected people.

Gmail offline download options

[Image: Official Gmail Blog]

If you still haven’t enabled it till now, click “Labs” Tab go to labs page and enable “Offline”

Today’s Google Doodle Galli Galli Sim Sim

by

It’s 40th Anniversary of Sesame Street [American educational children’s television series ] today and Google reminds it’s worldwide search users of the same.Regular Google’s doodle has been replaced with different styles using characters of the Sesame Street

Sesame Street has also been adopted to Indian televisions as Galli Galli Sim Sim in Feb 2006.

40th Anniversary of Sesame Street

[Characters: Boombah, Chamki ]

Google doodle

[ Big Bird from Sesame Street]

Google Voice Search Available For Your Nokia S60 Phones

by

Google has launched Google Search by Voice Application for Nokia S60 phones, which are hugely popular around the globe.

The new version of Google Mobile App for Nokia S60 phones which cover most N-Series and E-Series phones, when installed, places a a shortcut to Google search on your Nokia phone’s home screen.This allows you to search either by voice or by typing.

google app nokia s60

[image: Official Google blog]

Share

Also, the Google Search by Voice has been extended to support Mandarin Chinese.This means that Chinese users can just say the keyword they want to search and it will do come up with Google search result in a blink.

Note:To download the latest version of Google Mobile App directly from your Nokia S60 phone, visit m.google.com from your phone’s browser

Orkut’s Cool New Version Launched

by

Facebook has been gaining a lot of ground among the users in recent times outplaying Google’s Orkut. The Google has finally gets up to the challenge by launching more faster, lighter and much more safer version of their social networking site.

This new version has been developed using Google Web Toolkit (GWT).

What’s new ?

  • Simpler and faster loading
  • Easy navigation to other Google properties [You can find links to other Google tools like Gmail, right at the top]
  • One-stop notifications[friend requests, testimonials, community requests or birthday announcements, all at one place]
  • Fast photo uploads and photo sharing
  • Video Chat Integration
  • Inline comments for status messages, photos and videos
orkut new homepage

New Inline comments feature

More Customization:

Picking up favorite color in orkut

You can now customize your own profile page like never before.The new version claims to have added features like picking your favourite color from a list of 5 available default colors.

But this new version has been allotted to selected few users and you can identify them with thisOrkut favicon symbol next to their profile name.You can ask them for an invite to get started with this new version.

find out more at this page.

Firefox 3.6 Beta 1 Is Out

by

Mozilla has released the latest  beta 1 version of Firefox 3.6.This latest Beta version of the upcoming Firefox version was built on the Gecko 1.9.2 web rendering engine, which includes many improvements for web developers over the previous versions.

The Features:

  • Built-in support for Personas, so now your Firefox can be personalized fully.
  • Built-in Plugin-Check feature to alert users about outdated plugins , Web version of which was announced recently.
  • WOFF font format support
  • Enhanced JavaScript performance that improves browser overall responsiveness and startup time.
  • New CSS, DOM and HTML5 web technologies support.

Download Firefox 3.6b1 (Windows):

Firefox 3.6b1 windows download

via Mozilla Blog Post

How To Verify Blogger blog in Webmaster Tools

by

There has been some changes of late, to the verification process in Google Webmaster Tools for Blogger.com hosted blogs. The “Webmaster Tools” auto-verification link from the Blogger dashboard has been removed leaving Blogger blog users to have no other choice but to opt for verification through adding a HTML meta tag.

GWT plus Blogger logo

Webmaster Tools has outlined this process in simple steps.

Steps:

Sign in to Webmaster Tools

1)Click the “Add a site” button on the homepage of Webmaster Tools

add a site in webmaster tools

2) Just enter you blog’s URL (like techrena.blogspot.com for instance) and click “Continue” button.

3)Select the “Meta tag” verification method from the drop-down list

get verification meta tag

Copy the meta tag code that has been generated.It should be something of the form <meta name=”google-site-verification” content=”X…….X” />

Now open Blogger.com in a new tab or window and don’t close this Webmaster Tools page.

4) Now Sign into blogger.com and go to Dashboard and go to Layout section of your blog, under the Layout, select  “Edit HTML”

5) Paste the meta tag verification code it into the <head> section, before the first <body> section

edit template html and paste meta tag verification code

[Image : Google Webmaster Central blog]

6) Click “Save Template “

7) Go back to Webmaster Tools page which you have kept open and click on the “Verify “ button.

You are done and your blog has now been verified in Google Webmaster Tools.

Configure Google Friend Connect For WordPress Blogs

by

Google Friend Connect made its debut to WordPress.Google Friend Connect was previously available only to Blogger blogs through a simple gadget (although you can insert in any other non-blogger sites). Now there’s a more simpler way to this for WordPress , thanks to Mauro Gonzalez, Globant who developed this FriendConnect plugin  plugin to extend GFC to WordPress blogs.

He adds in a guest post in Google Social Web blog,

This plugin allows your visitors to authenticate using any OpenID account such as Google, Yahoo, or AIM and then comment on your posts with no need to complete a registration form.

Now, Let’s see how to setup Google Friend Connect for your WordPress blog:

Step 1: Go to google.com/friendconnect and add your new site details

Google Friend connect adding new site

Step 2: Once you have added you blog’s details, find your unique site ID of your site and note it down.

GFC site ID wordpress

Step 3: Download Google Friend Connect  WordPress Plugin and upload it to plugins folder in your WordPress installation.

Step 4: Under Settings in your dashboard visit ‘FriendConnect’ to configure that plugin.

Enter your site ID in the filed Google FriendConnect ID:

Google FriendConnect wp plugin configuration

Step 5: You can customize the GFC using various colour schemes.

Step 6: If you want to add various GFC widgets, visit widgets tab, you’ll find the widgets like

‘GFC Members’, ‘GFC Recommendations’ & ‘GFC Site Wide Comments’

GFC widgets wordpress

you can also try out various possible settings under them to find out which one best suits your blog.

Bing Brings Twitter Search

by

Twitter Search right from Bing!

Bing has today announced that It has integrated Twitter search in the universal Bing search, which now lets you the latest real-time tweets for your favorite topic or from the ‘Hottest topics on Twitter’.

Bing is also letting users know the ‘Shared links about Hottest Topics’ that the majority number of users are sharing.It’s known that Bing was previously gained access to the tweets of celebrities to include them in Bing search for testing purposes.

Twitter is providing Bing access to the overwhelming deluge of public, real-time tweets rushing in from all around the world so they can help you find those that make the most sense right now.

Twitter Team in their Blog Post

Bing and twitter search

The deal seems to have worked out and now Bing has access to all the tweets data of whole public in Twitter and this information is available via a simple Bing search.

At present the this is restricted to the US users.

Link:Access the Bing’s Twitter Search.

WordPress 2.8.5 – Security Hardening Release is Out

by

Popular Blogging Platform WordPress has released the update to the earlier version as WordPress 2.8.5 terming it as the “Security Hardening Release” with the following changes:

    • A fix for the Trackback Denial-of-Service attack that is currently being seen.
    • Removal of areas within the code where php code in variables was evaluated.
    • Switched the file upload functionality to be whitelisted for all users including Admins.
    • Retiring of the two importers of Tag data from old plugins.

WordPress 2.8.5 Download wordpress logo

The Issues:

Many bloggers today have reported some minor issues while upgrading to version 2.8.5

An error message

“Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 33554432 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 2354671 bytes) in …”

was prominent among the issues raised by the bloggers.

The fix to this issues is pretty much simple:

First disable all your plugins while upgrading and revert to the default theme of WordPress.

Now perform the auto-install upgrade to WP version 2.8.5.You’d have a very smooth upgrade.Now try to enable all your desired plugins.Now you may find that some plugins are still causing the above said error message.

Here’s the fix for it:

Open your FTP client, and open wp-config.php file in your WordPress installed directory.Add the following line:

define('WP_MEMORY_LIMIT', '64M');

This would increase the amount of memory that is being consumed by the PHP script.

    • A fix for the Trackback Denial-of-Service attack that is currently being seen.
    • Removal of areas within the code where php code in variables was evaluated.
    • Switched the file upload functionality to be whitelisted for all users including Admins.
    • Retiring of the two importers of Tag data from old plugins.

YouTube Launches Real-Time Comments Search Similar to Twitter Search

by

YouTube is testing a new feature ‘Real-Time Comments search’ and this feature has been launched in ‘TestTube’ where in the YouTube engineers and developers test out the upcoming features.

This new search however, is pretty much similar to that of ‘Twitter Search’.

“The full comment will appear on a continuously updated results page, and “trending topics” indicates the hottest topics of conversation on YouTube at that particular moment.”

[Access Real-Time Comments Search Page]

youtube comments search Twitter search

Like Twitter search results, YouTube also displaying  ‘Trending topics’, the hot searches that are being made in YouTube right at that moment.

Similar to Twitter, search results get updated whenever a new comment arrives (It has to be that way, since they are meant to be real-time updates).