Author: Pritesh Gupta

Gmail Facts: Part 1

1. Using Plus sign[+] for Email aliases OR filtering mails in Gmail

Yeah !, We can create infinite number of  Email Aliases in Gmail by adding a plus sign in front of our Gmail address like [email protected] is same as [email protected]. Gmail doesn’t considers the characters after the PLUS sign[+] in an email address but the gmail search filter can distinguish between the different address and we can therefore apply different labels.

2. Gmail doesn’t considers Dot’s(.) in an Email address.

Gmail doesn’t recognizes dots or periods in an email addresses or user names. That is an address like [email protected] is same as [email protected] or [email protected]. Also an email sent to [email protected](Mistaken Address) will be received by [email protected](Real Address).

3. Two separate addresses

When we create a account in Gmail we actually get two Email addresses, One is regular @gmail.com one and another is @googlemail.com one. That means [email protected] is same as [email protected]. We can use these addresses separately with filter’s. Also a mail sent to [email protected] will be received by [email protected]

This post will have it’s sequel when I will find more about Gmail.

Gmail cannot recognize dots or periods in email addresses or the user names – that means an address like [email protected] is the same as [email protected] or paris…[email protected].

What's new in WordPress 2.8

Today I upgraded to WordPress 2.8(Not beta) and found some new cool changes in it so lets have a look what’s new.

Better Management for Tags

A new subcategory has been added to Posts “Post Tags”, Just like categories now you can edit Tag name, Tag slug and also add description for your tags.

Better Management for Themes

Earlier each theme had to be opened and then Activate it or discard it, The new WordPress has a of direct Preview and Activation Button. By clicking Activate the theme gets Activated without a preview and also a Delete button is present which deletes the theme.

Plugin Management

The plugins manager is retouched. It now offers views/filters by plugin state, which I’ve found to be very convenient and bit of GUI trimming.

“Add new themes” Button

The new WordPress considers theme’s like Plugins. Just like plugins you can browse the new themes, Install them and upload it rather than doing it via FTP. You can also search for theme using different filters based on colors, columns, width and subject.

Feed links for everything

The new WordPress had feed’s for everything. For example when you open a particular category like “Web 2.0” there is a RSS feed for this Or for a author like “Tom” there is feed for post’s by that Author.

Improved Widgets Section

The new widgets section shows all you sidebar(s) in once. You can drag and drop the new widget and change the order also by drag and drop. Unlike earlier WordPress you don’t have to click “Show” for each sidebar separately. As soon as you drop a widget into a sidebar, it will pop down the widget’s properties automatically which can be modified and saved.

Edit  Post Comments Individually

While editing a post,One can see the existing comments present there in a seprate box in bottom. You can unapprove, spam, delete, edit, quick edit and reply to the comments right from the post edit screen.

Some Minor Changes

  • You don’t get notified of your own comments
  • You can autosave posts/pages when pressing Control+S
  • Support for more than one gallery on the same page
  • You can have multiple instances of a widget now
  • WordPress doesn’t ask for confirmation when marking a comment as spam
  • You can now edit all the files of a particular plugin
  • WordPress now allows case-insensitive logins (username)

2 Great Twitter Tools

Mutuality

Well Huitter.com offers a service called Mutuality which has the following features and are very useful in the journey of becoming a Pro-Twittrer.

  • Unfollow all who do not follow you back
  • Unfollow all
  • Follow all who follows you

I dont use the 2nd one but the 1st and 3rd are quite useful. One can also use the 3rd one as a manual auto follow feature.
Twitter Follower - Get Followed

Twitter Follower

is a database of Twitter users who will follow you if you follow them. By following the users in the database, you can quickly and effectively build your list and avoid that dread zero in the follower count. But everyone doesn’t follow you back in that list that’s the drawback as anyone can submit there name there.
Another feature from Twitter Followers:

Mass Unfollow Everyone Who’s Not Following You: The other feature of Twitter Follow is the mass unfollow button. Push this button and Twitter Follower will unfollow everyone who’s not following you back.

Source: http://www.johnchow.com/twitter-follower-my-new-twitter-site/

See Also http://www.buzzom.com

Other Useful Twitter Resource: http://www.askdavetaylor.com/how_to_auto-follow_twitter_followers.html

Microsoft Bing: Awesome !

Bing the latest offering from Microsoft is a great search engine, Its better than Google in various ways.

Bing has a better and more meaningful “Related Search”. It uses technology from Powerset (a search technology company Microsoft acquired) to display refined versions of your query down the left side of the page.
Bing also pop ups the text in the result page when you hover above the search result. Which will give the idea about to follow the result or not.
It has a Video Search in which one can refine the query by Length OR Screen size OR Resolution OR Source. I found this to be Good.
It’s Image search has all the features of Google as well as Introduced some more like layout, style, people.

And it knows that different kind of data is best represented in different format it will be hard to maintain this thing though as MS will depend on different sites to collect this data from.

Overall, The bing search is much more than expected and it may replace Google in Future as its just the beginning of Bing !.

Get your Social Media diagram by Geekchart

If you are a social media addict and share great links and content you get in the net with others and if you are a Geek in Social Media and do it in various platforms then this thing is for you. Geekchart is a new tool which gives pie chart based on your activity of various social media sites in the last 30 days

GeekChart fetches data from these 8 social media sources That is your blog, Twitter , YouTube , Flickr , Digg , StumbleUpon , Delicious , and Last.fm(and facebook coming soon.)

Geek Chart Keeps updating your Social Media diagram automatically as you continue to share.

I am sharing my Geekchart with you.


Priteshgupta’s Geek Chart

Free and Legal Music in Web 2.0

This is probably what everyone one wants these days.

Last.fm:This thing  has a Free Music Downloads section in bottom of the page, One can go there and browse for free downloads in that section, Of course the Downloads are limited still one can listen to unlimited and new songs there. I use this site frequently to share the name of my favorite tracks in my Twitter and Facebook.

ARTISTdirect:This is a brilliant place for free music, Some of the big releases aren’t always free, You need to pay for them. Still I use it a lot to see new tracks by top artists. One can use this site for browsing music by various Artists.

Kazaa: This site can be used to listen and download lots of free and latest music but this is only open for US. Not for any other country.

Flickr vs Picasa Web Albums

What if your digital camera is full of Pictures and you want to share with friends and relatives, Of course you wont mail them. You will probably like upload it somewhere and share.
There are 2 major 800 pound gorillas for photos sharing in Web. Yahoo’s Flickr and Picasa Web Albums by Google.

Flickr

Flickr is a well known in the photo sharing market and is owned by Yahoo. It has a good interface, it’s polished, works well, and is indeed addictive. But Flickr has some limitations Flickr offers 100 MB of free storage each calendar month but the storage counter is reset every month so you get virtually unlimited space on Flickr without spending a penny. (100 MB is good for storing upto 120 picture of average size). New pictures can be uploaded to Flickr via mobile phones, desktop software, email attachments or through the web-based interface available on Flickr website. Pictures can then be grouped in sets (like “Conference in New York”) as well as tags (like “conference”). You can upgrade to Pro for making the number of photos unlimited for each month but even after you upgrade to Pro, you’ll bump up against more limitations if your JPG files are over 10MB each, which happens quite often when you shoot with a late-model DSLR and upload at full resolution with the intention of printing that photo in a large size. Use Flickr if you want to engage actively within the big and friendly Flickr user community, get comments on your photos, join groups and submit photos to them — in short, partake fully of the social community of photo sharing.

Picasa Web Albums


This is the photo sharing client owned by Web Giant Google, This was made to enable Google Image Organization Software Picasa user’s to share there photos online. One can create private and public albums there and order prints. This is the best option for Photo sharing for a regular person but the storage is limited(Disadvantage over Flickr) it has a 1 GB storage and then Paid storage of 7Gb for $25 a year, You can come over this just by resizing the images rather than uploading the full High Resolution Pics. The default option is to resize only, so that’ll get done automatically. Once you’ve done tell your friends and its done.

Extra Features
For describing the photo, both services let you edit tags and a caption for the image, with Flickr also letting you give each photo a title. Both have a mapping feature letting you set a location for the photo on an interactive map. For the technical data relating to the photo, both services will read and display the EXIF data from a digital camera such as shutter speed, date/time etc. And for viewing a bunch of images, both have a slideshow feature built in. Finally, both services let you specify a name to make a more user friendly URL to give to your friends or family.

Flickr Vs Picasa

Transferring Photos: In Flickr the picture upload thing is very easy but downloading photos from there is difficult, for this you may need to have a 3rd part Flickr App where as in Google’s Picasa Web Albums it comes with an application Picasa. Through Picasa, you can do basic image editing (like crop, rotate, color adjustments, etc) and then upload the edited pictures online. The software can also download photos from the online Picasa albums to your hard-drive without any effort.

Organization: Picasa lets you create as many “albums” as you like to sort your photos into. Flickr lets you have just 3 “sets” to group your photos in, otherwise they all get added to a single “photostream”. For unlimited sets at Flickr you’ll have to go pro.

Storage: Picasa gives you 1GB of storage with the option to buy more (7GB for US$25 per year – shared storage with your Gmail account). Flickr doesn’t state a storage limit, instead they have an upload limit of 100MB per month and limit your “photostream” to the 200 most recent images. The “pro” option at Flickr which will give you unlimited uploads, storage, bandwidth and more.

Cost: Both Flickr and Picasa offer a free service initially, but with limitations on the service at Flickr And a word of warning here, Flickr’s FAQ states “if your free account is inactive for 90 consecutive days, it will be deleted”. Picasa is better here. You can upgrade to Flickr Pro for $25 and upgarde you 1GB to 7GB in Picasa for $25 a year.

Facebook changes Chat experience. (Good OR Bad) ?

Huh !, Another modification in Facebook, That’s what I was thinking But this time this upgradation in the chat service is really worth, You will find that It looks bit similar but works in a different way.

The new list enables user to sort the online peoples list according to one’s Friend List’s and set different privacy settings for them . So Facebook is certain to power its chatting style more. Users can now organize their previously unwieldy Chat lists into groups, defined by their Friend Lists.(That’s Cool ;))

On opening first time the users are promoted to select the Lists which they want to display in there Online List and the other users(Which are in no list OR no selected list) are seen under other friends.

The chat window as has two Tabs “Friend Lists” and “Options”
Friend Lists enables us to select the Friends Lists which we want to get displayed and the Options has various options like the Sound notifications and Go offline etc..

One wont be able to see the Display Picture under Other Friends but will be able to see DP under Friend Lists.
This is the only thing I found weird. Rest the New Facebook chat is amazing and better.

The usefullness of Twitter for me

Today even 1 day without Twitter kills me, Twitter is the best thing in the Web I have found yet(Another is facebook). Many people feel Twitter has no advantages and it is addictive, Time Waste and Lame. This isn’t true at all, There are great advantages of it but only one who uses Twitter can get it. A non Twitter user will surely think its a waste. This included me too earlier I didn’t know about Twitter and didn’t joined it, then one of my friend @ramkarthik Told me about Twitter and explained its uses and advantages in detail. Since that day I became twitter-addicted and just saw advantages in it. No disadvantages.

To make my point clear I am sharing this video its very humorous and one of mine YouTube favorite’s

The First good thing about Tweeple’s(Twitter People{Twitter user’s}) is that the Twitter crowd is very helpful. For an instance I broke up my WordPress and wasn’t able to fix it myself. I twitted and soon got help from many people(Mainly @Rampantheart).

Its great for connecting to people via Twitter, and Twitter provides us with 140 Chars so that no one gets bored by one’s Tweet and isn’t time consuming also. Most of the times I see Humorous Tweets in my twitter Timeline, Which is great. Basically it is a medium for connections with others in an easy and unobtrusive way.People say that micro blogging(Twitter) Makes one a better Blogger too.

A few possible advantages of Twitter are:

  • Stay connected with colleagues and friends when you are away.
  • Provides us with immediate support.
  • Be the first one to cast events/meets/summits by twitting in between and sharing the experiences.
  • Share Links and Other information
  • Learn more about people’s interests.

Do these basic steps and start tweeting today.

  • Sign up
  • Follow others.
  • Make friends on Twitter
  • Tell other people to join
  • And start communicating with people

Using Google services for a Website/blog

Google provides number of services/products to promote your blog or website on the Internet, the good thing about these services are that most of them are free for a very low price. These services are very helpful in various things. And all of its services works great for all types of blogs and websites.

Most of the services have a main focus for improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from Google Search engine via “natural” (“organic” or “algorithmic”) search results(viz. SEO).

Here is the list of Google Services for a Website/Blog :
In the order of their importance

  • Google Adsense:Offers a contextual advertising solution to web publishers Delivers text-based Google AdWords ads that are relevant to site content pages. Its great for earning huge bucks and trustworthy too(Because its Google).

  • Feedburner:Allows blog owners and podcasters the ability to manage their RSS feeds and track usage of their subscribers. The best advantage is it converts a RSS feed to a Email newsletter by “Subscribe via Email” thing.
  • Google Webmaster tools:Google Webmaster Tools provides you with detailed reports about your pages’ visibility on Google. One just need to verify the site and add Sitemaps.
  • Google Analytics:Google Analytics makes it easy to improve your results online. Write better ads, strengthen your marketing initiatives.

  • Google Apps:
    Google Apps provide with Google Mail, Google Docs, Google Video and Google Sites complement traditional office software to make teamwork easier. The best thing is it provides with a Email ID of your Domain just by adding MX data into your domain (Eg: [email protected]).
  • Google Friend Connect:
    Grow traffic by easily adding social features to your website. Google Friend Connect means more people engaging more deeply with your website.
  • Google Custom Search:
    Have a website or collection of sites you’d like to search over? With Custom Search Engine, you can harness the power of Google to create a search engine for your very own site.