Digital Inspiration

Digital Inspiration is a popular tech blog by  Amit Agarwal . Our popular Google Scripts include  Gmail Mail Merge  (send personalized emails with Gmail ),  Document Studio (generate PDFs from Google Forms ) and   File Upload Forms ( receive files  in Google Drive). Also see  Reverse Image Mobile Search , Online Speech Recognition and Website Screenshots , the most useful websites on the Internet.

Chef Charlie Ayers joined Google as their first cafeteria chef in 1999. Though Charlie is no longer an employee of Google, he owns 40k shares of GOOG and that are alone worth $26 million. He also had plans to write a cookbook titled "Revealing the Secrets of the Google Kitchen" - that never happened but Chef Charlie is now busy consulting tech companies on deciding good food for their employees. Update: Chef Charlie Ayers wife Kimberly  just informed that the Cookbook is happening. It will be released in April/May of 2008. Also, Charlie is opening a restaurant in May/June of 2008. Read more about Google Chef Charlie on NYTimes or watch this video on "How much is the Google chef worth?" at MSNBC News . [Charlie Ayers - From managing the Google kitchen to managing millions]

For some reason, Google's Webmaster Dashboard says that access to following blogspot URLs is restricted by robots.txt. http://labnol.blogspot.com/2005/05/guide-for-google-adsense-publishers.html http://labnol.blogspot.com/2005/05/us-government-rss-library.html http://labnol.blogspot.com/2005/08/screen-capture-ocr-for-text-and.html http://labnol.blogspot.com/2005/12/anonymous-email-that-disappears.html http://labnol.blogspot.com/2006/03/great-firewall-of-china-blocks-skype.html http://labnol.blogspot.com/2006/03/online-logo-generator-text-logos-made.html http://labnol.blogspot.com/2006/03/waterfalls-and-kazaa-are-bad-for-your.html http://labnol.blogspot.com/2006/04/blogging-stocks-aol-blog-experiments.html http://labnol.blogspot.com/2006/05/adobe-employees-excited-about.html http://labnol.blogspot.com/2006/05/interesting-forms-of-art-from.html http://labnol.blogspot.com/2006/06/louis-vuitton-ruling-could-mean.html http://labnol.blogspot.com/2006/07/please-j...

Blogs that are on Blogger or WordPress can add the wonderful Outbrain star ratings widget to their blog posts. This ratings widget has been under a closed beta for some time but they finally made a public release today. Outbrain Ratings widget is light, requires no registration and intuitive - visitors can hover the mouse over the five stars and click any of them to rate your current blog post. Even if you have a regular website that's not a blog, this ratings widget can be installed on your site as well. You need such a rating widget to get feedback from all those reader who are subscribed to your blog aren't contributing to the discussion because they are probably too lazy to write a comment. Give them a system like this ratings widget that requires no effort and they'll be happy to say if enjoyed or disliked reading your blog post. Get the Ratings Widget here . If you are using Windows Live Writer to insert ratings in your blog posts, make sure you remove the...

When I wrote this story comparing Google Finance with Yahoo! Finance , the one area where Google had a lead over Yahoo! was ticker symbol search. While Yahoo! Finance required you to enter the exact stock ticker symbol in the search box, Google Finance would offer matching suggestion as you type the name of the company or stock symbol. Today, Yahoo! Finance have enhanced their quote lookup search box and it looks even better than Google - you can now find quotes for a company even if you don't know the stock symbol. The other nice addition is multiple search - you can look for stock symbols of multiple companies in the same search box - just separate the names by comma. When you hit Go, stock data for all those companies will appear on the same summary page.

This is exciting news for people who use Flickr for storing photographs on the web but prefer Windows Live Photo Gallery on the desktop for managing their picture and video collection offline. Microsoft today released a  new version of Windows Live Photo Gallery that lets you send pictures to Flickr directly from the desktop using Windows Live Photo Gallery. You can also bulk upload images and folders to Flickr using this new feature of Photo Gallery. Like the official Flickr uploader, this one from Microsoft will also resize your pictures before uploading them onto Flickr (optional). You can also specify the photo set where that picture should be uploaded to. Related: Compare Picasa with Windows Live Photo Gallery If you operate multiple Flickr accounts, Windows Live Photo Gallery lets you add them all to the Flickr uploader. You can download this Flickr enabled version of Windows Live Photo Gallery through Windows Automatic Updates (kb943550) or the common Windows Li...

Here's a simple question for anyone who has been on Facebook for some time now. How do you create a photo collage of your Facebook Friends (as shown above) without using any of the available Facebook Apps or third-party tools . And no matter how large your Facebook friends list is, the whole process should not take more than 2 seconds . Hint: This secret feature is available right inside Facebook though Mark Zuckerberg and his team never told us about it. Answer: Once you finish exploring all the options in Facebook, read the solution .

Before you upload PowerPoint PPT files to Google Presentations for editing, make sure you know that the opposite is not possible yet. Unlike other members of the Google Docs family, Google Presentations doesn't have an export function so you cannot download your edited PowerPoint slideshows out of Google Presentations in PPT, PDF or any other popular formats. Update: This is no longer required, you can now easily  export PPT files from Google Docs . Google Docs does allow you to download the presentations as a ZIP, which is a mix of HTML, CSS and JPGs, but again that's not a very useful or convenient format. Considering that PPT is such a universally accepted presentation format, it is quite safe to assume that PowerPoint export feature will meet Google Presentations very soon. But if you are getting desperate to get those PowerPoint slides out of Google Docs now itself because the boss wants them, the good old Print Screen key can be your friend. Open the Google Pr...

The Forbes magazine today launched a new feature called the " The Future " where they invited personalities to predict trends and technologies that will become popular in the near future. An extremely intelligent prediction about Google's future comes from David Ewalt where he says - Over the next 10 years, Google will solidify its hold on the world's information, and as it adds data service to its portfolio, it will give away free Internet access and phone service around the country . In 10 years, the company (and its ads!) will be omnipresent in American lives. David also expects that Google will lose the cool factor - Expect Google, at 19 years old, to be regarded much like Microsoft is today - bloated, monopolistic and oppressive . There's a very interesting quiz as well where you have to guess about events that are likely to occur in 2008 - Will Google hit $900? Will the richest person be from China ? What will the exchange rate be between the U.S....

Since Adobe PDF is an output format, you cannot edit or recreate the PDF file unless the source documents are available. Now Adobe Acrobat does allow you to apply numerous modifications to your existing PDF documents (like editing text, changing font attributes, inserting images and more) but, as you know, Acrobat is an extremely expensive software. If you are on a budget and wish to edit PDF documents without Acrobat , the easiest option is to make edits in the original document itself and recreate the PDF using Google Docs or any of the free PDF writers . When that is is not an option because you don't have the PDF source files, the PDFill PDF Editor ( link ) can help you manipulate PDF documents though it may work with password protected PDFs. The PDF Editor is freeware and lets you make basic changes to PDF files - you can reorder the sequence of pages, crop a PDF page, add text information in header and footer, add image stamps or even merge multiple PDFs into one. ...

Some websites disable the right click menu on their websites to prevent people from saving images and photographs to their desktop. There are several ways to bypass that "right click" barrier - you can either do a screen capture, or copy that protected image from the web browser's cache or read the image URL from the HTML source of the web page and then save the image using your favorite download manager. All the above methods work but the only problem is that they are geeky. So let's take look at another approach that requires absolutely no effort - it's called "drag-n-drop." Just point your mouse pointer over the image, press and hold the left click button and drag that image either to browser address bar or somewhere on destkop. That's it. The image file will be instantly saved to your computer even if the right-click option was disabled (because we used left-click). The drag-n-drop method really comes handy when the web page is opened i...

Few months ago, Flickr removed PayPal as a payment method and only those Flickr members could upgrade to a Flickr Pro account who had a Credit Card. This was met with a great deal of disappointment in the Flickr community as existing Pro members, who were not having credit cards, could not renew their yearly Flickr pro membership. Well, the news is that PayPal will make a comeback on November 20, 2007. However, PayPal will now be offered as payment option in Flickr via Yahoo! Wallet. Flickr will also provide local currency support for payments made my PayPal. Full thread here . Compare Flickr Pro with Picasa Web

Facebook users are not too pleased with the "walled garden" approach of Facebook. The reason is simple - while you can easily import your Outlook address book and GMail contacts into Facebook, the reverse path is closed. There's no "official" way to export your Facebook friends email addresses or contact phone numbers out as a CSV file so that you can sync the contacts data with Outlook, GMail or your BlackBerry. Some third-party Facebook hacks like "Facebook Sync" (for Mac) and "Facebook Downloader" (for Windows) did allow you to download your Facebook friends' names, emails, mobile phone number and profile photo to the desktop but they were quickly removed for violation of Facebook Terms of Use. How to Download Contacts from Facebook There are still some options to take Friends data outside the walls of Facebook wall. Facebook offers the Takeout option allowing you to download all Facebook data locally to the disk (include...

If you are also planning to sign up for a new Gmail account, consider opting for Google Apps Premier Edition that makes Gmail even better. Here are five reasons: 1. While 3 GB in free Gmail is lot of space, it can get exhausted - Google Apps gives you 25+ GB of storage space. 2. You can define a list of approved email senders and web domains - any messages from approved lists will always go to your Inbox bypassing the junk email filters . You can also block individual email senders and entire domains - messages from anyone in a blocked domain go directly to the Junk Quarantine. 3. Google guarantees a 99.9% uptime for Gmail. If things still go wrong, you can call Google's 24x7 telephone support for a solution. 4. Google Apps Premier users can hide all advertisements in Gmail that show in the right sidebar. 5. Now the top reason for using Google Apps email over Gmail - accidents do happen but with Google Apps Premier, you can recover deleted email messages from Gmail . I...

One of the very popular question in the FeedBurner FAQ is about merging XML RSS feeds from different sources (like Blogger, WordPress, Flickr, Twitter, Jaiku) and then syndicate the entire content as one FeedBurner feed. This is desirable because a single feed makes it extremely easy for your subscribers to track new content and updates from you. Though FeedBurner doesn't provide any native feed mixing service, you can use the excellent Yahoo! Pipes service to combine two or more feeds and burn them into a single FeedBurner feed. Here's a step by step guide: Step 1: Go to the Yahoo! Pipes website and Create a new Yahoo! Pipe. Step 2: Drag-n-drop the "Fetch Feed" tab from the Sources tab to the main drawing panel. Step 3: Add all the different Feed URLs in the same Fetch Feed Module (click the plus icon). Step 4: Once you are done adding all your RSS feeds, drag the lower circle from Feed Fetch module to the Pipe Output at the bottom. Step 5: Give...

To open a Word 2007 document without installing Office 2007, you either had to download the Office 12 Compatibility Pack or manually convert .docx to .doc format using any of the online conversion services. The limitation with Office Compatibility Pack is that it still requires a previous version of Microsoft Office on your computer. Not anymore. Microsoft recently introduced a free Word 2007 viewer that lets you view docx Word documents, even if you don't have any version of Word installed. You will still need to install the Office Compatibility Pack. Other than Word 2007, Microsoft also provides a PowerPoint 2007 viewer for pptx presentations. There's no Excel 2007 viewer yet but you can convert xlsx to xls using Zamzar and then view the converted spreadsheet in Google Docs. None of the Online Office suites (like Google Docs) currently support the new Office Open XML format of Office 2007. Word 2007 Viewer | PowerPoint 2007 Viewer | Office 2007 FAQ

After two weeks of testing, Microsoft today released a patch that will fix the Excel 2007 calculation errors . Earlier, if the result of calculation in Excel 2007 is a number from 65534.99999999995 to 65535, it is incorrectly shown as 100000 in the spreadsheet. The patch file weighs around 32 MB and that could be one of the reasons why Microsoft did not include it the regular Windows Update cycle though the patch itself is released on a Tuesday. More details and download links on Excel Blog . Once you apply the fix, it will update the main Excel.exe program to version 12.0.6042.5000 as well as the Graph and Office Art programs of Office 2007. This will also be a part of Office 2007 SP1.

Internet World Maps - Visualize the popularity of Internet and Social Networking across various countries and continents. The full list includes seven interesting World Maps .

Distractions are always present when using a computer. For instance, you are watching a YouTube video but hate the desktop screensaver that gets activated every few minutes. Or you are writing an important Excel sheet and suddenly there's a notification in the system tray that says "Your friend Rick is Online" or that "You a new email." Here's a real scenario - I am writing this blog post in Windows Live Writer and there's Outlook, Google Talk, Firefox in the background all competing for attention. All these little things make it tough to focus on the task at hand. If you also find yourself in a similar situation and wish you could work on the computer sans distractions, a little utility called Zorro for Windows can help you here. Zorro is like placing a cardboard on the screen with a rectangular hole - you focus the Zorro views screen over any area of the desktop (or any running software application), hit the ESC key and Zorro will blank all ...

Matt Cutts has long been giving strong but indirect hints that selling text links ads (without using nofollow) or writing sponsored product reviews could harm the rankings of your blog or website in Google search results. Google is not against text link advertising, they just don't want sites to pass link juice to advertisers. Read Matt's take on the issue: You want my links for traffic.. totally fine..just don't make it so they affect search engines..so that's why we say use nofollow..or use a redirect which is through robots.txt Paid links that affect search engines (whether paid text links or a paid review) can cause a site to lose trust in Google. Two months ago, we saw that organic search rankings of a Page Rank 7 website were penalized by Google for selling text links . The ban was quickly lifted (in less than a week) after the site owner removed the paid links. Now another instance has surfaced where Google penalized the PageRank of a site ...

  You may not believe your eyes but the image above is not a photograph, it's just a painting of a non-real person done using airbrush, not Photoshop. Dru Blair took around 70 hours to paint this beautiful photorealistic image - look at the eyes, skin tones, hair curls.. they look so real. Dru has the details on how he completed this painting dubbed "Tica" - Photorealism at its best. Related: Fake or Real Photos

Like the Phishing Quiz from McAfee, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have developed an interesting online game to help people recognize online scams and phishing websites easily by looking at their URL in the browser address bar or with the help of Google. The plot is interesting - you are a small fish swimming around the bay with your experienced father in search of food. You will encounter worms in the water - swim over a worm to reveal it's attached web address (URL) . You earn points by eating the good worms (legitimate websites) and rejecting the bad ones (phishing websites or online scams). If you are unsure about a site, press T and you learned father will give you a nice hint if the site is legit or fake. Play the Anti-Phishing game here . Related: Google Phishing Warning Extension

You have heard of temporary email and disposable email services that help shield your actual address from spammers and email harvesting robots. Extend the same concept to websites and what you get is a service called disposable Web pages. First you make a proper webpage using the rich text editor that also supports tables, images and Flash movies. Then set the time when you want that web page to expire (or become unavailable). When others are reading that webpage, they will also see a count down clock that shows the exact time to disposal. Disposable WebPage provides a wiki like environment where others can also edit the web page created by you provided you share with them the password (or the master key). Could be a useful and quick alternative to small wikis for managing upcoming events and TODO lists. disposableWebpage.com

Whether you write a blog or a regular website, incoming traffic is always welcome even when the flow is from Digg.com. When a reader submits your blog post to Digg and the story gets dugg a couple of times more by other Digg members, you can quickly add the yellow "digg this" button to your website - that Digg button not just displays the current digg count but also encourages others site visitors to digg your story without leaving the site. Now the important thing - How do you know automatically when people submit content from your website to Digg.com ? Well, it's actually quite simple. You just have to setup a custom search RSS feed to track Digg like a hawk. 1. Go to Digg Search at digg.com/search 2. Type your web domain in the seach box and select "URL only" as shown in the screen capture. If you are on blogspot or wordpress, you will have to type the subdomain name as well. 3. Select "All Stories", "Sort Newest First" and h...

You have seen the screenshots but at the recently concluded Max 2007 conference, Adobe gave a live video demo of some prominent features in Photoshop Express, the much awaited online image editor. Like the live preview feature in Microsoft Office 2007 , you can hover the mouse over various thumbnail images in Photoshop Express to see how that effect will look when applied to the current image - it's efficient and lightning fast. CNET has the recording of the Adobe Photo Express demo which is embedded above. It's still not known if the online Photoshop editor can deal with layered PSD graphics. Related: Edit Photos Online for Free

This morning I woke up to a very pleasant surprise from Steve Rubel , author of the widely-read Micropersuasion blog. An excerpt from his post - APAC Rising : In Thomas Friedman's The World is Flat he talks extensively about " the great leveling ." Specifically, he writes about how broadband-enabled populations in India, China and elsewhere will make waves here in the US . This is more than just theory. It's reality. All you need to do is look to the emerging voices from Asia Pacific (APAC) and their ability to make money from US advertisers. Web 2.0 in APAC is rising. A lot of talented, new voices are emerging from the region - and quickly at that . Two of my favorites are Amit Agarwal , a technology analyst from India and author of Digital Inspiration , and Leo Babauta a Guam-based blogger who writes Zen Habits and also contributes to Web Worker Daily . What's notable here is that both are making money from US advertisers. Leo, who has 20,000 R...

UpdateStar is a new tool to help you ensure that all software applications installed on your PC are up-to-date. Like Belarc Advisor , UpdateStar scans your hard drive and prepares a complete inventory of software products (including freeware and shareware demos) that exist on your system - it then lists the available software updates, if any, alongwith a link to download those updates. So you don't have to manually hunt download.com or the software vendor's website to get hold of new updates, UpdateStar will let you know as and when they become available. Other than finding the latest version of software already installed on your computer, UpdateStar can also be used to uninstall programs just the like the Add/Remove programs or MyUninstaller . UpdateStar runs on Windows 2000, XP and Vista. It's fast and did a decent job of finding minor upgrades for some old software running on my computer. Unfortunately, it doesn't work with software drivers.

If you have an .xlsx file attachment in your email inbox but the computer doesn't have Microsoft Office installed to open file of that extension, what are your available options? The xlsx file format is the default extension for spreadsheets written in Microsoft Office Excel 2007 and Office 2010. The format is currently not support by GMail attachment viewer or any of the online office suites like Google Docs. However, you can easily convert .xlsx spreadsheet to the traditional .xls format using the Microsoft Office compatibility Pack available here . This will help you open, edit, and save .xlsx files in Office 2000, Office XP, or Office 2003. More details on Office 2007 FAQ . Alternatively, you can convert .xlsx to .xls or any other text format online using the  email conversion service  of Zamzar. Just forward the email attachment to xls@zamzar.com or txt@zamzar.com and it will send you a link to download the converted file.  Unlike the Microsoft compatibility pac...

PR professionals often approach bloggers, with decent readership, to talk about the products and services of their clients. Though most bloggers would love to read PR-pitches about products that are closely related to their niche, irrelevant pitching is always ignored and sometimes met with great frustration. To save from this frustration, Ogilvy PR team (in consultation with external bloggers) have drafted a "Blogger Outreach Code of Ethics" document that outlines certain essential guidelines for public relations professionals who pitch bloggers. Some excerpts: 1. Before we email you, we will check out your blog’s About, Contact and Advertising page in an effort to see if you have blatantly said you would not like to be contacted by PR/Marketing companies. If so, we’ll leave you alone. 2. If you are initially interested in the campaign, but don’t respond to one of our emails, we will follow up with you no more than once . If you don’t res...

Adobe officially entered the web-office space by acquiring Buzzword, a word processor that works inside the web browser (like Google Docs or Zoho Writer). Other than creating documents from scratch, Buzzword can also import your existing Microsoft Word .doc files. Buzzword is done in Adobe Flex, the same technology that powers Picnik , the popular online image editor.   Now that Adobe has a word processor, what could be next logical addition to their productivity suite? Adobe Ventures recently made an investment in Scrybe , an online organizer that's a perfect blend of Microsoft Outlook and Google Notebook. Scrybe (video demo below) allows you to store notes and web clipping, manage TODO lists, calendars and more inside the web browser. And like Buzzword, Scrybe looks beautiful, intuitive and extremely impressive. Do not be very surprised if Scrybe becomes the next member of Adobe Office Suite. The icing is that Scrybe already works both in online and offline mode . ...

Here's are simple tips for bloggers who work on multiple computers and use Windows Live Writer to compose and publish blog posts. Problem: If you write a blog post in WLW on computer A and save it as a local draft, how to you access that unpublished post from another computer ? Solution: You have two options here - the first is to use "Post Draft In Weblog" (available under "Save Draft") - WLW will put the post online though in Draft, i.e. it won't be available to your blog readers. The approach is recommended if you just have a handful of drafts written in Windows Live Writer. But if you tons of unpublished posts or if you are planning to move to a new PC altogether and transfer all the drafts from this computer to the new one, an easy option is "My Documents". Windows Live Writer creates a "My Weblog Posts" folder under "My Documents" which has two sub-folders - Drafts containing all the unpublished posts while Rec...

Love GTD? Make that your desktop or mobile phone background so you always remember the core principles of GTD. Stefanos Karagos has created some beautiful wallpapers for fans of David Allen's Getting Things Done workflow. They are available for the desktop or the iphone here .    Some more motivational desktop backgrounds by Stefanos are available here . The wallpapers are done in MindManager, Photoshop and PowerPoint. If you have a copy of MindManager, you can download the mindmap version here . Related: Download Windows Vista Wallpapers

It's a fact that a review on TechCrunch can really make or break Web 2.0 startups. To win a positive (or even neutral) review on TechCrunch, you just don't need to build a solid product, you should also pray to God that TechCrunch editor Mike Arrington is in some good mood while he's blogging about you. Here's what Mike told PC Magazine recently - " sometimes I wake up and I'm in a pissed off mood and I trash a company. You're never going to do that when you have an editorial process . And while maybe that's unfair to the company, it adds a little bit of color and flavor to what we do, which I think engages the readers so far. " TechCrunch is no doubt an influential online publication but it's still very much a personal blog. PC Magazine [via apscout ] Picture Credit: Chesh

Firefox is your favorite browser but, over time, it keeps getting slower and slower. Not only can it get slow, Firefox may sometimes hangs for no reason, consumes a large amount of memory and CPU usage can climb to 90% or more when you have multiple tabs open in the browser. You have uninstalled most of the extensions and toolbars, deleted all the cookies and internet temporary files, cleared up the file download queue and disabled the background check for software updates - but none of this has helped you speed-up Firefox. This is a common problem especially if you have been running the Firefox program on your computer for some time - I don't know why Firefox slows down but here's a small trick to rejuvenate the aged copy of Firefox without doing a fresh install. Start Firefox and export your bookmarks as a file on your hard-drive (we'll need them later). Type firefox.exe -P in the Run box of Windows. Click the Create Profile button without making any modificatio...

flauntR is a new web based image editor - extremely fast and works in the browser. It's layout looks no different from any desktop based software. While the basic image editing features in FlauntR are no different from other online image editing tools, what impressed the most are the variety of photo frames, textures and light effects that you can apply to digital images in a click. These small but very creative effects suddenly make your boring photos look very interesting. Update: Flauntr is no longer available but you can use Photoshop Express .

Skype Recorder is a simple tool for recording podcast interviews, skypecasts and voice calls made through Skype as MP3 or Windows Media audio files. Skype Recorder will start the recording by itself as soon as you start talking on Skype. Once the conversation is over, Skype Recorder will encode the audio recording to your preferred audio format. It has an in-built audio player, so you can replay your Skype recording immediately and decide whether you want to keep it or just delete it. Skype Recorder is Windows only and costs ~$14 but you can have it for free in the next 24 hours via GiveAway website here . Our favorite pick is still Pamela Skype Recorder though the free version will let you record Skype and SkypeOut phone calls upto 15 minutes. Record Skype Calls - This has more details options for recording skype audio and video conversations.

Your work colleagues, old classmates and friends will now have no problems finding you on LinkedIn even if there exist a dozen profiles with the same name as yours. Starting tomorrow, LinkedIn members will be able to upload a photograph to their profiles. You can control if the photos become visible in your public profile page or just your approved connections can see the picture. Thanks Adam . Click here to connect with me on LinkedIn.

If you are an Excel 2007 user, try this: Type =77.1*850 in any cell and press Enter. Excel 2007 would return a value of 100,000 instead of 65,535. Any combination of numbers that should calculate to 65535 will show 100000 in Excel 2007. Excel Team says the issue is actually not in the calculation itself (the result of the calculation stored in Excel’s memory is correct), but only in the result that is shown in the sheet.  Said another way, =850*77.1 will display an incorrect value, but if you then multiply the result by 2, you will get the correct answer (i.e. if A1 contains “=850*77.1”, and A2 contains “=A1*2”, A2 will return the correct answer of 131,070). I am not sure if that's correct because when I type =B1+1 in the cell C1, I get 100001 and not 65536 as per the official explanation. Anyway, David Gainer confirmed that this bug was introduced in the Excel 2007 version and a fix for the calculation issue would be available on Microsoft Download Center very soon. It...

Though you can easily redirect Blogger Feeds to FeedBurner now, this has a side effect - you will see some warnings when you submit the Sitemaps file (xxx.blogspot.com/atom.xml) to Google Webmaster Tools. (see screenshot) The following Sitemap warning messages are shown in the Google WebMaster Tools control when using Blogger feeds with FeedBurner: Line: 2 Invalid XML: too many tags - Too many tags describing this tag. Line: 2 Incorrect namespace - Your Sitemap or Sitemap index file doesn't properly declare the namespace. It's like a catch 22 situation - you submit the blogger generated atom.xml file to Google Sitemaps but it's redirected to the FeedBurner feed and that causes invalid XML errors. Fortunately there's a simple fix - just delete the existing sitemap and submit a new web sitemap that has the following URL: http://xxx.blogspot.com/atom.xml?redirect=false [replace xxx with your blog name] The secret redirect parameter in blogger feeds will o...

When you try to copy paste some text from a web page to a Word 2007 document, the application freezes for few seconds and the message in status bar says "Contacting the server for Information. Press ESC to cancel." This annoying behavior, also present in Outlook 2007 and other Office programs, mostly occurs when the clipboard has HTML formatted content (like when you copy content from a website to the clipboard). Would anyone know how to get rid of this permanent? Which server is Office 2007 trying to connect when you working in a local environment outside any network. One of the possible solutions is to do a "Paste Special" (click the down pointing arrow near the Paste Icon) and select "Unformatted Text" instead of the default "HTML format". Or you could have the Scrubber running in the tray that auto converts clipboard text in plain format. Favorite Microsoft Office Command - Format Painter

If you carry multiple Flash memory cards of different formats, the Elecom card reader is a perfect thing for you. Elecom MR-C12 series has numerous slots for housing a variety of Flash memory cards that may be from your mobile phone, PDA, digital camera or other devices. As in the figure, the card reader attaches to the computer via USB port so you don't have to worry about slipping the SD Card in the Compact Flash slot or vice versa. More details on Elecom website. It's currently available only in Japan but others can grab the Kingston MobileLite which is similar though not so sleek as the Elecom thing. Thanks GBM .

Thank you everyone who participated in the software giveaway ! - We received 112 responses and deciding the winners was no easy job. Here’s the list of five winners in no particular order - each of them gets a full licensed version of ALLCapture 2.0 screencasting software from Balesio. Congratulations and do stay tuned for more such events in the future. Announcing Winners of Screencasting Software Give Away!

Google Maps Image Downloader is a Windows-only tool that lets you auto download satellite images from Google Maps between two locations anywhere in the world. To use Google Maps Image Downloader, you will first need to specify the latitude and longitude of the two locations on the Google Map, then specify the zoom level and click download. The software also comes with an image stitching tool that will create a large panorama or a wallpaper by stitching these individual tile images of Google Maps. See how to find the latitude and longitude of any location on Google Map . The free version of Google Images Downloader is limited to a maximum zoom level of 13 so you'll probably miss the high resolution satellite imagery of Google Maps. Invest $25 bucks only if you're sure that Google Maps Image Downloader isn't violating any of Google Maps policies especially the one that says - "you may not use Google Maps in a manner which gives you or any other person access ...

Want to display Flicks photos in web pages as a Flash slideshow? Look no further than PictoBrowser . Here's a sample Flickr Photo slideshow generated just using PictoBrowser - all the pictures are displayed as thumbnail images in the lower navigation bar, you can also read the descriptions of individual images by hovering the mouse over the thumbnail. To get started, you type your (or someone else's) Flickr user name and then select the tags or photo sets that you would like to embed in web pages. The default dimensions of the Flash slideshow is 500x580 but you are free to customize that as in the case above. It's so good and impressive that Yahoo! should consider making PictoBrowser a native feature of Flickr. For geeks, there's another method for creating Flickr Slideshows . Related: Flickr Photo URLs Demystified

Say Cheese else the new Sony cameras won't capture your photographs. These affordable Cyber-shot DSC-T Series cameras have a special "Smile Shutter" mode that can recognize facial expressions like smiles, grin or a hearty laugh. If there are several subjects in the frame, you can specify the smiling face that you want to take as the main subject - or let the Smile Shutter choose the main subject and take the picture. The 8-megapixel, DSC-T70 and DSC-T200 Cyber-shot cameras won't lets you click until the selected subject smiles. Watch video. Related: Lose Weight With HP Digital Camera

Amanda Congdon, the famous vlogger who joined ABC News after her split with Rocketboom, is now moving out of ABC as well. There are two versions of the story - some say that Amanda has been let go by ABCNews.com while Amanda says that she herself decided not to continue at ABC as she is taking up a new digital project after her ABC contract expires. The excellent MobuzzTV , an English video blog similar to RocketBoom, are also looking for an anchor ever since the departure of Karina Stenquist . Susan Hickey then stepped in but for a very brief period. The most recent episodes were anchored by Anil De Mello who is infact the producer of the show. [Imagine Andrew Baron acting in Rocketboom while Joanne Colan is away] Am not sure about the latest assignment of Amanda but MobuzzTV looks like a perfect place for her. The show is massively popular (Alexa says that MobuzzTV has a higher reach on the web than RocketBoom ) and the format is quite similar to what Amanda has been d...

A lot of companies read emails sent by their employees. If you are also worried that someone in your office may be secretly reading your email messages, here's something you can do to at least prevent the email snoopers at work from visiting links (URLs) that you share in your emails - use a password. HideLinks is an online service that helps you password protect any web URL easily. You type in the URL and a password - HideLinks will then generate a new wrapper URL that you can pass in the email message. The email recipients (or the snooper) will have to type the same password in order to visit the actual website. Just make sure you don't put the password in the same email message as that will defeat the whole purpose. HideLinks hidelinks.com can also be used to shorten the length of hyperlinks similar to TinyURL or URLTea.com.

QlipBoard is free application that lets you create movies from photos and screenshot images. The interesting part is that QlipBoard has an in-built screen capture feature and voice recorder. The images (or screen captures) appear in the timeline of QlipBoard (like most other video editors ) so you just have to drag-n-drop to change the position of any image frame in the timeline. Further, you can easily record voice narrations, annotate or add text to images. And all your pen highlighter movements over the screenshot are recorded as part of the movie itself - so as you speak and move the cursor pen over the image, the exact movements are captured by Qlip Board. You may think of QlipBoard as a blend of Microsoft Photostory # and SnagIt. The free version of QlipBoad is supported by advertising. Overall, the software interface is not very intuitive but the application is still useful for creating screencast movies, photo slide shows or for annotating images. Get QlipBoard at...

What is the first thing you would do if you accidentally clicked your own Adsense ads that are displayed on your website? As an honest Adsense publisher, you are likely to send an email to Google Adsense support with the URL of the web page where you clicked your own ads and probably the reason (like the mouse was so sluggish ). Yes, it's important that you don't click your own Google Ads else there's an element of risk that Google may disable your Adsense account but do not get too worried if the click was made due to an error . Here's a standard response from Adsense support when publishers make honest confessions: Thanks for letting us know about the clicks on your ads. We appreciate your honesty and your efforts to keep your account in good standing. Although publishers are not permitted to click on their own ads for any reason, we do understand that accidental clicks may occur, so we don't require that you contact us every time you click on your ads...

If you are worried that some hidden or unknown programs on your Windows PC are secretly making connections to websites in the background, you can use a simple DOS command to detect and prevent such suspicious activity: 1. Open the Windows Start Menu and search for Command Prompt. Right-click and choose " Run as Administrator ". Alternatively, you can cmd in your Windows Run box to quickly open the command prompt. 2. The command prompt will by default open itself in the Windows System directory. Use the cd command to switch to the root directory c:\windows\sytem32> cd \ 3. Now type "netstat -b 5 > activity.txt" and press enter. After say 2 minutes, press Ctrl+C. 4. Type "activity.txt" on the command line to open the log file in notepad (or your default text editor) Which Programs are Connecting to the Internet? The file activity.txt will have a log of all processes (or Windows programs) that made a connection to the Internet in the last...

pfingo is a new service that provides a personal phone number for you to make (or receive) phone calls from a PC (or Wi-Fi enabled mobile phone) to any landline or mobile phone number in the world. See: How to Get a Local US Phone Number You just have to install a small software called pfingoTALK softphone onto your computer or mobile phone. Other than talk, the pfingoTALK client lets you send or receive SMS message using the computer, the voicemails reach you as .WAV files in email and you can also send and receive faxes from the computer.If there're any missed calls, you will be notified via email and an SMS. pfingo provides a Singapore based number (3-series), but if you have clients or friends in UK, US or Australia, you can get a fixed-line number of that country and friends can therefore reach you at local rates without paying international charges. While the subscription charges are around 60 cents per month, you can use it for 6 months without paying any fee.You ...

Tag Clouds, you have seen them on delicious , Technorati or Flickr , are an easy way to get people explore your site deeper. Here's a sample tag cloud that uses Google AJAX Search. Tag Clouds (provided they are not cluttered and display just the relevant words) help visitors quickly visualize what your website is all about since the topics you frequently cover are mentioned in bold or relatively bigger fonts. WordPress community already offers some excellent plugins for generating tag clouds (like the Ultimate Warrior) plus the upcoming release, WP 2.3, has inbuilt support for tagging. However, if you are on Blogger or have a non-blog website, there's no reason that you should miss Tag Clouds. Here's how to add a good looking tag cloud to your Blogger blog : 1. Type your Blogger feed address in RainMaker   http://www.blogger.com/feeds/xyz/posts/default?max-results=999 Remember to replace xyz with your Blog ID. This URL will retrieve your latest 999 posts ...

Say you are reading a blog or website inside Firefox and encounter some name (or an unknown term) that you would like to explore deeper. You will probably visit Wikipedia to read more about that person and search Flickr or Google Images for some photos. And if the text on the webpage is not in your native language, you'll copy paste that into Babel or Google Translate. Is that the way to work on the internet ? Well, that's a perfect approach but a bit inefficient. Enter HyperWords that lets you do all this and more without you having to visit any other site - the information will be fetched right in your current webpage with a simple click. With HyperWords, you can select any plain text on the web page and do some amazing things - say you choose Flickr or Google Images from the context menu and it will show you the best matching picture in the menu itself. Same for Wikipedia entries. The best part is about translation - you select a text and HyperWord will do inline...

SlideShare , an online service for hosting PowerPoint and PDF documents, has registered an extremely impressive growth ever since its debut last year . (see this recent Alexa snapshot) Related: Comparison of PowerPoint Hosting Services SlideShare have added some new email+web based options for uploading PDF and PPTs that makes the service all the more attractive. For instance, if you want to move your presentations from Scribd to SlideShare, just type their URLs here and SlideShare will automatically make a copy in your SlideShare account. [Like Scribd, Slideshare also lets you upload Presentations anonymously.] Another addition is the email based uploader (a similar feature exists in Google Docs ). You just have to send the presentations as email attachments to a specified address for uploading them onto SlideShare. Wishlist - Now that Slideshare has bulk upload, they may consider adding another feature that allows members to download multiple presentations in a batch....

A report, citing highly placed sources, says that Google has developed an offline version of Gmail that is likely to be made available within this year.   Like Google Reader which lets you work offline using Google Gears, GMail users will be able to interact with their GMail account even when they don't have an active Internet connection. This news, that Google is developing GMail Offline, is reported by a prominent Indian newspaper though the Google spokeswoman in India officially denied such a thing. While it's a definite possibility that Google is working to enable Gmail for Offline access via Google Gears , there are some bits that I will take with a grain of salt. For instance, the report says that you would have to download a GMail software client for that would automatically synchronize with the Gmail server . Why? Google Gears works inside a web browser and do not require any additional software. Or is Google developing a standalone desktop client for GMail...

Blogger Play is a self-running slideshow of photographs recently uploaded on Blogspot blogs. Other than the image, you also get to read a short excerpt of the accompanying blog post and the profile of the blogger. Excellent implementation. Bloglines offers a similar feature called Image Wall but that's not limited to Blogger Photos - they show recent images from virtually all blogs that are indexed by Bloglines. A small concern with such projects is that you are never too sure about stuff that may appear on your screen . While Blogger Play is only showing images from blogs that satisfy the SafeSearch criteria, Bloglines Image wall sources images from the entire space and therefore not recommended for family viewing. Will your photos appear in the Blogger slideshow ? If your blog on Blogger is listed as public, any image you upload to your Blogger account may be added to the Blogger Play queue. Wishlist - They should offer categories in Blogger Play - say someone wants...

oSkope will leave you impressed for sure. It's an extremely innovative online tool to help you browse and search YouTube videos, Flickr photos and more with minimal paging. When you type a keyword, oSkope pulls thumbnail images of the results and arranges them on the screen like a deck of playing cards spread out on a physical table. You can click the thumbnails of Flickr Photos or YouTube videos to watch them inline. The thumbnails can be easily in different styles like a stack, pile or plotted as a graph (useful for comparison of price vs Amazon sales rank). In its beta version, oSkope allows to search for products and images on popular web services like Amazon, Ebay, YouTube or Flickr. More services will be added soon. oskope.com

Ques: Your have a PowerPoint presentation (PPT, PPTX or PPS) that contains lot of pictures embedded in the slides. Is there an easy method to save these images out of the presentation ? As an example, let's take the above PowerPoint presentation that contains unseen aerial photographs of the World Trade Center captured by a military chopper on 9-11. To extract pictures from the PPT slideshow, all you have to do is export the Powerpoint Presentation as an HTML web page . Choose File -> Save As and select .html from the File Format drop down. PowerPoint will automatically extract every picture embedded in the PPT file and save it to the local folder. The same technique is also used to extract sound from presentations. Alternatively, you may choose File -> Save As and choose an image format like JPG or PNG - this will save the entire presentation slides as numbered images. Related: How to Compress PowerPoint Files

If Google every wanted to add a Microsoft Visio like flowcharting application to their Google Office suite, they'll have plenty of good options to choose from. Draw Anywhere is a new web based tool for creating flow charts, org charts and other drawings online. Like the Picnick image editing, DrawAnywhere is done in Flash and sports an extremely responsive interface. You can either save your Flowcharts online or export the diagrams as images and PDF files. drawanywhere.com

Say it's midnight and you want to call it a day. But the issue is that you are downloading some huge files from the Internet via Firefox and at your current internet speed, the download will take another two hours to finish. You could either cancel the downloads, or leave the computer in running state (think  environment ), or just install Auto Shutdown from mozilla.org . As the name suggest, this extension will turn off the computer automatically as soon as Firefox has downloaded all the pending files in the queue. If you not using Firefox, try the shutdown command in Windows that will turn off the computer after the given time. For instance, if you want to turn off the computer in next two hours, type the following in Windows Run box: shutdown -s -t 7200 [7200 = 2 hours] The Auto Shutdown extension of Firefox internally executes the same command. Related: Shut Down Your Computer Quickly

You already know about the Full Screen mode in YouTube video player that scales the current video to fill the entire desktop screen. The one big problem with full screen mode in YouTube player is that you cannot do anything else on the computer while the video is playing - you have the exit the FullScreen before initiating any other task. There's however an excellent alternative to Full Screen mode and that's about auto resizing the video player to fit the browser window. When you resize the browser window, the dimensions of YouTube Video player will change accordingly. Here's how you fit the YouTube video in the browser window: Say a YouTube Video URL is http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vr3x_RRJdd4 To watch this clip in a resizable browser window without switching to Full Screen, just rewrite the above URL a http://www.youtube.com/v/vr3x_RRJdd4 In other words, just append the YouTube video ID to this URL www.youtube.com/v/VIDEO_ID and stretch your browser wind...