Author: Deepak Jain

Deepak Jain is passionate about technology and mobile phones. He is the founder & executive editor at Mobile Gyaan and Editor-at-Large of this blog.

Reviews

Convert your Mails into RSS Feeds

Post author By Deepak Jain
Post date December 29, 2008
2 Comments on Convert your Mails into RSS Feeds

In this post, I am going to let you know how to convert your Email into RSS feeds and what exactly are its usefulness. First of all, let me tell how your Emails can be converted into RSS feeds. Actually, this is possible, with the help of a new venture named mailbucket.org. Using the services offered by mailbucket, you can forward all your emails to a specific id provided by mailbucket and using the RSS feed URL, you can later read your mails as RSS feeds in your feed reader.

Advantages of using such services?

Before starting to make use of mailbucket or any other Email-to-RSS service, you will surely ponder about the usefulness of such services. So, here are some quick highlights to answer this question:

Useful for low bandwidth users
Useful for persons, who subscribe to RSS Feeds on their cell-phone
Useful when your internet connection is too slow to open a website.
If required, you can filter and share your mails which can be read by many people using a common Feed URL.
You can also use these Feed URL in Google SMS Channels to get E-mail alerts by SMS

Hope, by now you are convinced to use this service atleast once. So here comes the detailed step by step instruction on how to convert your emails into RSS Feeds.

To forward your mails into RSS feeds, you need not create any account or log into Mail bucket or share any of your personal login information with them. You just need to forward your mails to “example@mailbucket.org” where ‘example’ will be your unique id in mailbucket and later on you can use mailbucket.org/example.xml as your RSS Feed URL while subscribing it in your feed reader. Provided the id ‘Example’ is not being used by any other mail bucket user. So, I would personally recommend you to use a long alpha-numeric id else anyone else knowing your unique id can peep into your mail box by subscribing to your Email-to-RSS feed URL.

As said earlier, though there does not seem to be a huge scope of such Email-to-RSS conversion services, but still it can be used as a backup as these can be of much help when your internet connection is too slow to browse various websites and also another important use of such service is that, you can use these RSS Feed URL in Google SMS channels to get SMS alerts of new Emails in your inbox.

Link: Mail Bucket

Tags Interesting Links, Internet

News

9 Year Old Indian become Microsoft’s Youngest Certified Professional!

Post author By Deepak Jain
Post date December 28, 2008
6 Comments on 9 Year Old Indian become Microsoft’s Youngest Certified Professional!

Just came across an article in Gizmodo wherein the story of the youngest Microsoft Certified Professional was flashed. It is really great to know that a 9 Year Old girl who have achieved the status of ‘Youngest Microsoft Professional’ is an Indian. As per sources, to become Microsoft Professional, one has to appear a very hard and competitive exam conducted by Microsoft and this exam is usually taken up by highly qualified computer experts. But it is really a pride for our nation to know that, the exam which is hard to be passed out even by some experts is being cracked out by a 9 Year old south Indian Girl. 🙂

Seems this is a new year gift for our country and everyone residing here should feel proud of it.

Image & News Credit: Gizmodo

Tags Internet, News

Tips

Best SMS Service you must use this New Year!

Post author By Deepak Jain
Post date December 28, 2008
20 Comments on Best SMS Service you must use this New Year!

After the launch of various group messaging services in India, what comes to your mind as soon as you hear the word ‘SMS’? The answer must be surely either Google SMS Channels, SMSGupShup, Mytoday or Vakow. If not that, atleast Ways2SMS must have hit your mind. Isn’t it? But today I am going to introduce you with a SMS service after using which, you will surely rethink while choosing to rate these free SMS services.

Foosms, a Bangalore based company claims to provide you the best service at the most affordable price. Though it does not support group messaging, 🙁 but still as compared to other free SMS services in India, it is better. It has a plan for users who do not want to pay anything and also for them who want to avail paid services. As customary, if you send free SMS, it will contain advertisement ranging from 40-50 characters and there is no option to choose the sender ID of the SMS, but one thing I like in their free service is that you need not create any user id or login to send free SMS. 🙂 Now comes the paid service, if you are planning to pay out for the SMSes you send, then choosing the sender ID of the SMS will be upon your discretion, provided you authenticate the mobile number. For paid users, there are also options to schedule outgoing messages, so you need not bother of greeting your well wishers while you are parting at mid night this new year. 😉

Here comes a quick highlight on the advantages of FooSMS paid services:

A simple and hassle free interface of their website.
Option to schedule SMS to be sent at a future point of time.
Support for API using which you can create your own SMS applications.
Option to import delivery reports of the SMS sent.
Support for bulk contact imports and personalized messaging
Flexibility to choose the sender ID.

Except these advantages, there are certain disadvantages and drawbacks present in FooSMS too which I will discuss some other time. But I said it to be the best SMS service to be used this new year, because all operators blacklist holidays and you cannot use their promotional SMS schemes on these days and ultimately costing you around 2 rupees per STD SMS whereas if you purchase SMS credits from FooSMS it will cost you approx. 35-40 paise only per SMS. If you know any better service, do let me know.

Well, there is a good news for you all. To test out this service, we are giving away 50 SMS credits per user to first 10 commentators. If you too want to try out this cool service, just create your own account on FooSMS and let us know your id on FooSMS so that we can credit your account within 24 hours. 🙂

Hope you will enjoy wishing your loved ones using this cool SMS service. 🙂

p align=”justify”>Links: FooSMS (Free) (Paid) | Register | Pricing Details

Tags Free Services, Internet, SMS Tips and Tools

Tips

Things you may not know Google can do

Post author By Deepak Jain
Post date December 28, 2008

I think Google is a term which does not need any introduction, every person using Internet must be knowing what Google is and must have surely used it atleast once. Even Bush says that he uses Google. 🙂 So, let me come to the point and discuss some tips to make the most out of Google.

Do you know, you can check the live weather report of any area, or convert the value of currencies right from the homepage of Google? If not just go ahead and keep reading this post, wherein I am going to bring into light such unexplored features of Google. 🙂

Weather:
This is one of the feature I use most of the times to check weather reports of various cities of India. As you can see on the image below, along with the live temperature, you can view weather forecast for four upcoming days.
To use it, follow this example:
WEATHER NEW DELHI, INDIA
Currency Conversion:
This is another search feature in Google that helps me a lot. Using this search feature, just within picoseconds, you can convert different currency values into your local currency value.
For converting currencies, simply enter the conversion you like. For Ex.
USD IN INR or
10 GBP IN INR
Stock Quotes:
To know the live value of any stock, simple enter the name of the company and the current market price of its stocks and shares will be made available.
Time:
May be, if you frequently keep looking world clocks, then you may like this feature as well. If you want to know the present time of any country, then Google have an answer for that as well. Just search for ‘TIME’ followed by the name of the country. For Ex.
TIME USA
Calculator:
Google can be used as a mathematical calculator too 🙂 To use Google’s built-in calculator function, simply enter the calculation you’d like done into the search box.
Unit Conversion:
This is similar to currency conversion feature. By using this feature you can easily convert values of various units.
I tried converting, 5CM in Inches and here is the result.

Apart from the above listed important features of Google search, there are even more features that you can make use of of. The list of other such features are:

Sports Scores
Book Search
Package Tracking
Fill in the Blank
Maps
Airline Travel Info
Word Definitions

To know about all such features in detail you can visit this official page.

Tags Google, Google Search, Tips & Hacks

News

New Features in Windows Live Writer 2009

Post author By Deepak Jain
Post date December 27, 2008
1 Comment on New Features in Windows Live Writer 2009

Approximately a week ago, the beta release of Windows Live Writer (WLW) 2009 was released. Since then, I wanted to upgrade my current version of WLW, but because of my scheduled life, I found Christmas holidays to be only opportunity to upgrade WLW and other applications of my system. 😉 After posting some topics, I found this upgrade worthy, and considered writing a review on it, here it goes.

The first change I noticed after upgrading to WLW 2009 was its new looks and interface.

Apart from this, another thing I liked on WLW 2009 as of now, was more border options to be used while inserting images. As you can see on the image here, new border options like Instant Photo, Reflection, Rounded corner, etc are being added into the existing options. Personally speaking, among all the border options, I liked ‘Rounded Corners’ the most. Also, as compared to the earlier version, there are more options for wrapping text around images. Apart from these, there are some minor changes and improvements, like image cropping & water-mark in WLW 2009 as far image insertion is concerned.

The tagging feature in WLW 2009 was appealing too. As you can view in the image, auto suggestions appears as you start typing a tag name. By this, similar tags will not be duplicated.
Now comes, browsing drafts and recently posted items. As you can see in the below screenshot, you can now easily search for pending items in drafts or in recently posted folder.

Apart from the above listed major changes in this upgrade of WLW, there are other many minor changes as well which are listed here:

Support for multiple photo insertion in a single go
Insert videos and automatically upload them into Youtube
Auto text linking
Spell check in many other languages
Image cropping, tilting, water-marking, etc.
Ability to search for Categories, posts in drafts and recently posted items.
Auto word count
Many great plugins included.

So what else are you looking for?? Unlike me, just go and update to Windows Live Writer 2009 as soon as possible. 🙂

Links: Official Release | Download | Suggest more features

Related: More about Windows Live Writer

Tags Blogging, WLW

News

Suggest New Features to WordPress Team

Post author By Deepak Jain
Post date December 26, 2008

If you have a WordPress hosted blog, you must be surely aware about the latest release of WordPress version – WordPress 2.7. Though the new version of WordPress is packed with loads of features, but still WordPress team feel that they can still improve and make blogging easy.

So, to get the most out of this blogging tool, WordPress have now set their minds to release version 2.8 and they are seeking help regarding it. Anyone out there can suggest new features to the WordPress team which may be considered to be added or modified in their later releases. For any suggestions in your mind, you just need to complete this short survey. Well, if you are looking to suggest them something, then be sure to fill the form by this year end, as the survey is open upto Dec. 31st 2008 noon UTC.

Links: WordPress | Survey

p align=”justify”>(Via WPCandy)

Tags Blogging, Wordpress

Tips

Convert Mails into Google Docs without Gmail Labs

Post author By Deepak Jain
Post date December 22, 2008

In one of my recent posts, I mentioned about a new Gmail Labs feature using which you could easily convert any of your mail in your Google mail-box into a Google Doc. But later on I came across an article in Digital Inspiration where in it was mentioned on how to convert mails of any other mail service providers into a Google Doc. Sounds interesting, isn’t it? So, if you do not hold an account in Gmail and looking for one such feature, then here is a complete how to guide for you. 🙂

First of all you will need a Google account wherein you can upload your files. So if you don’t have an account in Google then get it one here.

Once logged into your Google Docs account, you can see an ‘Upload’ option on the home screen.
As seen on the image below, you will get an unique mail id which you need to use while converting your mails into Google Docs.
Now, you just need to forward your email to the unique id provided to you and your mail will get automatically uploaded on to Google Docs.
To publish, return to the home page of Google Docs and browse to ‘Owned by me’ section and open the document you just forwarded from your mail box.
This final stage is just similar to that in Labs feature. Just open the document you want to publish and use the required option from ‘Share’ tab.

So, by this way even Gmail subscribers not willing to use the Gmail Labs feature for converting Gmail into Google Docs can make Google docs, but this trick is useful specially for account holders in mail services other then Gmail.

Links: Google Docs | Google Account Registration

Tags Docs, Email, Gmail, Google

Tips

10 Things Bloggers must Check Before Publishing a Post

Post author By Deepak Jain
Post date December 21, 2008
2 Comments on 10 Things Bloggers must Check Before Publishing a Post

Many a times, after hitting the ‘publish’ button, I realized what I missed out or what additional things could have been done to attract more visitors. Later on, I realized the need of a checklist that I should make use of before hitting the ‘publish’ button. I discovered that the checklist really helped me out, as such I wanted to write about it, to help budding bloggers and other Co-authors of this blog.

Catchy Headline:
To attract maximum people to read an article, an article must have a good, simple and a catchy headline.
Opening Contents:
You must avoid writing off-the-topic and bogus things on the opening lines of your post, specially in the first paragraph. If you do so, many readers will go away from your blog ultimately affecting your blog and its credibility.
Spell Check:
This is another important aspect, every blogger must practice. If yuo mkae scuh splleing erorrs, agian it mya aeffect yuor bolg. You can imagine how annoying spelling errors are, from the preceding line. 😉 So, you must never forget to run spell check before you feel, your post is ready to be published.
Grammatical Errors:
Again, by this point your readers will judge you and your writing skills which ultimately would affect your earnings and revenue. So, after you complete writing the whole article, read it back atleast once to find any grammatical errors.
Bullets & Text Formatting:
Readers usually tend to read the whole articles in brief, as such highlighting important things and making use of bullets should really help.
Images:
There’s a famous saying “A picture is worth a thousand words” and I too feel the same. If you make use of a related image, it will further add stars to your article. Also, do never forget to rename the image relating to the contents of your blog as it is good for SEO.
Alignments:
To make your post look decent and give an appealing look, I strongly feel, you should never publish your post leaving the whole text unaligned. For aligning the article you should prefer ‘Justify’ option. Also, if any images are used you must align them with proper margins and wrapping.
Back-Links:
On the bottom of every post, you must add links of various things your wrote about in the whole article. For example if I am writing an article about ‘Opening a new Gmail account’ then on the bottom of post I should link to related pages like Gmail | Registration | About
Sources, Credentials and Related Articles
Never forget to add links and give credits to those blogs or websites where you basically saw the articles you are writing about. By this your readers may not blame you, upto some extent, if the information you blogged about is false. Also adding up related articles on the bottom of every post is another tactic many pro blogger follow. This way, you can keep your readers stuck to your blog ultimately resulting in increase of your revenue and profits. 😉
Categories and Tags:
Not to mention, this is the most important thing you must look. This will help your blog reader to browser your blog posts category wise and would also be helpful for locating similar articles.

Image Credits: Trianglerentacar

Tags Blogging