Well it looks pretty without any doubt, but it would have been better if Orkut team have spent energy making Orkut itself better.
On the other hand, if they really wanted to improve email notifications, they could do it better by adding more information in notifications like:
In scrap notification, actual content of scrap could be sent
Same thing can be done for testimonials
If somebody post a comment on a pic, that comment itself could be conveyed in email.
One reason, many social networking do not send actual information in notifications is, it will decreases total number of pageviews for their website.
Its strange to see a service like Orkut, which is run by Google, avoiding this for traffic ranking when it will significantly improve user experience. Also it will slightly decrease load on Orkut server, which means more donuts for Orkut users who really spend lots of time on it.
If you have any second thought on this, please let us know. 🙂
Despite a lot of buzz about Google Chrome, one thing which is preventing many Firefox users from making a switch is, no support for third-party addons/plugins in Google Chrome.
If all you want is one firefox plugin, GreaseMonkey, then there is a software called GreaseMetal out there, which can for time being make most userscripts developed for GreaseMonkey work in Google Chrome.
GreaseMonkey is small exe file. Just download it and install it. If your are installing it from Google Chrome itself, then it will ask you to restart your browser.
Once installed, it will create a directory named userjs in your My Document folder, as highlighted below.
All you need to do now, copy all userscripts you want to use in Google Chrome to userjs folder.
Please note that some GreaseMonkey scripts may not work in Google Chrome even after using above hack. Notably scripts which are using GreaseMonkey API functions.
It would have been better if Kazuho, GreaseMetal’s developer, provided option to use Firefox’s userscripts folder.
Google already hinted that future versions of Google Chrome will have support for addons, so it you are eager to make a switch, GreaseMetal is here to help!
During last few weeks, many blogs posted about Google’s 10th official anniversary. Surprisingly, Google did very little to mark an event, compared to the enthusiasm they usually show for not-so-big events.
May be its debate on Google’s actual anniversary date, or may be Google, as usual, decided to do it differently by keeping entire event low profile.
Google fan will surely love this time travel. Also for those who are lazy enough to read best book on Google history, “The Google Story“, can take this tour. Of course, it doesn’t have drama that book unfolds but still an experience to remember! Thanks Dion Almaer. 🙂
After visiting AdSense help Google group, I have noticed that manypublishers, mostlyfromIndia are facing same problem. This particular message is receipt of AdSense team being aware of the problem. So all I can say, do not get panic!
The other question remains whether you will get a small check in local currency at exchange rate of 1:1 or is it just problem with web-interface?
If you are an experienced AdSense publisher, then you must have noticed that every Payment Details page shows “Payment Number”, which is in this case is blank. So I think payments are already processed correctly and soon web-interface will show accurate information.
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Anyway, if you get check at exchange rate of 1:1, I am sure difference will be credited back to our account for sure automatically by Google AdSense team.
Point of writing is, do not get panic and do not flood already busy AdSense team with support requests related to the issue. They are working on this (proof).
Just in case, you need follow-up, keep watching this thread.
Update: Just received this response from Google AdSense Team. (Sep 27)
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Hello,
We’re writing to let you know that your AdSense account is displaying an incorrect exchange rate for your most recent AdSense payment issued on September 23, 2008. While the exchange rate is incorrectly listed as 1:1, please rest assured that your payment has been issued with the correct exchange rate. You can expect your check to arrive according to the normal delivery time, within two to four weeks.
If you normally receive communication from us in a language other than English, we will provide additional information in your preferred language next week.
We apologize for the inconvenience and appreciate your patience.
Sincerely,
The Google AdSense Team
Google Inc.
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View, CA 94043
USA
Down for Everyone or Just Me is a very simple service which basically help you check if a particular website is down for everyone or just you!
If you are using free wi-fi on a public network, often it blocks some websites form opening. One such free wi-fi network near my home blocks all blogspot.com domain blogs and on top of it, they do not show any custom error message when I request a blogspot.com blog!
I remember for the first time, when I connected to it and saw all blogspot.com blogs down. For a moment, I thought I should post about it as many people think blogspot never goes down (and they are right as well). But then I wanted to make sure, if its unlucky me or overloaded Google! A simple service like this can help a lot in many situation.
The URL’s to result page have bookmarkable structure. Like you can bookmark this to check if Devils Workshop is down for everyone or just you.
Now apart from this manual checking, their sponsor (or parent company)Uptime Party offers server monitoring service for webmasters and professionals.
On registration, you can setup to monitor 1 server for free. For more than 1, they charge you accordingly. As most of blogger run only 1 main blog, free package is sufficient for most of us.
You can configure email notification on per server basis, for events like web downtime, email downtime, ftp downtime, etc.
I signed up for free account and configured email notification for Devils Workshop web downtime. I use Google Apps for emails.
One of most frequently asked question by Orkut users to me, is how to generate/create own custom orkut theme. By custom theme, they do not mean anything serious but just want to put their favorite actress’ wallpaper as background on orkut!
Thanks to Gaurav Dua, now any person can create such theme for orkut without any technical knowledge. Just head over to Orkut theme generator page and paste link to your favorite online pic. I linked to my favorite Devils workshop wallpaper created by Johnson. Next select a theme name and hit “Create Theme” button.
On next screen you will see link to your ready and hosted orkut theme.
Please note one thing that theme created like this can be seen only by you. These are unofficial themes and can not be seen by your friends. If you want to “show” you style to your friends, you have to limit your choice to official Orkut themes only.
In wordpress, there are two types of webpages – “posts” and “pages”. While “posts” are generated dynamically, “pages” are statics and created explicitly. You can create as many “pages” as you want and put them anywhere in your blog’s structure. Few pages I have here includes – about page, contact page, joining DW page, etc.
Apart from these “pages”, I use a special “search page” with extra-level of customization. It is technically outside my wordpress setup. I do not use wordpress built-in search mechanism. Instead I use, Google custom search like many of you. I will explain why I use Google custom search some other time!
For time being, if you notice my search page do not have any sidebar compared to say “contact page”. A simple way to disable sidebar for any post/page is to surround “get_sidebar()” call in theme with if-else block. But for sake of slight performance improvement and few other reasons I prefer maintaining a dedicated search page outside my wordpress setup. But as you can see, it is blended with my theme very-well!
So here is “how-to” guide to create such “search pages” outside wordpress:
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Create a page say in root-directory of your blog. Name it something like – search.php. It will have URL like – http://www.devilsworkshop.rsites.dev6.rt.gw/search.php
Next log into AdSense or Google Custom Search Engine, and create a new custom search or update existing search engine.
Just remember to use above URL (step 1) for search result pafe
Then add following code as it is to it:
<?php
define('WP_USE_THEMES', false);
require('wp-blog-header.php');
get_header();
?>
<!-- Google Search Result CODE -->
<?php
get_footer();
?>
Finally replace “Google Search Result CODE” line in above code with codes you will get from Google.
Save/Upload search.php in your blog’s root directory.
If you need to use some CSS, use it inline on Google search result code’s first line, i.e.
Yesterday, I was at PHPCamp Pune for full day. Here is my log of event for those who missed it!
As usual, for all early morning events, I reached late and missed my free T-shirt. Actual reason was huge response to the event. Organizer printed 300 T-shirts but around 600 geeks turned up for the event! More than 1200 guys registered for it. In fact, it was so overcrowded that venue sponsor Persistent denied access to the lift and asked people to use the staircase to the 7th floor! Smarty me, didn’t do that. I used lift between 1st and 6th Floor. 😉
Now something really important…
There were lots of talks on Drupal and Joomla, two popular CMSes. Those who use them or work on them must have been greatly benefited.
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Apart from this another hot topic was OpenSocial. Out of all talks on OpenSocial, I liked one given by Pravin Nirmal. He presented his topic very nicely with live demo of an Orkut App. He also cleared lots of my doubts regarding OpenSocial and Orkut Apps. You can expect my first Orkut App within a month. If you have any nice idea for an Orkut app, please share it with us. 🙂
I spent most of my time with Ankur Gattani, young entrepreneur behind LifeinLines. If you missed my earlier review about LifeinLines, its here. It was nice to know his plans for LifeinLines and if you are using it, expect a lot of cool features in coming days.
Apart from it, I was privileged to meet Sebastiaan Deckers, a member of XMPP (Jabber) Foundation and developer of Pandion chat client. Those who don’t know, famous Google Talk uses XMPP protocol for communications.
And lastly…
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It was really surprising to see that there was no single talk on WordPress and Facebook – two most-famous PHP apps! 🙁
Another bad thing was no wi-fi for campers. Again sponsor turned off wi-fi connectivity on campus. Sorry Rupesh, this is the reason, I couldn’t blog about event while it was going on. 🙁
Apart from this, overall event was great, thanks to organizers, who really worked hard to make it successful.
Finally thanks to my friend Anil’s younger bro Santosh, I got a cool T-shirt from Directi. It has PHP logo on it with PHP defined as – “Pretty Hot Programmer”. 😉
[Admin note: Those who visited this site on Saturday night and Sunday (till eve), Indian Standard Time, might have found it down. There was some technical issue popped up which is resolved now. Sorry for inconvinence caused and thanks for all who notified me.]
Gmail introduced a lab edition in June with 13 features. Over the time they kept adding these features and here is post listing latest lab features.
But before exploring further, for those who missed these lab features completely, these can be activated selectively by going to Lab tab under Gmail Settings.
And here are some cool and latest features:
Right-side chat
Move the chat box to the right side of the inbox. This is good if you have longer chat list which pushes your labels box below. By the way there is a small “options” link below chat box, which let you resize it to 4 different sizes.
Right-side labels
Move the labels box to the right side of the inbox. This is good if you use labels a lot. You can move labels or chat or both boxes on right side.
Default ‘Reply to all’
Make ‘Reply to all’ your default option for responding to emails. Good for developers who collaborate on projects as you will never forget copying to someone in group.
Quote selected text
Quote the text you have selected when you reply to a message. This works best if you use keyboard shortcuts. This type of quoting replies is quite popular with people who spend lots of time on forums or mailing lists.
Navbar drag and drop
Allows you to reorder the items in your navbar using drag and drop. Some Lab features adds extra boxes to your navbar. Enabling this feature can save a lot of scrolling in some cases.
Forgotten Attachment Detector
Prevents you from accidentally sending messages without the relevant attachments. Prompts you if you mention attaching a file, but forgot to do so. There was a greasemonkey script to do this from long time.
Vacation Time!
Lets you specify starting and ending dates for the vacation autoresponder. This is good for guys who forget to setup vacation responder in last minute rush. Using this you can set a vacation responder as soon as you make reservations for your vacation.
Custom Label Colors
Lets you create your own combination of colors for labels. Instead of choosing one of the standard colors from the label dropdown menu, click on Add custom colors. Pick your combination of colors, hit Apply, and enjoy.
Mark as Read Button
Tired of spending all that effort to click on the more actions menu every time you want to mark messages as read without reading them? Now just enable this lab and that is just a button click away!
Go to label
Enable keyboard shortcuts and hit ‘g’ then ‘l’ to display a popup for selecting a label to go to. Quite useful for guys who use labels a lot. Personally I will use labels more often now.
Let us know which lab features you are enjoying and which one feature you are missing in Gmail. Personally, I miss to-do list a lot in Gmail.
If you are a reader of this blog, then you might have come across Dreamhost’s unlimited hosting plan few days back. It was limited time offer and many people regretted about not making decision in meantime.
Now its time to come over it as Dreamhost reintroduced there Unlimited hosting plan for limited period. This time they haven’t mentioned date (or I might have missed it) but its only for first 1111 customers.
There is one interesting change to Dreamhost policy in meantime. They now offer 50GB space for personal backup on each account. You may find this offer somewhat crazy as you are already getting unlimited storage. Even though you can get unlimited hosting with many webhosts none of them allow it to be used for personal backups as per Terms of Service (ToS).
Finally, enjoy $50 discount by using promo code DW50.
