Apr 9
How-To Guides David
bookmarking, bookmarks, google, links, reader, RSS, Twitter
Unite Twitter & Google Reader with a click of the star
The Problem
For writers, most links come from either Google Reader or Twitter these days. In the case of Google Reader, one can easily save things for later by adding a star. However, saving links from your Twitter timeline requires some sort of bookmarking system (e.g. Delicious, Instapaper or Packrati.us). This gives the writer two sets of links to keep up with, wouldn’t it be better if everything were in one place?
Continue reading …
Feb 15
How-To Guides David
buzz, e-mail, email, filtering, gmail, google, privacy, socialnetworking, Twitter
Google Buzz
Google Buzz was released last week, and a positive spin on it would be that it could succeed where FriendFeed didn’t quite succeed, because of Google’s ready-made user base. A negative spin would be - we don’t need this. Certainly, I personally think that it’s naive to try replacing Twitter at this point. Twitter is not perfect, but we’re stuck with it, and there’s a great ecosystem of web services built up around it.
Sure, Google Buzz can take posts from Twitter and therefore work along side it, just like Facebook can. Although, Google Buzz is just going to be another place for replication of links. E.g. my blog posts updates to Twitter, and my Buzz account takes updates from both – I can see that it wouldn’t take many more steps to create a painful recursion here. To be fair, this is what the mute button is for, but why should we have to start playing whack-a-mole with all this? Duplication is also going to happen for committed Google users, who are likely to see the same updates appearing in their Google Reader as they are on their Buzz feed; unless they’re very strict about who they follow. Which reminds me, I had better unfollow most of those people Google automatically made me follow on day one …
In the interests of fairness, I should report that Google have responded, saying that they have replaced auto-follow with auto-suggestions. They’ll also make it easier to hide who you’re following, and to opt-out of Buzz completely; all via your GMail settings. At the time the writing though, none of these options were available in my GMail settings. Fortunately, there are other ways to get to these options, so here’s a round up of blog posts showing you how to protect yourself with Google Buzz.
Continue reading …
Dec 18
How-To Guides David
flickr, geotag, google, maps, photos, search
Earth Album
If you are a regular Flickr user, you’ll know you can Geo-Tag
your photos. A site called Earth Album makes finding photos by location so much easier by mashing up Flickr’s location data with Google Maps. Simply search for a location, drag and zoom with your cursor, then click on any point in the map to see a selection of photos taken on or near that point!
http://www.earthalbum.com/
Dec 11
How-To Guides David
add, add-on, extension, filter, firefox, language, profanity, swearing
[Firefox tip]
If you are in need of a profanity filter in your web browser, then there is a Firefox plugin that can do this for you, “Procon”!
From the project’s home page:
ProCon is a content filter for the Firefox browser created by Corvineum, and based on BlockXXX (by Tom Christensen). ProCon filters any type of content on any web page. If left on default, ProCon limits itself to filter pages containing explicit content automatically, based on the text. ProCon can also be used as a profanity filter, and makes use of a whitelist – useful for trusted sites.
Any instances of profanity will be replaced by asterists (*), you can add custom words, but remember there’s no 100% gurantee of effectiveness.
You can visit the project’s home page at http://procon.mozdev.org/
Dec 4
How-To Guides David
firefox, javascript
Does it annoy you when you visit a website that launches a new browser window, but you have no menu’s, toolbars and can’t even resize the window?
Where here is instructions on how to switch off website’s abilities to do this. I’ve used all the options listed in the following link, so whenever I get a pop up, I have all my toolbars and can resize as much as I like!
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Prevent_websites_from_disabling_new_window_features
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