Note Taking: Save Scraps from Web Pages Easily

When I started browsing the Internet during the mid 90s on Netscape, the Browser Bookmarks were like a god-send feature and probably the only way to collect and organize web URLs. Some prolific users of the Internet would save full copies of the web page to the hard drive and then use AltaVista Discovery (the only desktop search program available for free at that time) to search through their local archives. Fortunately, things are so much better now. Like the good old Netscape, the current browsers like Internet Explorer and Firefox still have no native features for saving web research but thanks...

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We Have Moved, Please Update Your Bookmarks

The new home of Digital Inspiration is www.labnol.org - Please update your bookmarks. RSS feed is located at feeds.labnol.org/labnol  Personalized Homepages     Online RSS Readers       Connect on Social Sites                 * We have switched blogging platforms from Blogger to WordPress....

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Charlie Ayers - An Ex-Google Chef Who Is a Millionaire

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...

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Webmaster Central Error : URLs Restricted by Robots.txt

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...

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Add Ratings To Your Blog Posts for Instant Feedback from Readers

Blogs that are on Blogger, WordPress or TypePad can now 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. It's light, requires no registration and very 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...

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Ticker Symbol Lookup in Yahoo! Finance Now Like Google Finance

  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...

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Upload Pictures to Flickr From Windows Live Photo Gallery

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,...

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Can You Spot This Secret Feature In Facebook

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...

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How To Save PowerPoint Presentations Out of Google Docs

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. 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...

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Technorati Blog Search Is Useful Again; Rolls Back Recent Changes

The two very useful features of Technorati - Charts and Blog Directory - mysteriously disappeared after Technorati decided to shift focus from a blog search engine to a multimedia search engine. The move may have backfired for Technorati and so they decided to revert the changes pretty soon. Other than charts and blog directory, you can also sort blog search results by authority like before to filter posts from blog sites that have very low or no incoming links. Another major enhancement is...

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What Will Happen When Google Becomes an Adult ?

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,...

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Google Adsense Plugin for Windows Live Writer

AdSense Coder is new plugin for Windows Live Writer that lets you to add Google Ads directly into your blog posts through Windows Live Writer itself. It will also wrap the Adsense code around your text using the align attribute. You first define different Google Ad formats that you want to include in the blog posts. AdSense Coder will then add those blocks of Javascript code to your blog posts anywhere you like. Pretty easy to use but before you download and install the Adsense plugin, here's...

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Modify PDF Documents without Adobe Acrobat

Since Adobe PDF is an output format, you cannot edit or recreate the PDF file unless the source documents are available. Agree, Adobe Acrobat does allow you apply numerous modifications to your existing PDF documents (like editing text, changing font attributes, inserting images and more), 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...

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Download Images From a Webpage When Right Click Is Disabled

Some webmasters disable the right click menu on their websites to prevent people from saving images onto their desktop. [The screenshot is from the online edition of a print newspaper.] As you already know, there are a zillion options to bypass that "right click" barrier - you can 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...

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Flickr To Accept Payments for Pro Accounts Via PayPal Again

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...

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PC Magazine - Give an OPML Of Your Favorite Blogs

Following the footsteps of CNET Blog 100, PC Magazine too today released their own list of 100 favorite blogs. The list includes the usual suspects but if you are new to the blogging world, this is probably a good place to quickly build your reading list. There's something surprising here - PC Magazine decided to release a Windows based installer that will add this grand list of 100 blogs right into your Internet Explorer bookmarks. Agree, a lot of people still use browser bookmarks to save...

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To Download Contacts from Facebook To Outlook Address Book

Some Facebook members are not too pleased with the "walled garden" approach of Facebook. 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 so that you can synch the data with Outlook, GMail or your BlackBerry. Some third-party Facebook hacks like "Facebook Sync" (for Mac) and "Facebook Downloader"...

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Signing Up for a Gmail Account? Consider Google Apps Premier

Gmail Invites - This is probably the longest page on Digital Inspiration and it's still growing though Google has lifted the "invite-only" curtain from Gmail. With ~3 GB of storage space, 20 MB attachment limit, inbuilt viewer for Office files and pretty solid spam filters, it is no surprise that Gmail is so popular especially among geeks and techies. If you are also planning to sign up for a new Gmail account because of the above advantages, consider opting for Google Apps Premier Edition that...

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Al Gore's Current TV Makes Impressive Foray Into Social Networks

Current TV, which is a wonderful mix of some original programming and viewer generated content, will soon launch in a new and very impressive avatar. While the original Current TV was limited to video, the new Current is more of a social network and bookmarking site where you can save and share videos, web pages and photos clipped from the web. You can also upload original videos, just as before, except now your videos can be nearly anything, not just programs for Current TV. You can watch...

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Add Tags To WordPress 2.3 Posts From Windows Live Writer 2008

The new WordPress 2.3 release supports keyword tagging without requiring external plug-ins like Ultimate Tag Warrior or Simple Tagging. With the new Windows Live Writer 2008, you can easily add keyword tags to WordPress blog posts (see screen capture) though this feature is not enabled by default. To enable tagging in WLW for WordPress 2.3 blogs, follow the steps below: 1. Download wlwmanifest.xml (with some images files) here and upload them to your wp-includes folder. [5023] 2. Add two...

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Merge Multiple RSS Feeds Into One with Yahoo! Pipes + FeedBurner

One of the very popular question in the FeedBurner FAQ is about merging XML 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...

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Microsoft Releases Word 2007 Viewer for Reading docx Documents

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....

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Excel 2007 Calculation Fix Weighs a Whooping 32 MB

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....

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Publish Your Twitter Tweets on Jaiku Automatically

Now that Jaiku is owned by Google, it will get lot of traction in the coming days - people who have refrained from micro-blogging so far are also likely to jump in. If you are a Twitter addict but also want to use Jaiku simultaneously, here's a time-saving trick - you can continue sending tweets to Twitter as before (via mobile phone, web or Google Talk) and the messages will automatically appear in your Jaiku account as well. See screenshot. This is possible because Twitter provides RSS feeds...

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This Little Bird Is Twitting In The Google Campus

Google acquired Blogger in 2003 from Evan Williams who later launched another successful company called Twitter. Google owned a service similar to Twitter called Dodgeball but for some reason, that service never got the attention it deserved and DodgeBall soon became history. Well, Google has re-entered the "micro-blogging" space - the news just out is that Google has acquired Jaiku, another Twitter clone. The litte bird above showed up on Jaiku homepage because the service may experiencing...

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