Before that what is an URL, and why everyone in this world is so much bothered about it?

People who use web knows very well about URL. And there are quite lots of topic around how to build a better URL. CMS software provides plug-ins, tools to build good URLs.  So, why is that these folks worried much about building a great looking pretty URL? I don’t want to talk much on what is URL, Wikip can give you enough information about URL. I will just quickly discuss about the part of URL and which one I’m speaking about. Consider this URL,

http://www.mymindleaks.com/blog/archives/object-oriented-programming-–-encapsulation-is-not-just-hiding-data.html

An URL has the following parts.

1. http -> protocol
2. www -> subdomain
3. mymindleaks -> domain name
4. com ->  Top Level Domain ( TLD )
5. blog/archives/object…data.html -> page / filename
6. .html -> file extension
7. And if you find anything after “?” -> CGI params

Check out here to  what I’m talking about in a visual stuff.

Now, in this post, I’m talking about the 5th part, “/blog/archives/object-oriented…data.html“. which is the page / filename part of the URL.

A quick research on URLs and Page rank.

Can anyone fool Google by writing an url as “10-tips-to-make-you-rich” and the entire content of the URL teaches you “10-tips-to-spend-a-lot”??? Will the Google still fetch the URL “10-tips-to-make-you-rich” when someone tries to search for “how to become rich” ?

When I tried checking the PageRank of the few famous blog over internet, via http://www.prchecker.info/check_page_rank.php , I could infer the following.

This results makes you wonder? Even me. Professional bloggers like Darren Rowse’s Problogger, John Chow, who have million of hits, lots of articles on tweaks, blogging, money making have a less PR rating compared to the simple-plain-old but content ful Norvig or Xahlee’s blog. If you look at Norvig’s blog, you might find URL which aren’t descriptive like [ http://norvig.com/paip.html -> Paradigms of AI Programming]. The Xahlee’s blog have unicode chars in his blog and his blog topic is bit diversified ( computers, math, and little bit of decent porn, yeah ).  Google isn’t that dumb folks.

Even my blog has pretty URLs, and I’ve spent relatively quite amount of time in thinking about URL for my blog., but that’s all purely to give the reader a better idea of what a post is all about. To me, a URL is just a tiny part that makes the user understand what is all the content is about without reading through the content. Relying on this probably might give you a fraction of what SEO’s call, the page rank juice.

Google’s Software Engineer Matt demonstrate a tip using a USB powered bar code reader.

1. Just login into your Google account.
2. Google Book
3. Goto My Library
4. Click Import
5. Power your USB bar code reader
6. Scan the bar code behind your book
7. And thats it. Done.

Google Book service recogonises the ISBN number and adds the book into your library.

Power your USB scanner, scan the bar code of your books and import  into your library.

Once you have build your library, you can make use of Google book services to work on them. You will have benefits like

One big advantage of having your You don’t have to go manually search for all the respective books for the pages. Google Book will search for the text in your library and will list down the pages where you can find the

Source: sbj

Have you ever used Google Books? If yes, have you unleashed the power of Google books? For those who aren’t aware of Google book,

Google Book Search is a tool from Google that searches the full text of books that Google scans, converts to text using optical character recognition, and stores in its digital database.

Source: Wikipedia

You dont need a seperate account for Google Book. Login into Google Book ( http://books.google.com) then you are done. You can search millions of books and the texts with the Google Book.

Search your home library:

Ok, now how does it helps to search my book library at my home. Simple, add all your books you own in your home library, tadaaa…done. Type in a search text in your book library, it will tell you which book does your search query has it and what is the page number of it. Simple and Powerful.

How to create a replica of your home library in Google Books:

1. Login into Google Books
2. Goto My Library
3. Left hand side, you will find Import Books Link
4. Type in all the Book’s ISBN number you need to import
5. You are done.

Now type in the phrase / reference you want to search. Google will get you the Book Name & Page number. Either you can read it on line ( if the entire book is permitted to read for free ) or You go fetch it in your book.

If you are a beginner to the internet and blog world, you would just have started your subscription and all you have to do is just to know how to manage the subscriptions. But for the advanced readers and the blog addicts, piling of the feeds will happen frequently. Now it is the high time for me to clean up my RSS shelf.

So, the big question is, how do I know which RSS should I get rid of?

Here is the arranged view of my google reader. There are 1000+ items in each section that is still pending with me to read. But I’m sure I gonna click ‘Mark as Read’ and I gonna get rid of all items ( including important and interesting stuff).

Now i’ve to clean up all these unnecessary stuffs, but at the same time I can’t miss out my favorite stuffs. Here comes my saviour the Google Reader Trends that helped me to sort out my problem.

Google Reader Trends

Reading Trends

The Reading trends answers the question ‘which feed you are reading the most?‘

The top 5 blogs that I read CrunchGear , Lifehacker, AppleInsider , Engadget and Ars Technica. Also the “#Read” count shows, how many posts you have read in the shown RSS feed and “%Read” shows you how much of the published content you have read. In CrunchGear, i’ve read 24 items, but it is just the 2% of the items that I’ve read from the published content. So I’ve more content to read in CrunchGear. Similarly, in ‘Doing Jalsa and Showing Jilpa ‘, I’ve read all the items published, which shows 100%

Subscription Trends

The subscription trends, answers the question ‘Are you intrested in blog feeds which publishes huge number of posts per day?‘Subscription trends, shows the frequency of the items getting published from a blog. In Gizmodo, about 46 items published per day but the trends shows that, I don’t ready any of Gizmodo’s item. Also, CrunchGear publishes 32 items per day and I’ve read 2% of the items from CrunchGear. So, even though Gizmodo publishes a large volume of news, I’m not much interested in the news item from Gizmodos. So, I might conclude that I’m not reading the subscription ( but might change in future ) that publishes more than 40 posts per day.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

(Via Google Operating System )

1. Change or Update Folder

Click open each feed and update the folder in which it wants to reside.

But this is just good only if you have about 10+ feeds. But as feed count goes on increasing you will find it more difficult and you might feel getting rid of the Google Reader

2. Bulk Organising

You can do bulk organising of the feeds in the settings mode.

Go to Settings -> Subscriptions, you will find all the feeds listed. This panel gives you a way to do bulk organization!

3. Quick Organising

Here is our trick that I want to explain. Google reader provides you a Drag n Drop facility to organize the feeds in the reading mode.

You keep your drag any of the feeds and move it across your folders and drop it, viola, that’s it. That’s really a faster and quick way or organising the Google Reader feeds.

You can get the movie details for the next 3 days starting from current day.

You can make Google sort the results based on the distance, film popularity and film title. This lists down which movie is so popular and it could tell you the index of movies running in a city with the theatres

You could see google tells you which movie is so popular , so that it runs in most of theatre & multiplexes.

I remember that it would take more than 2 days for Google to index this blog, but surprising that Google learns from the frequency of blog items from my blogs and knows the importance of indexing my blog quick.

Courtesy:zackv

You would have explored the features of GMail Search in my previous post Hack GMail – Part 1

In my previous post of hacking the search, you  would have explored the features on Labels, filters etc. On continuing the exploration, I came with my second post. This post lists down the features which are not available in the simple search facility. Come one, lets explore the the advanced search features.

For typing the query, you need not open the simple search view, just directly type the query in the default query box.

In order to be a master in searching, you have to know the operators used for searching. To know brief about the operators have a visit to

https://gmail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=7190

Also have a look on how to create filters and labels. This is a must use tool in Gmail, who fail to use these features, so pity on them. Please don’t miss it out.

https://gmail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=6579

In the rest of this blog, you could find the functions of the operators in elaborate.

from: used to specify the sender and fetches all the mails from the same

It is the same as the from in the simple search.

Example 1: Extract all the mails from friends, say abc,abc1,abc2. Then your query goes like this.

from: abc@hotmail.com OR abc1@yahoo.com OR abc2@gmail.com

Example 2: Extract all the mails from friends, say abc,abc1 and not from abc2. Then your query goes like this.

from: abc@hotmail.com OR abc1@yahoo.com -abc2@gmail.com

Example 3: Extract all the mails from except from abc

from: -abc

Example 3: Extract all the mails from except from yahoo or gmail

from: -yahoo.com –gmail.com

to

: used to specify the recipient and fetches all the mails from the same. It is the same to the TO in the simple search.

Example 4: Extract all the mails sent to friends, say abc,abc1,abc2. Then your query goes like this.

to: abc@hotmail.com OR abc1@yahoo.com OR abc2@gmail.com

Example 5: Extract all the mails sent to groups i.e mails your received from groups.

to: yahoogroups.com

Example 6: Similarly exclude the mails from yahoogroups

to: -yahoogroups.com

subject: Search for the subject words

Example 7: Search for a single word

subject: Chennai

Example 8: Search for more than one word. In this example to include all mails with subject Chennai and Mumbai and reject mails with subject kolkatta

Subject: ( Chennai OR Mumbai ) subject: –kolkatta

cc and bcc: This operator function similar to the to: and from: operator. It is used to give the email address or just the account name or just the service provider address to fetch the mails.

Example 9: Fetch all the mails which you had CCed or BCCed

cc:abc@yahoo.com
bcc:abc1@yahoo.com

label: Search the mails which holds a label.

Example 10: Let me assume that you have labels and have applied to some mails. Let me say you have label called “Family” for the mails which you receive from your family members. Now you are to search for the mails where only your mom had sent. Here I am considering that both dad and mom uses the same mail id.

label:family from:familyhead@gmail.com mom OR dad

Example 11: Another example to show is from my inbox. I have grouped all the fun related mails from various groups such as Nidokidos, myWorldPals etc. under the label named “Others”. Now all the mails arriving from that group would be fixed with the label “Others”. Now I need to search the mails from this label, which has photos regarding “Katrina”.

label:Others (subject:nidokidos OR myworldpals)

Another example which rejects all mails with subject beautifulIndia.

label:Others subject:-BeautifulIndia

Note: If you have label names separated with spaces, then use hyphen(-) while using in searches. The Hyphen, i.e the negation operator is different from this hyphen used in the label names.

E.g.: If you have a label called “Fun Mails”, then while searching use as label:Fun-Mails. Here note that there is no space in between Fun & Mails. If you introduce a space, then the query will search for the mails with label Fun and rejects all mails with words Mails.

i.e. label:Fun –Mails

It is possible to apply one or more label name to a single mail. Example, if you have received a mail from your friend relating to a job matter, then you would apply labels both Friend and Jobs. In such cases, most of the mails may posses more than one label. Now in such cases to search mails pertaining to particular label and rejecting the mails the label you are not in need. The simple figments is to use Negate Operator i.e Hypen.

Example 12: You need to extract all mails from your friend which don’t have job information i.e don’t have label named JOBS.

label:friend –label:JOBS

Example 13: Search all the mails from your friend with attachment, which has only Word document or PDF files as the attachments.

label:Friend has:attachment filename:(pdf OR doc)

in: used to search mail in the specific location i.e Inbox, Archives, Trash, Sent Items etc. If you are in need to search locations except Inbox, you could use this operator.

This operator had really helped me to search in my case, as I had about 30,000+ mails in my trash.

Example 14: Searching your trash box for a which you have deleted it unknowingly. All mails from your friend that had moved to trash.

in:trash label:friend

Now you can combine all the above said operators to search the mail.

Example 15: Search your trash and archives which you are not confident about it’s location which has an attachment of pdf file from your company.

in:anywhere has:attachment filename:pdf

is: Is operator is helps you to fetch mails that have read, unread , starred etc.

Example 16: To fetch all mails that you haven’t read that your friend had sent.

label:friend is:unread

Try with is:read is:unread, yeah you can guess what would be the result.

is:read – gives all the mails that have read

is:unread – gives all the mails that haven’t read

is:starred – gives all the mails that have been starred in spite you read or not.

after:, before: These operators are date operators which are used to input the query based on date values. The date format which I have aforesaid in the first part as YYYY/MM/DD is used.

Example 17: To search all the mails which have arrived after June 4^th 2005. to till date.

after:2005/06/05

Example 18: To search all the mails arrived on particular date, use both the operators

after:2005/09/10 before:2005/09/11

If you use after:2005/09/10 before:2005/09/10, will gives you all the mails.

So, how does it identifies your logon? Simple, the widget code that you will paste in your blog will contain all the details to identify you.

Does the user needs a Gmail account to chat with you? The answer is absolutely “No”. Any anonymous user can chat with you. So please be sure that who is chatting with you and don’t share any personal data.

So, How do you chat?

You click on the bubble, and you will get a popup to type in the message.

On the receiving end, When someone click on the link on your site and you are logged into the GTalk, then you will get a alert like this below.

Google is kind enough to alert you that you are chatting with Anonymous! I have two chat windows as I get two messages.

I wonder how many chat windows will be created if more number of people pings you!!

So, get your widget and plug it in your blog / site and make your viewers connect to you!