Shankar Ganesh

… You don’t know them probably I guess.

CTRL + R Right align text

CTRL + E Center align text

CTRL + L Left align text

CTRL + Tab Cycle through open windows

CTRL + 1 For single spaced lines

CTRL + 2 For double spaced lines

CTRL + 5 For 1.5 spaced lines

F9 Send an email to the contact you’re chatting with

F11 Start a voice chat with the contact

F12 Cancel the call

ESC Close the current window

ALT + ESC Close all Google Talk windows

Google is reportedly in acquisition talks with Feedburner, a feed management service that has become a favourite of bloggers, and other content publishers.

Feedburner, the so called Google Of Feeds, may be worth a $100 million.

What will Google get out of this?

• It is rumoured that Google may try to expand their RSS Ads market with this acquisition, and may even offer features to help users integrate their adsense ads (or even DoubleClick ads, for that matter ) with their feeds easily.
• Google’s Blogger service can be further enhanced with Feedburner. And it’s possible that Google may provide Feedburner completely free (you now have to pay for some advanced statistics for your feed)

And who knows? Many more…

There’s no official word yet, and the Vecosys report says that though their source is good, they’re still not 100% sure that this would happen.

Anyway, let’s wait and watch as it unfolds…

References:1, 2

This is funny.

Google has topic specific search engines and there’s one for Linux available at http://www.google.com/linux. This one helps you to search Linux related pages easily.

But here’s how Google calls it in its Advanced Preferences page, after the Universal search redesign:

Google.com/linux searches Penguin friendly pages.

Linux related pages are designed for Penguins?

All of these need Firefox + Greasemonkey to work.

Gmail Integration

Google Reader + Gmail Integrator
This [tag]greasemonkey script[/tag] integrates [tag]Google Reader[/tag] with Gmail, saving you one extra tab. One of the best greasemonkey scripts available for Google Reader. An improved version of the script is here.

Google Reader Folders on Gmail
This script adds a little box on your Gmail page that lists the folders on Google Reader and also the number of unread items. Screenshot on Gmail:

Google Reader Search

Read the rest of this entry »

It’s really very simple.

Type: [Name] [Space] Born into the Google Search Bar

For example, to know Einstein’s birth date, type Einstein Born and you get his date of birth instantly:

Born is an advanced Google Search Operator.

Well, this evening, I just logged in to my Gmail account, only to find something happening wrong. It was actually a temporary error, Google told me, and I was lucky enough to get back into my Gmail account within minutes. But what if my archived messages were gone? Some important ones! What if….

The worst thing might happen at anytime. Nothing is cent percent perfect. So why not take up some precautions?

Well, I earlier set up my Gmail account such that it forwards all emails to a private Google group and I established it, thanks to this tutorial on Google Tutor. When this is done, there’s a copy of all your arrived emails in a private Google group, accessible only to you. So when something’s wrong, you can access your emails – safe and sound – on Google Groups.

Many people have subscribed to this blog via Google Reader and I’m just one of Google Reader’s fans. I just wanted to give some tips to you all. Keep reading…

Tag your feeds appropriately
As days pass by, you find your self subscribing to a variety of feeds across the blogosphere. Some interesting, some not that much. Try categorizing the feeds as you wish. Besides tagging feeds like blog tips, technology etc., you could try prioritizing them. For example, you could take a look at the way in which I’ve tagged my feeds.

I’ve three categories: technology-1, 2 and 3. The first section is the most important one to me, the blogs which I find are must reads every day. I read them first and then the rest. This could be of great help when you have very little time to browse through the articles.

Star Items for later reading
Google reader has a very good feature which allows you to star your items. You could use this feature to mark items for later reading or for reference. Sometimes, you may have very little time browsing through the feed and you just have a glance and go off. You may wish to read that item in-depth later, and this is the point where Starring comes in.

Share Items with others
Well, this is not really a tip, but it’s a good thing to do if you use Google Reader. You could use the ‘Share’ button at the end of each RSS item to tell the world what you’re reading. You could then click the ‘Shared Items’ link in the left panel to get your Shared Items URL to which your friends could subscribe to.

That’s just what I was wanting to say about Google Reader. If you have any tips, please share them here.

Well, put up your shared items URL ,if you wish, here so that we shall exchange interesting items.

Now, you could share items on Google Reader with your friends via email, thanks to a new feature introduced in the product, the Google Reader Blog announced today.

It was possible to share items by using the ‘Share’ button at the end of an item in Google Reader, and your friends were able to read your items via your Shared Items Public Page feed.

But for the not so-savvy ones, this won’t be of much help. So, you could email them the interesting things you read the other day on Reader, by clicking the Email button under the item.

An AJAX box opens near the bottom of the feed, asking you for the email address. Like Gmail, contact addresses here can be autocompleted:

You could also add some personal notes in the email.