Shorthand Typing: Write Emails in Outlook More Efficiently

When we compose a new email message in Outlook or reply to an existing email, the body of our email will always have some text phrases that we type repeatedly. For instance:

When you get a blog tip, your reply may have - "Thank you for the tip."

When someone wants your phone number, you'll write - "You can reach me at 123-322-323 anytime during the day."

Hate typing the same text in different emails over and over again ? Here's an alternate solution:

You probably know of an old feature in Microsoft Outlook (and most other Office applications) called AutoCorrect that recognizes spelling errors and replaces them with the correct words as you are typing.

Other than fixing typos, AutoCorrect can be used for creating shortcut command for auto typing long lines of text.

For instance, you can set "familygreeting" as an AutoCorrect entry for Outlook some long line of text like "Hope you and everyone in your family is doing good." Whenever you type familygreeting in the message, Outlook will replace that with the greeting text. More text with less number of keystrokes.

The Autocorrect feature in Outlook can be accessed from Tools -> Options -> Spelling -> Spelling and Autocorrection

You can use this excellent feature to auto insert long email addresses or your website URL in the email message.  Warning: Don't use common English words as autotext entries since Outlook will not warn you before making the replacement.

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Fix Fonts Issues in Safari for Windows

If you are running Safari 3 on Windows XP SP2 or Windows Vista, you may have noticed that the fonts on the application menu bar, contextual menus and certain web pages are not displayed properly.

The Windows fonts are sometimes replaced by random characters and numbers. The problem occurs due to the Lucida Grande font that ships with the Safari installer - it probably conflicts with your existing copy of Lucida Grande font for Windows.


Here's an easy fix for font issue:

• Open the Safari 3 installation folder (C:\Program Files\Safari)
• Double click the "Safari.resources" folder. You will see have two font files - Lucida Grande Bold.ttf and Lucida Grande.ttf.1.
• Either rename the files with some different extension or delete them completely from your system.

Restart Safari - everything should look perfect now. No greek or strange characters anymore in the UI.

Update: If the above trick doesn't solve your font display problems in Safari, here's another workaround that works for sure.

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Use Notepad, Vim or Any Text Editor with Firefox for Writing Text

Ever tried editing your Blogger Templates or Wordpress Themes in Firefox ? Or a Wikpedia story that spans several paragraphs ? Editing large blocks of text in Firefox is both confusing and dangerous because it's so easy to make mistakes.

Here's an extremely useful  Firefox extension for you called "It's all text" - though the name offers no hint about the purpose of the extension, it enables you to edit or write text in Firefox using any external text editing software like Notepad, GVim, etc.

It's-all-text extension adds a small "edit" button near the textboxes in Firefox and if you click that button, the existing text opens up inside your favorite text editor.

You can edit the text and then close the editor - your text will automatically appear in the Firefox textbox. [think round-trip editing]. There will be a short Ajax style glow to hint that the text has changed.

The extension will be very handy for editing long blogger templates, Wikipedia entries, composing new blog posts in Wordpress web editor, writing blog comments, editing files in Web based FTP programs or replying to forum threads in Internet message boards.

Geeks may configure Firefox with Vi or Emacs while others may configure it with Notepad, UltraEdit or other text editors. Highly recommended.

It's All Text | Developer Website | Thanks Freakitude

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Yahoo! Celebrity Gossip Site Goes Live, Watch Out Perez Hilton!

"A very pregnant Pretty Woman", "Recovering Lindsay Works Out Her Issues", "Hot Hollywood Beach Bods" - these are the kind of juicy headlines that you are likely to find on most hollywood gossip and celebrity rumor blogs.

[No wonder, sites like Perez Hilton or TMZ.com draw the maximum traffic.]

But here's a small difference though - these are titles from the front page of Yahoo! OMG, the new Hollywood-centric web portal from Yahoo! with celebrity gossip news, pictures and video sourced from Associated Press, Access Hollywood and X17.

It's surprising that Aishwarya Rai, bollywood star from India, also figures in list of hollywood celebrities. Maybe Yahoo! has some plans to introduce an Indian version of Yahoo! OMG and this could be a dry run.

Unfortunately, Yahoo! OMG offers no RSS feeds for any of the content.

Coincidentally, Yahoo!'s partner X17 is the same agency that sued Perez Hilton blog for using copyrighted work. The competition is getting hot.

Yahoo! OMG | Celebrity Index | Thanks Rhiza Sanchez

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Get Your Blog Linked on BoingBoing - An Alternate Way

Unless you have written something very unusual like waterproof iPod speakers, schizophrenia virtual simulation or a bluetooth motorcycle helmet, it is extremely tough to get your article linked on the directory of wonderful things (aka Boing Boing blog).

But don't loose heart if BoingBoing editors aren't linking to your posts - you can now create Boing Boing posts yourself with this post generator developed by graphics designer Katie Sekelsky.

Stuff in a few words and your BoingBoing Story is ready. See the screenshot.

It's such an innovative idea that Xeni Jardin mentioned it on BoingBoing. And here's a fictional story created using the BoingBoing post generator with some editing:

The free WiFi in downtown New York is now blocking Digital Inspiration, following suit with what happened in Boston just last week. I was in the city just last week, for a signing of my new book, Overclocked, and predicted that this would be the next step that city officials would take, especially after the popular technology blog posted pictures of a love that resembles iPhone, as well as links to iPhone skins.

As everything on the website is Creative Commons licenced, I urge all of you living in or near the city to print and post as much of the site's content around as possible, from the church to museum. However, when you're out in the city, beware the roaming cameras of Google Street View Maps.

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Submit Multiple URLs to del.icio.us Bookmarks as a Batch

Imagine you have hundreds (or even thousands) of webpage URLs that you want to upload to your del.icio.us account. How would do this bulk submit when the delicious system allows you to bookmark web pages one at a time ?

There are some very genuine reasons for submitting bookmarks in bulk - for instance, bloggers can put all their blog posts onto del.icio.us to know which posts are most popular among delicious users and what kind of tags / text notes are users attaching to their posts. It's like a good visual analysis of your blog site.

Now let's see how to enter multiple URL's inside del.icio.us database in one go.

Assuming that you have all the URLs and the associate page titles, create a new text document in the following format:

<!DOCTYPE NETSCAPE-Bookmark-file-1>
<TITLE>Bookmarks</TITLE>
<DL><p>
    <DT><A HREF="http://www.abc.com/a.html">Page Title A</A>
    <DT><A HREF="http://www.abc.com/b.html">Page Title B</A>
............
............

    <DT><A HREF="http://www.abc.com/z.html">Page Title Z</A>
</DL><p>

Save this as a text file - It is fairly easy to create the file if you know any shell scripting language (like Perl) or just use the Concatenate function inside Microsoft Excel.

Now open the delicious homepage and go to settings » import / upload. Browse and select the above file, choose "Yes, Import Popular tags" and finally click the upload button.

The upload status page will reload once every minute. A success message will appear when the job is complete. If you are importing a large number of bookmarks (say more that 200), you can safely close the status page and check later as importing will take some time to complete.

These imported bookmarks will be marked as private by default meaning others won't see them in your del.icio.us account.

Know When People Bookmark Your Site on Del.icio.us [example]

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Share Pictures Directly from your Desktop

Photographer Claude Renault is looking for a tool to share pictures with friends and family directly from his computer's hard drive without uploading them on a public photo-sharing website or sending them as email attachments.

Some of you may recall PurpleNova that turns your desktop into a website - every file or folder on your computer (that you decide to share) is automatically assigned a web address and  your friends can view the pictures from your computer onto their desktops. No uploads required.

Another good alternative (to PurpleNova) for sharing photos and music from your computer is Dekoh Desktop - it runs inside your web browser (as a small Java applet) and works the same on Windows, Mac or Linux computers. [PurpleNova was Windows-only]

Getting started with Dekoh is simple. Create an account with your email address and the Dekoh software will seamlessly install in your web browser. Select the Dekoh Photos and add the picture folders that you like to share privately with your contacts.

Send them an invite via Dekoh desktop itself and they'll be able to view your photos from anywhere in the world. The pictures will stream live from your desktop so if you go offline, the sharing stops automatically.
Your friends can view the photos you shared as thumbnails, individual pictures, or in a slideshow.

The look-n-feel of the Dekoh Desktop is pretty impressive and though I had some issues installing it on my main computer (due to conflicting JRE versions), Dekoh worked like a snap on another computer.

They have just launch another application called Dekoh Music which scans your chosen folders for MP3 audio files and and you can listen to your music collection from any other computer. Dekoh.com

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Looking for a Job ? Get a Video Camera

Job seekers in India now have an opportunity to impress employers with their presentation and communication skills without meeting the prospective boss physically - just create a 2 minute video and upload it to Monster.

Monster India, one of of popular job portals here like Naukri.com and TimesJobs, have launched a new feature called "Video Resume" where job applicants can upload video files for free along with their regular text-only  resumes.

Once your video is approved by the system, employers will be able to search and scan the video files like other text resumes.

Video resumes could be a good way to gain the attention of the recruiter when he has to shortlist only some candidates from a list of few hundred resumes. It's the same as adding a picture to your profile on some social networking website - the profile views will be much higher.

The video resume files on Monster India are accepted in most common video formats and can be upto 50 MB in size (less than 2 minutes).

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Convert Web Pages into a PDF Scrapbook with HP Print Add-on

HP Smart Print 2.0 has released a free IE add-on for saving webpages as Adobe PDF files. It also gives you the option to print content from several websites into one PDF file.

Unlike other HTML to PDF convertors which install as a virtual print driver on your system, this HP PDF utility is built on the lines of a "scrapbook" application.

With the smart selection mode turned on, your cursor on the webpage converts into a crosshair - select portions of the webpage that you would like to save as PDF and they are automatically added to the clippings bin on the right.

Once you are done selecting the objects that have to saved as PDF, click the print button and you get an option to either send the printing job to your physical printer or save that as an Adobe PDF file locally.


The addon will automatically determine the best layout that wastes the least amount of paper. If you don't like the layout, change it manually. You can even resize objects. Available at HP.com

Reverse Trick: Convert PDF to HTML or Text

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Real Video Player 11 Can Rip YouTube Videos

The new RealPlayer 11 is like a powerful download manager for Internet Videos - it allows you to watch, download and burn streaming videos clips from YouTube and most other video sharing websites including Google Video and MySpace.

Real Player 11 will put a "Download this video" button on web pages that have embedded video content - you can click the button to start the video download process. Firefox and IE are supported.

Multiple videos can also be downloaded simultaneously and you can even burn the video content onto a CD or a DVD disc using RealPlayer itself.  [related hack: Burn YouTube Videos to DVD]

If you are happy with good-old Firefox extensions for downloading Youtube clips, RealPlayer 11 can even be used as a universal video player to watch videos in Flash, Windows Media, Real and Quicktime formats. [very similar to VLC Media Player]

Related: Save YouTube as QuickTime or MP3

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Save Web Pictures with Firefox in Different Folders Automatically

If you wish to save a picture from some web page onto your hard drive, you generally right-click that image, browse to the local folder where you want to store the picture and click save.

Firefox, by default, will always show the last selected folder in the "Save Image As" dialog.

This is fine as long as you dump all images downloaded from the internet to a single folder but the problem occurs when you are more organized and like to arrange pictures in logical folders (like pets, wallpapers, screenshots, etc)

That's when the "Save Image in Folder" extension comes in handy - This extension helps you to quickly save images into different folders without having to click through your folder structure again and again.

The standard Save Image dialog can be suppressed and the image downloads happen in the background. You may also add date-prefix to the file name or define any custom filenames that will auto-increment with each new download.

Save Image in Folder | Download Latest Version | Thanks Keith

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Download Apple Safari for Windows

Apple Safari is now available for Windows an the default search engine is set to Google.

Safari installation on Windows was a snap. The inbuilt RSS reader is excellent and the browser is pretty fast - Apple claims that Safari loads web pages up to 2 times faster than IE 7 and up to 1.6 times faster than Firefox 2.

However, there were some issue with the fonts - the Safari Toolbars and bookmarks are all appearing in overlapping numbers and symbols. Possibly I am missing some Apple font or the Helvetica Fractions font is corrupted. Anyone else noticed this ?

Another missing feature in Safari Windows is "email webpages" - Mac users can email full copies of websites (including images) while Windows users can only send the link of the current webpage.

You will love the "Private Browsing" feature of safari - when turned on, the sites that you visit are not added to the browser's history and searches are not saved in the Google box.

This is the second Apple software on my Windows PC after the iTunes-Quicktime combo and the fifth web-browser after IE, Firefox, Maxthon and Opera.

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Remove Unwanted Items from Firefox Right-Click Menu

When you do a fresh installation of Firefox, the contextual menu (which appears when you right click) is tiny and pretty containing only the most essential menu items such Save Image, Copy Email Address, View Page Source, Copy Link Location, Search Google for, etc.

But things change as you add new Firefox extensions.

For instance, I have six Firefox extensions (FireBug, DownloadThemAll, JSView, ScrapBook, Yoono, FlashGot) and they have all added several new items to the right-click menu.

The contextual Firefox menu wore a cluttered and extremely confusing look until I installed Menu Editor - a must have Firefox extension.

As the name suggests, Menu Editor lets you rearrange (move) existing menu-items, group similar commands or remove items that you rarely use (e.g., View Page Source is useless for non-techies and they can safely hide it).

You can also use the Menu Editor extension to re-arrange and trim your Firefox Menu bar on the top (that has the File, Edit, Help commands)

The extension definitely makes you feel more productive because, with the junk removed, you'll find the frequently used menu items much much faster. [See the Firefox contextual menu after the Menu Editor treatment - much better]

Menu Editor [Access it from the Firefox Add-ons Dialog]

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Adobe Acrobat 8.1 for Office 2007 and Windows Vista

Adobe today released an Acrobat 8 patch that makes this popular PDF writer compatible with Microsoft Office 2007 programs and Windows Vista.

Other than the new PDFmaker add-on for Office 2007, the second most exciting feature is the PDF Preview Handler - you can now view PDF files in Office Outlook 2007 as well as in Windows Explorer on Windows Vista without starting Acrobat or Adobe Reader.

See related guide: The Best Adobe PDF Tools

Acrobat 8.1 too sports the new Office 2007 style Ribbon UI - we are likely to see more and more vendors adapting to the new Office Ribbon especially when their application is tied to Office applications.

Organizations who have shifted to Office 2007 may be desperately waiting for Acrobat 8.1 since the Save as PDF plugin, available for free from Microsoft, doesn't work with Outlook emails which is like a lifeline for most Office users.

User who do not have Acrobat 8.0 Professional or Standard version may download the new version of Adobe Reader 8.1 to view PDF documents.

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Create Photo Greeting Cards with Flickr Pictures and Your Text

PictureSandbox Cards is a new online tool from FlickrCash (read review) to help you create and send personalized photo greeting cards with your own text and Images from Flickr.

The interface is intuitive - search the images from Flickr database (you can also limit search results based on Creative Commons license), add some text and the photo card turns into a webpage.

Here's a sample greeting card created from the the profile pictures of MyBlogLog visitors.

PictureSandbox Cards - Flickr Photo Greeting Cards.

Very neat implementation and the card is free of any advertising banners (for now) Wish the future releases have an option to change color schemes and photo frame borders.

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Measure Your Touch Typing Speed and Accuracy

Fingerjig is an interesting typing game (done in Flash) to help you calculate your touch typing speed as well as word accuracy.

The typing speed test will run at different levels for six minutes though you can take breaks and your score (word per minute, letter typed, etc) will be displayed after each level.

The word length gets larger as you cross levels.

Fingerjig by Jon Miles [picture: ed]

Typing tip - try to improve your net words per minute by making fewer typing mistakes - experiment with typing a bit slower.

Typing Tutor Software, Online Touch Typing Games

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yPen - An Online Text Notebook, Simple but Useful

Do not confuse yPen with sophisticated notebook applications like Google Notebook or the more feature-rich Zoho Notebook.

yPen, like other online clipboards, is just a quick tool for creating text notes online inside a neat and minimalistic interface.

No registration or browser add-ons required - just type (or copy-paste) the text in the available space and it stays there forever.

You can access your text notes via a unique URL.  And there's no save button, everything you type is automatically saved.

yPen is different from other note-taking applications in the sense that it sports a tabbed interface and therefore several text clippings can be entered on the same webpage organized as tabs (equivalent to sections or pages in Microsoft OneNote 2007)

For developers, yPen also has an API to create or read yPen notes inside your application or widget.

Goto yPen [Make and Share Notes] Developer Blog | yPen API

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Add Dynamic Charts or Graphs to Web Pages In Picture Format

We have discussed several Flash based solutions in the past to help you embed animated graphs and charts to your site without any programming.

Flash charts are preferred over static image chance since they the former are visually more appealing and data-driven - if the underlying data changes, you don't have to redraw the chart.

The disadvantage of Flash charts is that they require Flash plugin and therefore the charts may be visible inside email messages or news readers since they do not render Flash.

 

Zoho Sheet offers an elegant solution to this problem - their graphic engine lets you create dynamic charts and graphs in image format which you can also resize and embed in your blog pages just like any other web graphic.

Here's how you do it:

1. Create a Zoho sheet and fill it with tabular data.

2. Click the Chart icon and select the chart type [Column, Bar, Stack, Pie, Bubble, Line Charts and so on]

3. Once you have the chart, resize it to fit your site layout and click the "publish" link on the chart. This will create a public URL of that chart that points to a PNG image.

Use that anywhere in message boards, emails, blogs, etc. While this image may look static, it's actually drawn with the latest data in your spreadsheet - if that changes, you will see a new image.

Google Docs & Spreadsheets have also added impressive charting capabilities but they do not allow embedding yet though you can download the rendered chart from Google Docs as an image.

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Search Engine Optimization Tips from Google Search Evangelist

Adam Lasnik share some basic but useful SEO tips with WSJ on how businesses can improve their website rankings in search engines. [You many know Adam from the Google Webmaster Central blog]

The video is around 3 minutes but if you don't have the headphone, here's a quick text recap:

1. Use Descriptive Title Tags - they are more likely to appear higher in the search results plus they have a high probability of getting clicked. [The Title that Adam suggested had close to 10 words]

2. Meta tags, which contain the description and keywords, are also very important for good rankings. This kind of contradicts our previous understanding.

3. Meta Descriptions are also essential since they show up right beneath the page title in Google Search pages. Be patient once you apply Title Tags and Meta Description tags.

4. Link Building - If you are a new website facing the Google Sandbox effect, get a link from some trusted site in your niche or product area and that automatically boosts the confidence of Google in your new site.

5. Use Google Webmaster Console - another very useful tool for site owners. via

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Practice and Learn Keyboard Shortcuts with Keyboard Jedi

We all agree that keyboard shortcuts (like the Ctrl+C for Copy) speed up our computing experience but how do we memorize or master the various key combinations when software program (like Firefox, IE, iTunes, Word, Windows) has their own set of keys.

If you also need help learning keyboard shortcuts for any Windows application, a free utility called Keyboard Jedi can come in very handy.

No, this software is not any visual overlay or a diagram of keyboard shortcuts but something entirely different - it puts you in a situation where you have no option but to learn the shortcuts in order to complete your task - just like the strict teacher in the school.

Start any application and press Ctrl+Alt+Shift+F12. Keyjedi will disable your mouse only for that application. Whatever shortcuts you type will appear in a small transparent window.

The purpose is to this mouseless mode to force yourself to learn keyboard shortcuts instead of using the mouse. Press ctrl-alt-shift-f12 again to regain mouse control.

Roy Osherove [Developer of Keyboard Jedi]

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