BlogHASH » Web2.0

xFruits: Compose your Information System

Raj — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 14:00:39 +0000

xFruits is a web 2.0 service, still in beta, that comes with a very low learning curve to understand what it does and how to use it. The home page of xFruits will tell you, in less than a minute, about its capabilities and features it currently offers. I like websites that can project about its offerings in very short time. It’s all about organizing your home page. Ok, now back to xFruits.

xFruits is a free online service that lets you take advantage of RSS in a variety of ways. Some of the features that I found to be very useful are:-

RSS Aggregator – Combine several RSS feeds such that the output is a single feed consisting of last 100 new posts. Very useful when you are subscribed to many blogs and track them everyday.
RSS to HTML – Input a feed and receive a strict xHTML 1.0 output.
RSS to PDF – Create a PDF file from an RSS feed. The PDF document is automatically set for printing and it includes a bookmark by source, title and author.
Post to RSS – Get a RSS feed of all emails sent to an xFruits mailbox. Get several persons writing on that mailbox and get an RSS feed of it.
RSS to MOBILE – Automatically create your mobile website version! Enter your RSS feed and get an url to consult your Website or blog on your mobile. xHTML 1.0 standard.
RSS to VOICE – Create vFruits from an RSS input to a podcast output. Each item of the feed is converted into voice by the VocalFruits service. Now that’s something going to be very helpful in future.
RSS to OPML – Gather and organise your RSS feeds by putting them into a single OPML file.

» Go ahead and give xFruits a try and meanwhile I try to figure out to use xFruits to organize my information.

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How embedding a video can fail the XHTML validation of your web site?

Raj — Fri, 17 Aug 2007 21:24:07 +0000

If you have been happily embedding videos from Youtube and other popular video sharing web sites into your blogs and sites, you should know that it can fail the XHTML validation of your site or the page that is embedded with the video clip. That’s true!

I had never thought about it but discovered it accidentally when as a part of my monthly website checkup, I tried to validate my site for XHTML 1.0 Transitional and it failed poorly. Looking at the validation output, the reason was very much evident. It was the code from Youtube that I had used to embed two video clips in my post on Hubble Telescope.

Why did it fail the XHTML validation? – Simply because embed tag is not a part of XHTML specifications and using this tag in your pages will fail the validation. This tag was initially used by Netscape to insert plugins and players in their browser and is also supported by all modern browsers. For further reading, refer to this article from A List Apart.

What did I do to correctly embed Youtube videos in my blog? – I used a plugin for WordPress called “WordPress Video Plugin” which helped me to a great extent by following XHTML standards while embedding video clips in my posts. The plugin doesn’t use the embed tag, instead solely relies on the object tag, to insert the video clip, which is very well in XHTML specifications.

If you have been inserting videos in your site and blogs, I highly recommend that you perform validation of your site and check the output for any validation errors.

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FeedBurner Stats PRO and MyBrand Services are NOW Free for Everyone

Raj — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 17:00:24 +0000

Good news for users of FeedBurner services. After the recent acquisition of FeedBurner by Google, the PRO services are now available for free to everyone.

FeedBurner Stats PRO will show you the number of people who have viewed or clicked individual content items in your feed and “Reach,” which estimates the daily number of subscribers who interacted with your feed content. This service was earlier charged but is now completely free.

MyBrand is another PRO service that lets you brand the feedburner’s URL to show as if it is a part of your domain name. Example: feeds.yourdomain.com/feedburner

Existing customers of FeedBurner PRO will not be charged for June 2007 and onwards. For more information, head over to FeedBurner Blogs.

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Wayki: Create Your Own Markers on Google Maps and Share with Others

Raj — Sat, 28 Apr 2007 15:00:42 +0000

Wayki is a free service that lets you create your own markers on Google maps and share them with other by linking to them from your website or blog. You can also add a photo, message or a place on the map to share. The interface is pretty easy to work with and creating a new place on the map is such an easy job that you will love it.

Creating your own marker is easy. Login using your free account and click on the Markers menu to add a new place, photo gallery, or a message.

Then drag your marker to your desired location on the map, add a title, description or photos for your marker.

Finally, click the Post It! button. A link will then show up which you can use on your site and blogs to share with others.

» [Wayki]

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A set of useful and FREE tools from Gritwire for people who use web everyday

Raj — Mon, 25 Dec 2006 18:03:20 +0000

[gritwire] is another online portal offering customized pages with plenty of online tools, just like [Netvibes] does. It consists of the following online tools built into the site:

1. SpeedFeed Reader – You can organize your feeds into folders for easy navigation. One can also rate the feeds and feed items. If you have an OPML file, you can upload all of your feeds in one go to your customized page.

2. Friends Network – Invite friends and create your own network at [gritwire]. Share your wikis, feeds and feed items. You can even discuss about any topic or anything else through Gritwire.

3. Media Player – An online player lets you play most common file formats such as MP3s. Listening to Podcasts and Videocasts is very easy with online Gritcast Player.

4. Wikis – It’s more like an online version of notepad or web notes. You can also share and edit wikis with your friends in your network.

5. Bookmarks – Better known as QuickLinks in gritwire, lets you store your favorite links online, organize them into folders for viewing later. This seems to be much similar to [del.icio.us].

6. Inbox – The Inbox in your customized page will let you see invitations from other members, recommendations about feeds and other notifications. You can also start discussions with your friends right from inside your Inbox.

Interested? Go ahead and signup. It’s FREE!

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Easy Web Development with Firebug Add-on for Firefox

Raj — Wed, 20 Dec 2006 22:01:17 +0000

If you haven’t come across Firebug yet, you are missing a lot of good things that Firefox can do for you.

Firebug is an amazing Firefox add-on that lets you edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page. The entire add-on is under 300k in size and offers the following features.

One key stroke to open the interface.
Global enable and disable options for websites.
Option for blacklist and white listing websites.
Inspect and edit HTML code.
Visualize CSS metrics when your CSS code doesn’t work as expected.
Monitor page load time for individual pages and including external scripts.
DOM explorer is built in.
Powerful Javascript logging console.

What are you waiting for? Get [Firebug] now!

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YouOS – A Web based Operating System

Raj — Sat, 09 Dec 2006 19:10:20 +0000

YouOS [as of now] is an experimental operating system that’s installed on web, boots up in your browser, accessible at your office and home too. In fact, YouOS is a web based application, which looks more like an OS and less like an application. The interface resembles a Windows or Linux desktop and is very easy to work with.

Registration is free and as soon as you login, the default icons are loaded on the desktop. You can then customize and explore the features of YouOS. Some of the important things that I noticed during my test drive of this application are:

Very easy to operate.
Resembles a windows desktop.
Control panel to add/remove applications.
A browser and RSS reader are already installed by default.
A file manager to easily explore stored files and directories.
Built in sharing, share music and other documents.

Some of the most common applications that are available in YouOS for installation are MAC OS 7 simulator, MSN messenger, GMail checker, NES Emulator, Text Editors and Process Manager. Many other applications are still under development though.

It might take some more time for YouOS to become more useful and functional and for people who have been using Windows or other operating systems for quite a while may not really look upto YouOS very soon. But for those who would want to move around with their stuff, YouOS does a very good job. Create files and content in YouOS and save it, resume working on your stuff from anywhere.

YouOS is also available as a hosted or licensed solution for businesses. If your business has resources for running the application, then licenses version is what I would recommend. Companies with large number of sales staff would see more benefits from such an application.

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My Favorite and Top Firefox Add-Ons!

Raj — Tue, 31 Oct 2006 23:34:08 +0000

Here is a list of my favorite Firefox add-ons that I use very often and just can’t imagine doing so many things on Internet that I do everyday without their assistance.

AD-Blocker

Adblock Plus – Very helpful to prevent most of the annoying ads from loading up in the browser. Backed up by an automatically updated Filter list of Ads, am sure you will find it useful. I strongly recommend this to people with very slow Internet connections (are there any?)
Get it @ https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/1865/

Bookmarks

del.icio.us Bookmarks – Use this extension to automatically add bookmarks to your del.icio.us page. (For those who don’t know about del.icio.us) it is an online bookmarking website, to which you can post your bookmarks from your browsers also and can be viewed from any other system. Example is my del.icio.us page.
Get it @ https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/3615/

Internet & Web Development

[Firebug] – Firebug is an amazing Firefox add-on that lets you edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript – live in any web page. The entire add-on is under 300k in size.

Web Developer – One of my personal favorites, I use it to look at the structure of any given website in the browser. It is capable of outlining block level elements such as DIV. You will no longer need to copy the source and paste in HTML editor to understand the anatomy of a website.
Get it @ https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/60/

FireFTP – FireFTP is a free, secure, cross-platform FTP client for Mozilla Firefox. Though you may not find it as easy to use as a commercial FTP client, I still recommend it if you are looking for a free alternative.
Get it @ https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/684/

IE Tab – Another great extension that lets you change the rendering engine for any given URL and instead of using the native Firefox rendering engine, it will use IE to open the page in a tab inside Firefox. Great help for developers who wants to see how their pages show in both the browsers. You can keep switching between rendering engines as and when you like.
Get it @ https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/1419/

Gmail Space allows you to use your Gmail Space for storing your files, just like an online drive.

Performance

Fasterfox - Fasterfox allows you to tweak many network and rendering settings such as simultaneous connections, pipelining, cache, DNS cache, and initial paint delay. All this helps in faster browsing.
Get it @ https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/1269/

Downloads

DownThemAll! – It’s a download manager for Firefox browser. It features an advanced accelerator that increases speed up to 400% and it allows you to pause and resume downloads at any time!
Get it @ https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/201/

Download Statusbar is a browser extension that allows you to keep track of ongoing and completed downloads in a hide-away status bar.

VideoDownloader adds a small icon on the status bar at the bottom of your firefox window, and a toolbar button. It will let you download the video you are watching. Many popular sites such as Google video, Youtube, metacafe and many other supported.

FlashGot will let you download one link, selected links or all the links of a page, using the external download managers.

PDF Download will let you decide if a PDF file should be opened in a browser window or downloaded as an external file to open with PDF reader.

I will keep this list updated as and when I discover more and useful Firefox extensions.

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