Free Software reviews, Windows tips, tricks and advanced options

This handy Google Labs tool will allow you to see your website as seen by users with different screen resolutions. One of the major challenges while designing a website template is to design the template so that user can read the relevant information at the very first glance itself. Sadly this depends on the visitors screen resolution. This tool from Google Labs will overlay a transparent ruler like layout to the web address you give it, thus enabling you to see how your web site looks at  screen resolutions other than yours.

Screen Shot of Simple Informations on browser Size by Google Labs

The tool allows basic settings such as transparency adjustment of the ruler. You can use Google Analytics to know what resolution is used by most number of your visitors. Then you can head over to Browser size and see what all portions of your website is viewable at that resolution. This will allow you to make your web site more accessible and improve the “page views/visit” as well as “bounce rate”.

The following is a screen shot of my Google Analytics page showing the details of this blogs visitors and their screen resolution.

Statisctics of visitors to this site by resolution - Google Analytics

Link : Browser Size | Google Labs | Google Analytics

Name

: Quix

What is it?

: Quix is a JavaScript BookMarklet which allows you to add functionality to your browser

Details

Quix is a simple BookMarklet that you can add to you browser toolbar by drag and drop. It is more like the “Latest Headline” in your FireFox toolbar. When clicked, it opens a prompt that accepts short commands and behaves accordingly. Commands include whois lookups, social bookmarkings, webmaster tools, URL shortening etc.

You can type in your command to this prompt : Quix

An example is here. You are on a particular website and you need to know the whois informations of the site, What do you do? You can copy the web address, go to a domain tools site and type in the address to get the details. OR you can click on the Quix button on your toolbar, and just enter ‘whois’ to see all the required information then and there. You can also use Quix for web searches as “g Simple Informations” will search on Google for Simple Informations. Try “dict amazing” for a word meaning or “map LOCATION_NAME” for google map of the Location.

These are just a few of the commands available in Quix. YOu can see the full list of commands at Quix Help.

An introduction to Quix : Video

Do I need Quix

If you haven’t yet added it to your toolbar, probably you are confused as to why you need it. Well it makes searches handy, access to other information and sharing on social networks including Twitter and FaceBook easy. If not using this button, you might end up using a single bookmarklet for each of the social networks and one bookmark each for a search. Another advantage is that you can add custom commands to Quix easily. so hurry and get yours now itself.

Pros

Does NOT slow down browser like other plug-ins. Can be used with every browser that supports JavaScript. I don’t think I can list its goods. You just need to prefix each command with a space and it will result in a new tab. All of it is just great. You can extend it with command files (see links below). Can disable the default commands – you should need some crazy reason to do so.

Cons

Haven’t seen one yet.

Verdict

This is one tool every one who uses Internet must have. The SEO and WP tools make life easier for web Admins and Bloggers. Yoast has done a wonderful job by creating the plugin.

Links

Quiz | Quix commands | Extend commands | How to add commands | Joost de Valk

One of the visitors of SI, Joseph, recently asked in a comment to the post “How to disable drive access from registry” how he could disable  access to a drive even for programs like Ashampoo which managed to override the registry trick. The method to be used in such situations is explained here. In one of the previous posts we had discussed how to Manage disk drives using [intlink id="how-to-view-all-drives-disk-management-under-windows" type="post"]Disk drive management console Object of Windows[/intlink]. We can use the Management Console to disable access to select drives also.

This very same method can be used to change the drive letter of any drive also.

1. Run (WIN + R) “diskmgmt.msc” to open te Windows Disk Management Console.

WIN+R diskmgmt.msc open Disk Management Console Object

2. Right Clcik on the desired drive and Select “Change Drive Letter and Paths..“

Select Drive and Right Clcik -> Change Drive Letter and Paths..

3. Remove the drive Letter and Click OK.

Remove the drive letter and click OK on the warning message.

You can use the same process to later access the drive. Just select the unnamed drive from the console and Use the Add drive letter function to later add a drive letter and make it accessible all across the system. This is really easy to do and probably most of your friends would never find out.

FaceBook has a built in chat engine which allows users to chat through their browser window. But often this is a pain i the bottom. It is always easier to chat using a dedicated client. In a previous post I had [intlink id="one-free-instant-messenger-for-all-services" type="post"]talked about pidgin[/intlink] – a free IM client with support for multiple accounts.

The best part about pidgin is that it will allow you to converge your friends accounts into a single icon on the GUI. that is you can combine a friends GTalk and Yahoo ids to a single name on pidgin. If the user is online is any one account your IM will e automatically to that id. Of course this does not mean you can cross chat from Yahoo to GTalk or vice versa.

Although Pidgin supports Myspace there is no built in support for FaceBook chat. but that’s not going to let you down, because there is a wonderful plugin available solely for that purpose. The pidgin-facebookchat plugin developed under Google code and distributed under GNU GPLv3 can let you use FaceBook chat on Pidgin. The plugin is available for both Windows and Linux.

Add a FaceBook account to pidgin screen shot

After installing the plugin goto “Accounts>>Manage Accounts>>Add” From the dropdown select FaceBook as the protocol. Set you username and password for the FaceBook account. You can set additional options including email notifications and Status updates from Pidgin under the Advanced tab.

pidgin-facebookchat home list of downloads

Last day when coming back to edit my blog (http://www.exnol.com ) I was literally shocked to find out that the login page took ages to load. Thinking that it was a server issue because I had been here a few hours before, I came to face the reality the hard way. The problem was that the landing page or the front page or the index page of the blog was alright without any problems but every other page including the admin pages took many minutes to load, sometimes even dropping the connection.

So what should we do on such situations? After a brief search on Google and coming out with no practical answers I decided to go my own way. The steps : Since the front page was OK it was not a Database or Server issue. To make this sure I tried [intlink id="filezilla-free-ftp-client-and-server-for-windows" type="post"]FTP using Filezilla[/intlink] and found out that FTP was fine. Since the admin interface was affected I couldn’t try deactivating plugins altogether. so I decided to try a trick. Rename the “plugin” folder.

Note the path to the folder : /wp-content/plugins

Right click on the folder and select Rename. Rename it with some other thing. You would successfully have brought down your WP blog now. Most probably your blog won’t work. (Make sure you try to access your blog at least once after the renaming). But hey its just temporary. Rename the folder back to plugins. Now you will have all of your plugins deactivated.

Now start reactivating plugins one at a time or in groups and watch which plugin is causing the trouble. This was my idea of the last minute trick you can use to deactivate plugins if the admin pages are unavailable. Share your thoughts!

The Wordpress community like any OpenSource project has got a highly creative and devout developer base. They never fail to please you with every major release of WP. So the customizable dashboard was also no surprise. But the fact that we can use some applets on the dashboard as makeshift feed reader is what really impressed me. If you have  a self hosted WP blog, you should probably have noticed this, or may be you don’t. So here is how you can view feeds on your WP dashboard.

You can use two of Wordpress applets as feed reader which will show you the title with the first few sentences from a feed. The third one is much limited. This is made from the “Incoming Links” applet and so it shows only the first few words of the posts and the link. The two applets that can be used to view latest feeds as excerpts are titled “Other WordPress News” and “WordPress Development Blog”. When you move your mouse over the Title Bar of these applets you can see a configure link.

Click on that ad you will be taken to a page where you can set options for that particular applet. The config options include number of posts to be shown from that feed, Address of the feed, Title of the feed and some minor tweaks. I have added this blogs feed to the applet to show you how its is done. Once you have set these options you ca save them and configure the other applet. Coming to the third applet which is a little less mighty, things ecome somewhat different. We cannot edit the title of this applet directly from the dashboard (although we can do it by editing WP core file). You can just edit the address of the feed and the number of posts to be shown.

If you would like to keep the original applet feeds, make sure you save the feed addresses before changing them. You can use these applets to subscribe to two blogs which you can never miss out on. Although this can’t be substituted for a regular feed reader this would be fun tweaking.