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How does my blog look in all browsers worldwide – how to check compatibility?

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It’s not just Google Chrome, Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Safari and Opera. There are many more web browsers used by people worldwide in their computers, tablets and Smart phones. In addition there are different versions of the same browsers and different Operating Systems. 


So how does my blog or website look like in all these permutations and combinations?

It’s the wish of every blogger and website builder to know an answer to this important question. Let’s find out! The reason is that if their blog didn’t look correct in any of these, they might lose a good chunk of visitors.
Not surprisingly, there is an easy solution to this problem.
A service online provides a feature which captures screenshots of your blog or website in various platforms and shows them all in one screen for you.
The two most important advantages of using this service are:
  1. It can help identify visual differences, plug-in problems of your site on all web browsers. 
  2. Your website’s appearance as it is – and to use that screenshot for studying and enhancing user experience.

Bonus advantage: It also provides the page loading time in most cases.
Who provides this service?
1. One that immediately comes to my mind is browsershots.org. They have a big list of permutations and combinations of OS platforms and Web browsers. You might get around 150+ screenshots once the blog is tested.
2. The second one is www.browserstack.com.  This is also equally good in terms of checking your blog or website on many platforms.
3. Another one that is available is www.browsershots.at.
Though all the above given services are FREE, one may have to wait in the queue as there is a lot of demand. They also let us register and/or pay for the service to get precedence.

 Thus, this helps us in ensuring our visitors get the view that we intended to show when we kept our best foot forward with our blog or website. 

 Good luck in enhancing your user experience!

Written by Arun Sarathy.

How to sort and filter emails in Gmail by size and more

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Gmail from Google has a feature that lets you filter emails in many ways.
But let’s say the day has come when suddenly your Gmail’s storage capacity is nearing its full limit.
Of course Gmail offers 15GB of free storage for your Gmail account (as on today) and they keep increasing the storage capacity eventually but what if today you’ve reached almost the full capacity.?


First I would check my emails to see if there are old, never or seldom opened forwarded emails with loads of photos in it that weighs more than 10MB in size. But this is not outlook to simply sort the emails by hitting on the header that says ‘size’. So how do we do that?

Google has an excellent inbuilt feature to do just that.

Simply go to your Gmail and in the search bar type “size:10m” to filter emails that are 10MB or more in size. You can type in any size that you want to filter with.

 Note that Gmail’s maximum size limit for an attachment is 25MB. To add an attachment more than that size you might want to use Google Drive.

To know more about adding attachments in Gmail, go to this page. 

 Next time you want to kill time productively, I would suggest to first go to Gmail, filter your ‘All Mail’ section with specific sizes and clean it up. It helps in the long run to save that precious virtual disk space for storing something better. 

Written by Arun Sarathy.

Five websites that provide Currency Conversion online

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How often have you decided to travel abroad and wanted to know the value of your local currency outside your country?  Or just simply wanted to know what you currency value is when compared with any other nation?


Image courtesy of PinkBlue / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

No matter what’s the situation, there are many websites to work that out for you. More so, there are also apps that can do the job on the go – most of the websites given below in this post have their own apps available for download. 


How to know which website offers a better solution to answer your above questions? 

First of all, you can just jump to any of these websites to get the conversion done. However, if you wanted to dig deeper, ponder over which website you might want to stick to in the future or share with your friends, then this guide shows you five easy to use websites that helps you convert the currency as per the current market rate.


1. Xe.com (xe.com)

XE.com not only is the top in my opinion but it also provides a very good snapshot of many other currencies right on their homepage. It refreshes automatically to show current rate.



2. Google (google.com)

My 2nd option to go for currency conversion is Google homepage. Yes! Google search window offers quick currency conversion online. Just type in your local currency amount to be converted to the other nation’s currency that you want to convert to. For example, you may type in 11 USD in EUR and it gives you the following output:




Oanda.com offers the same conversion but website is little more trendier in my opinion. I have been using Oanda since 2007 and their way of presentation is pleasing. I usually take a print of their Traveler’s cheatsheet. Pretty neat personalized cheatsheet for our wallets.



4. GOCURRENCY.com (gocurrency.com)

Gocurrency provides a drop-down menu right on top as soon as we visit them. This has a list of countries which when chosen gives historical data, credit ratings, bank rates, GDP details, etc. Their currency conversion is also good enough that gets the job done.




Yahoo Finance page has its own currency conversion section within finance.yahoo.com page. But it takes some time to locate it in the site. One good thing is that it also offers along side their page an ‘education’ section. It provides us links to trading with currency, intro to currency, floating vs. fixed rates, etc. For someone who wants to learn the basics should surely give it a shot.



These are the five currency converter websites available online which does well in my viewpoint. Sometimes you may find slight differences in the converted rates. This should be kept in mind and thus warrants a reason to check more than one website – this post helps you to do just that!

As with freedom of choice, you’re welcome to dig even deeper and find your favourites. Though many other websites offer this conversion to us like Bloomberg, X-Rates, etc., in my opinion the above mentioned websites do the job well. You can find the rest here in this simple google search for Currency Converter.

Written by Arun Sarathy.

How to add a Facebook ‘Like’ button to your blog or website

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Facebook Like button

Facebook has become a part of our lives in many ways.

One such is to attract more readers and friends of readers to your blog or site. To do this, first and foremost one should have an already created page in Facebook. If you are not sure how to do that then simply click on ‘create a page’ in the main Facebook login window.


Once created, making a like button for your blog or website is just a piece of cake.

Head to Facebook Developers webpage and give in your URL under Get Like Button Code. The rest is just plain simple.

WYSIWYG – a live image of how your Like button looks on your site is shown on the side bar beside Get Like Button Code. There are options to edit how the Like button should look like – either make it with visible profile pictures or just a plain Like button. The option and imagination is yours to play with.

Written by Arun Sarathy.

How to keep ‘Explorer’ view as default view in Windows XP? (Five easy steps with screenshots)

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How often you have thought of maintaining a particular style of look and feel of your computer screen, no matter what enhancements are introduced in the market?

 Most of us still like to use (and stick to) Microsoft Windows XP.  


And sometimes we get used to using the ‘Explorer’ view in our Windows XP machine, which shows the folder tree structure instead of the common tasks. But this is not the default option always. 

 If you would like to keep this setting as the default option, just follow the simple steps given here:

  1. Open My Computer, My Documents or any Folder.
  2. Click on Tools menu and then click on Folder Options.
  3. Now, click on [NONE] Folder and click on Advanced button. The Edit File Type window opens.
  4. In this window, under Actions list, select ‘explore’ and hit on ‘Set Default’.
  5. Click on ‘OK’ in this window and also on Folder Options window. Hereafter, whenever you open any folder, it opens up in Explorer view.

Repeat the above steps to set the default view. You just have to click on ‘open’ instead of ‘explore’ under Actions menu to revert to default view.


 

 Written by Arun Sarathy.