5/20 Digital Inspiration - Technology Blog

Please add updates@feedmyinbox.com to your address book to make sure you receive these messages in the future. Digital Inspiration - Technology Blog Now Read All Those Spam Emails from Russia & China in English May 19, 2009 at 4:33 pm Google has enabled language translation in Gmail meaning you can now translate emails written in foreign languages to a language you can read. The translation happens inline so you don’t have to leave the current message view. And there’s a print option as well so you can translate and simultaneously print the translated version. Gmail will try to auto-detect the language of your email message but you can also change the default language pair from the drop-down just above the message body. And to translate the entire thread, click the globe icon on the right side of the conversation. To enable translation in your copy of Gmail, open the Labs tab and enable the "Message Translation" gadget. Now Read All Those Spam Emails from Russia & China in English - Published at Digital Inspiration (RSS) Amazon S3 Hosting Tips You Should Know About May 19, 2009 at 3:05 pm If you using Amazon S3 (or CloudFront) for your web hosting needs, here are some essential tips that you should know about. The tips discussed here will also help reduce your monthly S3 bandwidth (thus saving you money) and you don’t have to be "technical guru" to implement them. There are a couple of good S3 file managers that provide a visual interface to manage S3 though my personal favorite is CloudBerry Explorer. Tip #1: Are people misusing your S3 files Amazon S3’s bandwidth rates are inexpensive and you pay for what you use. The problem is that if other websites are hot-linking to your S3 hosted content (like images, MP3s, Flash videos, etc.),  you’ll also have to pay for bandwidth consumed by these sites. Unlike Apache web servers where you can easily prevent hot-linking through .htaccess files, Amazon S3 offers no such mechanism but what you can do is enable logging for all your S3 buckets. Amazon will then log all client requests in log files that you can parse in Excel to know about sites misusing your content. Send the owner an email or simply change the name /location of your S3 object and update your web templates to reflect the new web address. How to Implement - Create a new S3 bucket to store your logs. Now right-click the bucket name and choose "Logging". Tip #2: Create Time Limited Links By default, all public files in your S3 account are available for download forever until you delete the file or change the permissions. However, if you are running some sort of contest on your site where you are giving away a PDF ebook or some MP3 ringtone to your visitors, it doesn’t make sense to have those file live on your S3 server beyond the duration of the contest. You should therefore consider creating "signed URLs" for such temporary S3 files - these are time limited URLs that are valid for a specific time period and expire afterwards (or return 404s). How to Implement - Right click a file in the S3 bucket, choose Web URL and then set a Expiry Time. Click Generate to created a "signed URL". Tip #3: Use Amazon S3 without a Domain Name It’s a common myth that you need to have a domain in order to host files on Amazon S3. That’s not true. Simply create a new bucket on Amazon S3, set the file access to public and Amazon will provide you with a public URL which is something of the form bucketname.s3.amazonaws.com/filename Tip #4: Set Expiry Headers for Static Images It is important that you add an an Expires or a Cache-Control HTTP Header for static content on your site like images, Flash files, multimedia or any other content that doesn’t change with time. For a more detailed explanation, please see this post on how to improve website loading time with S3. The gist is that all web browsers store objects in their cache and this Expires header in the HTTP response tells the browser how long that object should stay in the cache. So if it’s a static image, you can set the Expires date sometime in future and client browser won’t request the object again if the same visitor views another page on your site. How to Implement - To set an expires header, right click the S3 object properties, choose HTTP headers and add a new header. Call it "Expires" and set an expiration date like "Tue, 12 Apr 2010 01:00:00 GMT". Tip #5: Use BitTorrent Delivery for large files If you are planning to distribute some large files of the web (like a software installer or some database dump) via Amazon S3, it makes to sense to use BitTorrent with S3 so that you don’t necessarily have to pay for all the download bandwidth. Each client will then download some part of the file from your Amazon S3 ("seeder") and some part from other torrent clients, while simultaneously uploading pieces of the same file to other interested "peers." Thus your overall cost for distributing that file on the web get lowered. The starting point for a BitTorrent download is a .torrent file and you can quickly create a .torrent file to any S3 object by adding "?torrent" to the original web URL. For instance, if the original S3 object URL is .. http://labnol.s3.amazonaws.com/software-installer.zip ..the torrent file for that object will be http://labnol.s3.amazonaws.com/software-installer.zip?torrent Later, if you want to prevent distributing that file via BitTorrent, simply remove anonymous access to it or delete the file from the S3 bucket. Tip #6: Block Google & search bots To prevent bots from indexing files stored in your Amazon S3 buckets, create a robots.txt file at the root and it should say: User-agent: * Disallow: / Make sure that you update the ACL (or access permissions) to public else spiders won’t find your robots.txt file. Amazon S3 Hosting Tips You Should Know About - Published at Digital Inspiration (RSS) Edit Google Documents Directly in Microsoft Office & Save Your Changes Online May 19, 2009 at 12:05 pm Oudi Antebi, a former marketing manager at Microsoft, has developed an awesome plug-in that turns your copy of Microsoft Office into an offline Google Docs editor. You can save your Office documents directly to Google Docs or directly open your online documents in Microsoft Office programs for reading and writing. Here’s a quick tour on how you can integrate Google Docs with Microsoft Office via Offisync. Step 1: The plugin adds a new toolbar to your Microsoft Office suite of applications (both Office 2003 & Office 2007 are supported). You can then log-in to either Google Docs or your Google Apps Account or both. Step 2: Once logged-in, you can browse through the list of your existing Google Docs documents from within Microsoft Office as if you were browsing files stored on the local file system. The plugin implements some sort of a filter so you will only see .doc files inside Word, .xls inside Excel and ppt presentations inside PowerPoint. If you have too may documents in the root folder of Google Docs, you can use the built-in search function to limit that document list to a small set. Step 3: Now click the document name in Google Docs to open that file in the corresponding Microsoft Office application. A limitation is that you can’t download multiple documents from Google Docs in one go. Step 4: If you are editing an existing Google Docs document in Office or need to upload a new document from Microsoft Office to your Google Docs account, simply hit the "Save" button and the modified copy of the document will be saved to your online Google account. Another advantage is that you can share Google Docs documents with multiple people right from Microsoft Office. Just specify the email addresses of your contacts along with permissions (read-only or read-write). It can’t get easier than this. And since Google Docs now supports the new Open XML format, you can also save Office 2007 format files (pptx, docs, xlsx) via the same plugin. Office Live Workspaces will also be integrated with Microsoft Office 2010 but until that is released, this plugin is a great choice. Also check this detailed Google Docs Guide for more tips and tricks. Related: Sync Google Docs with Microsoft Office Edit Google Documents Directly in Microsoft Office & Save Your Changes Online - Published at Digital Inspiration (RSS) Orientation Webinar For People Who Are New to Google AdSense May 19, 2009 at 9:23 am This is something for AdSense publishers in India whose accounts have just been approved by Google. The AdSense team at Google will hold an online webinar on May 22, at 5:00 p.m. IST to help newly approved publishers on getting started with their AdSense account. Highlights, according to an email from Google, include: Learn how to make the most of your AdSense account Get an opportunity to chat with some AdSense Specialists Get detailed insight into different account features You can participate in the AdSense webinar by registering at this link on the Webex site - the meeting can accommodate a maximum of 500 people. You will need to use the email address and your AdSense publisher I.D. in order to sign up. On-demand webinars can be viewed whenever you wish by clicking on the view now link next to the webinar you want to watch. Orientation Webinar For People Who Are New to Google AdSense - Published at Digital Inspiration (RSS) How the ZooZoo ads were Created - A Behind the Scenes Video May 19, 2009 at 8:46 am If you were wondering how O&M created the popular Zoozoo ads for Vodafone without using computer animation, here are some behind the scenes video clips that will give you some good idea about the whole production process. You may also want to check these photographs from a studio in South Africa where these videos where actually shot. Pictures are courtesy the official group of Zoozoo on Facebook. For instance, here’s the original Zoozoo phone backup ad that’s currently getting aired on television during IPL cricket breaks: And the following video clips shows how that Vodafone ad was shot in South Africa using “real” human characters (mostly kids). How the ZooZoo ads were Created - A Behind the Scenes Video - Published at Digital Inspiration (RSS) Google Shares How Audience React to Commercial Breaks in TV Programs May 19, 2009 at 3:29 am The above graph shows how Television viewers react to commercial breaks in TV programs second-by-second. The audience level drops immediately at the start of the commercial break but then starts to grow again. The audience starts to grow again about halfway through the break, presumably as some of these viewers return in anticipation of the programming resuming. Once the programming resumes, the audience builds back up to roughly its original size, over the course of about two minutes - Deeksha Hebbar. The second graph represents channel surfing activity during the same time-period - the red spike seen at the beginning of the commercial break indicates that people are actively tuning out of the channel where that advertisement is being aired. Google TV Ads - Every second counts Related: Google Chrome Ad on TV Google Shares How Audience React to Commercial Breaks in TV Programs - Published at Digital Inspiration (RSS)   This email was sent to xfeedr@gmail.com.  Create Your Account Don't want to receive this feed any longer? Unsubscribe here.