You certainly know Paypal for this kind of gifting or any other payment, but then you have to take the decision to specify the amount of what you are willing to spend each time. Flattr makes it a little easier.

You just load an amount to your account and specify a monthly total donation amount. All your honor clicks of that month are shared among all the respective websites you have flattred. So if you have 2,00 € and hit 10 Flattr buttons, then each URL author will get 0,20 €.

It’s that easy and if you like my work here, please consider to flattr each article you like!

If you need a beta invite code, just leave a comment. There are still three left.

If I see an update of an application, I want to have the latest and hottest stuff, of course. But first of all I read the changelog to know what is new or changed, and then I do run the update.

Unwanted changes

Sometimes, the developers change the behavior of a certain feature or in worst case it is even removed. If I really need this functionality exactly as it was before, it would make sense to downgrade the fresh installed update back to the old version.

New software is not always an improvement. A good bad example is Aptana Studio having removed the FTP-Sync functionality from version 1.5 to 2.0. It was so heavenly useful and now it is gone. The developers stated to eventually bringing it back in a future version.

Back to the past

If that worst case scenario became true, it is often impossible to get the old version back, because the vendor often just serves the latest version for downloading. But, what if there is no archive existing? Where do you get it?

For the Mac user

On a Mac you can use Time Machine and grab your old copy back from the Applications backup folder. But what, if no Time Machine backup was created?

Then go to http://mac.oldversion.com/ and download what you need. They have a large archive and host really many old versions of favourite applications.

For the Windows user

Go to http://www.oldversion.com/ and download your older piece of software.

Previously, when a user clicked a link leading to a podcast, it brought you to an empty white web page. Then, iTunes was opened – and if not installed you got a offer to download the free ware. The user did not know what is to be expected.

The new change is, that you will now see a tiny preview with the same information that is presented only in iTunes, before. The behavior of starting iTunes or the download offer is still there. Click the picture on the right to see an example with my podcast.

You also can view video and pre-listen audio!

• multiple accounts
• auto refresh with countdown and caching
• API limit counter
• view followers by reciprocals, new followers and quitters
• integration of twitter counter statistics
• picture upload, URL shortener
• spell checker

It is still in beta state, but if you want an invite, just leave a comment on this post.

Here is a picture how it looks like when logged in:

Playback with a seek

One of the most unknown and rarely used parameters is the playback with a seek. Let’s say, you want to show a video and the important moment your want to point to is at 1 minute and 28 seconds. Did you know, than you can directly jump into that position? Simply add #t=1m27s behind the video URL like this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a92JSlFZHH0#t=1m28s

Video starts playing at 1 min and 28 secs.

This is very cool when sharing videos via twitter or instant messengers and you do not want your participant to watch the whole story.

Other options

There are a lot of other values like setting borders, enable related video recommendations, HD playback and some more which you will find on Googles API page. Have a look at it and I am sure, there is something useful for you.

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

]]> http://www.markuszeller.com/youtube-video-link-power/feed 0 http://www.markuszeller.com/welcome-to-the-google-wave http://www.markuszeller.com/welcome-to-the-google-wave#comments Thu, 26 Nov 2009 19:15:23 +0000 Markus Zeller http://www.markuszeller.com/?p=1478 So many people are talking about the Google Wave. It is still beta and Google limited the amount of users who may have access. You can either fill out a form and wait for an approval or get invited by someone else who still has invites left.

Since I got an invite (special thanks to Leuk and Jack Brendon Smoke) I really like it. Sometimes it is quite slow and some things are not working fully, but hey, it is beta and Google stated it.

The Wave is a powerful tool which I think will be a future kind of team collaboration. You can see in realtime what the other participants are typing or changing. A playback function shows you all changes step by step.

Many public Waves are available, where everybody can join and take part. Also, you can make your Waves public by inviting a special email address.

There are a lot of things to do until it matches a fluently workflow, but even in this state it is quite useful.

If you want to join, I am still having some invites left. Just leave a comment below with your email you want the invite to be sent to.

Take the following settings, to enable it:

Incoming mail server: imap.gmail.com
Outgoing mail server: smtp.gmail.com

Username: yourmail@gmail.com
Password: yourpassword

You also may take these settings, even if you own a googlemail.com address.

On OS X’s mail.app you will find an extra area on the left hand pane for your Google mail account.

To learn and improve my English, I need to look quite often into a dictionary. There are many free dictionaries available on the web like Leo or Dict.cc.

My favorite is Dict.cc, because it is a very slim page. The results come as speedy as gunshot and look like I expect them. There are a lot of other word suggestions and common phrases which totally differ from language to language.

For using Twitter, or when on the road, sometimes I just need to find the right word. And of course, “there is a app for it”. Get the free German to English and vice versa dict.cc application in the AppStore for the iPhone. It is really well done, with a quick and easy interface. My most liked feature is the live-type-suggestion.

The handling is easy, and even greenhorns get good along with it. Just find a nice template, punch it in, create some headlined pages and every user can deal with it.

I think the blogging features are almost perfect and there is not much what needs to get improved in my humple opinion. I would prefer native support of multiple languages.

Therefore I like the developers way asking the community to vote for the most wished functions. As the results show, they will concentrate for better multimedia integration. So let’s get excited for the WordPress 2.9 release at about end of October?

If you want to make a simple, but sexy poll, you can use twtpoll for free. Unfortunately the results are displayed as a flash animation.

In the interface you can set the questions and if the answer should be unique or multiple. Also an expiration date is possible and you must not keep it alive forever.

The best to use for twitter is, that it generates a short URL direcly from it’s own host. That is is looking like this

http://twtpoll.com/kedhqx

Test it out to get quickly and easily public without complicated setup surveys.

What is a hashtag?

First of all, you need to know what a “hashtag” is. A “tag” is something like a keyword. This is used to describe the most important subject of the message. From blogs and many other content sensitive websites you will know that kind of technology as tagclouds. Have a look at my blog’s sidebar at the part “Tags” to see such a tagcloud.

In Twitter, those tags are called “hashtags”, because the hash sign “#” is written in front of the tag without any spaces.

A good example would be

Michael Jackson really is THE king of pop #MJ

or

Listen to the latest episode called Procession at my audio #podcast http://www.itunes.com/podcast?id=323879840

What is the #followfriday?

Every Friday many people use the hashtag #followfriday to recommend other follow-worth Twitter users. New people to Twitter see them, because of the trending topics which are shown on the Twitter website. They are also found on Twitter when searching for the hashtag #followfriday and are automatically read by your friends following you.

Follow @timpritlove the maker of the great Chaos Radio Express podcast! #followfriday

This helps other people to find other interesting people.

With that it is totally easy to see if your popularity is even growing. A viewing range from one week up to three months is selectable.

Another nice feature is that you can compare yourself to other twitter users.

It also gives you some additional features like a follower-count button and to see the top scorers in each category. The speed is really amazing great and you should absolutely have a look at it.

In my eyes, in the twitter terminology “friend” should be only called a “friend” if you follow him and he or she follows you – so that there is a direct relationship.

Watch out the friendorfollow.com website which shows you all that relationships in a customizable order and organized by a good terminology, grouped in tabs called “Following” showing people you are following. “Fans” are people following you and “Friends” are people you follow and they follow you.

That tools is great to clean up your profile from people you probably should not follow.

Without links, the web would not be what it is, today. How did you find my blog? Did you type www.markuszeller.com in the addressbar or did you click a link?

A link brings you to another web resource, mostly a another homepage. If you click one, then you are following it.

Any website containing a link, has a source code looking somewhat like this:

<a href=”http://www.markuszeller”>Markus Zeller Blog</a>

Web-Spiders and search engines will look at this source codes and pick the links out of it – and now we are coming to “follow” and “no follow”.

This is a follow link, that means the search engine or spider will follow that link and index the content to present it when you search for it or some words and keywords containing the site.

No follow makes sense for areas or directories of your website you do not want to be found. Let us say, I have a directory like http://www.markuszeller.com/secret and do not want anything in there to be found. Then I can advise the spider not to look in there by putting in something like this in the index file:

<META name=”ROBOTS” content=”NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW”>

See: http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/appendix/notes.html

Another way would be, if I link it somewhere in a user-only area:

<a href=”http://www.markuszeller.com/secret” rel=”nofollow”>Keep out</a>

This, is in my opinion the ONLY reason to use a no follow!

Google says, a no follow would prevent blog spam, and WordPress is believing this advice and made ALL commenters as a no follow. So when you leave a comment in a WordPress blog, it would not be credited in Googles and some other engines search results.

Blogging is hard work and eats a lot of time, so I will credit every commenter! Spam will be deleted, and in case of that, there is no chance and credit for spammers. If you have the same thoughts, then you can get out of this with your blog with just installing the free WordPress plugin DoFollow by Denis de Bernardy.

Here is a list with 11 reasons why NOT to use no follow by nonofollow.net:

1. nofollow does not prevent comment spam
2. nofollow is confusingly named
3. nofollow harms the connections between web sites
4. nofollow is not useful for humans, just for search engines using PageRank or a similar technique
5. nofollow could be used to shut web sites out
6. nofollow discriminates legitimate users as spammers
7. nofollow heists commentators’ earned attention
8. nofollow could be used to further discriminate weblogs
9. nofollow prevents the Web from being a web
10. nofollow eliminates the dissemination of free speech
11. nofollow was developed in privacy with only search engines companies taking part in the discussion

Do you trust SEO-experts? Before you do, have a look at their pagerank! If they are experts, they must have a page rank over 5. If they do not, they are lying and making money with your credulity. You may this free online pagerank checker or any SEO toolbar for your browser.

There is an interesting twitter tool called twitter.grader.com in the web telling you how your twitter grade is. See on which position you are, compared with all the other twitterers in the whole world.

You even can divide the view by location and have a prying look, if you made it beeing under the top 50 twitterers in your city, region or country.

The rank is calculated by a lots of criteria such like how many followers you have and which power they have. Also your activity is defining a part of your ranking and quality.

This is also nice to find the best of the best and to get new interesting people of the community to follow.

The iPhone checks frequently for new mails and you will be up to date of what has been sent to you. Every mail is marked as unread and until now I do not a see a built in function in the iPhone to mark them all as unread.

This is really nerving me, especially if I do not use the iPhone for some hours. I do not want to click every single mail to get it marked as read. Here is my workaround:

1. Login to GoogleMail and go to the “inbox”
2. Select “all”
3. In the first line, you can select really all mails of your inbox and not only those which are listed on the first page.
4. “Archive”
5. On the iPhone, start Mail
6. Leave the inbox
7. Go back to the inbox

Now, all mails are even in the archive on the iPhone and nothing is unread anymore, besides you receive new ones meanwhile.

But it is not that free I have expected to get it. You need to enter your Live ID to receive the serial keys and to get the end link for the leech.

Begginning to write this article I put my Live ID userdata in and I am still watching the green spin wheel letting me authenticate. I am afraid, this could take another while.

But after all let’s see if Microsoft has learned something and what got else copied by Apple.

Update:

Taking the Firefox browser instead of Safari took me to the download almost immediately. I tested it out several times, it looks like deceitful blocking.

Today are still some guys at the demoscene active and coding really amazing and stunning stuff we absolutely could image that it would ever be possible.

With modern tools and utilities are very cute home made things possible. Have a look what Benjamin Heckendorn has produced:

C64 Laptop by Benjamin Heckendorn

A laptop designed Commodore 64. Nostalgy for the “pocket”. Please visit his Blog to see more details.

My unique color

The amount of available colors is really huge, so it is possible that everybody can have his own color. Colors are mostly compound with the RGB color model. They are mixed out of three values, where R is red, G is green and B is blue. The shading is zero for none and 255 for full power. If you think in lights and mix all colors together you reach white equals RGB(255,255,255). Black would result in RGB(0,0,0).

When you are dealing with HTML, then hexadecimal codes are used to describe the colors. So white would be FF (255) and black 00 (0).

Combining all color shades together there are 255*255*255 = 16,581,375 single colors! Ok, there are more people living on planet earth than just 16 million. Coulourism had the idea to combine your name and birthday to find your unique color.

My unique color is a nice Purple (#9208A1).

So what is your color? Post it as a comment.

Skype

Yes, I do have an account on almost every important protocol and I was managing them with the Adium client. That is really a great and superb tool with an awesome tight interface. But, I have made a hard and ultimate decision.

I decided to take just only one messenger and one protocol, since now: Skype.

Why Skype?

• It runs on important platforms: Linux, Mac, Windows, Mobile phones.
• The interface is free available and really easy. All functions an instant messenger needs to have are there. My favourite is to sort out old and unused contacts.
• Encryption is enabled by default. Other instant messenger do not even encrypt at all or plugins are not easy to install.
• Can run even through firewalls.
• Chat, audio/video possible. Even conferences with multiple users.
• Standing out audio/video quality and reliable.
• Working and fast file transfers, also encrypted.
• Less network traffic by using just only one protocol.
• Available web graphics to show current online status.
• Great directory with search. You can specify by yourself what is visible by anybody and what to your personal contacts.

If you need, you can charge services at fair prices:

• Call from internet to local lines and mobile phones.
• Send SMS to mobile phones.

That list is incomplete, but that points are facing exactly what modern instant messaging in those days should be able to do. There are even LAN/WiFi phones available having Skype implemented. Also, having just one account makes it easier to configure and to handle.

If you have Skype installed and want to get in direct contact with me, click the Skype icon (blue cloud with a “S” inside) on the top right social profile bar to add me to your contact listing.