The only constant thing for me in my life is change. I like to change my lifestyle, habits, hobbies once in a while so as to keep my mind fresh and active. I get bored with routines and so is the same case in my browsing activities or tools which I use. This time around my axe swayed in the direction of my age old favorite feed reader, Google Reader.

I am thoroughly satisfied with Google Reader for reading my RSS feeds but I felt its been a long time I have spent on it and it has now started to bore me a bit. So I started some search for good desktop applications which would give some eye candy and also improve my productivity while learning from the feeds.

I have found one nice solution which has relieved me to some extent and which is certainly an impressive effort in the direction of web desktop integration. Its called ReadAir. It is a really nice application for feed reading and I am impressed by its potential.  The reason I liked it was because Read the rest of this entry »

Did you always think about what creative stuff you can do with your photos? Well, I do most of the times and end up editing some of my most favorite ones and putting in some artistic touch. I always feel that, enriching the photos gives them a whole new dimension to look from. It might be either making it more attractive, more lovable or to enliven the sentiments you attached to them from a long time.

Whatever the reason may be, editing a photograph is no layman’s job. Sometime people give up half way through when they do not find the required results. I recently found a something which might make your spirit rise higher when you will notice the results you get out of it. The name of the tool is Picasa. Its a tool from Google. I am sure you must have used it many time to upload your photos to the online Picasaweb. But did you ever try making collages from it. Picasa can generate some really amazing collages out of your precious photos and make them really gift worthy or send it amongst friends as a memoir.

So here’s how you can make collages out of your photos: Read the rest of this entry »

Knowing about different techniques of searching in Google, has the biggest advantage in saving precious time. The more you optimize your queries, the more faster you get what you were looking for and finally the more quicker your work gets done. Its a bit of ‘more’ in everything when Google search tricks are applied. If you liked my earlier articles on how to use various tricks provided by Google then here are some ‘more’ for you.

The theme for this article is “Definitive Search“. It means that, instead of beating around the bush for carrying out permutations and combinations of your search queries, why not carry out the search for exactly what we are looking for. By doing this, you would become more sure of getting the most relevant articles to your queries. Notice the ‘more’ here too!

Most of the Definitive Search tricks are obtained by using the Google Advanced Operators. I would like to specify in this article as to where the operators can be utilized ‘more’ efficiently. I was myself thrilled when I tried using these operators which lead me into writing this article.

For this article I am taking a particular case study for search query optimization. So here we go… Read the rest of this entry »

My article on 10 Most Amazing Google Search Tricks was very well received which made me realize that people have not yet seen the powerful features provided by Google. The tricks in the article were amongst the common ones which frequent searchers know. But there are still many more which a few rare search savvy people, termed “google hackers” seem to know.

The fact is that, people miss out on these tricks since they are busy finding the keywords! In order to make them aware I will be trying to put up different tricks and their usage as per the requirement so that it becomes easier for you to get the required information in an instant.

This article is specially for the movie lovers since I am one of them. I am not “crazy” about movies but when I am keen to watch a movie I make it sure that the money is well worth spent. This is the place where Google helps me to make most of the decisions quickly. Some of these decisions include finding:

• Release date
• Cast of the movie
• Reviews of the movie
• Theatres where the movie is being aired
• Checking the schedule
• Trailers

So let me reveal the 5 most fantastic Google Movie Search tricks that I frequently use: Read the rest of this entry »

A few days ago, I had written a post that the Google Chart API had a lot of power when you wanted simple and quick results for displaying charts in your website. I had also written a tutorial on how to go about creating a chart. But there was a certain shortcoming in the tutorial. It was tedious. It required you to create lengthy URL’s and also properly format the URL’s to get the chart.

But by the time I had written about the API, I noticed that people were coming up with great new ideas in order to reduce the burden of making the chart. And the ideas are practically impressive and have great scope for improvement.

A JavaScript Library
Chris Heilmann has created a script which Read the rest of this entry »

Searching on Google can be a magical experience once you find out how to make your search queries efficient. By making efficient I mean using some tricks or the cheat sheet provided by Google itself to quickly find what you actually require. Having being hooked onto Google for a long time now, I have come across some amazing search tricks which can change the way you look at Google today.

In this article I will list down the search tricks which I use quite frequently. Be it finding time, meanings or watching the cricket score, searching PDF’s, with Google as the search engine life cannot be more simpler. Here are the 10 most amazing Google Search tricks: Read the rest of this entry »

What do you do when you want to show the reports of some particular analysis in your website? Some of the answers to this question would probably be:

• Use a server side framework to code in the chart
• Use a database to collect the report data and then code for the framework integration
• Insert chart image after generating a chart in a software
• Use some heavy JavaScript libraries which add to the loading time of the page

But if you had only a few outcomes and wished to show a simple chart in your web page to the readers of your website or blog then probably you would be fixed in a situation like this. The main reasons being: Read the rest of this entry »