Post Links to Delicious via Email Messages - Perfect Option for Mobile Phones

Source: http://www.labnol.org/internet/post-links-to-delicious-via-email-mobile/4470/

Though del.icio.us is such a popular place for saving bookmarks, it is still not friendly enough for use on cell phones or mobile devices.

For instance, it takes a minimum of four steps if you were to save a web page from BlackBerry browser on to delicious bookmarks - copy the page address to clipboard, open delicious post page, paste the URL from clipboard and finally click submit.

*iPhone Safari (and Opera Mini) users are lucky here as they can post via delicious bookmarklets

Send Links to Delicious via Email Messages

Now a really simple workaround to this ‘delicious’ problem is email. Most mobile browsers make it extremely easy for you to share web pages via email so if it were possible to connect this email message with our delicious account, the problem would be solved.

That’s were ping.fm enters the scene.

1. Setup a free account - ping.fm just opened their gates for public.

2. Now associate your delicious account with your ping.fm account via this network.

3. Get your secret post email address here and add it to your mobile address book.

4. Compose a new email on your mobile phone, type @de in the message body and paste the URL. Send and you link will appear in delicious within seconds. Simple.

Now see how the workflow changes - you open a web pages inside BlackBerry browser, press P (Send Address, Email) to compose a message and send it your ping.fm account.

If your mobile carrier supports SMS to e-mail, you may also post.to delicious by sending an SMS text message. And if you staying online via Google Talk or Yahoo! Messenger, you can even save links to delicious via IM as in this screenshot - just remember to add @de before the link.

I find this easy and much quicker than saving links via the regular delicious website where you need to be logged in before posting.

Related Resources:

• Most Useful Email Addresses
• Easy to Remember Email Addresses
• IM Bots for Google Talk
• Advanced BlackBerry Tips for Power Users

Post Links to Delicious via Email Messages - Perfect Option for Mobile Phones - Digital Inspiration

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Never Lose Web Pages That You Ever Bookmarked Locally or Online

Source: http://www.labnol.org/internet/permanent-archive-of-bookmarked-web-pages/4474/

The moment you see an interesting website, you save it to your bookmarks for future reference.

Thus, with time, you have created a huge list of favorites that’s not just long but is spread across different places like Firefox, delicious, Google Bookmarks, Opera, etc.

Though backing up favorites is easy but are they worth anything if the underlying web page changes or disappears off the web completely ?

You definitely don’t want to miss access to all these food recipes that you have painstakingly collected on the Internet over the past couple of months.

Now you could either save web page manually using these web clipping tools or a much better option is Iterasi - they have come up with a very elegant solution where you just have to upload a file containing all browser bookmarks and they handle the rest while you take a coffee break.

Iterasi create an archive of all web pages associated with your bookmarks and saves them permanently into your account so you always have access to all your favorite content. And the price is perfect - $0.

Archive Web Pages Automatically at Regular Intervals

There’s some more - Iterasi can also archive different versions of your favorite web pages as they change over time. For instance, if you CNN is your favorite website, you can do a "Daily" check and a new copy will be uploaded to your account each day so you can see changes across time.

Iterasi can either accept your local browser bookmarks or you can pass your del.icio.us credentials and it will fetch all your online bookmarks. For this to work with other online bookmark service like Yahoo! Bookmarks, ma.gnolia, Windows Live Favorites, etc - you’ll have to first export them local in the standard bookmark format.

If you ever used bookmarks to save links, this is definitely something your should not miss. Available on both Mac and Windows version of Iterasi.

Related: Build Your Own Internet Archive With Iterasi

Never Lose Web Pages That You Ever Bookmarked Locally or Online - Digital Inspiration

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Google AdSense Reports in Analytics - More Screenshots

Source: http://www.labnol.org/internet/google-analytics-adsense-reports-screenshots/4480/

AdSense publishers will soon have access to extremely detailed stats about ads via Google Analytics reports.

You’ll know about web pages that get more clicks, revenue generated per page, CPM rates, top referring sites, etc.  For more, check this story on AdSense and Analytics integration.

The screenshots were inadvertently published on TheGoogleCache.com and were cached by different newsreaders. Here are more screenshots from the same source that give exciting hints about what’s coming next. (click to enlarge)

AdSense Overview

There’s a new AdSense section added to the Analytics Reports that displays complete statistics about how visitors interact with Google Ads on your site and how have the ads performed over time.

Top AdSense Content

This report gives a consolidated view of AdSense earnings made along with information like clicks per page, CTR, CPM and total number of ad impressions.

AdSense Trending

This Analytics report will give an overview of how your AdSense earnings have changed over time (like your site traffic in Google Trends).

AdSense Revenue Per Page

This report is similar to the ‘Top AdSense Content’ report but that was for the entire site and this is on the page level.

Top AdSense Referrers

Let’s say site abc.com and xyz.com have linked to a page on you are website and you are getting referral traffic. With the AdSense Referrer report, you’ll know the exact revenue that you are making from visitors that are coming to you via two different sources.

Great for AdSense Revenue Sharing Sites

All these new AdSense - Analytics reports will also be very useful if you plan to have a site / blog with multiple contributors and their payment is a fixed percentage of AdSense Revenue generated from articles that they have written. No complex Excel sheets required anymore.

Google AdSense Reports in Analytics - More Screenshots - Digital Inspiration

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Free Website Building Tools That Are Good Replacements for Google Page Creator

Source: http://www.labnol.org/internet/free-website-building-hosting-tools/4511/

Google Page Creator is awesome - anyone can build a good looking website in minutes using the built-in templates or they can write pages externally (say in Dreamweaver) and upload them to Creator.

And everything is free - there are no ads on your pages and Google takes care of all the web hosting bills. But as they say, all good things come to an end, and so is Google Page Creator getting replaced by Google Sites.

Compare Google Sites with Google Page Creator

While Google Sites and Google Pages have common feature (like the WYSIWYG AJAX editor), they are still quite different. For instance, you can’t upload HTML pages to Google Sites and are therefore limited to using one of the built-in themes for your site design.

The second issue is that if you make a Google Site public, the associated ’site activity log’ also becomes public - most website publisher will have reservations sharing this data with unknown visitors. Lastly, all external hyperlinks are ‘nofollow’ if that means anything to you.

Free Alternatives to Google Page Creator

Here’s a roundup of some website building services that are free and non-technical.

1. Office Live Small Business - While the name may suggest that the service is only for small business owners, just about anyone can create their website here.

Website Builder inside Office Live Small Business

Office Live is easy and filled with goodies - you have tons of professional web templates and color themes to choose from, there’re ready-made modules for common tasks like web forms, photo galleries, live maps,  email newsletters, etc. plus you can also upload office documents to the website.

Everything is free including web hosting and server space. See a sample site.

2. Weebly - This is powerful but very user friendly and easy web page builder where you start with a blank canvas and build the page by dragging elements that include text, videos, pictures, maps and more.

Geeks can write their own HTML and add them to Weebly pages. There’s support for Google ads as well so you can even monetize sites created inside Weebly. Another advantage - site publishers download their full site with pictures and CSS as a zip file. Free users gets 100 MB of free storage space and there’re no bandwidth limitations. See sample site.

3. Snap Pages - This is Flash based website editor that is very beautiful and may be a perfect place if you looking to create a small website for sharing some photos and your calendar. The options are slightly limited for non-premium users as they can’t create new pages. See sample site.

4. Edicy Pages - It’s a new website creation tool that is just perfect for the techie crowd who wants more control over their site layout.

Start by picking a design from the template gallery and then you may completely change the look and feel of your site by editing the blog template similar to WordPress themes or Blogger template. It also supports JavaScript code and like Google Sites, Edicy tracks all changes made to a site. See example site.

 

5. Synthasite - This is again an easy yet very powerful tool for building websites but unlike competition, Syntasite is completely free. Images uploaded to Synthasite can be diretly edited in Picnik just like you have in Flickr. The tool also lets you embed Google AdSense ads in web pages much like Weebly. See example site.

Some more site builders worth checking out are WebOn, WebSketch, Viviti, Wix and Webs.

• Know Everything about Websites
• How to Completely Test a Website

Free Website Building Tools That Are Good Replacements for Google Page Creator - Digital Inspiration

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Build a Web Page Monitor with Google Docs and Track Changes Automatically

Source: http://www.labnol.org/internet/monitor-web-pages-changes-with-google-docs/4536/

RSS feeds have completely changed the way we consume information on the web. You no longer have to visit The New York Times or CNN every hour of the day to check news headlines because the feed reader is doing that for you behind the scenes.

The only problem is that not all web content is available via feeds. For instance, Amazon, eBay and Google Product Search (Froggle) are good places to find discount deals on books and electronic gadgets but unfortunately, none of these shopping sites publish feeds.

Monitor Web Pages with Google Docs

Problem: Let’s say you are looking for some discount deals on iPod Nano. An option here is that you open Google Products page and search for iPod Nano. If you don’t find the right price, repeat the same cycle next day. This may sound easy but imagine doing this for ten other products on five different shopping sites. Tedious, right?

Solution: What we can do here is build a simple spreadsheet in Google Docs that will monitor prices across all these search pages and will present them in a table so you don’t just track prices but also compare them at the same time.

To get started, you need access to Google Docs and some basic knowledge of XPath. Don’t let this scare you - XPath is a simple way to access information contained inside HTML web pages. For instance, if you want to know about all URLs that are mentioned on any web page, the XPath expression would be //a[@href]. Some more examples:

//strong means all the items in the web page with strong html tags

//@href means all the items in the web page with href element, i.e., the URLs in that page.

If you feel that writing XPath expressions is a tricky job, get the XPath checker add-on for Firefox that will help you easily determine the XPath of any element on a web page.

Import Data from Websites into Google Docs using XPath

This is the search page for ‘ipod nano’ inside Google Products. As you may noticed already, the result title is formatted with CSS class "ps-large-t" while the the product price using the class "ps-larger-t" - you can easily find these class names via Firebug or  from the HTML source.

 

Now we’ll create a table inside Google spreadsheet that will have the name, price and URL that will link to that product listing in Google Docs. You can use the same approach to get product data from other sites like Amazon, eBay, Buy.com, etc.

Here’s how the final spreadsheet looks like - all this is live data and will update automatically if the corresponding information is updated on Google Products.

Get External Data in Google Docs with ImportXML

As you may have seen in the previous tutorial on Google Docs, there’re built-in spreadsheet functions to help you easily import external data into Google Docs. One such useful function is ImportXML that, like ImportHTML, can be used for screen-scrapping.

The syntax is =ImportXML("web page URL", "XPath Expression")

Coming back to the spreadsheet, in order to fetch the price of ‘ipod nano’, we type the following formula:

=ImportXML("www.google.com/products?q=ipod+nano","//b[@class='ps-larger-t']")

You may replace ‘ipod nano’ with any other product name like ‘harry+potter’, ‘nikon+d60′, etc.

To enter this function into Google Docs, click an empty cell, press F2 and paste. See this Google Docs movie:

Similarly, for the product name, we use this formula:

=ImportXML("www.google.com/products?q=ipod+nano","//a[@class='ps-large-t']")

And for the URL (product hyperlink), the formula is:

=ImportXML("http://www.google.com/products?q=ipod+nano","//a[@class='ps-large-t']//@href")

You need to concatenate this with ‘http://www.google.com’ since Google Products uses relative URLs. This can be easily fixed by adding another column with the formula

=HYPERLINK("http://www.google.com/"&B3,"click here")

Related: Import data from HTML Web Pages into Excel

Subscribe to Web Page Changes via Feeds

You don’t have to check this Google Docs Spreadsheet manually to see if prices have since yesterday - just select publish   followed by "Automatically re-publish when changes are made" and subscribe to the document in your favorite RSS reader.

The author is an Excel whiz kid and blogs at Pointy Haired Dilbert, a virtual gold mine of tips related to data manipulation & visualization through Excel and other spreadsheet programs.

Build a Web Page Monitor with Google Docs and Track Changes Automatically - Digital Inspiration

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