Author Archive
Changes to GMail Contacts Manager
One thing I like about Google is that they keep on adding new features and improving the current features frequently, the latest being the changes to the contact manager, earlier when you used to send email to someone he would be added to the contacts list so that when next time you want to send an email to the same person you type first few letters of his email address and a bunch of suggestions show up in auto complete list (which is a good feature) but now the problem is that if you send a lot of emails to different people then they all get added to the contact list and the auto complete list grows huge with time making it less efficient.
The Gmail team in a bid to fix this have modified the contacts manager and sorted the contact in to three categories that are as follows:
- “My Contacts”-these are the contacts you have manually added or contacted a lot in the past
- “Most Contacted”-the people you have contacted the most, if number of times you have emailed a certain person increases he is automatically added to My Contact (at least five time)
- “Suggested Contacts”- all the people you have emailed are added automatically in this category
To access the contact manager click on the contacts link under Gmail folders and above labels box on the left sidebar:
as you click on the contact button you can now see the Gmail contact manager which looks like this:
Gmail Contacts Manager
More on the official Gmail Blog
Mozilla Firefox 3.0.1 Released Fixes Two Severe Security Flaws
A while ago Firefox 3.0.1 was added to the Firefox FTP site, I was waiting eagerly for this release and I hope that it fixes the issues that were making the browser crash very frequently with the Firefox crash reporter showing up every time, sometimes it would crash five to six times in a single browsing session! anyway I updated to the latest version and out of 25 extensions that I use only 1 is incompatible with this release, and as soon as the browser opened I got a page from the Mozilla site thanking me for trying out the beta, seems like the website hasn’t been updated yet!
this release fixes two severely rated security flaws, the first one being “remote code execution by overflowing CSS reference counter” and the other one being “command-line URLs launch multiple tabs when Firefox not running”, you can read more about these flaws here and here
Get Mozilla Firefox 3.0.1 from here
Update: Here is the official Mozzila blog Post
Take Screenshots of web pages in Firefox using ScreenGrab
As a blogger I sometimes need to take screenshots of websites and for that purpose I use a Firefox extension called ScreenGrab, using it you can take screenshots from within Firefox, that way it is more convenient than loading a special software just for taking a screenshot. ScreenGrab has a very fast engine unlike other screenshot extension’s for Firefox and doesn’t uses much resources.
ScreenGrab can take screenshots of entire web pages unlike special screen grabbing softwares which can only take screenshots of the visible area, the options available to you are save or copy the complete page, save or copy visible portion of the webpage only, save or copy a selected area in the webpage, you can choose between JPG and png as the format of screenshots and you can also choose between gecko or java as the engine.
Get ScreenGrab from official Firefox add-ons site
WordPress 2.6 Final Released
Today when I opened my site’s dashboard I saw a notification about updating to WordPress 2.6 and I was surprised as it was released a whole month ahead of its release date, thumbs up to the developers! there have been some new features added to this version along with 194 bug fixes.
I upgraded to the latest version and immediately saw some changes like the dashboard now shows your comments count along with spam comments and unapproved comments, the theme section is now paginated and whenever you click a theme an Ajax based preview page opens up and you can then apply the theme from there, there is a “press this” bookmarklet so that you can start posting quickly, now every time you or someone edit your posts wordpress remembers the changes so that you can restore them later if there is a problem and the plugins page has been redesigned to add inactive plugins and recently active plugins section, WordPress expert has a detailed post about the changes in this release check it out here
here are some screenshots of the visible changes in this release:
Backup Your Firefox Profile With FEBE
For me loosing my bookmarks or website login information is like a nightmare that’s why I regularly backup Firefox Using an extension called FEBE, I am using it for a long time and it has never let me down
It is a very powerful extension with a lot of configurable options, using it you can either backup the full profile or selected things e.g extension, themes, bookmarks, preferences, username and password, cookies, search plugins, userchrome files, browser history, form fill history, permission or a backup that you define, you can also use timestamp directories so that you can keep multiple backups and easily manage them (You can set the number of backups it should store), you can also schedule backups at a specific time either daily , weekly or monthly (Firefox must be running at that time) you can also set reminders if the backup somehow doesn’t gets created or you have not set up scheduled backups, febe also has a very good extension backing up support it can save all your extensions in a .XPI file so that you can easily install them again
