Chad's News

One of the things I dislike about Google Reader is that it takes up a lot of space with nonessential items. Until recently, I used the “minimalistic” skin in the Better GReader Firefox extension to make the most use of my screen space. But now Google has built in a similar feature. I’ve been using it for about a month or so, and the verdict’s still out on which version I prefer.

Link: http://googlereader.blogspot.com/…
(via Lifehacker)

Google Chrome is blazingly fast, but I find it annoying that the browser exits when the last tab is closed. Now there’s an extension, named Last Tab Standing, to prevent that from happening.

Link: https://chrome.google.com/…
(via Lifehacker)

Google recently unveiled a new feature for its search engine: search results are displayed as you type. The expectation that it will accurately predict what it is you’re typing and display the appropriate results well before you finish, thus saving two to five seconds per search. Here at Chad’s News, however, we must be typing too fast, because we find the rapidly changing screen text to be very annoying. This is one feature that got disabled immediately.

Note that this behavior is different than the old Google, where it displayed suggested search strings—you actually get the search results as you type.

Link: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/…
(via Ars Technica)

Users of Google services such as Gmail, Reader, and Voice can now sign in to multiple accounts at the same time and via the same browser window. This is especially useful for those who have more than one gmail account. Unfortunately you’re currently limited to a maximum of 3 simultaneous sign-ins. The linked article has more details as well as links to the official Google announcement and the help pages that explain how to use the feature.

Thanks to Josh for this topic.

Link: http://lifehacker.com/…

As any web designer will tell you, the current state of web fonts is deplorable. Google is coming to the rescue, however, with 18 free fonts and an API to make them work correctly.

Link: http://arstechnica.com/…

Google Chrome version 4 has native support for Greasemonkey scripts. This means there are instantly 30,000+ extensions for the browser.

Link: http://blog.chromium.org/…
(via Lifehacker)

I just did a Google search on my name and was pleased to see that my personal website, www.cloman.com came up as the number-one result. The remaining nine results were all profile information from various websites that I belong to. In the past, my cloman.com page has been eclipsed by these other sites. The linked article, however, gives a simple piece of HTML code that tells Google which web page you consider to be the primary source of information about yourself. The trick is to add this attribute to the appropriate link(s): rel="me"

Link: http://marshallk.com/…
(via Lifehacker)

Last week, Google released version 4.0 of its super-fast Chrome browser. A much-desired enhancement is the ability to support extensions. Say hello to AdBlock!

Link: http://arstechnica.com/…

Nearly all web surfing makes use of a DNS resolver, a computer program that takes your human-readable domain name (e.g., www.chadsnews.com) and turns it into a numeric IP address that’s understood by the routers and switches on the Internet. DNS resolvers are typically supplied by your ISP, but astute Chad’s News readers will already be aware of OpenDNS, a free DNS resolver that has advantages over the ones provided by ISPs.

Now Google is getting into the business by offering a free DNS resolver service. They say it speeds up the browsing experience, increases security, and does away with those pesky redirects to advertising pages (which my ISP, Qwest, does when it can’t find the domain name).

The downside is privacy. Here at the Chad’s News network command center, for instance, Google already knows a lot of information about us because we use gmail and the Google reader. Using the resolver would give them even more data about our web browsing habits.

If you want to do a trial of the Google resolver, there’s a Windows program called Google DNS Helper that does the switch for you and, if you don’t like it, will switch you back.

Link #1 (Google Site): http://code.google.com/…

Link #2 (More Details): http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/…

Link #3 (Negative Analysis): http://arstechnica.com/…

Link #4 (Speed Tests): http://www.pcmag.com/…
(via digg)

Are you tired of people asking questions online that can easily be answered by a simple Google search? If so, then the linked website is for you. Perform the search like you normally would on Google, and you’ll get a link. Copy that link and give it to the person instead of an answer. The results are funny.

Thanks to Tom for this topic.

Link: http://lmgtfy.com/

Lifehacker performed some non-scientific speed tests on the latest versions of popular browsers. As expected, Google Chrome completely destroyed the others in the JavaScript category. This is why I use Chrome for Facebook—Firefox just can’t handle it on my underpowered machine. The only reason I stay with Firefox is because of its wide variety of extensions. Note that I was a bit surprised to see that Apple’s Safari also had very fast JavaScript processing.

Link: http://lifehacker.com/…

Here at the Chad’s News network command center, we adopted gmail as a central repository for the multitude of email accounts that we use (currently nine of them). The switch was made several years ago, primarily for gmail’s superior spam filtering and the fact that the cloman.com server kept appearing on spam blacklists (one of the downsides of shared hosting). When using gmail to send a message from a non-gmail account, however, it puts your gmail address in the “Sender:” field of the message header. Certain email clients do not handle this well. Some versions of Outlook, for example, will say that the message is from “xyz@gmail.com On Behalf Of xyz@cloman.com”. Even worse some clients use the gmail address as the reply address, which is something I do not want and which defeats the purpose of using the cloman.com account in the first place. Simply put, this feature is annoying.

Google will not remove the “Sender:” field because its use is in accordance with email standards, but they now provide a workaround where you can use gmail to send messages from a different server. Thus I could, for example, use my cloman.com SMTP server from within gmail. In this case the “Sender:” field is omitted, and the problem is solved.

Astute readers will have immediately recognized that this doesn’t solve my core issue, which is that the cloman.com SMTP server appears on some spam blacklists. So I continue to use gmail’s server to send my cloman.com mail. But I have email accounts in other domains for which I am using this new feature.

Link: http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/…
(via Lifehacker)