I’ve been a user of computers and the internet for long enough to remember the first browser war. It used to be that I’d regularly use multiple search engines in order to ensure that I got the best* results. My defaults would be Yahoo, AltaVista, and Kvasir, but others were certainly in the mix, too. Over time, however, most of these were replaced by Google. As a student, my exprience was that Google usually provided “more or less close enough”, rather than “exactly what I need”, and as your search gets more specialized, Googles results tend to get less useful.
(more…)Tag: Google
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Paste text without formatting
I recently had a long term collaboration with a number of colleagues, where part of what we did was produce, edit, and agree upon finalized versions of text. We applied various formatting such as color, cursive, and bold to track the status of specific text blocks. At the end of it all, we needed to collate the disparate pieces of text into a single document.
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Start a new Google Doc/Sheet/Slide deck straight from the address bar
I recently learned of a nifty little trick for users of Google’s Workspace services (i,e. Docs, Sheets, Slides, Forms etc.): You can start a new document, spreadsheet, slide deck and so on from the address bar of your web browser. Simply enter the appropriate command (below) into the address bar, hit return, and watch as it unfolds:
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Improving your Google-fu
Search engines can be a great way of finding what you’re searching for. Using them to their fullest extrent, however, requires a bit of knowledge about how to structure your searches. These examples are some that I use on a regular basis:
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Setting up Google AdSense on WordPress
Regular readers may have noticed that ads started appearing on the site back in the beginning of february. While I don’t expect to ever earn a lot of money on this site, it would be nice if it didn’t cost me money. Running a WordPress blog on a hosted domain isn’t all that expensive, and the total cost depends on what host you go with.
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Top five Google apps
Spending as much time online as I do, Google is an integral part of my day to day routine. This is my top five list of Google apps:
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Google Wave: First Impressions
For the last month or so, I’ve been playing around with Google newest online toy; Google Wave. Billed as a “personal communication and collaboration tool”, it is designed to combine email, IM, wikis and social networking. Written in Java, using OpenJDK, Google has announced plans to release most of the source code as Open Source.
As a communications platform, it is fun, and I like the way it combines instant messaging with logs, meaning that you can see how a conversation has taken place. The playback function is simple to use, and allows you to see context in a nifty way. It also means that you can use Wave as a presentation tool, should you so wish.
As for using it for project planning and communication, which I think is likely to be one of its most used applications, it looks pretty good. Indenting messages could, and should be simpler – they now get automatically indented if inserted between two other messages, but otherwise they are not indented. That’s definitely a function I’d like to see.
Another feature I’d like to see, is an option to share a wave publicly, giving you a URL to post to a tweet, a blogpost or the like, so that people who don’t have a Wave account can see the discussion. I hope this is something that will be coming, and I think it’s likely that we’re going to see it, keeping in mind that this is a feature that the guys at Google are more than somewhat familiar with, as we can find it in Google Calendar as well as Google Docs.
The last thing that kinda irks me, is that there is no print-function. While I’m all for a Wave being a digital entity, it would be good, I think to have the option to print a wave. I’ve already had one situation where I wanted to do so, but ended up having to copy all the text over to a document, which somewhat makes the point of the wave go away.
All in all, I’m pretty impressed by Google Wave. I see a lot of potential in it, and I’m definitely going to keep playing around with it. I’m already using it to plan one project all by my lonesome, as well as communicating with a mate about the translation of his role playing game to English. -
Gears + Dropbox = Mobile computing
I’ve been looking for a sturdy, simple and preferably free solution to enhance the way I take my computers with me. I’vew recently found just that.
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Seven tips for more efficient Googleing
Since its start in 1998, Google has grown to become one of the largest search providers in the world. Here are seven tips to using Google more efficiently: (more…)
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Read your GMail while offline
In a previous post, I talked about Google Gears. Now, let’s take a look at a practical application. First, the developers at Google brought us the next big thing in web-based email. Now, they are bringing a way to take it offline.
Bear in mind, Offline is a GMail Labs feature, so it is wont to be a bit unstable for now. That being said, here’s how to enable the feature:
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Google Gears for Offline and Online goodness
The clever people at Google have made Gears, an Open-Source multiplatform program that enables more powerful web applications, by adding new features to your web browser, such as:
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