Too Busy Being Geeky to Actually Design this site.
It’s simple to take advantage of Google Analytics on your blog by simply signing up for a FREE Analytics account (http://www.google.com/analytics).
Once you have your analytics account setup, be sure to go out and install “Google Analytics for WordPress” from Yoast.com.
I’m a fan of Google Docs and Google Spreadsheets. I love having access to important spreadsheets and documents from ANYWHERE. I also use Microsoft Excel for more advanced spreadsheets that Google can’t handle yet.
I am a big fan of the “Paste Special” Option that you get when you right click in excel. It lets you paste just the values of cells and not the formatting. I just now discovered how to use the Google Spreadsheets equivalent of this function.
It’s not a full featured as EXCEL’s paste special function, but it gets the job done when you want to just paste just your values or just your formatting.
1. Cut or Copy your values
2. Click on the “Paste Button / Icon”. It’s on the edit tab. It looks like a little clipboard with a piece of paper on it.
3. Three options will appear: PASTE, PASTE VALUES ONLY, and PASTE FORMAT ONLY.
4. Select the one you want! Viola!
Here is a Google Adsense Cheat Sheet.
1. Google Ads must be from genuine user interest. Any method that artificially generates clicks in prohibitied.
2. Clicking on your own ads for ANY reason is prohibited.
3. You may not ask visitors, pay visitors or otherwise encourage site visitors to click your ads.
4. You may not “fool” people into clicking the ads by using graphical gimmicks or misleading labels.
5. You may not promote sites displaying ads through unsolicited mass emails.
6. Google ads can only be displayed on sites that adhere to Google’s content guidelines.
7. Sites displaying Google ads may not include:
Violent content, racial intolerance, or advocacy against any individual, group, or organization Pornography, adult, or mature content Hacking/cracking content Illicit drugs and drug paraphernalia Excessive profanity Gambling or casino-related content Content regarding programs which compensate users for clicking on ads or offers, performing searches, surfing websites, or reading emails Excessive, repetitive, or irrelevant keywords in the content or code of web pages Deceptive or manipulative content or construction to improve your site’s search engine ranking, e.g., your site’s PageRank Sales or promotion of weapons or ammunition (e.g., firearms, fighting knives, stun guns) Sales or promotion of beer or hard alcohol Sales or promotion of tobacco or tobacco-related products Sales or promotion of prescription drugs Sales or promotion of products that are replicas or imitations of designer goods Sales or distribution of term papers or student essays Any other content that is illegal, promotes illegal activity, or infringes on the legal rights of others Stolen copyrighted material Deceptive or manipulative behavior intended to trick search engines or site visitors Pop-ups or pop-unders that interfere with the site navigation, change user preferences, or initiate downloads
8. Adsense code must be placed into pages without modification.
9. Adsense ads may not be integrated into a software application.
10. Up to 3 ads can be displayed on each website page.
11. A maximum or two Adsense search boxes may be placed on a page.
12. Up to 3 link units may be placed on each website page.
13. Adsense for search results pages may show only a single ad link unit.
14. No ad may be placed in a pop-up, pop-under, or an email.
15. No element on the page may obscure any portion of an ad.
16. No Ad may be placed on any non content based website pages.
17. No Ad may be placed on a website page published specifially for the purpose of showing ads.
18, Google ads and search boxes are not to be published on websites that also contain other ads or services formatted to use the same layout or colors as the Google Adsense Ads.
19. You may have other ads on your site, they may not be confused with Google Ads.
I was hunting for a way to use my Google Bookmarks with Chrome when I ran into a couple of cool Google Chrome tricks and a couple of things I really don’t like about Chrome.
First off, I learned that Google didn’t build in support for very many of it’s own features. I’m not sure if they just wanted to avoid the accusations that they just built a browser to promote their own products, or they just haven’t gotten around to it yet. In any case, I use quite a few of Google’s offerings, so I would like them more integrated into Chrome.
1. There is no way to sync the Google Chrome bookmarks with Google Bookmarks. This kinda stinks because I don’t ever use browser bookmarks. Bookmarks belong on the cloud, so I have all of mine stored with Google. So, Google, please eliminate the “in browser bookmarks” and let me have easy access to my bookmarks stored on the cloud.
You can still add bookmarks to Google Bookmarks withing Chrome. You have to select “always show bookmarks tab” from the little wrench icon in the upper right corner of the browser, or you can just hit “ctrl-b”. Then you have to drag the Google Chrome bookmarklet to the browser bar (You can find the bookmarklet here). Any time you visit a webpage that you want to save to your Google Bookmarks page, simply click the bookmarklet in the bookmarks bar.
2. I HATE the backspace button being used as a shortcut for the “Back” button to go the previous page in the browser history. I have navigated backwards in my browser SEVERAL times when I was just trying to delete the text in a form field.
3. Have you ever closed a tab by accident? I’ve done it several times, usually while cleaning up the browser space and getting rid of the dozens of tabs I’ve opened throughout the day. Here’s the fix, just press Ctrl+Shift+T to open the last closed tab, or open a new tab and check the “Recently closed tabs” section on the right side of the page.
4. If you ever need more space in a text area, you can resize it by grabbing and dragging the lower right corner of the text box. I find this really useful when you’re blogging. The text box in blog tools never seems to be the right size, so you can easily grab it and make it bigger or smaller. I really enjoy this one, and am actually making use of it RIGHT now while authoring the post.
5. Interested in using Chrome, but you don’t want to be all “look at my Google browser.” Then check out Chromium, Google’s open-source version of the browser. Google is either very sincere in helping the open-source browser project movement to help “move the web forward,” or at least they want to make you believe they are. Anyway, check out the Chromium homepage here, or click here to see the latest snapshots for windows to install it. You’ll probably want the directory closest to the top of the page, and download mini_installer.exe to install it. Enjoy having a browser that lacks Google branding, or jump in an help make the internet a better place to surf. Be wary, the open-source browser may be less stable than the Google Chrome version.
6. In Firefox you can drag tabs from one browser session to another. This was pretty cool, but I always wanted to drag a tab right out of the browser into it’s own browser session. Well, you can’t do it with Firefox, but you can with Google Chrome. I’m a browser spawning fool, and I love it.
Do you have inane or private chats that you’d rather not leave sitting around your Gmail account?
First off, change your Gmail settings to not save your chat sessions. After logging in to Gmail, go to your “Settings” menu, and under the “Chat” menu, choose the option to “Don’t save chat history in my Gmail account”. Click here for more detailed instructions on this step.
Second, what about the person you are chatting with saving the chat session? Go “Off the Record”. There is an “Options” link at the bottom of your chat window in Gmail. Click that and choose to take your chat off the record. The chat session will not be allowed to be saved by your chat partner either. If your chat partner decides to change the setting, it will show up in your chat that they did so. Click here for more detailed information on going off the record.
Note one – If your chat partner is using a third-party chat client, it may be keeping it’s own record of the chat and there is nothing you can do about that.
Note two – Your chat partner can always cut and paste the contents of your chat window into another file.
LASTLY, don’t freak out if you’ve turned off saving chats and gone off the record and then when you open a chat to one of your friends, EVERYTHING you said last chat session is still there! This is because you havn’t logged out of Gmail since you chatted. Log out and log back in again and when you open the chat window for your friend again, it will be brand spanking new AND empty.
I have a SanDisk Cruzer Micro USB Flash Drive 2GB.
Btw, mine doesn’t look as good as this one anymore – I carry it in my pocket with my keys everywhere I go!
Earlier this week I went to copy a large file to it and it told me it was out of space.
After deleting pretty much everything from the drive I still did not have all of my space back!
Highlighting the files on the drive, I right-clicked and chose “Properties” and was shown a little over 6mb in file – the correct amount. However…
When I highlighted the drive under “My Computer” and right-clicked and chose “Properties” the drive was still reporting an excessive amount of space used! 678mb! WTF?
I searched the ‘net for an answer and many folks with similar problems advocated formatting the drive. Umm… Drastic.
The NON-DRASTIC fix follows!
Go to your “My Computer” and under the “Tools” menu choose “Folder Options”. Under the “View” tab uncheck the box for “Hide protected operating system files”. Don’t forget to reselect this when you’re all done.
Now when you look at the files on your flash drive, you will see a “Recycled” trash-bin icon.
Right-click on the trash-bin icon and choose “Delete”.
Yes. Yes, you do want to delete this pesky little critter.
Don’t worry, it’s not going to hurt anything. I did this on mine and all is well.
Checking the space on the flash drive again, all of my drive space was back!
Far as I can tell… not disconnecting your flash drive correctly before removing it could cause this. Or using it between a PC and a MAC was a theory on the ‘net. Or just gremlins. You fed them after midnight didn’t you? 
I recently installed Google Chrome and have been using it fair amount to see how well I like it. So far, I’m a big fan of the increased screen area, and I haven’t had too many problems with surfing. There are several small features that are absent, but what can you expect from the beta release of a new browser. I’m really looking forward to seeing where they go with this thing, and how they implement it with their other tools (GMAIL, GOOGLE APPS, YOUTUBE, PICASA, etc.)
So, I added the Google Chrome icon to the browser party in my quick launch menu. The choices, the choices, I can now choose from Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer, Opera, and Flock.
Sheesh, who’s next?
To make installing WordPress Plug-ins easy, try installing the “One Click Updater” Plugin by Janis Elsts.
I’ve used it for installing both plug-ins and themes on several wordpress sites and it has worked great and saved my tons of time downloading, unzipping, and uploading plugins to websites. Just a couple of clicks, and this plugin will actually install directly from a web address.
Loving it.
Here is a quick summary of some of it’s features:
We’ve been waiting years to hear that Google would finally launch it’s own browser. The time is finally here.
Click Here to read about it.
Click Here to read the comic about it.
Click Here to download it.
If you are running a word press site be sure to install the “WordPress Automatic Upgrade” Plug-In. This will save you a lot of time and aggravation.
WordPress Automatic Upgrade allows a user to automatically upgrade the wordpress installation to the latest one provided by wordpress.org using the 5 steps provided in the wordpress upgrade instructions.
WordPress automatic upgrade upgrades your wordpress installation by doing the following steps.
- Backs up the files and makes available a link to download it.
- Backs up the database and makes available a link to download it.
- Downloads the latest files from http://wordpress.org/latest.zip and unzips it.
- Puts the site in maintenance mode.
- De-activates all active plugins and remembers it.
- Upgrades wordpress files.
- Gives you a link that will open in a new window to upgrade installation.
- Re-activates the plugins.
The plugin can also can be run in a automated mode where in you do not have to click on any links to go to the next step.
Click Here to visit the “WordPress Automatic upgrade” Plug-In page on WordPress.org.
Well worth the install time!