Remove Google Blogspot Blogger Navbar

Look at my blog. There's no Blogger Navbar right? :)

This great article teaches how to remove the Google Blogspot Blogger Navbar.

Article Source Link
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First off, what is the Blogger Navbar?
The Blogger Navbar appears by default at the top of every Blogger-powered blog. It is available in several colors, and is configured in the Template tab in Blogger’s interface. If you are using a classic template, you’ll see a menu from which you can select a color. For blogs using Layouts, just click the “edit” link on the Navbar page element. Blogger gives a more detailed explanation of this here.

There are several reasons why I think it’s important to remove the Blogger nav bar but I’ll name my two most important reasons. First one being that it’s an eye sore and makes your blog look less professional. Secondly, when you click on the “next blog” button you never know what type of blog you might stumble upon. There are so many spam blogs with adult content or other information you don’t want young people to read. When you do block the navbar on your own blog, you prevent others from also easily leaving your site and accidentally heading to one of these spam sites.

google blogspot blogger navbar

Unfortunately Blogger doesn’t give you the option to remove the navbar easily but this simple modification to your template allows us to hide it. The good news is that it’s not against Blogger’s TOS so it’s not illegal to do. I read a post recently by Blogger Support that stated

While it’s not officially against our TOS, we discourage folks from removing it because we think it’s a great feature with more improvements to come. Follow the above instructions at your own peril, as Blogger controls the TOS and has been known to change it.

So the change you want to make is to the stylesheet. First make sure you backup your current template just in case you make a mistake. Click on the “Download Full Template” link ( go to “Template” => “Edit HTML”) and save it locally. Next, from within your template code you want to scroll down until you find ]]> and stop. Then you’ll want to add this line of code right above this line.

#navbar-iframe {height:0px;visibility:hidden;display:none}

So once you’re done, it should look like this:

#navbar-iframe {height:0px;visibility:hidden;display:none}

]]>

After that, save your template and view your blog. The top Blogger navbar should have disappeared! Looks much better now doesn’t it? If you ever want to add the navbar back, it’s simple. Just remove the line of code we just added. Also, if you ever switch templates, make sure to follow these instructions again because it needs to be done with each new template you use.

"


Free and Robust Inventory / Asset Software

After surfing around for a free and robust Inventory / Asset software.

As the list of features is too many, i'm not going to list them all out here.
Do check out the respective sites for the features. :P


Do update me if you have any good recommendation as well!





Here are some of the great softwares that i found:
1) Open-AudIT
open-audit logo

2) OCS Inventory NG

ocs inventory ng logo

3) GLPI
glpi project logo

HOWTO: Exclude your visits from Google Analytics

Often i find the Google Analytics not able to differentiate my visit with real visitors. After surfing around, i finally found the solution.

Article Source Link
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Introduction

In my view, one of the minuses of Google Analytics (GA) is the difficulty of excluding our own traffic (aka internal traffic) from the reports. As per this help article, there are two methods of achieving this. One is to set up a filter to exclude traffic from a given IP address or a range of addresses. This method is undesirable if you are using a connection that assigns dynamic addresses for each session.

The other method is to filter using a cookie installed in your browser. This method is more reliable and safer than using the first method. But the caveat is installing the cookie as it is not straight forward. And the second method described in the help page is flawed according to this discussion.

The Steps

Here are the tried and tested steps to exclude your traffic from GA.

1) Open your template in the Edit HTML mode and scroll right to the end where your tracking code is installed. Locate the script shown below and add the line shown in red.



Replace the variable passed to the _setVar() function with something applicable to you. The string you provide here ("exclude_ids_bguide" in this case) is called the filter pattern and it will be used later when we create the filter.

2) Save the template and visit your blog from all the browsers that you want this cookie installed. For example, if you are using Firefox and IE, visit your blog's homepage from both the browsers. If the page is already loaded, make sure that you do a page refresh.

The next step is VERY IMPORTANT!

3) Go back immediately and remove the line added (i.e. the line shown in red) in step (1), from your blog template and save it again. If you leave this line, all visitors to your blog will also get the cookie installed and you will not have any visits. That's the danger here. Make sure that you remove it immediately after step (2)

4) Login to GA and create a Custom Filter for this cookie. Provide the values as shown in the figure below and select the profile (i.e. your blog address) that you want to exclude. Make sure that you copy the exact filter pattern that you gave in step (1) above.

google analytics filter manager
You will have to wait about a day until you confirm that your visits are now excluded.
"

How to find any email with Gmail search

3rd follow up on gmail search.

Article Source Link
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The sight of someone scrolling through hundreds of email messages trying to find a specific one is like fingers on a chalkboard for me. With a few tricks, you can use Gmail to find the exact message you're looking for, without all the scrolling.

If you don't get a ton of mail, just typing in the words you're looking for usually does the trick. I can just type lisa in the search box and get all of the messages from my friend Lisa, southwest to bring up my ticket confirmations, or "bank statement" to help get my finances in order.

But the real power of Gmail search lies in search operators -- words that help modify your queries. Search operators work pretty much the same way within Gmail as they do for Google. So, if I want the email Lisa sent me with her flight information so I know when to pick her up at the airport, I type from:lisa SFO. Likewise:
  • A link from my co-worker Michael: from:michael http
  • A photo from my mom: from:mom has:attachment
  • That last chat I had with one of the Gmail product managers: keith is:chat
  • All messages from ebay that aren't outbid notices: ebay -outbid (the hyphen tells Gmail to return all of the messages that don't contain the word that follows it)
  • The messages in my inbox sent directly to me that I haven't read yet: to:me is:unread in:inbox
You can limit the scope of your search to a particular subject (subject:) or label (label:) as well. And you can get pretty fancy. Recently, I was trying to remember the date of my friend's April birthday. I always send her a birthday email, so I searched to:maya (birthday OR bday) after:2007/4/1 before:2007/5/1. It's the 19th.

gmail search operators

If remembering operators isn't really your thing, that's ok. There's a "Show search options" link to the right of the search bar at the top of your inbox.

gmail search options

Clicking that provides you with text fields you can fill in to get the precision of advanced search. Start there, but after a while you'll probably find that using operators is a lot faster.
"

Open Source Google Analytics Alternative

Found a nice article on an Open Source Google Analytics Alternative

Article Source Link
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piwik logoGoogle Analytics may be free, but it is still based on proprietary technology - which means you only ever get reports on the things that Google thinks are necessary and some of those reports are aimed at people using Google's other services (managing campaigns on AdWords, for example). Further, using Google Analytics means that you're tied to Google's TOS. Enter Piwik, which aims to be an open source alternative to Google Analytics. It is closely affiliated with OpenX, the open source ad server alternative to Google Ad Manager [Ed: which we just started using on RWW].

While OpenX has been around a while and has good traction, Piwik is fairly new and under the radar. It surfaced first as PHPMyVisites and is only at version 0.1.5, which is a sign that it is still for the highly committed.

Piwik originates from France and almost all the attention so far has been from outside USA. It seems to be catching on in Japan and China, as well as in Europe. The team responsible for Piwik seems to be made up of interns from big companies such as Amazon, Intel and even Google.

You need PHP and MySQL to use Piwik, which is no problem for techies but any widespread adoption will need a hosted version. Some entrepreneur is likely to offer that. Plug-ins to WordPress and other blogging platforms will also be needed, but cannot be that hard.

Open source products usually get traction, even when they are raw, when the alternative is too expensive or restrictive. Google Analytics is free, so it is hard to see rapid adoption by bloggers and small media companies. It is possible that Piwik will get better traction in companies that already use one of the expensive web analytics services from companies such as Coremetrics, Omniture and Visual Sciences/Websidestory.

piwik stats

Larger companies may have some pause for concern before switching to Google Analytics, because of the service's Terms of Service. An analyst in the IT department is likely to point out two clauses (yes big companies DO read this stuff):

"2. FEES AND SERVICES . Subject to Section 15 herein, the Service is provided without charge to You for up to 5 million pageviews per month per account, and if You have an active Adwords campaign in good standing, the Service is provided without charge to You without a pageview limitation.

Google may change its fees and payment policies for the Service from time to time including but not limited to the addition of costs for geographic data, the importing of cost data from search engines, or other fees charged to Google or its wholly-owned subsidiaries by 3rd party vendors for the inclusion of data in the Service reports."

So, don't go above 5 million page views without paying something to Google via AdWords. That may make one a bit uneasy, but it is the "Google may change its fees and payment policies" that will have both IT and Legal aiming to nix the deal.

Then a bit later on you get:

"6. INFORMATION RIGHTS AND PUBLICITY . Google and its wholly owned subsidiaries may retain and use, subject to the terms of its Privacy Policy (located at http://www.google.com/privacy.html , or such other URL as Google may provide from time to time), information collected in Your use of the Service. Google will not share information associated with You or your Site with any third parties unless Google (i) has Your consent; (ii) concludes that it is required by law or has a good faith belief that access, preservation or disclosure of such information is reasonably necessary to protect the rights, property or safety of Google, its users or the public; or (iii) provides such information in certain limited circumstances to third parties to carry out tasks on Google's behalf (e.g., billing or data storage) with strict restrictions that prevent the data from being used or shared except as directed by Google . When this is done, it is subject to agreements that oblige those parties to process such information only on Google's instructions and in compliance with this Agreement and appropriate confidentiality and security measures."

In short, they have the right to use your data. We have lived for a long time in a world where Microsoft and others charged for the software and kept it under a tight IP control, but did not try to take any use of the data. Google reversed that. Google is happy to let you use anything for free, as long as they get to use your data. That is OK for most individuals and small businesses, but totally unacceptable for large companies.

Piwik is working hard to be developer-friendly, not just relying on open source. They claim 4 big advantages:

  1. Open API
  2. Plug in architecture
  3. Data abstraction layer
  4. Customizable dashboard

But the nub of the issue for most big companies will be the data ownership issue. That is why Piwik is really a Google Analytics alternative, even if they will see few firms switching from GA initially. IT groups, under pressure to cut costs, will look at Google Analytics as an alternative to their current analytics software and reject the option based on TOS restrictions. Then some bright spark will Google the term "open source alternative google analytics" and see Piwik on top of the organic listings.

"

Set Gmail as your default email client in Firefox 3

Time to fully integrate Gmail with Firefox 3. :)

Article Source Link

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For those of you using newly released Firefox 3, or willing to give it a try, you can take advantage of a new feature that lets you set Gmail as the default for all email links -- those that contain "mailto:" in them. If you're like me and don't have a default email client set up, then clicking these links typically launches an installation wizard for a destkop mail client, or opens some email software that you don't actually use.

Now you can configure Firefox to launch Gmail when you click on email address links and avoid the hassle. The folks over at Lifehacker published these tips on how to set it up:

1) Go to Gmail and sign in.

2) While in Gmail, copy and paste the following into your browser's address bar and hit enter.

javascript:window.navigator.registerProtocolHandler("mailto","https://
mail.google.com/mail/?extsrc=mailto&url=%s","Gmail")


Google Apps users can use this code (but be sure to replace yourdomain.com with your Google Apps domain name):

javascript:window.navigator.registerProtocolHandler("mailto","https://
mail.google.com/a/yourdomain.com/mail/?extsrc=mailto&url=%s","Gmail")


3) Click "Add Application" when you are prompted1. Congrats, you just added Gmail to your browser's list of mail clients.

gmail picture 1 final

4) To set Gmail as your default, click on this link and you will be prompted with a dialog box listing available email applications. By selecting Gmail and checking "Remember my choice for mailto links" you won't have to tell your browser again. (You don't actually need to send an email after you click that link.)

gmail picture 2 final

You can always change this setting by going into "Tools" > "Options" (or "Firefox" > "Preferences," for Mac users) selecting "Applications" and going to the "mailto" option. There's a drop down next to the option that lets you change your default. Clicking "Application details" will take you to a settings page where you can completely remove Gmail or other mail apps.

gmail picture 3

1If nothing happens when you type in the code, double check that you copied the entire snippet correctly, and if nothing happens, you probably changed an advanced setting (maybe without even knowing) and need to set it back to default. To do it, type about:config into your browser and make sure that network.protocol-handler.external.mailto is on the default setting: true.
"

Gmail Contact Manager

Finally Gmail has update its Contact management manner. Often i'm stuck with numerous contact which i have just email once but do not wish to include them in to my contact list.

Article Source Link

Here's a brief on newly updated Gmail Contact Manager:
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We've heard from some of you that Gmail's auto-added contacts can lead to too much address book clutter. One of the advantages of automatically creating contacts is that all of the addresses you email subsequently show up in auto-complete. We wanted to preserve this benefit while giving you the ability to have a clean, uncluttered contact list, and we've come up with a solution that's rolling out this week. It separates your contacts into two groups: "My Contacts" and "Suggested Contacts."

gmail contacts
My Contacts contains the contacts you explicitly put in your address book (via manual entry, import or sync) as well as any address you've emailed a lot (we're using five or more times as the threshold for now).

Suggested Contacts is where Gmail puts its auto-created contacts. By default, Suggested Contacts you email frequently are automatically added to My Contacts, but for those of you who prefer tighter control of your address books, you can choose to disable usage-based addition of contacts to My Contacts (see the checkbox in the screenshot above). Once you do this, no matter how many times you email an auto-added email address it won't move to My Contacts.
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Samsung Omnia i900

Samsung Omnia i900
Samsung Omnia a.k.a i900 is a excellent phone with touchscreen, A-GPS (Assisted GPS), a 624MHz processor and the customer’s choice between an 8GB and 16GB flash drive, Samsung ups the ante in just about every other department (except, arguably, the slickness of their software platform -- it's based on Windows Mobile 6.1.)

An externally-accessible MicroSD card slot provides for up to 16GB of additional storage – perfect for quickly loading up a slew of movies or TV shows before your next long trip. And that video content can be in DiVx, XviD or even WMV if you so choose, along with MP4 and H.264.

On the musical side of the equation the Omnia goes beyond the de facto MP3/AAC combo to include WMA and the open-standard OGG, while adding an FM radio for a quick shot of news or some totally random variety in your listening.

Samsung’s own addition to the OS in the form of a widget-based overlay called ‘TouchWiz’. This mimics Vista’s gadget-friendly sidebar and desktop by parking a sidebar onto the left of the screen which can hold up to 14 handy widgets – you can see around six at any time, and scroll the sidebar up or down to view the rest. Drag the icon for any widget off the sidebar and onto the phone’s home screen and you’ve got information at a glance.

Here some tips on using this sleek samsung omnia phone.

1. For lock screen after call established setting go to POWER/CALLING to config
Screen will be lock when call is made, 10sec later it will off LCD

2. By default the front panel buttons will wake up the device but u can set at BUTTONS/WAKE UP for any button or just power button
U can also set to lock when the device is woken up

3. Flashlight option is off by default, go to setting BUTTONS/FLASH LIGHT to enable it
Press and Hold Volume UP for ZOOM IN/OUT at any application
Press and Hold Volume DOWN for FLASH LIGHT
Press and Hold Reject Button for LOCK DEVICE

4. By default the device is set to AUTO ADJUST BRIGHTNESS u can set to manual instead.

Firefox 3 and Java

After upgrading from firefox 2 to firefox 3, you might encounter some java issues such as applet not loading.

Try the below steps to resolve it:

1) Go to Control Panel
2) Double click on 'JAVA'
3) Click on 'Delete Files'
Firefox java 01

4) Click 'OK'.
Firefox java 02

5) Restart 'Firefox' and try again.

Do update me if it's not working for you. :)

How to Kill a Windows NT Service that hangs on Starting or Stopping

  1. Go to the command-prompt and query the service (e.g. the SMTP service) by using sc:

    sc queryex SMTPSvc
  2. This will give you the following information:

    SERVICE_NAME: SMTPSvc
    TYPE : 20 WIN32_SHARE_PROCESS
    STATE : 4 RUNNING
    (STOPPABLE, PAUSABLE, ACCEPTS_SHUTDOWN)
    WIN32_EXIT_CODE : 0 (0x0)
    SERVICE_EXIT_CODE : 0 (0x0)
    CHECKPOINT : 0x0
    WAIT_HINT : 0x0
    PID : 388
    FLAGS :


    or something like this (the "state" will mention stopping).
  3. Over here you can find the process identifier (PID), so it's pretty easy to kill the associated process either by using the task manager or by using taskkill:

    taskkill /PID 388 /F

    where the /F flag is needed to force the process kill (first try without the flag).

Windows Manual Cluster Failover

how to fail over nodes manually using cluster administrator?

Solution:
GUI

"Right click on one of your Cluster Resources and select Move. That will relocate the resource on the other Node."

CLI
"

C:\>cluster /cluster:w2k3cluster group
Listing status for all available resource groups:

Group Node Status
-------------------- --------------- ------
Cluster Group W2K3NODE1 Online
NODE1 W2K3NODE1 Online
NODE2 W2K3NODE2 Online

C:\>cluster /cluster:w2k3cluster group node1 /moveto:w2k3node2

Moving resource group 'node1'...

Group Node Status
-------------------- --------------- ------
node1 W2K3NODE2 Online


C:\>cluster /cluster:w2k3cluster group
Listing status for all available resource groups:

Group Node Status
-------------------- --------------- ------
Cluster Group W2K3NODE1 Online
NODE1 W2K3NODE2 Online
NODE2 W2K3NODE2 Online

C:\>

"

How to remove AVG 8.0 Link Scanner

Create a shortcut of the installation file. Then edit the shortcut to run with the parameter below:


# Run the installation with the parameters :

/REMOVE_FEATURE fea_AVG_SafeSurf /REMOVE_FEATURE fea_AVG_SafeSearch



> AVG 8.0 Free SCREENSHOT BEFORE LinkScanner removed:

How to 'Disable-Remove-Uninstall-Forever' LinkScanner then reinstall AVG 8.0 Free without LinkScanner! 1

> AVG 8.0 Free SCREENSHOT Without LinkScanner:

How to 'Disable-Remove-Uninstall-Forever' LinkScanner then reinstall AVG 8.0 Free without LinkScanner! 2


Foxit Reader 2.3: How to Disable Ads

Here's how you can disable to ads in Foxit Reader.

Article Source Link

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By default, the free version of Foxit Reader has six ads. In earlier versions of Foxit, you could disable the ads simply by clicking on each one. This practice no longer works but you can prevent them from appearing again by creating and executing a simple reg file.

1. Open Notepad.

2. Copy and paste the following into the new text document:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Foxit Software\Foxit Reader\MainFrame]

"ShowEditorAd_908"="0"
"ShowReaderAd_908"="0"
"ShowTypewriterAd_908"="0"
"ShowPOAd_908"="0"
"ShowSDKAd_908"="0"
"ShowFFAd_908"="0"



3. Save the document as foxit_noads.reg.

4. Merge the new file into the registry by doubler-clicking it.

5. If you're using Windows Vista, continue through the UAC prompt and confirm that you wish to perform the action.

"