Subscribers' Count For Any Website - A GreseMonkey Script

Google Operating System reported a real neat GreaseMonkey Script that you could use with your FireFox browser. This certain script allows you to view the number of Google subscribers who have subscribed to any certian site's feed. This information, kind of, gives you an idea about the popularity of that page and if you too happen to like it, all you need to do is click on the link and subscribe to its feeds.

For more detailed information and an accompanying screenshot, check out this post titled "Counter for a Site's Google Subscribers".

By the way, I am really sorry for not being able to post the second installment of "What They Taught Me" series because of the internet connection outage in Jamshedpur (that's the city in India where I blog from). Since I take an off on Sundays, I shall surely come up with the next installment by Monday. Sorry again.

Labyrinth Spammed!!

Huh? The very first time I think of posting something this year and this is how Blogger greets me, with a word verification setup that I need to type to be able to post on my own blog! This is preposterous! I have been maintaining this blog for almost 3 years now and finally, one fine day, Blogger dismisses me off as a spammer. After I clicked the little question mark (that's so characteristic of Blogger), the following is what I get to read.

Although I did fill out the form and asked the Blogger guys to review my blog, I got curious and checked out their page on spam protection. It says they consider blogs that keep referring to the same page everywhere (link spamming) as spam and that is it! That is the only category they've specified. I still just can't understand how could they classify Shayon's Labyrinth as a spam blog. Do you have any suggestions?

Good Ol' Orkut Has Changed

It was high time that Google had considered me too to be worthy enough for being bestowed with the latest look of Orkut. I have been hearing about the change in their popular social networking site Orkut's layout on The official Orkut blog , Google Blogoscoped and various other news sites for the last 4 days. Even here in my college, quite a few students have been blessed with the new design, but not me. Although Orkut's blog had said "We're rolling it out to groups of users at a time over the next week", it was getting tough for me to keep patience. Well, finally I too get to use the latest layout from today and I thought, why not check out every nook and cranny of the new layout and find out how much our good ol' Orkut has actually changed.

Changes in Orkut (that I could figure out):

• Added a few lovely round corners here and there.
• The tabbed links actually look and feel like tabs now.
• The special first character for your name is missing now.
• It looks like a complete package now. No more a social network under the development phase, if you know what I mean.
• They have now added breadcrumb-like navigation for communities.
• A very useful navigation bar added at the top (reminds me of free blogs on Blogspot, though).
• Options like "send message", "send teaser", "add to crush list" etc have been removed from the main profile page. Rather, they can now be view by pointing your mouse on the "more" link below the profile pic. This is for others' profile page, not your main homepage.
  Update: However, I feel the "Report Abuse" link should not have been hidden. It should rather be prominently visible to the users.
  
• The way "trusty", "cool" and "sexy" meters have been incorporated looks much better now.
• "Edit Profile" page looks much cooler.
• The fact that you can now crop your profile picture after uploading just rocks!
• Update: Thankfully they have done away with the line "You are connected to xxxx users via xxxx friends" from the main page. It was an useless piece of information, anyway.
• Update: You can now know about every change that your friends make, right on your homepage.
  

Changes in Orkut that would have been desired:

• Akin to the Orkut extension for FireFox, I would have preferred if I could have direct access to a profile's scrapbook, album or communities or send message to him/her just from a profile's picture or name.
• I wish instead of just "scrap tips", there would actually be a rich text editor for scraps and messages to be able to modify fonts, add pictures or insert smilies.
  Update: Or, how about keyboard shortcuts? Say, Ctrl+B for bold and Ctrl+I for italicized text.
  
• I would've preferred to be given an option to write in Indian languages.
• After you reply to someone's scraps using the "reply" button just below that profile's scrap, you can't refresh your scrapbook without sending the same scrap again to that profile. It's so irritating while trying to chat with a friend that I just end up scrapping on my friend's scrapbook itself, the old way.
• I hate the fact that you can send a message to either one person, a group or all friends at the same time. What if I want to send a message to my classmate, my girlfriend and my brother? How do I group them then? I would rather have the option of tagging people and then message them according to tags or I should be allowed to manually select profiles from my friends list, the way my email client allows me to select addresses from my address book.
• It's time for Orkut to shed the Beta tag.
• Update: Just as, in GMail, we get a notification and request to "update conversation" the moment we get an email concerning the same conversation that I am currently reading, I'd love it if I could get a similar notification asking me to "update scrapbook" the moment I get a scrap from a contact. That ways I don't have to keep a track on my GMail inbox or Google Talk to know whether someone has scrapped me.
  

My perception of the latest change:
On the whole, Orkut definitely looks much better than how it was before. Yet, as I've already pointed out, there are still more scopes for improvement. Allowing user post videos and html on scrapbook was a huge step Orkut had taken. Somehow, the very first time I looked at the new design, it suddenly reminded me of Windows Live Mail and Hi5.

Anyways, I guess we just got to change to survive. Darwin's theory always stands true, be it a living being or be it a website. I have pointed out as much changes and wanted features as I could. But that doesn't mean you aren't welcome to add to the list ;-).

Happy Orkutting!!

Hooray! Increased Feed Subscribers on Labyrinth!!

(Click to enlarge)

Wow! It seems all my hard work is finally paying off. I can't believe sprucing up my blog page would fetch me so many subscribers, and that too overnight. It was just yesterday that I had installed the menu bar at the top, gotten the links work fine and even asked George to help me out with the header.

The picture above is a summary of my feed subscribers for today, as charted by FeedBurner, my RSS feed management service. Even until yesterday, the maximum subscribers I'd ever had was 16. I was pleasantly shocked to find that it has increased to 27, today. As is pretty apparent in the above report for today's activities on my page, I've gotten the highest subscriber today, in the past 30 days. I can see I have 80% new visitors on my page and people have actually started to reach my page searching for terms like "sort my inbox", "mozilla" and "problogger" (that was a shocker, especially because the site itself gets a huge turnout as compared to mine, where it's mention only in my blogroll.

Well, what can I say? I love Google and I love FeedBurner (which incidentally is again a Google service, now). I'm now just keeping my fingers crossed while anticipating the reaction from all you readers, after I get the revamped look of my blog, live!

Sorting Out My GMail Inbox

Almost everyone uses GMail these days. I'm sure, you do too. So, how much of space has Google allocated to you? How frequently do you check your mails? Do you check your inbox neat and sorted out? Do you even feel the need of keeping your inbox organized? Well, I do. It's been long long time since I last sorted out my GMail inbox, labeled the mails properly and created filters to suit my needs. I donno what got into my head today but I just got myself determined to get the heap sorted out and well, it took me about an hour to get the thing done to my satisfaction. I realized, I've been using up 698MB of Google's allocated 2892MB of real estate and I have over 3K of mails in my archives. Well, I am certainly a net freak, I guess. Thankfully, I still haven't run out of my GMail quota, at least. :-P

Mozilla FireFox Plugins : Recommendation #2

Here's the second installment of recommendations of FireFox plugins, as promised in my earlier post. Hope FasterFox made a difference in your browsing activity. The very second extension that you should install is -

Google Browser Sync: Google Browser Sync is one of the best bookmark manager I've ever seen. All you need, to be able to use this feature, is an account with Google. Now that that obstacle is out of the way, you just need to download the extension from this link and you are ready to go! Once you have this nifty extension installed, it doesn't matter what PC you're working on, wherever in the world, you can easily access you bookmarks , address bar history, saved passwords and even sessions, any time and any where! Here's what the official explanation says:

Google Browser Sync for Firefox is an extension that continuously synchronizes your browser settings – including bookmarks, history, persistent cookies, and saved passwords – across your computers. It also allows you to restore open tabs and windows across different machines and browser sessions.

By the way, just in case you are interested in online bookmarks, that you don't need to install and can access irrespective of the operating system and browser you use, you can give Del.icio.us a try!

Other FireFox PlugIn Recommendations -

• #1 : FasterFox
• #3 : AdBlock Plus
• #4 : StumbleUpon

Google's Privacy Concerns

I'm sure you must be aware of the loads of privacy concerns that Google has been churning out in various quarters and among the public in general. Well, here's a video uploaded on YouTube from Google itself, telling you what they actually do with those cookies that they store in your computer and whether and how they know who you are and what you do. Hope this video succeeds in putting some of your concerns to rest.