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Google PR upadate for April 2009

Mayank — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 04:39:05 +0000

The PageRank update for April 2009 is underway. This is the first major PageRank update of the year (last being towards the end of december in last year). The update started yesterday.
Biotech-geek.com The Everything Blog, still remains penalised. (its been almost an year since the penalty now Google, come one, you can show some love there, are you listening?), while my other blog Knayam went from PR of 2 to 3 (some of the internal pages have also got PR’s of 1 or 2).

Its been an okay PR update for me as I dint make real efforts and also dint update the blogs regularly, so I am kind of happy.

How did your sites/blogs fare in the PR update?

If you havent checked your PR’s as of yet, you can use this tool to check the PR of any site/blog or webpage.

Check Page Rank of any web site pages instantly:

This free page rank checking tool is powered by Page Rank Checker service

New in Gmail: Select multiple files and a progress bar

Mayank — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 08:01:27 +0000

Gmail has been in a phase of dynamic improvement ever since Gmail Labs was introduced. Labs has given us so many amazing features like ability to access our emails offline, multiple inboxes,new themes,mouse gestures,creating a Google document,sending SMS’s via chat (US only) and many other features. (Ten Gmail Labs Features You Should Enable)

So whats new in Gmail currently is that you can now select multiple files to send at once. You can hold key to select individual files or you can press to select multiple files in a folder, just like you would do normally.

And the part i liked the best,you finally get to see a progress bar! I dont know why such a basic functionality was missing from Gmail for so long. I love my Gmail even more. (Even though there was a Gmail outage recently on 24 Feb which lasted for couple of hours and the Gmail web interface was broken. Though it dissappointed me a little but i was anyway able to access Gmail via IMAP. Also, the web interface was back online quicker,although in bursts,in Google chrome thanon other browsers )

Multiple inboxes in Gmail

Mayank — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 11:30:30 +0000

Gmail just keeps getting better and better. This time, its a really useful feature. You can now have multiple inboxes in your gmail.
You can enable this feature from “Labs” tab and then can configure “multiple inboxes” from settings.

You can use it to organise your mails in an even better way. You can set different inboxes for your different lables. You can also set the location of the number of mails that you want to displays in your new inboxes and also set the location of your inbox panels. It looks much clean and organised.
I am already loving this cool new feature of gmail. What about you?

Access Gmail offline

Mayank — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 20:27:39 +0000

Gmail just gets better and better. This time its something fresh. Gmail users can now access their Gmail accounts even when they are offline. This has been introduced as an experimental feature in labs, which since its birth is giving us many great features to love the mail service even more.
If you are a gmail user, you just need to go to the labs tab and enable the feature “Offline”. Gmail will then locally cache Gmail on your computer using Google gears and you will be able to use Gmail without a internet connection. You can read,label,and even compose mails as you would do normally and gmail will sync your activity when the next time you connect to the internet.

To use this feature, you will need Firefox v 1.5+ or Internet Explorer v 6.0 and up.

The internet was a malware for 40 minutes

Mayank — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 03:36:07 +0000

If you did a Google search between about 6:30 AM PST until 7:25 AM PST yesterday, you were for sure alerted by this error message against every search result irrespective of what you searched, “This site may harm your computer”.
The error was fired for about an hour and was quickly fixed but it made news as this kind of behaviour is not characteristic of Google.

Marissa Mayer, VP, Search Products & User Experience wrote and clarified about the error on the official google blog. She said the error was triggered because of a human error.
An excerpt:

Google flags search results with the message “This site may harm your computer” if the site is known to install malicious software in the background or otherwise surreptitiously. We do this to protect our users against visiting sites that could harm their computers. We maintain a list of such sites through both manual and automated methods. We work with a non-profit called StopBadware.org to come up with criteria for maintaining this list, and to provide simple processes for webmasters to remove their site from the list.

We periodically update that list and released one such update to the site this morning. Unfortunately (and here’s the human error), the URL of ‘/’ was mistakenly checked in as a value to the file and ‘/’ expands to all URLs. Fortunately, our on-call site reliability team found the problem quickly and reverted the file.

They also apologised to users for any inconvinience that might have caused them, along with the webmasters whom sites were wrongly labelled as infectious.

Now view PDF’s and send SMS from Gmail

Mayank — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 12:56:16 +0000

Gmail recently introduced two more amazing features. You can now view PDF’s right from your inside your Gmail. You will see a “view” button against your PDF’s in your mail,you can click the button and view the PDF without needing to download and save the file on your computer!.

Gmail team also introduced another feature few days back. You can send text messages to your friends mobile from Gmail. The problem is that right now you can only send SMS to your friends in US. I really really hope that this feature is opened to users outside the US as soon as possible.

Now get Gmail on your desktop

Mayank — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 08:05:19 +0000

From now on, to access your Gmail, you will not need to open your browser because Google has just launched a desktop Gmail desktop gadget.

You can check all your mails right from your desktop. Easy,isnt? It currently works with the latest release of Google desktop.

Here is an excerpt from what the official Gmail blog has to say on the new Gmail gadget:

You’ll see that it covers the basics such as reading, searching, and sending messages. You can star messages, use the same keyboard shortcuts, and we didn’t forget about contact auto-complete. It doesn’t take up much space in your sidebar or desktop, and you can also resize it to show as few or as many messages as you’d like.

Pep up your Gmail mailbox with themes

Mayank — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 13:48:33 +0000

Google products dont stop getting better. After giving some intuitive features like Labs, ever increasing storage, Google has made its users smile yet again.

Google has introduced 30 themes for its customers on 19th Nov. The release was gradually rolled out to all the customers in the next two days (I got the themes today )

Gmail users (me included) have long been using other ways to spice up their Gmail interface using third party addons, but now with this new addition, we wont have to do that.

Here is a screenshot of all the themes:

To see the themes and chose one for yourself, go to Settings–>Themes

From Gmail blog