Archit Tantia

I was trying to access my Twitter account to do some twitting and follow new people but I guess Twitter is having yet another problem. Meet the Twitter whale:
Oh great! They are over their capacity. “Too many tweets! We’ll try to lighten the load and have things back to normal soon.” – Yea you better do that.

Google Sites (aka Google Wiki) is now open for signups by anybody having a Google Account.

Google Sites makes it easy for anyone to create and manage simple, secure group websites. You can create and publish new pages with the click of a button, edit web pages like documents, and move content and pages around as you please. Information is stored securely online, and you decide who can edit or view the site. Google Sites is powerful enough for a company intranet, yet simple enough for a family website.

They even made a small video to explain what Google Sites basically is:

So quickly go and grab your Google Sites URLs before someone else takes them because like all other Google Services(almost all) – its Free of Cost! Google Sites will not offer SEO benefits as all the external links have a “rel=nofollow” tag in them.

So what do you think about Google Sites?

Note: If you have subscribed to this blog’s newsletter you may not be able to see the video widget in your email issue or feed syndicate. Please visit this page to view the video.

I logged into Windows Live Mail using Internet Explorer 7 just because Windows Live Messenger forced me to log into it through it. I was certain that as Live Mail is a Microsoft service, IE would render the website correctly but to my surprise I saw that it did not(Erm…could not!). See what did I saw after the loading finished:

When I tried log into Live Mail through Firefox 2 see what I saw:

Surprising huh? LOL! Firefox can render Windows Live Mail but IE cannot! Doesn’t really Firefox rock? Erm…I don’t think we need anymore arguments against this topic.

I just spotted a “Firefox 3 is coming” ad in an Adsense ad unit.
Looks like they are trying to gain in users before their final release planned to be in June. You can download the Firefox 3 Release Candidate 1 if you want a sneak peak of whats going to be in it in the final release.

BTW, Adsense thinks I am a girl(second ad above) – I guess you are mistaken Adsense!

Blogger recently changed the way the layout codes are processed which prevented Blogger users to change their layout through the Page Elements Layout tab while using the Swap Title hack. Nobody could find a solution to this till now. Blogger introduced a new layout tag “blog.pageName” recently which gave me an idea to solve the Swap Title problem. I tested my method on this blog and guess what? It works just fine!

So without wasting any more time here is the all new “Error Free” Blogger Swap Title Hack:

1. Backup your blog’s template just to be safe.
2. Find this code in your template:
   

   <title><data:blog.title/></title> or <title><data:blog.pageTitle/></title>

3. Replace the above tag with this:
   

   <!– Blogger Swap Title by Archit T at https://blog.archit.in –>
   <b:if cond=’data:blog.pageType == &quot;item&quot;’>
   <title>
   <data:blog.pageName/> | <data:blog.title/>
   </title>
   <b:else/>
   <title><data:blog.pageTitle/></title>
   </b:if>
   <!– End of Blogger Swap Title by Archit T at https://blog.archit.in –>

4. Save your template and you’re done!

This hack does not return any XML errors which the older Swap Blogger Title Hacks do and it also lets you change your template layout through the Page Elements Layout tab!

Everybody knows YouTube launched YouTube India last week and it has already become so famous. The localised site contains all the videos found on YouTube’s global site, except they’ve applied an “Indian lens” to the content, meaning that the video charts you see reflect what Indians are watching now, the featured videos are programmed to cater to an Indian audience. I saw this video and found it pretty good:

What do you think about the video as well as the localized site?

I had a ping test of this blog to check whether it was blocked in China or not and guess what’s the answer? YES! (dhuh!). Seems this blog is also visiting the “Great Firewall of China”! China has been blocking a lot of blogs ahead of the Olympic games that begin in Beijing in three months from now.

I conducted connectivity tests using two different nodes in China and none of them could connect to this blog:

Is your blog blocked in China too?

I am sure you have come across many websites which require you to enter CAPTCHA (“Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart”) words to complete registrations or send mails. Don’t you just hate them to the core?

I came a cross a few CAPTCHAs which will make you laugh rolling on the floor! Try to crack them if you can:

So how many did you crack?

People in India will finally get to buy the much-hyped Apple’s iPhone from their local Apple Stores!

Don’t be that excited now because it’s delayed launch in India is expected with telecom operator Vodafone in the first week of September. Now thats a long time to come.

Initially the 8 GB version of the much-hyped touchscreen device — which combines Wi-Fi capabilities with a powerful email client, TV feeds, online music store and map-based location guide — will be launched at a price ranging between Rs. 27,200 and Rs. 28,000. Presently Indians get to buy the illegal cracked version at a price near Rs. 24,000 so it seems the legal version’s price will have to go down else people would still prefer buying the illegal version when it comes here.

A detailed report can be read here.

Google indexes something on their own site which should not be indexed at the first moment. Out of just curiosity, I typed google.com/google to find out what happens and I saw a 404 – Page not found custom error page. But wait, the error page also showed some suggested URLs. The first one was something which should not be indexed. Some Google Registry file at google.com/google.reg.

The registry file had a few lines written specifically for Internet Explorer:

REGEDIT4


[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main]
"Use Search Asst"="no"
"Search Page"="http://www.google.com"
"Search Bar"="http://www.google.com/ie"

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\SearchURL]
""="http://www.google.com/keyword/%s"
"provider"="gogl"

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Search]
"SearchAssistant"="http://www.google.com/ie"

Weird?

The second suggested URL made me learn a new link to the Official Google Blog. Its google.com/googleblog.

Anybody knows what the registry file means?

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