The Google Operating System has an excellent post on how to download entire Google help files which you can either print out or save to your computer as either a HTML file or another file of your choice (such as a PDF).
Google’s help pages are extremely good but they are normally a rabbit warren of links, links and more links. But by adding ?fulldump=1 on the end, you can have it ALL on the same page and you can then save the whole lot to your computer.
As GOS points out though, these help pages are frequently updated so if you do save a copy of a help page to your computer, it will be out of date pretty quickly, although the fundamentals will always be the same.
I got a pleasant surprise today when I noticed that my Google pagerank has been increased by one. I am now a 6 which is nice. I had heard that Google was conducting a review of pageranks and I was hoping that mine would go up. I get a lot of stuff published on other websites most days with outgoing links to this site so I figured a bump in pagerank was not an unlikely prospect.
A lot of people have asked me what a bump in pagerank really means and if it has any real meaning. Well, I guess a higher pagerank means a higher position in the search engine results (i.e. more visibility in search results). This in turn leads to more visitors to your site which means a higher RSS subscription base (potentially) which potentially could lead to higher advertising revenue possibilities. So a bump in pagerank isn’t something to be written off lightly. The more Google loves you, the more possibilities that open up to you.
Google Talk has rolled out a chat bot to translate your IM messages into “instant message-speak”. I personally would never use it and it gives me a migraine to see and hear people talk like this. But I guess everyone is different.
In case you don’t know what a robots.txt file is, it is a file which tells the Google searchbot which areas of the site to crawl and which areas NOT to crawl. It’s essential for all webmasters to have a robots.txt file in their website root directory and this robots.txt generator in Webmaster Tools makes the whole process much easier.
If you entered long queries in a Google search box, you would notice that it’s difficult to edit them because Google optimized the size of the box for short queries. Things have changed and now you can much bigger queries and Google will adjust the search box’s size after you perform a search.
The 21 Steps is told by following the story as it unfolds across a map of the world. Follow the trail by clicking on the link at the bottom of each bubble. The first story is told by one of my favourite authors Charles Cumming. The story is good but it gets a bit tedious doing all that mouse clicking and waiting for the site to constantly load up.
Google Maps has brought out a cool new feature in the US, Australia and New Zealand where you can edit a Google map if there is an error. You can move the official placemarker as well as edit business details (for example, if the business has suddenly shut down).
I sure hope the feature makes its way to Europe soon.
Accessing your e-mail in a web browser is all the rage, but rage is all you’ll be feeling when your net access goes down and you don’t have a local backup of your messages. Here are some tips for backing up your inbox. It requires a bit of work to set up, but once you do, you’ll be able to enjoy the goodness of Gmail’s web interface worry-free.
This is something I’ve been meaning to do for ages but I don’t want all my thousands of messages, only some of them downloaded to the desktop. I’ve yet to work out if that is possible.
Google Spreadsheets, the most mature application from Google’s online office suite, has suddenly become much better. Now you can get email notifications when your collaborators make changes or edit some specific cells. You can also get notifications when someone submits new data using a form.
Web applications track many user actions and use them for different purposes. For example, Google Reader records some of your actions without providing options in the interface to access the data. Here are some addresses where you can find historical data about the items you’ve subscribed to (click on “View all items” to see all the posts).
A story I wrote for Make Use Of. Much has already been said on Make Use Of about keyboard shortcuts but I want to focus specifically on the ones I use most often. I’ve often found that it’s easy to be totally overwhelmed by the sheer volume of shortcuts out there (who can remember them all?) so I’m going to boil it down for you to the absolute essentials and ignore the rest.
Gmail is one casualty. For the past couple of days, the site has generally been sluggish and I have also been unable to change photos or details in my contact book :
Google Operating System has an excellent piece on a subject which has been baffling me for ages - getting your Gmail messages to show up in a RSS reader. I’ve never been able to get it to work but it actually turns out that it doesn’t work in Google Reader! In fact the only online reader that it works in is Netvibes! How’s that for weirdness?
Google doesn’t trust their own RSS reader to handle Gmail?
May 3, 2008
photo credit: muammerokumus
Posted in Google 
1 Comment »
I got a pleasant surprise today when I noticed that my 
Accessing your e-mail in a web browser is all the rage, but rage is all you’ll be feeling when your net access goes down and you don’t have a local backup of your messages. Here are some tips for backing up your inbox. It requires a bit of work to set up, but once you do, you’ll be able to enjoy the goodness of Gmail’s web interface worry-free.
