Gmail Access & Plinky

If one forgets Gmail password, one can get it reset either by answering the security question or by requesting a reset password link to the secondary mail id. But, if these do not work. Say, the account has been taken over and security question & secondary mail id are changed to something else, then how to recover? Well Gmail has an Account Recovery Form where they ask for some information so that the account is made available only to the correct person.

Blogger through SMS: Now, one can enable posting through mobile phone, currently available only to USian's

Plinky: Well, its another website where one can add up blogs, or Facebook, Twitter accounts and by answering the prompts, automatically all the linked services would get updated! Its surely good. This is created by one the original blogger team-members - Jason Shellen. Anyone wanna follow me there, here is the URL (First time I got a profile URL without a need for additional numerals or surname initials... that shows no other Rampy has yet signed up there :) )

Essentials for bloggers

Found this informative link on few essentials for bloggers

http://www.quickonlinetips.com/archives/2005/04/free-essential-tools-for-blogger/

Google Maps integrated with Blogger

Continuing with their tradition, culture of integration, Google has integrated GMaps with Blogger after integrating with Picassa-web, Gmail (in contacts) and few other products. I observed it as I was publishing the earlier post. It appears right next to Labels with the legend Location: add location with its cheeky icon. Because of this, the space for labels has expanded length-wise since Location hijacked its earlier territory.

As I tried underlining 'add location' in the earlier statement, there is surprisingly no 'U' icon existing in Blogger's RTF toolbar!

Blogging: a fashion

Thought Blogging was picking up as a philosophical, intellectual pathway towards sharing data, thoughts freely only among the self-professed gypsies? We now have Bollywood stardom finding no better thing than getting in touch with their 'fans' through this electronic medium, probably they realized acting required more effort than blogging!

Amitabh Bachan (BigAdda)
Aamir Khan (Blogger)
Salman Khan (Blogger)
Karan Johar: This is a website: My name is Karan

They have made it interactive. They promise responding personally, to a large extent. Infact Aamir, based on the response given at the blog, included one song in the movie Jaane Tu Ya Jaane Na, which was earlier omitted, inspite of AR suggesting its presence in the film. Thats a good response and gives a reason for one to interact with them, thus keeping it lively.

p.s: Trouble finding these blogs was, there were so many, so many people mentioned these at their blogs, in news reports, but failed giving these links. This lead to popularity of these subsidised blogs, websites, news reports than the actual blog. Infact, I am yet to get the official blog of Shah Rukh Khan, which exists!

Hyperlinks in Comments

How does one add hyperlink to the comment on a Blog?

I saw an hyperlinked comment first on this blog for this post. Thats it, I wanted to know how that is done. It hardly took few minutes to know that its the regular html code inserted into comment form. Once done, automatically blogger renders it in html. Never knew this, great to know it! :)

Ex. adding a hyperlink:

< a href =" url">text to display < / a> (without spaces)

replace url with:
http://powerandcontrol.blogspot.com/2007/06/introduction-to-blogging.html
leave the quote marks

replace text to display
with:
An Introduction To Blogging

An Introduction To Blogging

----------------------------------------------------------------

Here is an useful post on

Keeping comment spam off your site and away from users

Blogs I'm Following...Face Recognition on PicWeb

Blogger:
Sure, its been missing our eye for quite sometime. Unsure when it was introduced, but today discovered it.

One can display on the Blog, who all are following that Blog.

Its like, if I  am fan of the contents of a blog, and I want everyone in the world (or only myself) to know that I am following all the proceedings, new posts at that blog, then I have to just click on the link 'Follow this Blog', and I will be added to the display-list of all the bloggers who follow that blog.

This feature has to be enabled at an individual blog level so that 'Fans' show to the world (or themselves) that they are fans of the particular blog. When one becomes fan of a blog, it is at the Blogger Profile level...quite obvious though :)

What exactly have they done? They have integrated RSS feeds....If I am subscribed to RSS feeds of a particular site (either through Google Reader or any other FeedReaders), I am becoming 'fan' of the content of that site. By adding this feature, they are just making the identity of all those people who have subscribed to their blog (willing the subscriber wants to reveal his/her identity) known to the world. FeedBurner just displays number of subscribers, where this one shows the profile pic with link to their profile on that site. This is a step towards integration of Blog and Google Reader. I can easily mark myself as a fan of a feed in Google Reader. Vice-versa, a particular site gets subscribed automatically to Google Reader when I mark myself as its fan.

What is Following?
How do I add Following gadget to my Blog?

You can see me following Google Student Blog  :)
And I need to see, how many follow my blog! :o)

Update 1:
In Google Reader, it gives option to "hide blogs you follow" under Settings -> Preferences -> Misc -> Show followed blogs from Blogger (check or uncheck it)


Picassa Web:
Addition of Face Recognition into PicWeb has taken globe by a storm (officially called 'Name Tags'). There are multiple forums, blogs, sites talking about it, reviewing its credibility, durability, and usefulness. Let me give my own comments on it.

I have tagged about 340 photos (agree, the count does have some duplication). Stunning thing is, it groups similar faces and tags them in one go. It has kind of solved one of the biggest research problem on generic face recognition and their grouping (Raghu sir to confirm and authorise). This grouping is irrespective of a person wearing a cap or not! :)

Okay, so one part is it is: groups images together (ofcourse, not 100% of pics are grouped in one go. Might be due to difference in the angles of face, complexion, light balance, etc.). After we tag few pictures, it provides suggestions for tagging a new pic(face) / group of pics(faces). If I have tagged name 'Raghu sir' (this name/mail id comes from the contacts list of Gmail) against a pic(face) of his (which was framed by internal process of PicWeb which takes few minutes to finish its processing), then if there comes another pic or group of pics of Raghu sir, then one of the three name suggestions for the pic is invariably Raghu Sir. When I observed this, I had to appreciate the brain behind this working.

It first identifies a face, then continuously it compares with already tagged face and suggests that name which closely fits it. For one of the pics, it gave me only one suggestion and that was 100% correct!!!
Link to read up. Theres a lot to it, no doubt. But these things, were something I could not stop myself from appreciating.

People are welcome to share their experiences...

Scheduled Posting at Blogger

This got missed out yesterday. Learnt only now. There is a possibility of scheduling a post to a future date and time. Here are the details posted by Bloggers themselves.

Bloggers' New Avatar

Blogger in Draft - as it is called by Google is the next version of Blogger. At the first glance itself, I selected this as my currect default layout. Many functionalities have been added into Blogger which exist in other Google Products.

Dashboard is much cleaner. This was one drawback earlier.

Layout

• Gadget List for the sidebar have gone up from about 19 to thousands (similar to the Gadgets available for iGoogle). Some of them being BlogSearch, FeedLink, BloggerRoll, TechBlog, etc.

Posting

• The hyperlink edit functionality in Gmail (editing link in Compose mode) plus facility to test the link has been added in Compose mode of the post. 
• Bigger icons in RTF help in easier and clearer access.
• One thing that was shocking was the unavailability of adding Videos within the post, which existed earlier. Though whenever I tried to use it then, it failed. Thought it might be failing because of the large size of the video file. But, removing this functionality was not expected.
• A preview of the post before publishing it; which I so badly wanted, has finally been added (relieved!).

Settings

• Number of mail ids for intimation on publishing a new post have been increased from one mail id to ten mail ids. I remember how we had found a round-about way to inform multiple people (which holds good even now because of restriction on number of mail ids to ten). - Created Google Group, - added interested members to this group, - gave google group mail id for intimation. This way all will get intimated though only one mail id was allowed in Blogger. To reduce the admin work of manually adding interested users to the group, added a javascript provided by google groups as a gadget in the sidebar of the blog, so that any individual can add him/her-self to this group. To avoid one adding another persons' mail id without his/hers' permission, confirmation of the group request was sent.
• Support to Import & Export Blog has been added like Wordpress. But this is limited to blogs on Blogger.com only unlike Wordpress which supports scores of other blogs like b2evolution, Blogger, Blosxom, Dotclear, Drupal, more...
• Now Blogger can be set to Custom Domain aswell. Need to work out details though.

Waiting to see more additions ;)

Update-1: Just discovered Blogger has listed all these features in their Blog. Did not know it existed. (Am I feeling like I wasted time formulating above postulates?!?!). Yet glad that I got most their rolled-out features. Missed few things (rather learnt on going through this post) about Star Ratings and Embedded Comments. On trying to add Star Ratings, one can even change the post layout (restricted). So, Explore and Enjoy Blogging!