Alright, I’ll be honest. The only reason I came up with this post in the first place was because I myself had a hard time figuring out how to do it. As cool as the idea of having an image pop-up from your blog, graying out everything behind it seems, its easy to feel like you’re chasing a distant dream when there are multiple ways to do it wrong, and make it complicated.
Before you begin reading further, I must tell you that this technique will be relevant only to certain people. This post is primarily for those people hosting their wordpress blog themselves. If you have a wordpress.com blog, this post will not help you as it is not possible to edit theme files in your blog unless you use wordpress.org. Any other person using something else might also find this post useful in terms of weeding out the good options from the bad ones when you are trying to achieve what we’re trying to achieve here. Ok! Now that that is cleared up we can get into the real stuff!!!
A few months back I had discussed how to use keywords in firefox, and make your browsing experience better. Well, if you’ve begun using keywords, you might as well use them for grooveshark to play almost any song in the world.
The stumbling block however, is that grooveshark’s keyword can not be made in the same way as we had described earlier. And the reason for that is, that the current grooveshark website is made entirely in flash. Right clicking on the search bar, doesn’t give you the regular options you expect! So what do you do? Don’t despair. I have a nice piece of nugget for you :)
In firefox, press Ctrl+Shift+B to open up the bookmarks library. Then click on “Organize”, followed by “New Bookmark”.
A new window should come up. Fill in the empty fields with the following:
If you are using Wordpress to write your blog on your domain name, your wordpress database might be growing beyond your wildest imaginations!
When writing posts in the Wordpress Admin page, for reasons of security, Wordpress keeps autosaving your posts as you write them. It is a very handy feature especially if your internet is intent on sabotaging your hard work. For example, after thirty minutes of hard work, when you finally press the “Publish” button, your otherwise faithful browser might run into an error page thanks to that intermittent internet connection. Numerous thoughts flood your mind – “Is my work lost? Would pressing the back button recover my stuff? Would hitting refresh help? Do I have a backup!?.” Don’t worry, Wordpress’ autosave feature has it figured out for you.
It would probably reflect very poorly on a blog if within the span of 5 days, three posts are made, two of which pertained to Google logos. Putting this blog’s (little) reputation on line, that’s exactly what I’m going to do.
Correct me if I’m mistaken, I believe this is the first time Google came up with a logo that is impossible for the human eye to read. There are no letters to read; all you see is a bar-code in remembrance of the day this now-ubiquitous invention came into existence.
As it would make sense to me, I took a screenshot of the homepage and cropped the logo right off the page. But the cropped logo in itself looked so regular (it was a bar-code after all) that I had to take a new screenshot and a bigger crop of the homepage! Here’s what the Google homepage looks like today -
Google came up with a very innovative logo for their homepage today on October 2, Mahatama Gandhi’s birth anniversary, and looking at it only made me wish that I had come up with such a creative piece of art.
A famous sketch of Gandhi’s profile covered up for the G in Google, leaving the famous corporation with only “oogle” to spell out. The way in which Gandhi’s mustache converted what might have been mistaken for a ‘C’ into a ‘G’ was the best part. An extra touch was given by putting the Google logo on a khaki, albeit photoshop-woven.
I wonder if you have ever used the keyword feature in firefox. If you haven’t, I cannot stress how handy a tool it is to speed up your internet experience in firefox. If you find yourself going to a number of websites where you have to search for stuff, (eg. Wikipedia, IMDB, youtube, dictionary.com etc) then this feature is for you.
Next time you go to youtube.com, just before you get down to searching for your favorite videos, right click in the youtube search bar, and then click on “Add a Keyword for this Search”. Fill in whatever you want for the “Name” section, but in your keywords put something short, something like “yt” or “y”. Once everything is filled in, click on Save.
Today, while aimlessly checking the gtalk status messages of my friends, I found a link to a news article next to Manu’s name. It mentioned thatGrooveshark.com, one of my favorite websites had reached 1 million users! What made it all the more special to me was that this site is a venture by 3 Gators! Go Gators!
For the uninitiated (and not part of the one million..tsk tsk :P), grooveshark is a site where you can listen to almost any streaming song within a few clicks, as opposed to, I don’t know, hunting the internet just to find that the rare song you’re searching for IS rare. What makes it best is that you can purchase the song if you like it (at a pretty cheap price, I believe), thus giving the owners to the rights of the songs something to be happy about too. For a person like me, who almost always finds himself getting an urge to listen to a particular song I have heard years ago, grooveshark.com does the job for me just fine, sparing me the trouble of fishing through my highly unorganized music library, one that I have been promising myself to fix since the past 5 years.
Starting June 13, 00:00 AM (EDT), Facebook will start supporting usernames for its users. And how would that help us? We will now have pretty URLs to our profile pages. Instead of having a URL that would read “http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=123456789&ref=name” (which was so easy to give out to friends) we will now have URLs such as “http://facebook.com/username/”.
Thus you would now no longer have to worry about having a name so common that a 1000 results pop up when you’re searched for. Just tell your friends your username, and you’ll be found within seconds in the dense Facebook mesh of users.
The usernames will be provided on a first come first serve basis, which would mean it would be well worth waiting that extra longer on the night of the 12th if you’re in the US. If on the other hand, you see the sun a little earlier than America does, you would want to be on the watch sometime later in the day on the 13th.
Before you begin reading further, I must tell you that this technique will be relevant only to certain people. This post is primarily for those people hosting their wordpress blog themselves. If you have a wordpress.com blog, this post will not help you as it is not possible to edit theme files in your blog unless you use wordpress.org. Any other person using something else might also find this post useful in terms of weeding out the good options from the bad ones when you are trying to achieve what we’re trying to achieve here. Ok! Now that that is cleared up we can get into the real stuff!!! 
The stumbling block however, is that grooveshark’s keyword can not be made in the same way as we had described earlier. And the reason for that is, that the current grooveshark website is made entirely in flash. Right clicking on the search bar, doesn’t give you the regular options you expect! So what do you do? Don’t despair. I have a nice piece of nugget for you :)
