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Samsung Drops Prices for Google Chromebooks

Chromebooks went for sale in June and in this short period of time, Samsung has already dropped the price of their Google Chrome OS laptops by as much as 10%.
The Wi-Fi only Series 5 Chromebook is now selling for $399.99, down from $429.99, while the 3G + Wi-Fi Chromebook is available for $449.99, down 10% from the original $499.99. The prices for Acer Chromebooks are however unchanged.
While a price drop is always welcome, I am still not convinced why would anyone prefer a stripped-down Chrome OS based laptop over these netbooks that are much more versatile.

How to Host your Website on Google

In what looks like a brilliant PR win for Google, the Royal Family of UK has selected Google as the web hosting provider for Prince William’s official wedding website. The site, available at officialroyalwedding2011.org, contains news updates, photo galleries and videos and all this is hosted on Google App Engine.
What’s new here? Web developers have long used Google App Engine to host web apps in the cloud - see Sleeping Time and Tall Tweets for example - but this is probably the first time that Google’s infrastructure is being used to host a 'static website' of an event that will get plenty of press attention and web traffic in the coming days.

Host your own website on Google App Engine

There are quite a few advantages with hosting websites on Google App Engine. First, it should be more reliable since your site will get served through Google’s own data centers.
Second, if you have a low traffic website, it is highly likely that you won’t have to spend a penny for web hosting. You get 1 GB of free storage space for hosting your images, HTML web pages and other files and 1 GB of bandwidth per day. If you exceed that quota, you pay-per-use similar to Amazon S3.
Ready to jump?
With a regular web hosting company, you rend some storage space on their server, you then transfer your HTML and other files to that server using FTP or cPanel and your website is ready to serve. Google App Engine works in similar manner except that the file transfer mechanism is a bit different.
Step 1: Go to appengine.google.com and create a new application. If you have never used App Engine before, you might be asked to verify your mobile phone number before you can create a new app.
Step 2: Give your application a name – it should be unique and may only include lowercase alphabets and digits. For this example, our app identifier is “thisismyawesomewebsite”.
Step 3: The next two sub-steps may scare some of you but trust me, they simply require you download and run two installers in the given sequence.
3a. Download and install Python from python.org.
3b. Download and install App Engine SDK from this code.google.com.
Step 4: Download and unzip this file - website.zip – somewhere on your desktop. It contains a basic website with some HTML pages, images and CSS that we’ll try to host with Google App Engine.
Step 5: Open the app.yaml file with notepad and replace the word ‘labnol’ with the application identifier that you created in Step 2 above. Save the changes.
Step 6: Finally it’s time to deploy /upload our website to Google App Engine. Open the Google App Engine Launcher program from the Start Menu, choose File –> Add Existing Application and browse to the folder where you unzipped the website.
Hit the deploy button, input your Google Account credentials and within seconds, your website should become available online at abc.appspot.com where abc is your unique app identifier. Later, if you add or modify any web page, press Deploy again and your new /edited files will get uploaded to App Engine.



Sharing on Twitter, Facebook and Google+

There’s little denying that Facebook, Twitter and Google+ are the three most active social networks at this time where billions of pieces of content are shared every single day.
To give you an idea, more than 200 million tweets are written every day by 100+ million users on Twitter while the numbers are even more impressive for Facebook. The 800+ million users of Facebook like and share more than 2 billion posts per day. Google+ is growing at an impressive rate but is still a relatively small player with 43 million users.
Thus, as a web publisher, it definitely makes lot of sense for you to share your content across all these channels but have you ever wondered which of these networks have the highest engagement level? Which of them would bring the maximum eyeballs to your content?
Kevin Rose, best known as the founder of Digg, recently did an interesting experiment. He shared the same web article on his Twitter, Facebook and Google+ profiles simultaneously and, with the help of bit.ly analytics, calculated the number of clicks coming from each of these social networks for the next two days. The results aren’t very surprising.
  sharing stats
Kevin has 1.2 million followers on Twitter who clicked on the link ~5800 times. Some 135k people have added Kevin to their Google+ circle and that got him ~3600 clicks. Finally, his 261k subscribers on Facebook clicked on the link link more than 11000 times.
The click-through ratio, or the engagement level, was the highest on Facebook.

Control Two Computers with a Single Keyboard and Mouse

Let’s say you have two computers on your desk and, in an effort to save space, you want to operate them all using a single pair of keyboard and mouse.
There are two solutions here. If the computers are connected to the same network, you can use software programs like Input Director or Synergy to operate them with a common keyboard and mouse. In the other scenario where the machines aren’t connected, you can get a KVM switch to share one keyboard and mouse between them.

A Better Alternative – Mouse without Borders

My work setup is quite similar to what you see in the illustration above and I have been using the Input Director software all this while to control the two Windows PCs with one keyboard and mouse. Input Director is reliable and (mostly) works without problems though it does require some understanding of the Master and Slave concept.
Last week, I switched to a new Windows utility called Mouse without Borders and find it so much better than my previous solution. Wondering why?
The best part about Mouse without Borders is how easy it is to set up. You install the utility on all your Windows computers, enter the security code provided by the software and your computers will get linked. This is almost as simple as pairing a set of Bluetooth devices.

Installing Mouse without Borders – Step by Step

Step 1  Step 2  Step 3  Step 4
Once installed, you can not only use the same keyboard and mouse across your computers in a seamless manner but you can also drag and drop files between them. This is so convenient. Earlier, I had to create shared network folders or had to use Dropbox to transfer files but now I can simple drag them from desktop A to desktop B as if they were on the same computer.
With the Mouse without Borders utility installed, you can also send screen capture of one desktop to another by pressing a hotkey or from the system tray menu. After having used the tool for about a week, I never experienced a crash though I did have problems sharing clipboard especially when the copy operation was done inside a Flash application.
Mouse without Borders can only be used to control Windows based computers. If your work environment involves a mix of Windows, Linux or Mac computers, Synergy could still be the only good choice for you.

Turn your Google Docs into a Fax Machine

While there are dozens of web-based services that let you send and receive faxes from the computer without requiring a fax machine, Interfax goes one step further – it turns your Google Docs into a complete fax machine.
You just have to connect your Google Docs account with Interfax and once the link is enabled, you can fax any of your existing Google Docs documents, or spreadsheets, to any fax number in the world right from the browser. You may even send the same Google Docs file to multiple fax machines in one go – remember to separate the different fax numbers / Google Contact names by commas.
The cost for sending faxes from Google Docs varies according to the destination country and the length of the document. For instance, if you are to send a fax to US, the cost would be 13¢ per page, 15¢ for UK while a single page fax to an Indian number would cost you 60¢. There’s no monthly fee for sending faxes though you’ll have to buy minimum credits for $10.
GinzaFax is another online fax service that is built around Google Docs. It is slightly more expensive to send faxes through GinzaFax – the cost 40¢ per page for US numbers and 60¢ for other countries – but here you get a $5 free credit for sending faxes the first time you sign up for an account.
Other than sending faxes, you may also use both Interfax and Ginza Fax to receive faxes from anywhere in the world directly into your Google Docs account. The incoming faxes are automatically converted to PDF format and they get saved in a separate folder thus making it easier for you to locate them later.

Tools that Detect Changes on your Favorite Web Pages

Last month, my story about Facebook hitting a trillion page-views received an unexpected amount of interest around the web. I obviously don’t have inside sources nor did anyone contact me with those numbers – so how did I get the news about the trillion milestone before anyone else on the web?
The answer is simple. I use a web monitoring software that tracks a list of web pages (URLs) at set intervals and alerts me whenever content is added or deleted from these pages. In the above case, the monitoring utility was watching a page on google.com and the moment Google uploaded the new numbers, I got an alert on my desktop.

Tools for Monitoring Web Page Changes

The utility that I have on my Windows machine is called Website Watcher from Aegnis.com – a single-user license for the basic edition of Website Watcher is about €30 and it supports all types of web addresses including secure http and ftp based URLs.
A web monitoring tool, in simple English, works something like this. You specify the address (URL) of a web page that you would like to track and how frequently the tool should ping the given page to determine if the content has changed.
In the case of Website Watcher, you can also visually specify the portions of a page that should be ignored for tracking (like the sidebar or the footer). Later, if the tool detects that a page has changed, you can compare the before and after versions of the page side-by-side and, like any other diff tool, the changed text is highlighted for quick comparison.
Website Watcher works well but if you are looking for a free alternative, check out NotiPage. This is again a Windows-only utility for monitoring web pages with basic monitoring features except for one limitation - NotiPage only highlights the new content that has been added to a page but you won’t be able figure out what has been removed from a page.
If you are monitoring a page that follows a regular pattern – like a Google Search results page where all the different results are rendered as a pattern using a similar set of HTML tags – you may also use Google Docs as a page monitor. You essentially scrap the page content into Google Docs with the help of ImportXML function and then track changes through RSS. This does however require some knowledge of XPath and CSS.
Versionista is another awesome web-based tool for tracking web pages. It lets you compare the two versions of a page side-by-side and thus you can know what has been added, or removed, from a page since you last viewed it. Versionista also lets you apply regular expression based filters to help you specify what kind of page edits should be ignored by the tool during the comparison.