Re-design the web with Stylish Firefox extension

Bored up looking at same old interface from years, time to give web your colors! Stylish is a Firefox extension which enables you to change the look & feel of a web site. I got to know about this at Barcamp Bangalore from The100rabh a fellow Blog-a-lorean. If you take example of Gmail, it has the same interface from the day one. Though slighter changes were made in adding functionalities like chat inside email, there were no changes made in color scheme & look/feel.

Stylish enables you to define your own stylesheet for a website. But for writing a stylesheet of your own, you should be having knowledge of CSS. Hey, don’t stop reading! there are lot of ready stylesheets for many websites, which you can just load into Stylish. Stylesheets are available at http://userstyles.org

Procedure to install Stylish & load new stylesheet:

• Install Firefox if you don’t have from getfirefox.com
• Install extension Stylish for firefox from addons.firefox.com
• Browse available stylesheets at http://userstyles.org & load stylesheets you want
• That’s it!! start re-designing the web!

To give you an example how stylish can change a web site, I am posting couple of screenshots of Gmail after loading awesome stylesheet Gmail Re-Designed.

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Good News for Tech Bangalore readers, TB enters into Alltop list of Indian websites at http://india.alltop.com. This is a single page with recent five post title’s from top Indian Sites & Blogs. Content form around 40 - 50 popular websites & blogs are aggregated in a single page. Upon mouse over on a title, it show snippests from that post. So, user will be able to have a look before he clicks & goes to that particular website.

Alltop has top websites all around the world from different categories & sub-categories. It’s a  “dashboard,” “table of contents,” or even a “digital magazine rack” of the Internet. It has a minimalistic interface with no ads & graphics providing great user experience. Overall it’s a good site to hang on & find top stories in favorite category.

Above is the radio created for Tech Bangalore. You can listen to all posts made on Tech Bangalore. Text to speech conversion looks pretty good. You can listen to all blogs which are having RSS feeds. You can listen to any blogs in simple two steps:

1. Goto http://blogbard.com
2. In the search box enter blog URL

That’s it! it automatically detects feed of that blog & creates a flash radio out of it. Embed HTML will be provided in a text box, copy & paste it in your blog. Now your visitors will be able to listen to your Radio, oh! I mean blog.

BlogBard also has features to read your subscriptions in Google Reader & Bloglines. Just login to thes services in BlogBard & it does the rest!

In my experience Plusmo is the easiest way to mobilize your blog. It makes your blog easily readable on mobile phones. Your blog can be mobilized using plusmo in three easy steps:

1. Go to www.plusmo.com & select a widget to put on your blog.
2. Give your blog URL in next step & click “Fetch”
3. It generates a HTML, copy that code & put it on your blog.

That’s it! Now your visitors can subscribe to your blog through their mobile phone. For first user has to download the Plusmo mobile application, which is small & simple. Later they can add more blogs which they want to read in that application. Browsing blogs in Plusmo application is really fast & simple. You can use your phone’s navigation keys as “Next” & “Previous” to browse next & previous posts of a blog.

Plusmo also has a usage tracking system where you can see how many users are subscribed to your mobile content, number of pageviews..etc. Plusmo has a monetizing option, where they can put ads on your content with your permission & generate revenue out of it.

Go on, mobilize your blog!

It made a very positive impact on my mind at the first look itself. What an interface, looks really great & simple. Coming to service, it apparently looks to me as combination of smsgupshup & twitter! Tagg.in claims itself as SMS group messaging system as well as micro blogging platform. But they are not simply telling like that.

Firstly registration is very easy, you have to fill only three feilds, email, password & verification code (are you human?). You can activate your mobile phone later, but updates via SMS is what looks great. Registration process can also be completed via SMSs. So you need not to have internet to use this service, just remember SMS short codes & their number. Tagg.in uses local number 99801 99801 so you will be less charged by service provider to update via SMS.

After simple registration process, you can create your own group termed as TAGGtivity. Updates to group can be sent using web interface or SMSs. Your followers can follow your updates in either medium. You can subscribe to other popular groups like CricScores, BrkgNews, SportsNews, JokesGuru…etc to get free updates.

Cons:

• You cannot add your friends mobile numbers to your group, they have to sign up or have to send a message from their mobile to follow your updates. SMSGupShup has a feature where you can add mobile numbers of your friends to your group & start sending messages straight away.
• Updates can be made via only two mediums, SMS & web. I still love twitter because it provides lot of ways to update. May be they are going to add these features in final release, this is still in alpha.
• Lack of badges to display your updates on your blogs or web pages.

I feel it still lacks in features when compared with it’s competitor. Let’s wait and see what features they are going to bring in final release.

First have look at this following video:

It looks like it’s made by professional editor, but it’s created by me! When my friend Sidharth told me about this, I was not too much interested & simply went to have a try. But it exceeded my expectations.

Animoto is a web tool which converts your images or photos into professionally looking videos. Just register at Animoto, which shouldn’t take more than 5 mins & start creating videos. Animoto has a user friendly interface, which takes you through step by step process to create a video. First upload photos which you want to create video, then select a soundtrack from Animoto’s collection or upload a soundtrack from your PC. Click on create video & you are done! It takes around 8-10 mins to create video & automatically sends a email notification when video is created.

Animoto is free for short videos, which are 30 secs in length.If you want to create a video of more than that length, you will have to pay $3 per video or $30 per year. With the effect this tool is producing, I am satisfied to pay $3 per video.

Test drive to create a short video at Animoto

Microsoft is providing 5GB of space to store your files online. As the above picture illustrates, you can save files for yourself, share files with friends & also share on world wide web. It provides three level of access control for your files.

Private: Store files which are only accessible to you. This could be used to store files which are private & should not be accessible to anyone else.

Shared: Share files only with your friends, but they need to have an MSN or Hotmail account. Other than your friends can’t access these files.

Public: Upload files to public folder to make it available to everyone. After uploading files you can share link with anyone & they can download the file. If you have a web page or blog & want to provide a download to your visitors, it also provides attractive badges to insert in your web pages. Clicking on it, user can download that file.

Users who already have MSN or Hotmail account can straightaway start using it by logging in. If you don’t have one, you can sign up for a free account. Sign up or login to Skydrive at http://skydrive.live.com/

As my Twitter network is growing, I’m discovering interesting new people. Aalaap Ghag is one of them, who is also the founder of a new online service called LinkBunch.

You might have heard or used TinyURL which shortens lengthy URLs into smaller ones, which can be used in places where space is a constraint. LinkBunch is a step ahead - it lets you create a single, small URL out of multiple links. The LinkBunch link is easy to remember and share, due to its short length.

Some Web 2.0 services have limited amount of characters that you can input. In Twitter the limit is 140 characters per tweet. If you wanted to share multiple links services like Twitter, you will run out of space. LinkBunch can be very useful in this case.

LinkBunch is still in Beta and the full set of features is not yet implemented. As I discussed with Aalaap, user accounts will be integrated into this service. With an account, a user can manage bunches created by him. Managing includes adding links, removing links, editing links in a current bunch, deleting old bunches if not required. User need not to go through sign up process, as this service will be OpenID enabled.

I have created a bunch with URLs of my blogs and social networking profiles, this is an example LinkBunch: http://linkbun.ch/4ma

To create your own Link Bunch go to linkbun.ch

Twitter is a service which ask you “what are you doing?”. But it’s deviated a lot from this theme & evolved as a big microblogging platform. You can just update whatever you want through web, IM or Phone. Others can follow your updates & can receive updates via all three mentioned mediums.

Twitter has millions of users & finding people from your location to interact is difficult as there is no such option provided right now. Abhinav Sarkar, a forth year student in IIT Kharagpur, created a script just for fun. But the script is really useful, it is written in python & uses Twitter API. Primarily script crawls Abhinav’s Indian friends on twitter by looking at location entry as “India”, “Bangalore”, “Mumbai”…etc into his database. Later script crawls his friend’s Indian friends & so on, the list keeps building. Finally, the result is a directory of all Indian Twitterers!

This list can be accessed at
http://abhinav.sarkar.googlepages.com/indiantwitterers.html

Great work Abhinav

Update:

Abhinav has created a twitter bot which follows, collects tweets from all Indian Twitterers & re-tweets them. So, you can follow this bot to follow all Indian twitterers tweets. Follow this bot at http://twitter.com/IndiaTwit