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Lea how to embed YouTube videos responsively and without increasing the page load time. The embeds are light and mobile friendly and the YouTube player is loaded only when the user initiates the video playback. It is easy to embed a YouTube video but you’ll be surprised to know how much extra weight that embedded YouTube video can add to your web pages. The browser has to download about half a Mb of extra JavaScript files (see screenshot) for rendering the YouTube video player alone. And these files are downloaded even if the visitor never plays the embedded video. The embedded video not only increases the byte size of your web pages but the browser has to make multiple HTTP requests to...

Lea how to create online forms with file uploads that save files to Google Drive. The forms use Google Forms style responsive material design and the responses are saved in a Google Spreadsheet. Google Forms areprobably the best service for creating online forms but they miss a few key features found incommercial web form builders. Google Forms do not allow file uploads, there’s no option foradding CAPTCHA in forms to prevent spam and, what may be of interest to the legal and retail industry, Google Forms caot capture electronicsignatures. A school teacher may want a Google Form where students can upload assignments and the files are automatically saved to herGoogle Drive but in separate s...

Lea how to create impressive pixel paintings with Google Spreadsheets. You can convert any image into pixel art with little effort. You may have been using Google Spreadsheets for budgeting and project management but did you know that the same sheets application can also help you create impressive pixel paintings in minutes? The Google blog recently published a storyoftwo illustrators who created a bright and beautifulwall muralusingGoogle Spreadsheets. Marina and Mallory coected on Google Hangouts to plan and sketch out ideas, and creatively “hack” Sheets in order to make art: resizing cells into thousands of pixel-like squares, merging cells to create color blocks, creating vibrant colo...

Lea how to temporarily share files in Google Drive that are accessible for a limited time. You can set an auto-expiry date and the shared Google Drive links will stop working after the specified date and time. Works for both Gmail and Google Apps accounts. When you share any file or folder in Google Drive with another user, the shared links will work forever unless you manually change the sharing permissions. For instance, if you have shared a document with an exteal vendor, they’ll continue to have access to the file longafter your business contract may haveended. In such a situation, wouldn’t it be nice if you could set expiration dates while sharing files in Google Drive? For instance, ...

How to use Google Sheets as a free website monitoring tool and receive instant email and SMS text alerts when your website goes down. The app runs on Google Servers and can monitor unlimited websites. Would you like to receive instant alerts as soon as your website goes down or isinaccessible to users? Would you like to receive these downtime alerts as anemail message or text on your mobile phone or both? Mostwebsite monitoring servicesfollow the “freemium” model– they have free plans for basic downtime & uptime monitoring of a website but need to pay for unlimited email or SMS alerts. You may also need to upgrade to monitor multiplewebsites. There’s a goodalteatethough. Create your...

How to use Google Sheets as a free website monitoring tool and receive instant email and SMS text alerts when your website goes down. The app runs on Google Servers and can monitor unlimited websites. Would you like to receive instant alerts as soon as your website goes down or isinaccessible to users? Would you like to receive these downtime alerts as anemail message or text on your mobile phone or both? Mostwebsite monitoring servicesfollow the “freemium” model– they have free plans for basic downtime & uptime monitoring of a website but need to pay for unlimited email or SMS alerts. You may also need to upgrade to monitor multiplewebsites. There’s a goodalteatethough. Create your...

Lea how to create impressive pixel paintings with Google Spreadsheets. You can convert any image into pixel art with little effort. You may have been using Google Spreadsheets for budgeting and project management but did you know that the same sheets application can also help you create impressive pixel paintings in minutes? The Google blog recently published a storyoftwo illustrators who created a bright and beautifulwall muralusingGoogle Spreadsheets. Marina and Mallory coected on Google Hangouts to plan and sketch out ideas, and creatively “hack” Sheets in order to make art: resizing cells into thousands of pixel-like squares, merging cells to create color blocks, creating vibrant colo...

Lea how to temporarily share files in Google Drive that are accessible for a limited time. You can set an auto-expiry date and the shared Google Drive links will stop working after the specified date and time. Works for both Gmail and Google Apps accounts. When you share any file or folder in Google Drive with another user, the shared links will work forever unless you manually change the sharing permissions. For instance, if you have shared a document with an exteal vendor, they’ll continue to have access to the file longafter your business contract may haveended. In such a situation, wouldn’t it be nice if you could set expiration dates while sharing files in Google Drive? For instance, ...

Lea how to place a Google Drive file or folder into multiple folders simultaneously. This prevents you from creating duplicate copies of the files in Google Drive. Gmail works around the concept of tags (or labels) and any email message can belong to one or more tags. Google Drive hasfolders instead of tags and thus any file or folderin Drivecan have a single parent folder. For instance, if you have uploaded a presentation file in Folder-A, it can’t simultaneously exist in Folder-B. Right? Well, you’llwill be surprised to know that Google Drive does allow you to place any file inside one or more folders without you having to create multiple copies of that file. This makes Drive organizatio...

Which websites and apps have access to your Google account? Where do they store your searches and location history? These 10 links will reveal everything Google knows about you. What does Google know about the places you’ve visited recently? What are yourinterests as determined by Google? Where does Google keep a list of every word that you’ve ever typed in the search box? Where can youget a list of Google ads that were of interest to you? The 10 Important Google Links Google stores everything privately and here are the 10 important links (URLs) that will unlock everything Google knows about you. They are hidden somewhere deep inside your Google Account dashboard andthey may reveal inte...

Lea how to embed a YouTube video that autoplay but the sound is muted. The YouTube video will automatically play when the webpage is loaded but with the volume set to 0. It is easy to embed YouTube videos in your website. You grab the default IFRAME embed code, paste it anywhere inside your web page and you’re done. YouTube offers basic customization– you can modify the player dimensions or hide the YouTube branding– but if you would like to exercise more control over the behavior of the embeddedplayer, YouTube Player APIis the way to go. This tutorial explains how you can embed aYouTube video that will automatically play when theweb page is loaded but with muted audio. For instance, a pro...

The Drive Auditor scans your Google Drive and prepares a detailed report revealing who has access to your files and the permissions they have over shared files. The files and folders in your Google Drive are private by default until you decide to share them. You can share your documents with specific peopleor you can make them public and anyone on the Inteet can view the shared files. Google Apps users have the option to share files and folderswithin the organizationwhile restricting access toanyone outside the domain. You cannot only control who has access to your Google Drive files butcan also assignthe level ofaccessthey have on the shared files. You can set the access permissions to ei...

Lea how to extract email addresses and names of senders from your Gmail account and import the CSV list into Google Contacts. The extractor can mine emails from the message body content as well. Acme Widgets Inc. has been in business for over 10 years and they have exchanged emails with thousands of customers and suppliers. The email messages are archived neatly in Gmail but most of the email addresses aren’t stored in Google Contacts. The company is now shifting office and they need to inform everyone via email of the office move. The big task ahead is to extract all these email addresses from the Gmail mailbox and download them in a format, like CSV, that can be easily imported into the ...

Twitter Analyzer identifies the gender of your Twitter followers based on their profile picture. The user details are saved in a Google Spreadsheet. Do you ever wonder what is the demographics of people who follow you on Twitter. How many of your Twitter friends are men? Or women? Or random colored eggs, people who are either too lazy to change their default avatar or maybe they are Twitter bots. The Graph Search of Facebook can provide deep insights into the demographics of people who are coected with you on the social network. For instance, you can write a natural language query like “My friends who are older than 30” or “My female friends who live in Delhi” and the answer will be availa...

Lea how to make cinematic video presentations and beautiful photo slideshows with Spark, a new digital storytelling app for the web from Adobe. Adobe Voice has long been my favorite digital storytelling app for making video presentations and photo slideshows on iOS device. All you have to do import your photos, type some text, add your own voice narration and a stuing video is ready for uploading on to YouTube or Facebook. Here’s a video story that our 10-year old made with Adobe Voice. The background music, transitions and other effects are automatically applied by the Voice app to make your video looks both cinematic and professional. I have all good things to say about Adobe Voice ex...

Google Drive does not offer an xcopy like option to copy folders and their subfolders to another directory. A simple script can duplicate folders in Google Drive and retain its permissions. Google Drive, launched almost 4 years ago, is an online vault where you can store all your files and documents. It offers nearly all the functionality that you would expect in a file manager app making it easier for you to manage files from within the browser. You can move files between folders, rename files, differentiate them with colors, add text notes for easier lookup and more. However the one piece that is still missing inGoogle Drive is the ability to copy folders. You can duplicate any file in G...

You can embed the Facebook Messenger button in your website and receive messages from anyone who has a Facebook account. People can message your Facebook page or your personal profile. Email has always been the preferred mode for reaching out to people on the Inteet. Websites would put their email addresses on web pages and made them clickable hyperlinks using the mailto protocol. Things have changed and while email is still considered important, the new generation is known to prefer instant texting apps like Facebook Messenger over email. For them, writing an email is as boring as creating a résumé. This step-by-step guide explains the various techniques that you can use to easily embed t...

Your WhatsApp account is filled with motivational quotes, memes and other junk images that are clogging your phone’s memory. Here’s how to smartly delete all the useless content in one go. WhatsApp is probably the largest space hog on our mobile phones. We all have friends and relative who diligently forward us every single motivation quote and meme they’ve received from their own network. Some think it is their duty to wake us with a “good moing” message accompanied with photos of the rising sun or chirping birds. The bigger problem with WhatsApp is that these ‘spam’ messages often originate from contacts who are close to you in real life and thus blocking them would be considered rude. Y...

Lea how to create multiple copies of the same e-mail draft messages in Gmail. The duplicate message will copy the body and attachments too. You have composed a draft inside Gmail and would like to send the same email message to multiple people, separately. The subject, the email body, the attachments remain unchangedand the only thing that differs in each message is the recipient’s email address. Maybe you are sending your résuméto multiple companies. How canyou do this without having to copy-paste the subject and body of the draft message multiple times? When you compose a draft email in Gmail and hit the Send button, the emailis automatically removed from the Drafts folder and moved to t...

Meet the best resources on the Inteet for leaing CSS, the computer language that defines the look and feel of web content. CSS, short for Cascading Style Sheets, are rules (or “styles”) that define how content should look on a web page. To give you an example,if your web page containsa table, you can use CSS to specify the thickness of the border and thecolor of text insidethat table. Leaing CSS is easy. There are a plethora of goodonline tutorialsor, if you prefer the traditionalroute, get a book. My favorites CSS books include HTML & CSS by John Duckettand CSS Secrets by Lea Verou. You should also watch theYouTube seriesby Travis Neilsonand Guy Routledge, probably the best free video...