George's Technology Blog
» Smart Phones, Web Design, Google or whatever
Updated Contacts and Gmail
Aug 10th
Logging in to Gmail tonight I was greeted with this popup:
Contacts has been renovated and Gmail has some spruced-up changes, moving email closer to the top of your window, about 16 pixels higher, according to the Gmail blog. So I read a little bit of the writeup in Gmail help and checked out the new look. Contacts is surprisingly different and I’ll probably be checking that out for a while since its the biggest change.
CONTACTS
Its now simpler to add or edit a contact, the interface is cleaner and less distracted. Contacts are displayed more like mail in a long list, and adding contacts to different groups is very easy. Also, you can undo changes now, very handy. Ooops, was that DELETED? No problem, just UNDO.
There’s also automatic saving and more standard name fields.
GMAIL
Mail, Contacts and Tasks are now at the top, followed by Compose Mail which is now a button instead of a text link. Now I am waiting for ActiveInbox to update so I can use it again since that interface has disappeared!
Emails (as mentioned previously) are just a little closer to the top of the window now, and the left sidebar seems different, though I guess that could be due to my Gmail theme.
Gmail / Google Multiple Account Access in one Browser
Aug 6th
Wow, I just noticed this new access multiple accounts in one browser feature at the end of my lunch and had to write a a quick bit about it. First, a message from our sponsor (lol). But seriously here’s an interesting quote from Macduff Hughes’ post on the Gmail blog…
Now, you can visit google.com/accounts and click the link next to “Multiple sign-in.” After you sign into your first account, you can sign in with up to two additional accounts from the new accounts menu in the upper right hand corner of Gmail, then easily toggle back and forth between them. You can even open multiple Gmail tabs — one for each of your accounts.
- Gmail Blog, Access two Gmail accounts at once in the same browser
I’ve got to check this out more later and add more – its such an exciting feature with possibilities. One caution, read the Gmail post because access via one browser to multiple accounts is not working universally yet and the post lists these exceptions and notes.
Gmail Now with Drag and Drop attachments onto your desktop
Aug 4th
Yesterday the Gmail Blog posted Drag and drop attachments to save them to your desktop … for now it looks like it may only be available on Chrome.
Dragging and dropping files is an easy way to save time in Gmail. We’ve previously blogged about dragging files to upload as attachments and dragging images into new messages. Now, if you’re using Google Chrome, you can also drag attachments out of messages you receive to save them to your computer.
- Gmail Blog
More later….
Using PHP to convert a string to lowercase
Jul 15th
At times you may need to change a string to all lowercase letters, here is the way to do that (2 samples including one practical application):
SYNTAX: string strtolower (string $mystring);
$myLowercaseString = strtolower ($mystring);
As with all PHP, test to make sure you’ve implemented correctly. Comments, questions or suggestions? Please leave a comment.
Google Video Chat – In Gmail
Jul 1st
Google video chat is one of the cool Google/Gmail things I don’t use, but I’m sure most of you aren’t too lazy to go out and get the required gear (watch the video) to get starting video chatting on your own! I’ve got a friend who video chats with his mom overseas (pretty sure he uses Skype, but its the the same idea), and I’ve got family in 2 states I could video chat with because they live far away.
Often when I tell people that I work on Google video chat, I hear stories about how they’ve used it to give a video tour of a new home to friends, introduce a baby to relatives, keep in touch with traveling loved ones… the list goes on. This got me thinking about how convenient— and sometimes even magical — the experience of video chatting is.
- Gmail blog (link below)
Check out the Grandmother’s guide to video chat on the Gmail blog for more info and find out how to get a t-shirt, printable guide and VHS of the video.
GOOGLE VIDEO CHAT
View Word .doc Files with 1 Click in Gmail
Jun 25th
The title of this post says it all: View Word .doc Files with 1 Click in Gmail
Of course, you’ve already been able to open some other documents like this in Google Docs such as PDFs…
Using PHP to redirect to another page
Jun 18th
Using PHP to redirect to another page is a common task, especially when you are working with email forms. Fill the form out, process it, then redirect to a “thank you” page:
<?php
header( “Location: http://www.example.com” ) ;
exit;
?>
You can also use variables for the URL like so:
<?php
$destURL = “http://www.example.com”;
header( “Location: ” . $destURL ) ;
exit;
?>
NOTE: The code above has to be processed before any HTML headers, so it needs to be placed above ANY HTML code.
NOTE 2: Watch the code above, depending upon my current CSS in my current theme the single quotes or even double quote may change to fancy quotes which will need to be edited if you cut-n-paste the code.
MORE info available on PHP.net’s header manual page
Using PHP to grab the Referer
Jun 18th
You can use PHP to track how someone got to a specific page by grabbing the referring page, called the referer. Use this code to get that info:
<?php
$myReferer = $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'];
?>
NOTE: Watch the code above, depending upon my current CSS in my current theme the single quotes or even double quote may change to fancy quotes which will need to be edited if you cut-n-paste the code.
MORE info available on PHP.net’s $_SERVER manual page
