Even after having a massive 4GB RAM, of which a good share is always free, my Firefox used to be slow. Can’t blame it completely; 40+ tabs and a couple of dozens of plugins would make anything slow, but closing down the tabs wouldn’t solve the problem.

The easiest way out was restarting Firefox. Restarting is not a big deal, if you have free bandwidth and have the habit of completing everything you started. That doesn’t describe me at all.

Luckily, I stumbled over a amazing plugin called RAMBack.

RAMBack is a simple plugin that does nothing but clear the RAM that’s being used by closed tabs and unused pages. The plugin will add a menu item ‘Clear Caches’ into the Tools menu (see the snapshot). When clicked, it will do its job.

I had been using RAMBack for over a month on FF 3.5.1, so far so good.

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Pidgin is a free and open-source, multi-protocol chat client, that can connect to AIM, Gtalk, Yahoo, MSN, IRC and many popular chat networks.

Pidgin has a Twitter plugin Twitgin. With this plugin, one can tweet, re-tweet, reply to tweets and send DM’s. This plugin can also be used to make backup of tweets.

Saving Tweets using Pidgin

• Download and Install Pidgin.
• Go to Tools > Plugins. From the plugins list, tick Twitgin – Twitter plugin for Pidgin.
• Enable Logging from Tools > Preferences > Logging. Tick all check-boxes.
• Add a new Twitter account. (Navigate to Accounts > Manage Accounts > Add… Choose protocol as TwitterIM, give twitter username and password)

Now Pidgin will fetch all tweets from those you follow and show in and IM window. Every IM you send will be a status update. You can reply to tweets by clicking their username. See your mentions (@replies) by typing in /replies in the IM box.

All tweets including your friends updates and your own tweets, will be saved a text file (or html file, if you had chosen html in the logging preferences). You can access the log from Buddies > View user log… (Use Name as twitter.com and Account as the respecive twitter account.)

On the window that follows, watch for “Browse Logs folder” button (see image). This opens up the folder with all logs saved as txt files. That’s your twitter backup.

Bonus: Add Facebook chat to Pidgin using Facebook Plugin.

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We all have our own favourite sites. We visit some websites several times a day. For easy access, we add such sites to the Bookmarks toolbar or to the Favourite list. Most browsers give suggestions based on your history as you type in, so you can easily select it from the list.

With a simple hack, Windows users can access their favourite with a single character, saving the extra time needed to use the mouse to click the bookmark, or the time spent in choosing it from the suggested list.

Access Favourite Websites Faster

Windows uses a file to map IP addresses to host names. We can use this file to map our one letter short-forms for websites to its corresponding IP addresses. Essentially, this hack will work for those sites with static IP address. Most popular sites have a static IP.

• In your Windows Explorer, navigate to Root Folder (Usually C:\) > Windows > System32 > drivers > etc
• Find the file named hosts and make a backup of it somewhere else.
• Open the file in Notepad or any text editor of your choice.
• Find the IP address of your site using this tool. Type in the IP address in a new window and see if its working. (e.g.: IP of twitter.com is 128.121.146.228)
• To the end of the file named hosts, add the IP address of your favourite site and the character you would like to use for it. Separate the IP address and the character with a space. (e.g.: 128.121.146.228 t)
• Save the file. Open a browser window, type the character (e.g.: t) and see if its working.

This is browser independent, works on all browsers.

Did you know that you could assign keywords to Bookmarks in Firefox and then access them easily? Here are two Time Saving Features in Firefox that you might have missed.

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Some time back I wrote a bookmarklet for u.nu. Some found it quite useful and told me about it via comments and on twitter. Here are some more shortners.

7 URL Bookmarklets

Just drag and drop any of these to your browser tool bar, and when you need to shorten the url of any page, just click it.

• Bit.ly
• Idek
• Cli.gs
• To.ly
• Is.gd
• Su.pr
• U.nu

Click any of above to see what happen, the resulting window will come up with a short url for the long url of the current page. Have fun!

(The bookmarklets might not render properly in emails or feed readers, get it from the page online)

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Guest Post by Quakeboy of TechTola.

Scenario:

1. You are reading a web page Page A which is loaded in a “Firefox Tab”. Let us call the tab – Tab A.
2. You are about to open a link on Page A in a new tab. You either hold down CTRL key and click on the link (OR) Right-click and select “Open link in new tab”. A new tab is created. Let us call the new tab – Tab B with page B loaded in it.
3. Now as you think you no more need “Page A” (or) you are a clean person like me and hate cluttering of tabs (or) you were curious to see what the close button would do and so you close Tab A.
4. After a while you realize you actually need to go back to Tab A and try to click on Browser’s Back button on Tab B and it is DISABLED !

Given that you don’t remember the URL of page A & you are not able to find a link back to page A. You might attempt the following things.

• As a true Firefoxian at heart, you know where the recently closed tabs will be listed. So you click History > Recently closed tabs. If you are had not closed more than 10 tabs after that, you might find your tab listed there.
• Or click History > Show all history and spend some time and finally succeed in finding it there.

As this has happened more than twice, I sat down trying to figure out a simple way in which I succeeded and so I am here to share it with you.

Solution: Create a custom back button !

Right click on your Firefox bookmarks tool bar and select “New Bookmark”. Fill in the name with “BACK !!”. That’s the name of our cool powerful back button. In the location box just copy & paste the script below and click Add.

javascript:window.location=document.referrer;

Let me explain. First we say the browser its a JavaScript. Then we tell that the current window’s location has to be set to the current web page’s referrer. Referrer is a property of every web page and it has the URL of the page from which you came from. The property will be blank only, if you had typed the URL in the address bar of the browser and opened the page.

Create another bookmark the same way with a slightly modified JavaScript and try playing with it.

javascript:alert(document.referrer);

FYI – Alert is a built in JavaScript function for showing information in a message box. To learn more cool JavaScript functions you can head over to OpenJS or W3C School tutorials. Thanks for reading this article and hope this helps you

This article was written by Quakeboy. He blogs at TechTola where he writes about the Internet, the blogoshpere and shares useful Tips and Tricks. He writes in short bursts, with just the right amount of information you need. If you have something to say, you can write a guest post here.

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From the point of view of the reader, subscribing to a blog via Email has two minor short comings.

1. You cannot get the content when it’s hot. Emails are delivered once a day, so you have to wait till the mail comes in to get the updates. (Knowing things when it’s hot matters at times!)
2. You have to reveal your email id to the publisher. No big deal, but just if you don’t like that someone to know that you are reading?

A quick solution is to switch to an RSS reader. Yeah, that works, but you don’t like using the RSS readers, now what?

Use Google Alerts!

Google Alerts is one great piece of code that can be put into weird uses and this is one of them.

Google Alerts as your RSS Reader that comes up in email

Google Alerts lets you create an alert for any word or a phrase. Suppose you like to know when someone says your name on the web, create an alert for your name and Google will promptly send you an email when it crawl the page with your name on it.

In this case, the idea is to get notified when the target blog is indexed. Remember, most blogs that are updated often get indexed in no time.

For this, Go to the target blog and find a unique phrase that repeats over and over on all the pages. Here on my blog, the titles of each post have the name “Million Clues” attached to the end of it. Also, my name “Arun Basil Lal” is repeated on all pages.

Look into Page Titles For Repeated Keywords

Every blog will have either the author’s name or the blogs name repeated on all pages. Look for something unique on the blog, and create a Google Alert for that word or phrase. If it’s a group of words, remember to include it in double quotes when you create the alert (as in “Charles Dickens”).

While creating the Alert, choose “As it happens”, else you will miss all the fun. Now when a new article is posted and Google indexes it, an alert is sent to you.

The two problems are solved: You got an email update of the new post, and you didn’t leave your email address!

The Google Alert as it Hits your Inbox: See the Page Title

Nasty: Some publishers would be thinking that I am advising something that will ruin them, because if you do this, you don’t count in the Feedburner counter. Hey! If someone has to read the article, they have to come to the blog, which means something, right?

Bonus tip: To track when Google indexes you, apply the above tweak to your own blog, when Google indexes you, you get an email. How is it?

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Have you noticed the small line of Text that comes above your Emails in your Gmail inbox? Google calls it the Web Clips not Ad clips, because that portion can display links from any RSS Feed!

Using Gmail Web Clips

Follow the instruction in the following screen shots.

Search For Your Areas of Interest and Press Add

Give Your Favorite RSS and Press Add

The greatest advantage of using Web Clips is that you get the updates right when the RSS is updated. Web Clips will help you, if you are someone who doesn’t check their RSS reader often, but spent a lot of time emailing (like me!).

Suddenly I found a lot of productivity in that small area which I never paid attention before. Make use of it

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Leave a Comment: Stay Updated on Your Favorite RSS with Gmail

Not every netizen is blessed with a Fast Connection or Unlimited Bandwidth. Thanks to the regulations in switching data plans, I fall into that category of the unlucky netizens. But I stay online almost half of my day and my friends wonder how I do that.

Let me explain how I survive on a limited plan with just 1 GB free usage and yet take home most of the web! Mostly, my monthly usage is under 950 MB and I have never exceeded the 1 GB limit.

Browse the Web without Burning your Pocket

These are not just tips; this is how I do it. These might not apply to you directly, absorb what looks good and create your own game plan.

• Always use Firefox and Opera to browse the web: Both FF and Opera are faster than IE and have got lots of Bandwidth saving features. I use Opera 9.24; since it’s not the latest version available, it doesn’t support some of the newest features in many web applications. For instance, the new version of Gmail pre-fetches the emails for faster performance which is a bandwidth sucker. It loads all emails including those which you have no intention reading at that time.
• Block unwanted Images: Opera can block images via a button on the View bar. A Firefox Add-on ImgLikeOpera does the same on Firefox. Most websites usually contain lots of animations and images which we don’t even notice. If you need any images, you can always load specific images (Right click > View image on Opera and Right click > Load image on FF). For sites that I frequently visit, I load all the images once and then select the option to ‘load cached images only’ so that the reading experience is not compromised.
• Block Flash and Adsense: Use the Adblock Plus Firefox Add-on to block Adsense Ads and Flash animations. A flash ad can be as big as 200 kb or even more! This add-on makes pages load faster and saves on bandwidth. If you have ever been to Digg, you might have noticed the number of Ads per page. How fast would the pages load if there were no ads?
• Remove the Bandwidth Intensive Plugins: Some Firefox Add-on’s like those that bring you the Alexa ranks or Google PR, connect with their server to bring you the stats. If you don’t need those stats, disable those plugins. If you need the stats sometimes, but not every now and then, then create a different Firefox Profile with those plugins.
• Hibernate Windows instead of Shutting Down: Hibernation saves your desktop the way you left it (Microsoft says that even the mouse location is saved). I save my windows and continue work from last days end. That’s saves a lot of unnecessary pageloads and saves bandwidth!
• Use Desktop Clients like Pidgin and TweetDeck: Pidgin is an open source chat client that can connect to multiple chat networks at the same time. I use it to connect with my Yahoo and Gtalk friends and clients. Moreover it’s a very light client that doesn’t suck bandwidth the way Gtalk does. TweetDeck is a must have for twitter addicts. It makes the twitter experience more enjoyable by fetching the tweets so that you don’t have to refresh your pages to see if you have new tweets. Saves bandwidth and saves time!
• Use a Download Manager: A download manager is a definite time saver. I use the Free Download Manger to keep track and organize downloads. Usually I save the download links and videos with FDM and download all of them towards month’s end when you exactly know how much free bandwidth remains. Also you can export the download lists and send it to your ‘Lucky’ friends with unlimited bandwidth and ask them to download it for you!
• Block Automatic Updates: Most software have the automatic updates enabled by default. The software detects when you are connected to the internet and checks and downloads updates. So you loose control on your bandwidth. Instead, I have disabled all automatic updates and I update all my softwares towards the end of the month, when I know how much usage remains. (Thanks Anish for reminding me!)
• Disable Opening of Files inline: Browsers open PDF files and Video files inline. It might open a PDF without telling you how big the file is. Worst part, the browser becomes non-responsive until it completes loading the file. Result: You waste bandwidth on a large PDF which you have no intention reading. You can disable that in Firefox Options. Learn how. (Thanks Quakeboy)
• Monitor your usage: Use a Network monitor to know how much you use and how much bandwidth remains. It helps in planning things better. I use a Free Bandwidth meter from ShaPlus. It’s a good one and has the necessary options. Read the review and download it free.

A little extra can save serious money at the end of the month. If you try any of these, you might feel a little uneasy first, trust me, it will soon fly away. I had been doing these for years!

You might have more tips with you to save bandwidth and browse at lightning speed. Share them here and I will add them up (of course, with credits) to the list

Related: Visit your Favorite Websites with a Single Character

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Leave a Comment: How to Browse Faster on Limited Bandwidth

We complain a lot about Spam Emails. We are often deceived and often confused with spam. When I started living online, I have even replied to a spam email that said I won $60,000 in an online lottery that I didn’t even know about. I guess many of us are still confused with such emails and it’s our ignorance that spammers exploit. Did you know that you were helping spammers a lot? I know you would not agree, but here is something that might convince you.

My 12 year old daughter is a heart patient and needs $12k for an open heart surgery. Thankfully AOL and Gmail have agreed to give me 0.5 cents per recipient of this email. So please save my daughter and help me by forwarding this email to all your contacts.

Most of us would have received something similar from some of our friends. Many of us doubt its credibility, yet we forward since we don’t want the girl to die because of us. I got one last week and that’s what inspired me to write this up. If you have ever forwarded something like this, you have been spamming! Here is how it works…

• The email that you initially received has a lot of email address attached to it. These are the email addresses of those people to whom it was forwarded before it reached you.
• You send the email to all of your friends, and all your friends forward them to their own friends.
• So after some time the original email will have thousands of email addresses attached to it.
• Somehow the email will reach the hands of an email harvester or a spammer. Either they will be there in some of our contacts or they will be subscribed to groups or subscription lists. Someone is definitely going to forward it to a group or a list.
• The harvester extracts the email addresses using software (there are email harvesting softwares too!) and sell the email addresses to spammers. Say $1 for 10,000 legitimate email addresses, that’s not hard to get.
• Once the spammer has the email addresses he sends out spam emails. He can easily sent it out to one million or 10 million recipients in one click!
• Even if only 0.01% of the recipients trust the spam mail and respond, he still has 1000 customers for his products. That’s a whole lot of sales and lots of money. But mostly those who spend money on such emails are cheated.
• So you cheated a 1000 people without even knowing it!

Does that mean that you should never forward emails?

No. But before you forward, understand that…

• You will not win $50k without actually purchasing a lottery. Who will give you that kind of money?
• Microsoft or Sony Ericsson never gives out free laptops or Mobile phones for forwarding emails.
• Bill Gates is never sharing his fortune with some email spammers.
• A heart surgery doesn’t cost $12k and AOL is not going to track all your emails and give that guy 0.5 cents per email.
• Gmail is never going to delete your account because it is over capacity. If Google becomes over capacity there is nowhere else in this world where you can be!
• Read the best forward I ever received to get an idea of the blunders we make.
• Read what Quakeboy did with such spam, awesome read!
• Don’t believe in all the forwards, most of them are pure scam. Here is the Ultimate Myth-Buster of e-mail Forwards.

Safe Practices to Fight Email Spam

• Forward only those emails that you are very sure about. Else you are staking your friends and your own safety.
• Before you forward an email, DELETE the email addresses that precede the content of the mail.
• Add your friends email addresses only to the BCC field. BCC means Blind Carbon Copy i.e. the recipient will not be able to know who else received the email.
• Create private groups in yahoo and google and send the forwards to those groups. Tell your friends who would love to receive forwards to sign-up. And approve only known members!
• Never respond to spam, or follow the links that they send you. Don’t even open the emails in the spam folder.

Now the next time I receive such a spam email, I am gonna send them a copy of this post or a link to this one. Do the same and save your and your friends email from the hands of dirty spammers.

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Leave a Comment: Forward Emails Responsibly and Help Fight Spam

Google’s Social networking site, Orkut recently did some security updates that would disallow anyone to save images from Orkut photo galleries. This is in addition to a security feature added some months ago, that permits users to disallow strangers to access his / her photos. So now you can block your images from strangers and even if someone can see your image, he can’t save it.

Orkut, being a social Networking site, is one place where people share their photos and there are cases when you have to save the images for offline use. Like, you might wish to save the recent party photos for some later use. Here are five ways to save Orkut photos.

Saving Photos from Orkut Galleries made easy

Disable Java to Enable the Right Click Menu

Orkut added this security feature simply by adding a bit of Java Script to its pages. The script disables the Right Click Menu and once you don’t have the right click menu, you can’t save the photo. Just disable the Java Scripts on your browser and the right click menu will come right back! And then you can save the images.

How to Disable Java Scripts?

• Firefox and Flock Users: Go to Tools >> Options >> Content >> Uncheck ‘Enable JavaScript’ and ‘Enable Java’ >> Press OK
• Opera Users: Press F12 >> From the Menu that appears, Uncheck ‘Enable JavaScript’ and ‘Enable Java’
• Internet Explorer: Follow this Guide! (I seldom use IE and had to google to find the solution)
• Safari: Edit >> Preferences >> Security >> Uncheck ‘Enable JavaScript’ and ‘Enable Java’
• Google Chrome: Disable Java Script with this tutorial.

Use the Firebug Firefox Plugin to Remove the Java Script

If you are on Firefox then you have lot more options to save images. The Firebug Firefox Plugin (never heard of it? Read about Firebug) can edit the code in real time. Load the image that needs to be saved on the browser, and press F12. The Firebug Console pops up.

Disable Java With The Firebug Firefox Plugin

Press the inspect button and set the focus on the image. Now right click the code of the image in the console and select ‘Edit HTML’. From the HTML code editor, delete the following code:

oncontextmenu="return false;"

Now the right click menu is enabled and you can save the image!

Drag and Drop image to a New Tab

If you still need more options to save images from Orkut, Tech Tola has three more solutions. One easy way which he advises is to drag the image to a new blank window or tab. That’s the easiest of all. Find details on the easy ways of saving the Orkut Galleries on Tech Tola.

Remember to save images responsibly…

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Leave a Comment: Enable Right Click Menu to Save Orkut Photos