Facebook changed its looks. The new design was launched at PALO ALTO CA on 20th July. Keeping it in beta and testing phase the user have options to either switch to the new design or keep the current one. Though facebook haven’t made any functional changes so this revamp can only be labeled as a design change rather then a version 2 of facebook.

According to facebook the new design took about an year in making. During which many public opinions was taken in ground.

Face book face uplift bring the following enhancements

• The feed technology has been enhanced .Content from indirect contacts can be written on the user wall. The user wall now portrays more recent images and stories related to the user
• The stories now include add on features. The types of stories include short stories, long stories and one liner. User can customize their stories according to their suitability. This includes story content and appearance.
• The content limits have been enhanced with the help of publisher. Users can manage videos, images and text all in one place instead of individual applications. A user can also design content on the profile of any of his contacts through his profile.
• The navigation menus have been improved. Individual menus have been designed for user information, photos, boxes and the wall, for each user.
• Users have been provided rights to accept or reject a particular design. Each user can use a particular application and decide whether he wants a particular application on his profile.
• The security features have been enhanced. Users can restrict the viewing of all their content including photos and videos .They can allow particular users to view their content as well as restrict the ones they want.

Why did facebook change its design?

Although Mark Zuckerberg wrote a complete letter stating the three goals which they wanted to achived by the new layout :

We had three goals to improve Facebook in this version. First, we wanted to make everything clean and simple to use. Reducing clutter makes it easier for you to find what you’re looking for and share information with others. Second, we wanted to give you more control over your profile. Everyone should be able to express themselves how they want, which means privacy controls and control over how content appears on your profile. Lastly, we wanted to show the most recent and relevant content. People share so much on Facebook that it’s easier to keep up with your friends by focusing on the newest and most important information

But the real reason for a new layout design for facebook might be a little different. One of the biggest flaw with the previous version of facebook was very small adspot size. The only size facebook could sell was 110px by 80px box which didn’t made much use for advertisers. But the new layout brings new spots for ads and my prediction the first one is going to be 300px by 300px for the main page and a 200px by 200px for the profile page.

Source [ Facebook Press Release ]

Do you like to keep track of global time, or are you the person who is quite fascinated with the clock on bbc.co.uk new website and wanted such a clock for your website. ClockLink provides online clocks made from flash which you can easily add into your web page or blog by copying a simple HTML tag into your website.

But its not as good and as free as it looks, clockLink makes its revenue through the ads that are displayed when you hover your mouse over the clock. Seems like a weird way of advertisement but that’s the core reason of providing a bunch of free clocks.

But one thin that was fun is the global time map:

Filezilla is a free FTP solution for client & server. A free software to make ftp connections to your web server upload / download files and manage your sites. Its a product by Mozilla Inc.  Its fast & reliable cross platform FTP, FTPS & SFTP client with features like :

• Easy to use
• Supports FTP, FTP over SSL/TLS (FTPS) and SSH File Transfer Protocol (SFTP)
• Cross-platform. Runs on Windows, Linux, *BSD, OSX and more
• Available in many languages
• Supports resume and transfer of large files >4GB

Personally i am big fan of the software and recently ran into a problem that involved recovering saved passwords in filezilla.

How to recover Saved / Quick Connect Passwords from Filezilla.

Well if you Google this question up you will probably land up with tons of software’s each claiming to help you recover password i tried a bunch of them and the results were pathetic also its a bit unsafe to trust such unknown software’s to recover you passwords for FTP as you don’t know if they transfer that information across the internet as well.

So the way out is quite easy and a little shocking to, shocking because its so easy that the file containing the sensitive information for your ftp access is not even encrypted. So if you want to recover the passwords all you have to do is follow the three easy steps:

1. First go to folder options and enable all hidden files
2. Two Go to ‘c:\document and settings \ [username] \ Application Data \ FileZill’ (in win XP / 2000 ) & “C:\Users\[username]\AppData\Roaming\FileZilla\” (in windows vista) or “/home/username/.filezilla/” (for linux)
3. Locate the files
   • filezilla.xml (stores morst recent server info including passwords)
   • recentservers.xml (stores all recent server info including passwords)
   • sitemanager.xml (stores all saved sites server info including password in plaintext)

Using notepad you can easily open the file and all the user / password and ftp information is displayed.

[Download Filezilla Free]

With iPhone 3G hitting the market and high speed internet access is easily available on cell phone, more people are using their cell phones to browse internet. Access to internet via mobile grew up to 147% in 2007 and is expected to take a huge jump after the 3G networks & cell phones goes common. Being a blogger its time you should think about accessibility of your blog from a cell phone. So how do you make your blog cell phone friendly. (more…)

Google in a recent development have announced that it has attained the ability to crawl websites made in flash. Previously Adobe presented Google & Yahoo with there SWF libraries so as both the companies could work on it to develop technology that could help there search engines to show results from flash based websites.

Flash or SWF was a glory of its time and gained tremendous attention from user end, it changed the face of the web by giving freedom to develop websites full of interactive media. But the only flaw in the system came to life when search engines were unable to crawl content within a flash website thus causing lack of traffic for website owners.

With this new development of Google being able to crawl thought a flash site new dimension and a new scope for flash based website is about to rise.

According to Google:

Google has been developing a new algorithm for indexing textual content in Flash files of all kinds, from Flash menus, buttons and banners, to self-contained Flash websites. Recently, we’ve improved the performance of this Flash indexing algorithm by integrating Adobe’s Flash Player technology.

• Googlebot does not execute some types of JavaScript. So if your web page loads a Flash file via JavaScript, Google may not be aware of that Flash file, in which case it will not be indexed.
• We currently do not attach content from external resources that are loaded by your Flash files. If your Flash file loads an HTML file, an XML file, another SWF file, etc., Google will separately index that resource, but it will not yet be considered to be part of the content in your Flash file.
• While we are able to index Flash in almost all of the languages found on the web, currently there are difficulties with Flash content written in bidirectional languages. Until this is fixed, we will be unable to index Hebrew language or Arabic language content from Flash files.

Cross Browser testing is a night mare for web developers and designers. You website might work fine in IE7 but it might not work well in Firefox or even IE6. So if you are choosy about your website and want to work into details to make it perfect then you have to test you web site on various browser.

So here are three great ways to test your website

1. Install All Browsers in Your Computer
2. Use web screen shot tool
3. Use a handy tool

(more…)

Hulu has been a favorite way to watch tv online as long as you are in USA or else if you are using back door to watch hulu outside usa .

Thanks to adobe air applications now you can watch videos from hulu right on your desktop. No need to open up a browser and go to the hulu site at all.

(more…)

Launching a website or in a plan of launching a website, you do have a domain registered but when you tell your friends about it there is boring page posted by your web host. So if you are looking to quickly create a splash page for your website then LaunchSplash comes in handy.

(more…)

Oh yes Firefox3 broke the Guinness world record, well of course they did it reason being there is no other record to broken so no matter how many downloads they got the Guinness world record was to be made.

So Mozilla Firefox did make a Guinness world record of the most downloaded software within 24hours. The number of downloads went up to 7378216. But there is bit confusion on that as well. If you check on the home page of spreadfirefox on the right top you will find a heading with blue background stating Firefox downloads : 579137807 [check here] & if you look on the world record page with the map of the world you will find downloads : 7378216.[check here]

So which is the actual value & this does put doubts in its authentication as well.

FireFox 3 Review

Apart from that most important promise of the Firefox was fullfilled with the new version, yes Firefox3 is much faster then Firefox2 & Internet Explorer. The new tabs & new windows open really quickly.

The interface is more mature and decent not bad indeed, some hidden and interesting feature have been added one of my favorite  is the ability to drag any image from a website to a folder on your desktop no need to use save image as.

The Website ID feature is quite cool and protects from phishing and help authenticate the sites who have purchased certificates for authentication like paypal, ebay. This feature has been added to the Firefox’s new Smart Location bar. The location bar has been the core focus of development, and have integrated three great features to it, one was the website ID click on the favicon on location bar and you can see its ID to verify its authentication. Second you can simple bookmark any site with only one click by clicking the star on the location bar or usding [ctr + d]. Thirdly once you type your address there is a list of recomendation which do have a flaw as it shows the Title of the site and its URL and sometimes its difficult to find the exact URL.

Apart from more on the features can be checked out at Mozilla Firefox3 Features

Ever wondered where actually a website is hosted, what if there are bunch of guys living next door and have tons of equipment could they be your web host. Well thanks to Server IP location now you can locate physical location of your web host or physical location of any website on a Google map and find out where actually is there web server.

This cool tool is made by 81solutions an SEO / Hosting & commerce company. The IP Tool location asks you to enter a website address and the Google map on the page will show you the exact location of where you data center is. So in one way you can find out exactly where it is, you can cross check if the sales guys are lying about there locations or you can just have few minutes of fun and find out most of the web hosting is done in California.

But the real purpose according to the inventors

For SEO purposes it maybe useful to locate servers in the country you wish to serve. For example, if you are targeting the UK market, thus UK search engines then it maybe advantageous to your websites position on the search engine results pages to host your website in the UK. Hosting in your target country may also increase customer satisfaction as webpages will load quicker and have faster response times.

Check it out Server IP Location