Did you know? I ran across an interesting Q+A from Labnol.org with innovative suggestions for using Google Docs. Take a look at some of them below -
Q: I am worried that someone may hack into my Google Account and delete the important files. To play safe, I want to download all documents from Google Docs locally and burn them on to a CD. Is it possible?
A: To download a copy of all your Google Docs documents on to the hard drive, get this Grease Monkey script. It will create a list of all your online documents that you can download in one step using the DownloadThemAll add-on.
Q: How can I add watermarks (like PRIVATE, CONFIDENTIAL, etc.) to my Google Documents?
A: You simply need to edit the CSS of your document – add an image with non-repeating background.
Q: I am sending a Google Docs document to a large mailing list. Is is possible to track who read the document and when?
A: Go to your Google Docs Settings page (link) and turn on the option that says "Track visits to my documents using Google Analytics".
Q: Forget the mailing list, I am just sending a document to my immediate boss so how do I if he really opened my document?
A: Just embed a secret 1×1 tracking image in the document to know when people open your Google Documents.
To see the entire list, check out Google Docs Guide: How to do Stuff with Google Docs from Labnol.org.
In case you missed the list, here’s the link.
Did you know?
Google has recently added a feature to video chat that lets you play videos from YouTube and Google Video without opening a new page.
Google System Blog notes that “if you tried the audio/video chat plug-in for Gmail and it didn’t work well, there’s a chance that the latest updates solved your issues: incompatibility with Creative camera drivers, errors when sending and receiving video for CPUs without the SSE2 extensions, lack of support for many USB cameras on a Mac OSX.”
Of the 500 or so promises President Obama made during the election, he’s off to a good start. Check out which promises he’s kept.
No. 125: Direct military leaders to end war in Iraq
No. 239: Release presidential records
No. 241: Require new hires to sign a form affirming their hiring was not due to political affiliation or contributions
No. 427: Ban lobbyist gifts to executive employees
No. 503: Appoint at least one Republican to the cabinet
Shephard Fairey Obama Commemorative Plates
(via coolhunting.com)
Vote for Idealist! 
We produce a lot of content here at Idealist that’s easily shared on social networks like Digg, Reddit, Delicious and StumbleUpon. If you search through those sites, you’ll see that our blogposts, podcasts, videos, photos and other resources are already up there. Some of the content we’ve submitted ourselves but much has been posted by our network of supporters. What sets these networks apart from sites like Facebook, Twitter and MySpace is how they aggregate submitted content. Digg, Reddit and the others use a version of the vote-to-promote idea, which basically is the promotion of stories and news by voting, and the links with the most "votes" float to the front of those services. Unfortunately nonprofit content doesn’t get a lot of love on these sites, and to date, there’s no service solely designated to promoting nonprofit ideas via vote-to-promote. What can you do to help you ask? Well, that’s a very considerate of you. Below I’ve set up a spreadsheet where you can see which Idealist links have been submitted to Reddit and Digg. If you have an account on either of these services, you can click through the urls to vote for Idealist. If you don’t have an account, you can easily set one up. The more votes we get, the easier it is for people to find out about us.
The Graphic Design blog runs down the Best of Obama designs, take a look.
Did you know?
Search Light Digital runs down the list of the things you need to be doing with Google Analytics to get the data you need. Some of the hacks you can try out -
- Tracking clicks on links – Every time you put a link to anything external or a download on a page, make sure you add onClick=”javascript: pageTracker._trackPageview(’/link/linkname’); “. Always know where your visitors went.
- Tracking user groups – If you’re sending people to a landing page, and you want to know where they go from there, segment them by using onLoad=”javascript:pageTracker._setVar(’Segment/Subgroup’);”. This will help you know what different groups are doing, and split-test user behaviour.
- Exclude internal visits – Add a new filter, with the “Exclude all traffic from an IP address” setting. Then add your own IP address, and repeat for any other IPs you don’t want to be included. Make sure you escape any full stops, with a backslash, like this: 63.212.171.
And the rest -
- Tracking across multiple domains/subdomains
- Tracking exact keywords for AdWords
- Making the site overlay tool useful
- Tracking full referred URLs
