A Simple Trick to Highlight the External Links on a Web Page

Some popular websites – including Mashable, The Huffington Post and TechCrunch – include too many internal links in their stories (hyperlinks pointing back to their own website)  and it often becomes difficult to determine the links that are pointing to external websites.

You have to hover your mouse over a link and look at the status bar of your browser to know where that link is pointing to. That’s lot of work.

Highlight External Links using Favicon Images

Before: This is the original page on TechCrunch

After: The same page but the external hyperlinks are now highlighted

If you wish to quickly highlight all the external hyperlinks on a page, just drag the following bookmarklet link to your browser’s bookmarks toolbar.

Highlight Links

Now when you are on a web page that looks cluttered with links, just click this bookmarklet button and it will add favicons next to all external hyperlinks on that page while the styling of internal links is left untouched.

The bookmarklet will also add underlines to external links  making it easier for you to distinguish between external and internal links. And in case you wish to revert to the original style of hyerlinks, just hit the refresh button (Ctrl + R) in your browser.

I have uploaded the bookmarklet source code (de-obfuscated) on ctrlq.org in case you wish to modify the link styling. The favicons for corresponding websites are automatically generated using this simple Google hack.

How to Get Refunds from the iTunes App Store

If you are wondering why would anyone want refunds for purchases that they have made from the iTunes Apps store, consider the following situations:

A. You ordered an HD movie from the iTunes store but after making the purchase, you realize that it would take several hours to download that massive file to your computer. You can stop the download but your credit card will still be charged.

B. You have an iPhone but you accidentally bought an iPad version of some app which is obviously of no use to you.

C. You wanted to buy a game but there were at least a dozen similar titles on the iTunes store. The one you finally bought is not the one you were originally looking for and you therefore want to return it to Apple.

D. You purchased a song from iTunes store but there’s some problem with the audio format and it won’t play on your iPod or iPhone.

E. You have two or more iTunes accounts and you purchased an iPhone App using the wrong iTunes account. You can’t transfer apps across accounts so a refund followed by re-purchase makes more sense.

F. The 1-Click ordering system, that Apple licensed from Amazon, makes it easy for anyone to buy apps, songs, movies and games from the iTunes store with a single click but this can sometimes lead to accidental purchases especially when kids have access to your devices.

These are just some of the legitimate reasons why   people may want to return their iTunes store purchases and request refunds from Apple.

Return your iTunes Store Purchases to Apple

The iTunes App store sales policy clearly says that you cannot cancel a purchase or receive a refund for a purchase but they are known to make exceptions if you have a valid reason.

For instance, I recently purchased the $2.99 Reeder app from the iTunes store but only after installing it on my iPad did I realize that it was an iPhone-only app and not designed for the iPad. I requested a refund from Apple and how they reversed the charges in less than 4 hours.

Step 1: Locate the email receipt for your iTunes Store purchase and click the “Report Problem” link next to the app that you would like to return.

If you have deleted the email invoice that Apple sent you after you completed the purchase, launch the iTunes program using this special link and you’ll see a list of all items that you’ve bought from the iTunes store. Open an order by clicking that little arrow next to the order date and then click “Report a problem” next to the app name.

If the above method fails, or if you don’t have iTunes on your computer, you can use this page to submit a refund request to Apple through any web browser.

Step 2: Click the Problem drop-down menu and choose an option that best describes your problem. If you have purchased an app accidentally, choose “I inadvertently purchased this application.”

You can expect a response from Apple in the next 24-48 hours. If the support rep is satisfied with your reasoning, he’ll probably reverse the charges. Please remember that you are not entitled to a refund under the iTunes Store Sales policy so if they deny your request for a refund, move on!

           Windows 8 Installation Guides

I spent almost the entire day playing around with Windows 8 and finally installed it on all thethree machines that I have – two of them were previously running Windows 7 while the third one is an iMac running Mac OS X Lion. Everything just worked without any issues.

The first Windows machine is sort of test machine and I therefore installed Windows 8 as the primary OS on that machine overwriting Windows 7. All my previous files, Windows settings and programs were preserved and it was quite an effortless installation.

The second Windows machine is my primary computer, the one that I am using to write this story inside Windows Live Writer, and I therefore installed Windows 8 on another partition (dual-boot setup). Thus my existing Windows 7 installation is not modified in any way while I can switch to Windows 8 anytime with a simple restart.

In the case of iMac, I created a new NTFS partition and installed Windows 8 using Boot Camp. The metro tiles of Windows 8 on the 27” iMac look absolutely gorgeous and the Apple keyboard and Magic Mouse also work inside Windows 8.

Finally, I installed Windows 8 as a Virtual Machine inside Windows 8 itself just for the purpose of recording the Windows 8 installation procedure.

Windows 8 Installation Guides

If you haven’t tried Windows 8 yet, you should consider doing that now because Windows 8 looks fresh, beautiful and definitely brings that “wow” effect. It’s a beta version but after using it for about a day, I found it stable though the new UI might involve a bit of learning curve.

The best part is that setting up Windows 8 is extremely easy and the installation procedure won’t take more than 15-20 minutes. Should you be interested, I have written several detailed guides that will walk you through the installation steps in either of the above scenarios – pick one that best fits your workflow and get going.

• How to Install Windows 8 as a Virtual Machine (using Oracle’s VirtualBox)
• How to Install Windows 8 on a Mac (using Apple’s Boot Camp)
• How to Install Windows 8 alongside an older version of Windows (Dual boot)
• How to Upgrade your Computer to Windows 8 (Overwrite mode)

Print Files from any Mobile Phone using Dropbox

ere’s a simple trick that help you print documents, emails, photos, PDF files, etc. from a mobile phone to your printer. All you need is a printer connected to the computer (any old printer will do) and a mobile device for sending print jobs – this could be a BlackBerry, iPhone, iPad, Android or any other mobile phone.

Wirelessly Print Anything from Anywhere, Anytime

While mobile phones have become a lot more capable in the past few years, the connection between the printer and your phone is still very weak.

For instance, if you are using a BlackBerry or an iPhone, how do you print any of the presentations or spreadsheets that you have as email attachments? Or if you are viewing driving directions on Google Maps using an iPad, how do you send that map to the printer?

Your phone’s app store will have a few printing apps to let you wirelessly print files but if you want to save a few bucks, you can simply use Dropbox to print documents from your phone to any printer without requiring any additional software.

Some upcoming printers will have built-in support for mobile printing via email but with Dropbox, you get the same feature without requiring any new hardware.

Before we get into the details, watch the video above as it shows how printing from a mobile phone actually works through Dropbox (apologies for the bad audio quality).

Print Files from any Mobile Phone through Dropbox

The workflow is like this. You download a small utility on your computer that runs in the background and constantly monitors one of your Dropbox folders for any new printing jobs.

You can send files for printing from your mobile phone through email or using any of the Dropbox mobile apps. As soon as Dropbox downloads the file locally, the utility will send it to the default printer. Once the file is printed, it gets archived to the logs folder.

To get this thing running on your computer, please follow these easy steps:

Step 1: Make sure that you have Dropbox installed and running on the computer that is connected to the printer.

Step 2: To send print jobs from your mobile device to the printer, you have two options. You can either download a Dropbox app on your mobile phone – they have apps for iPhone, BlackBerry, iPad, Android, Windows Phone, Nokia – or the other option is you upload the files (that you would like to print) to your Dropbox using email. You can use IFTTT to send files to Dropbox over email.

Step 3: Download this zip file* and double-click the eprint.vbs file (see the source code). The script will create a sub-folder inside your main Dropbox folder called PrintQueue where all the mobile print jobs will queue up and another sub-folder called logs where all the completed jobs will be archived.

[*] VBS scripts are Windows-only but there are workarounds for Mac OS X and Linux as well.

Step 4: You are now all set to print files from our mobile phone. Just send a test file from your mobile phone to that secret email address, or upload it through the Dropbox mobile app, and your printer will turn it into a hard copy almost instantly.

The utility can also handle multiple files in one go and it should print almost all file formats for which you have an associated application on the computer. If you would like to shut down the eprint utility, launch Windows task manager and end the “wscript.exe” process from the list.

If you have trouble running the above script on your computer, there’s a chance that you may have associated the file with Notepad or some other text editor. Press shift and right click the file in Windows Explore and choose “Windows Based Script Host” under Open With. Alternatively, open the command prompt, type “cscript eprint.vbs” and hit enter.

Make your own Proxy Site using WordPress

If you are unable to access a particular website, either due to government censorship (for instance, IMDB.com is blocked in China) or because your employer has blocked the site (hoping that it will make people more productive), you can use an online proxy server to quickly and easily bypass the filters.

There are tons of proxies available online and most of them are free (supported by advertising), but if you would like to keep things under your own control, without revealing your tracks to a third-party website, you can build your own proxy site using WordPress.

The NYT website served through WordPress proxy (see the URL)

Turn your WordPress Site into a Proxy Server

It takes less than a minute to set things up and all you need is a website (or blog) runningWordPress.org software and the free RePress plugin - ‘repress’ here is short for ‘repressive’ as in ‘repressive regimes.’

Step 1: Make sure that Permalinks are enabled for your WordPress installation. Open your WordPress admin dashboard, choose Settings -> Permalinks and select any format for your Permalinks other than the default option. Save the changes.

Step 2: From the dashboard itself, go to Plugins -> Add New and search for Repress in the WordPress plugin repository. Install and activate the plugin.

Step 3: Next we need to whitelist website domains that should be accessible though our new WordPress based proxy server. Go to Settings -> Repress and add one or more domain names that you would like to access from work. Save.

Add web domains that you like to serve through the WordPress Proxy

Your proxy server is now ready for use. If your WordPress site URL is abc.com, you can access a site like nytimes.com using the URL http://abc.com/proxy/nytimes.com. All the internal links on the NYT website are rewritten to be served though the proxy site.

Also see: Setup Proxy Server with Google App Engine

Internally, this proxy server is based on the open-source PHPProxy project but it is easier to deploy since it uses the WordPress plugin architecture. The proxied web pages are served with the NoIndex, NoFollow header and hence search engines are unlikely to notice them.

That said, it might be a good idea to deploy this on a separate WordPress install as too many proxy requests may put strain on your main website

Google Chrome Gets a Web Accelerator

Long ago, Google offered a Windows software called Web Accelerator that was designed to make web pages load faster in your browser.

Among other things, Google Web Accelerator would pre-fetch certain pages in advance in the background – like the top three links on a Google page – and the corresponding pages would thus load instantly as soon as you click on them.

Google discontinued the development of Web Accelerator in early 2008 but some of that functionality has just been added to Google Chrome with Instant Pages.

Google Instant Pages

Google has gotten much better at predicting what we are looking for – you know how accurate Google Instant and Google Suggest are – and with Instant Pages, they prefetch the links on a search page that you are most likely to click and makes them available in the background. If you happen to click on one of these links, the pages would load with the blink of an eye.

You can currently test Instant Pages on Google.com using the dev version of Google Chrome but going forward, the functionality can be extended to other sites as well.

The following video compares the speed of loading web pages with and without Instant Pages. If you have a website, use this sample page to test how your web pages might look inside Chrome with prefetching enabled.

An Easier Way to Implement Google Authorship

Google now routinely highlights author information in search results. For instance, if you are looking for gadget reviews on Google and one of the search results is pointing to a column by David Pogue, you might also see a thumbnail image of Pogue – picked from Google Profile – next to the snippet. Google may also display the circle authority in case that author has a presence on Google Plus.

Here’s an illustrated tutorial on how you may display your own profile picture in Google search results next to articles that you may have written on your website or on someone else’s website. You need to create a Google+ profile and then link it your website using the rel=”author” markup.

It takes some effort to implement the authorship markup and the other big hurdle is that it requires you to edit the HTML code of your website. Some authors may find it too technical while others, think guest contributors, may not have access to the site template at all. Fortunately, there’s now a simpler option as well.

Setup Google Authorship using Work Email

Instead of modifying HTML templates, you can just include your name and email address on a web page (using the mailto syntax) and Google will automatically connect it to your Google Profile. Here’s how:

Step 1: Go to your Google Profile, page, click the Edit Profile button and then add a Work email. Make sure that the visibility of this email address is set to “Anyone on the web.”

Step 2: Click Verify to verify your email address. You’ll then see a little “tick mark” next to your email address in Google Plus – see example.

Step 3: Next open any of your web articles that you would like to “claim” in Google Search and add either of these two lines in your article:

Option 1: Use both email address and name together
<a href="mailto:david.pogue@nyt.com">David Pogue</a>


Option 2: Link the author's name to his Google+ page 
Send <a href="http://plus.google.com/1158131688984505">David Pogue</a>
an email at <a href="mailto:david.pogue@nyt.com">david.pogue@nyt.com</a>

The important point is that all web pages, that you have authored, should include your name and your “work” email address that you previously verified in Google Plus. That is the only signal Google can use to verify your content ownership.