Recently, in the bucket full of features, the loyal users of gmail got a new feature, which they had in every other mail account, but were missing in Gmail. Now gmail can be personally customized with around 30 themes, many of them similar to their orkut counterparts.

Today morning, i logged into my gmail account, and found a new notification about themes. My first reaction was “Now that’s what was missing”. I instantly clicked on the link and browsed all the themes. Many of them were ported from orkut itself, where Google introduced themes earlier.
You can theme your gmail accont through settings-> themes tab.

While most of the themes are appealing, i found “DESK” the right one for me and applied it immediately. Now my gmail inbox appears more tempting for communication. Many people won’t believe now i am checking my inbox every two minutes !, and it’s hard to take my eyes away from my INBOX.

So, who all have not yet experienced it, login immediately and indulge into it.

I was, maybe too late in getting the opportunity to experience the new Facebook through my account.

Meanwhile Facebook users like me, who still haven’t got the link for new Facebook in their account, can simply log on thorough http://new.Facebook.com to experience it.

Facebook announced the launch of new Facebook on 21^st July 2008 only, but the new feature was rolled out in phases to users. I got the link to try out the new Facebook in my account today and so thought of giving it a through review.

The link appeared like this and when I clicked on it, I was taken to the new Facebook home.

Surely this time, the whole focus of the developer team at Facebook was to redesign the homepage and profile page, which many users (like me) feel, was too much cluttered with many application boxes. The home page has changed from three columns to two columns, with all other things on the homepage remaining pretty much the same.

But the main work from the ground level has been done on the profile page, which is still 3 columns…one column only for ads. The prominent features I noticed on the profile page are:

1. Firstly, I was first wondering on how to change the profile pic now, as the link to change it was nowhere. But don’t worry when you hover your mouse over your profile pic, you get an option in the upper right corner, to change your pic.
2. If you are getting too much confused by the new features, there is a help. All the new features have yellow highlights on them, on which you can click and learn what are they, and how to use them.
3. The most user-friendly approach is the introduction of tabbed style menu on the profile page.
4. Now you can also click under your pic and write a small tagline.
5. The update bar is introduced in place of “what are you doing”. It has been given prominent place in the profile. The update status bar looks more like Twitter update bar saying “what are you doing”.
6. Now the users have ability to preview third party applications before installing them.
7. And most importantly, the whole clutter of the third party application boxes is cleared from the profile page now and given a separate “boxes” tab and page.

And last but not the least as the best trick in the hat of a social networking firm, it is upto users themselves, to continue using the new interface or stick to the old one. They can revert back anytime by clicking “back to the old facebook”.

Techunknown Rating: Changes are most often for a good. On the Facebook, it will be for better. The integration of story updates as feeds is surely a broad social advantage for the users. Making itself more appealing and simple, Facebook can be sure that it will get huge fan following from every part of cyberspace, because it has no boundaries.

I was browsing though a website when i saw this Google ad about exclusive discounts for technical students on Apple Notebooks in India.
Now this is an irresistible offer for technology enthusiasts like me. I clicked on the ad and was redirected to this website: http://macforstudents.netbiz.in/

To get the details of the offer, i had to fill in a simple contact form with details of my institution. Took me hardly 1 minute. After that i got a mail with the complete details of the offer, which can be seen in this screenshot:

But for those who want to avail this offer, hurry up as the offer is till 30th august only.

The popular social bookmarking site del.icio.us is now delicious.com. It is sporting a new web 2.0ish look and very speedy interface. The best thing-now no URL confusion !

Last week Google again smoothly made a pagerank update of all the websites.

http://techunknown.com got lucky this time. In just 5 months, that without much effort we got PR1.

I found one more useful website to check the pagerank of your websites in bulk at once @ http://checkbulkpagerank.com/

Regarding how exactly the pagerank algorithm of Google works, i found some pretty interesting images. Do have a look:

If any of you has the head of Agatha Christie but can’t draw a round balloon, can try this. GoAnimate allows you to share your stories with the stock animations it has (including Hillary). Developed on Adobe flex, you can select the backgrounds or default templates and move on.

There are lots of animation characters to customise with. You can also add your face to the character on the screen or morph it etc. After you are done with your actors, its time to move to the sets. Check out GoAnimate’s vast database of music, sound effects, dialogue bubbles and other visual effects.

After the sets are over, setup the expressions of your characters, anger or sarcasm or rofl etc. The interface is quite easy understand as you can see from the image above. After you have finished with your work, it can be marked as private or public.

In my opinion, its one of the best forms of storytelling or express your views on the interesting topics.

Check out GoAnimate here.

Via Techmixer

Knol is another Google project which aims to include user written articles on various topics ranging from science medical information, geographical and historical information, entertainment, how-to’s and all.

It was officially announced on December 13th 2007, but opened in beta to public on July 23 2008.
Google defines “knol” as a unit of knowledge.
All contributors to the Knol project must sign in first with a Google account and are supposed to state their real names.

Knol is being described as a competition to sites such as Wikipedia, but in its layout and model, it most closely resembles About.com.

It still has a long way to go to be fairly useful to general public.

Information source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knol

Another search rival to Google cropped up, this time maybe a bigger one, CUIL.
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It claims itself as the biggest search engine on the planet.

Cuil’s hype is understandable given its claim of indexing 120 billion web pages compared to approx 40  billion by Google.

Some quick facts about it:

1. Most popularly being pronounced as COOL.

2. Cuil is an old irish word for knowledge.

3. Its robot web-crawler is named Twiceler.

4. Cuil’s two main goals as pointed out clearly in the about section of the search engine is: One-how to index the whole internet, not just a part of it and Second-how to analyze and sort out its pages to get relevant pages.

5. Main features of its search are Drilldowns, Roll-over definitions, tabs and navigation suggestions.

6. The main people in its foundation are TOM COSTELLO, who has earlier worked mostly in IBM
And Anna Patterson, who was a key person in the technical line of google adsense and google search index.
Both of them happen to be spouse.

But on the performance front the search engine failed miserably.
The news of its failure is floating all over internet. It can’t even produce relevant results for common words and queries. In that way it can’t even challenge rivals like Yahoo and Microsoft, Google is still a distant dream.
If you want to test it, just type its name in Google.com and Cuil.com simultaneously and see the difference. Holes like this in the search engine can put it into grave forever.
Right now, Google still rocks.

The only thing that went into its favor was large investment, which enabled it to build reliable cluster of servers. Most of the new start-ups are launched with lots of pomp, but crash (die) as soon as the initial users and traffic increase. Atleast cuil was able to survive that phase and did reasonably well.

I was thinking from many days to upgrade to the latest version of Wordpress (The CMS used in this blog), but wasn’t able to do it, maybe because of the fear of database crash or something.

Allhailmike was again and again asking me to do it, as he pointed out, the new ver WP 2.6 is more streamlined, search engine friendly and more stable. So, after all the tweaking last night, i thought to give it a try.

I downloaded the latest version from the official website http://wordpress.org/ and uploaded it to a separate directory, inside the main root directory where i had installed my old installation of WP 2..3.1.

Then i headed to the documentaion part, to help me out smoothly with the process. I must say even the short documentation (they even have step-by-step spoon feeding) was clear and sufficient enough to do all the things safely and successfully. The documentation is at http://codex.wordpress.org/

So here goes the step-by-step instructions (in short):

1. First extract the contents of the new version in a separate folder and upload it to the main directory (root directory where wordpress is instaslled). Uploading through FTP is a better choice.

2. Now delete your wp-admin and wp-includes folder, from the older installation.

3. Copy the new WordPress files to your server, overwriting old files in the root.
NOTE The wp-content folder requires special handling, as do the plugins and themes folders. You must copy over the contents of these folders, not the entire folder. Copying the entire folder overwrites all your customizations and added content.
Also take care to preserve the content of the wp-config.php file in the root directory. This file contains current settings for your existing installation, e.g. database sign-in information.
Compare your existing file with the new installation file which is named wp-config-sample.php. Either transfer your settings to the sample-file and rename it to wp-config.php or copy the new statemens from the sample file into yor current file.

4. That’s it.Visit your main WordPress admin page at /wp-admin. You may be asked to login again. If a database upgrade is necessary at this point, WordPress will detect it and give you a link to a URL like http://example.com/wordpress/wp-admin/upgrade.php. Follow that link and follow the instructions. This will update your database to be compatible with the latest code.

Everything done correctly, itself calls for a coffee break.

Techunknown is alive again…

It died abruptly soon  after being born in feb 3 2008 (the day i registered and started it), because of lack of interest, support and time.

But never mind, we are back again with a bang.
Now we have got what always lacked here; web 2.0, new clean theme, clutter free navigation, user friendliness, new posts…and all. You name it, and we got it

So here is the new team:

1. Me Anurag Upadhaya aka INFERNO (the lead developer)

2. and this time accompanied with Pushkar bhatt aka ALLHAILMIKE (man behind gadget posts, his web http://geekgyan.com ).

Wish us luck.