how to

How to Sprout? A step by step guide

by Sujoy on May 25, 2008

Sprout is an online content creating tool which enables users to create sophisticated multimedia web content on the fly in a very quick and easy way. It is as easy as probably MS Paint. Just drag and drop. Sprout is for free and the best part is you can just go ahead and create your sprout without signing up for an account. The signing up does come into the picture when you want to save your sprout, publish and manage it. We’ll cover all those steps here in this post. But first, let’s build some demo sprouts and check out how cool they are. Go to the official website here, and click on Get Started. You will get the option of just go ahead and start building your sprout, or sign up for an account. I’ll first create a few sprouts just for the testing purposes.

So, now you’ll be on a page where there are a few templates to choose from. And well, you can choose to start from a blank slate as well. You can preview each template to choose one suitable to your tastes or just go to a blank slate if you experiment with all the options. It is all in flash, so do remember that you would require a Flash plugin to your browser (Flash 9 is recommended on the website). And yes, it supports only IE 7 and above, Firefox 2.0+, Safari 3.x +. Cool, so we have given a title to the project, and it is now at Step -1: Creation of the Project. I have chosen a blank slate and am building a sample sprout for this post titled Techkeyla (surprise!!).First, you can choose a suitable size of the page. The options available are just more than enough and you can choose from standard Youtube video sizes to Adsense head banner sizes to even full pages of 960X800. I have chosen a Youtube video size as I am including it in the post itself. Now you can add some really cool stuff. Right from Google Charts to Videos to Slideshows. And even polls and News Feeds.I’ll add a slideshow and the images that I have used are from my website itself. You can really go nuts with the options that are available, and creating flash based widgets have never been so much fun and easy.

Next up, is step 2: Saving and then Publishing. So, I guess, it’s time to create an account. And now that it is done, I can go ahead and publish my Sprout entitled-Techkeyla . It’s just another flash slideshow, but you all know it is so much more than that. Hope you like the slideshow which is a journey of my past posts in images.


And yes, these Sprouts can be published across many platforms viz. Facebook, Orkut,Bebo, Blogger, MySpace ,you get it. I’m really looking forward to creating some really cool ones . Hope you enjoy sprouting as well.

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GMail Search the easy way

by Sujoy on May 7, 2008

GMail BridgeThe INBOX size is now exploding. GMail now offers almost 6.5 GB of Inbox space and well, 20 MB attachments. How cool is that!! But, I have been using GMail since, umm…end of 2004, and by now , I have almost 38% occupied. That is almost 2.6 GB. Pheww! A total of 3700 mails with no archives. I don’t know how much would the number touch once I start counting the archives as well. So, the basic problem faced by me is getting back to a mail sent to me by a friend, say ‘Mohit’ on a summer of 2005 and which had some attachment. I really don’t remember what he had on the Subject line and well, really have a faint idea that it was something good that he sent in the attachment. Perhaps a funny presentation or whatever. But how do I go about searching for it from the 3700 mails that I have. (For some that’s a very small number. I have friends who are almost touching the upperlimit with 10k mails and counting. Yes, they live on GMail). SO here’s how you search your Mails the easy way. GMail’s blog released some hack today , and I am sharing some from the treasure.

Yes, you guessed it right, Search Operators it is.

So if I’m searching a mail sent by Mohit, I would put in the search bar: from:Mohit. And if I know when he sent it, say in 2005. I could narrow down the search results by adding  in 2005. So the search query would be – from:Mohit in 2005. However if you put “in 05″, you will get results of mails sent in 2005, as well as May of any year, or the 5th of any month of any year.

For searching for mails having attachments, the search query to add is ‘has:attachments’. And like any Google search engine query, it can be appended. e.g. from:Mohit in 2005 has:attachments.

If you had labeled a mail sent by a friend, you can search by searching for,”from:mohit label:flickr” etc. The same works for Subject as well. And if you really are into finding SPECIFIC stuff, you can add conditions like from and to dates, and/or conditions etc.And yes, the Show Search options on the right of the search bar is for those who find using operators a bit on the wild side.

Happy GMailing. Adios!

Image Courtesy:angie_real Angela Lobefaro

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How to Watch and Download HQ videos on Youtube

by Sujoy on April 27, 2008

**UPDATE**

If you are looking for Youtube HD, please look at the following posts

Search for HD videos on YouTube

How to Watch and Download Youtube Videos in HD

YouTube HD for Dummies : Search, Watch, Download

Youtube HQ

We all know that Youtube had introduced the option of uploading High Quality Videos and also given the option of viewing these Videos in the High Quality Version. Now, out of the millions of videos out there,

only a few have the option shown on the video page itself which reads : Watch in High Quality. Now the HQ version definitely take longer time to buffer. But here’s how you can even watch those videos in HQ where the “Watch in High Quality Link” is not available. Here’s the hack: Just add &fmt=18 at the end of the URL of the Video (i.e. The Youtube link in the address bar of your browser), and the video which will be shown will be the HQ version.

Now, some videos do show a significant difference in the Quality of the Sound as well as the Video Quality. But for some, the Video remains as compressed as the Low-Q version. But one thing’s for sure. The audio bitrate of the HQ version is definitely much better. So that’s it: Just by adding &fmt=18 at the end of the Video Link, you can watch the HQ version of the video. (It is advisable to opt for the HQ version only if you have a fast broadband connection, else you might just be spending ages for the video to even start buffering).

e.g. Here’s the original Low-Q version of Paul Pott’s on the Oprah Winfrey Show, and here’s the HQ version. The Video doesn’t show much of a significant increase in quality here, but the audio is definitely much better.

Second example: Here you will watch a smudged, compressed Low-Q version of Paul Potts’ Hello Message. And then, here the sharper,a bit pixelised, but definitely Higher-Q version. Not only did the audio quality increased, but there is an evident increase in the Video Quality as well.

And how to download them. Although there are many Firefox extensions to do the same, here I’ll suggest a one-stop solution. Just visit KeepVid.com. It has a very green address bar. Just paste the URL of your Youtube video you wish to download and hit the Download button on the right. You’ll be given two links. One is of the Low-Q version (which is in FLV), and the other is the High-Q version (which is in MP4 playable on your PMPs,iPods etc.). So there you have it, you have learnt to view your Youtube Videos in High-Q and now how to download them as well. Now thank me. C’mon, be a bit generous to the services

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How to Upgrade to WordPress 2.5

by Sujoy on April 20, 2008

WordpressThere has been a notifier above my dashboard for quite some time. Initially, I had just ignored it. But it was quite some time now and I thought, a Sunday afternoon would be good to upgrade to the latest WordPress version. I had a 2.3 version running and had plans of upgrading to the latest 2.5 version. So, the first thing I did was search on the instructions. Apparently I didn’t need to search for it. I clicked the link to download the new version from the WordPress page and it redirected me to a page, with links on the official guide to Upgrade. It even contained links to fully install the new version or upgrade to the new version. I’ll be telling you the instructions in as detailed steps as possible, but first, let’s first consider why it is necessary at all to take the pain of upgrading.

Firstly, I heard Blog indexing websites like Technorati are leaving behind sites which have older WordPress versions. Apart from that, there is the obvious reason of trying out something spanking new and be a member of the New League of the New WordPress users. And yes, the new Dashboard is a welcome change. Although, there are some flaws and shortcomings which I’ll discuss eventually. So, anyway here are the steps to upgrade to WordPress 2.5.

Step 1: Ensure that you have backed up your WordPress DB. How to do that? Check out my post on it here and the things to remember while backing up post. Keep it ready, just in case anything goes wrong. If possible keep a back-up of your wp-content folder. This is very necessary as you might need it in case you deleted it by mistake. Also keep a copy of the wp-config.php file. This contains the information to connect to your DB. This shouldn’t be a problem as the new WordPress folder will have a wp-config-sample.php file. Anyway, so you should have all your back-ups ready. [Continue Reading]

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