How To Turn Your Gmail Inbox Into A Reading To-Do List

How To Turn Your Gmail Inbox Into A Reading To-Do List: "

If you are often on Gmail, you most likely know how many things you can actually do with it (apart from readings and sending mail). We have already shared quite a few tips on how Gmail can be turned into a multitasking tool but it is still amazing how this great free email service can come in handy for various purposes.

This post covers another fun way to use your Gmail account – collecting and organizing your daily reading list using your Gmail inbox.

Easily Email Any Article To Yourself

Google Chrome : “Email This Page”

Email this page lets you quickly compose an email by grabbing the page title and the text you have selected on the page. You can therefore highlight the main idea of the page and then easily remember why you decided to send this one to your reading list.

It can also be set up to always use the Gmail interface to compose a new message – even if you have another mail client by default.

It’s an official extension by Google but it did seem to have some bugs. On some pages it refused to send me to the “compose mail” screen and just did nothing. I hope that’s just a temporal glitch.

FireFox : Email Yourself!

This is an excellent addon just for these purposes. Unlike the Google Chrome extension, it won’t make you type in your own email address each time.

It allows you to email yourself the link, title, and selected text of the page you are viewing using Gmail. After having it installed, just click a toolbar icon or use the keyboard shortcut and a new Gmail message will be created with the page details.

Keyboard Shortcuts

• For Windows and Linux Users: ALT+Windows+Tilde (~)
• For Mac Users: Options+Command+Tilde (~)

Before using the extension, you’ll need to edit the two preferences:

• Enter your gmail address.
• Enter a personal identification message (used as a suffix for your email subject). By default it’s set to “-Sent via Email Yourself!”. In our case, this might be “TO READ LATER” or something similar.

Alternative FireFox Addon: Mozilla F1 (with Gmail support).

Any Browser : Notes For Later

Notes For Later sends the highlighted text, link, and time you accessed the page to your email. It works via browser bookmarklet. Each bookmarklet is unique and can be generated for your browser separately after you register.

Once you click a bookmarklet, it will let you enter a short note or just send the article right away:

The app will send you the link together with details as well as the PDF of the page content (for offline reading).

Alternative App For Various Browsers (Including Mobile Browsers): JoliPrint

Organize Your Gmail Reading List

We receive lots of email messages daily, so how do you effectively organize your Gmail reading list? Gmail filters work best for this!

First, create a new label called “READING LIST” and filter your emailed links to get labeled automatically (and probably skip the inbox to avoid any clutter).

For “Email this Page“- and “Email Yourself“-type of extensions (that let you email links to yourself), you’ll need to set up a filter for all mail coming from yourself to yourself:

For “Notes For Later“-types of tools (that email you from their official email accounts), filter all mail by their email address:

Now just let all the filtered mail go to your new label while skipping the inbox:

Once you have read an item in your list, you can unstar the email to mark it as done.

Have you ever used your email as a reading list organizer? Please share your tips in the comments!

comedy_nose

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How To Turn Your Gmail Inbox Into A Reading To-Do List is a post from: MakeUseOf

More articles about: bookmarklets, chrome extensions, email, firefox addons, Gmail, reading, to-do

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Blogilo – The Best Blogging App For Linux

Blogilo – The Best Blogging App For Linux: "

No one can deny that blogging has brought plenty of personality to the Internet. Not only that, but some very popular sites today run on blogging software as their framework, in order to make creating and sharing content a lot easier.

These pieces of blogging software, such as WordPress, offer a great, intuitive interface of their own. However, some people, for whatever reason they may have, might like to use a blogging client on their computer rather than blogging straight in the browser.

There are options available for Windows and Mac, but what about Linux? No need to fear, Linux is covered too.

About Blogilo

Blogilo is a decent blogging app made for the KDE desktop, although it works just as well under GNOME. In case you’re wondering where the name comes from, Blogilo is “blog tool” in Esperanto. If you are running KDE, you should already have Blogilo installed. If not, or if you’re running a different desktop environment, you’ll need to look around in your package manager. Where Blogilo is located varies from distribution to distribution, but your best bet is to look for something called kdepim-blogilo or similar. However, Fedora users, for example, won’t find such a package, as Blogilo is combined with other programs into the single kdepim package.

Features

Once it’s sitting happily on your hard drive, you can go ahead and launch it. You’ll find it under your Internet category. When it’s launched, you’re greeted straight away by the main editing window. The layout is quite simple. At the top you have your menus and main buttons, including creating a New Post, Save Locally, Submit, a drop-down box of which configured blog you want to write for, and Opening the blog in a browser.

Below those buttons is the main window for where you write your post. Alongside your title, you have multiple necessary formatting buttons for your post, as you have by now come to expect. You can also choose between the Visual Editor, HTML Editor, and a Post Preview. However, the Post Preview may not always work, as I’ve come across an instance where it has not. Below the editing box you’ll see the “media list”, which lists any media files that you have inserted.

To the right of that you’ll see some more options. Under Blog Posts you’ll find a list of posts that you created, which you can choose from and edit. Under Post Categories you’ll find all categories that are configured on your blog, so you can select which category that post you’re currently writing should go to. In Post Options, you can choose the status of the post (if you have permission to do so), allow comments and trackbacks, modify the timestamp, and add a permalink (if you’re using WordPress) and summary. Finally, in Local Entries you’ll find all articles that you wrote using Blogilo.

Setting Up Your Blog

Writing a post is great, but you can’t do it without having a blog configured! Doing this is very simple, just go to Blog > Add Blog. Enter your blog’s base URL, your username, and your password. Blogilo will then automatically configure everything for you, even the blog API!

Options

You can also configure some settings, although there isn’t much to configure, and that is reflected by the amount of options available. One option I suggest that you enable is spell checking. Other than that and the fact that there is no word count, this piece of software is pretty much perfect.

Conclusion

If you’re an avid blogger and use KDE, I highly recommend that you try this out if you haven’t already. It’s clean design and ease of use make it a great choice. Also, being able to write a post without having to worry whether you’re connected to the internet in order to reach the editor is another great benefit. So try it out, I’m sure you’ll like it.

Are you a fan of blogging software rather than using the blog’s own editor? If so, which one do you prefer?

Blogilo – The Best Blogging App For Linux is a post from: MakeUseOf

More articles about: blogging, blogging client, blogging tips, blogging tools, Gnome, KDE

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Repair Corrupt Zip Files with Zip2Fix

Repair Corrupt Zip Files with Zip2Fix: "

Zip2Fix is a small freeware to repair corrupt zip files. When you download a zipped file from internet and try to unzip with your favorite unzip freeware, you sometimes get a message that zip file is corrupted. In those instances, you can use Zip2Fix to repair damaged zip file.

What Zip2Fix actually does is that it scans zip archives for all the available files. Then it finds the files in the archive that are not corrupt, and extracts those files. So, if the archive has 10 files, and only 2 of those are actually corrupt, then Zip2Fix will be able to extract remaining 8 files.

Zip2Fix is quite easy to use. It is portable, so you do not need to install it. Just download the software, and double click on it to run. After that, click on “Open” button and select the zip file that you want to repair. Zip2Fix will scan the zip file, and will show the results in its window. Once it has extracted all the files that it can extract, it saves them together in a new zip file.

Zip2Fix is quite effective, as Samer found in his tests. And the best part is that it is completely free.

In case Zip2Fix does not works for you, you can try other file repairing software that we reviewed earlier, like, DiskInternals Zip Repair, Object Fix Zip, and File Repair.

Related posts:

1. How to Repair Damaged Zip Files: DiskInternals Zip Repair
2. Object Fix Zip – Free Software to Repair Zip Files
3. File Repair: Free Tool to Repair Corrupted Files

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Empty Folder Remover: Detect and Remove Empty Folders

Empty Folder Remover: Detect and Remove Empty Folders: "

FMS Empty Folder Remover is a small freeware to find and remove empty folders from your PC. Empty folders take unnecessary space on your hard drive, and make your explorer look cluttered. Empty Folder Remover easily finds and removes them.

Empty folder remover scans any folder to find all the empty folders within it. Then you can choose to delete all the empty folders, or just selective ones.

Another software to remove empty folders include Delete Empty Folders.

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3. Rainbow Folders – Freeware to Change Color of Folder Icons

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Cloud Export: Back Up Your Online Data To Your Hard Drive [Windows & Ubuntu]

Cloud Export: Back Up Your Online Data To Your Hard Drive [Windows & Ubuntu]: "

Back up information you’re currently trusting the cloud with to your own hard drive. With support for most Google products and a few others, including Twitter and IMAP mail, Cloud Export is a piece of software every cloud computing enthusiast should probably look into.

The cloud is great, but it’s out of your hands. Most of the time that’s fine, but there is always the chance that something goes wrong cloud-side. As such, if you really want to know that your information is safe, you should back it up yourself. That’s why the Data Liberation Front, a service provided by Google, offers guides for backing up Google products.

Guides are nice, but automated software is better. CloudExport is based on what Data Liberation offers; it’s just automated. It comes in the form of a Windows executable (which is easy to use) and a cross-platform python script (slightly less easy to use, but not impossible).

Using Cloud Export

Get started by downloading Cloud Export. You’ll find a .exe file for Windows users and a Python script for everyone else. Windows users can install as usual. Keep reading to find Ubuntu instructions.

Fire up Cloud Export and you’ll see a simple user interface. Click “Add new account” to get started:

As you can see, you’ll need to pick which things you want to back up. Click a general category and you’ll be presented with individual things you can backup:

Select your services and enter your account information. Note that, to back up Gmail, you’ll need to enable IMAP in Gmail.

One you’ve go everything set up you can start the backup process. This might take a long time, especially if you’re downloading all of your email, so be patient:

Your files will be put wherever is configured in settings; by default a new “Export” folder is added to your user folder:

As you can see, I backed up my contacts, calendar and photos. I was particularly happy to get my high-res photos from Picasa:

Overall this is a great way to back up the cloud. Try it out yourself and let us know how you like it!

Currently Supported Cloud Backups

Cloud Backup supports a lot of services already. They are, according to the readme:

• Normal Google accounts:
  • Contacts
  • Gmail
  • Reader
  • Picasa
  • Blogger
  • Health
  • Finance
  • Calendar
  • Talk
  • Docs
• Google Apps accounts:
  • Contacts
  • Gmail
  • Calendar
  • Talk
  • Docs
• Twitter
• Identi.ca
• RSS
• XMPP/Jabber
• IMAP (download email)
• OFX

See an application you’d like to be included? You can request applications be added to CloudExport.

Ubuntu Instructions

Getting this working in Ubuntu is possible. You’ll need to install one package: python-tk. Install this using apt-get or simply click here.

Once you’ve done that you simply need to make the file cloudexportw.py executable, then run it from the command line:

python cloudexportw.py

The process should be similar on other Linux systems; feel free to leave information about this in the comments below.

Conclusion

Backing up your information is important, but how many of us regularly back up information we store on the cloud? It doesn’t matter how much you love and trust the companies that are storing your data for you; something could eventually go wrong. If that happens, you’ll be glad you backed up your information.

Do you think it’s worthwhile, though? Leave your thoughts in the comments below, along with any other tips for backing up cloud services.

Cloud Export: Back Up Your Online Data To Your Hard Drive [Windows & Ubuntu] is a post from: MakeUseOf

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Get a super customizable docking launcher with Gizmo Toolbar

Get a super customizable docking launcher with Gizmo Toolbar: "

Gizmo Toolbar is a free toolbar app that can provide multiple docking toolbar launchers on your desktop.

The software two main launcher styles, slab (with icons laid out on a rectangular shape and carousel (laid out of a circular shape), and offers a very high degree of customization: color, size, opacity placement on screen, keyboard hotkey, behavior, etc. And while this makes it very powerful software it also can make the creation of a simple toolbar a rather complicated affair. Luckily, Gizmo Toolbar offers a one-stop-shop “toolbar gallery” that users can choose from, as well as a wizard to make setup more user friendly.

PROS: here’s what I like about this one:

• Multiple docks: on the same screen or multiple monitor, you can set each up with their own user customizable hotkey (see screenshot below).

• Drag and drop: adds items to docks
• The toolbar wizard: makes setting up your launcher easy (easier, at least than the manual setup)
• The toolbar gallery: provides ready made presets to choose from, and lets you make and save your own (see screenshot to the right).
• Light footprint: remarkably, at around 6 megs in memory.
• You can run each dock as its own process: optionally.

CONS: or “tips on how this program can be improved”

• Complicated setup: despite its high degree of configurability (or because of it), setting up a toolbar is a long, drawn out affair that many users just might give up on. At least the wizard offers an easier alternative.
• You cannot duplicate docks: once you create one, you cannot simply duplicate it and modify the copies, which is strange.

The verdict: looking for a cool docking launcher app that can display multiple docks? Then try this one. Gizmo Toolbar is a nice app that is highly configurable and quite useful.

Version tested: 2.7.9

Compatibility: Windows XP, 2000, Server 2003, Server 2008, Vista, Windows 7; 32bit or 64 bit.

Note on installing: this software can be installed standalone (gtoolbar-xxx-setup.exe) or as part of Gizmo central (gizmo-xxx-setup.exe). If you are installing via the latter, make sure to only check the Gizmo central option (first option, see screenshot), unless you want to install other components.

Go to the program home page to download the latest version (6.08 megs).

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