Web Browsing Tips Category Archives

Latest Version of Firefox

December 30th, 2011 by Chief Webmaster

The latest version of Firefox is out and it’s faster. If you haven’t tried it out yet, visit the Firefox download page and download a free copy/upgrade. You won’t notice much difference on the surface, but in the back-end they’ve streamlined a lot of processes to make it load faster.

One of the reasons I left Firefox was because of it’s slow speed, albeit was faster than IE or the dreaded Safari. Google Chrome is still my preferred browser, although I have to admit that Firefox has done an amazing job with their latest release. The Firefox 10 release looks even more promising, it will include new webmaster tools. (see video below)

Chrome, along with the Web Developer extension, leaves me perfectly content for now despite Firefox’s excellent redemption.

By: Jonathan Gibbons
Web Ventures Plus
Owner & Chief Webmaster

Related External Sources: An Overview of Firefox’s Coming Developer Tools

RSS Feeds, Google Reader, FeedDemon and Multiple News Sources

December 15th, 2011 by Chief Webmaster

Web Ventures Plus™ recommends FeedDemon
Image © FeedDemon

Discover RSS feeds and how using them will make your daily news reading more efficient. In the age of information overload, RSS feeds are a godsend. If you get your news from as many news outlets as possible, then you’ll find this article to be of great use. I’ve often found myself bookmarking multiple websites onto my bookmark bar in Google Chrome and attempting to visit them each day. I realized that even with all these great bookmarks I tend to only visit around five of the sites a day. It quickly becomes tedious and often overwhelming to attempt visiting every single news website each day. RSS feeds come to the rescue.

RSS Feeds

If you haven’t heard of RSS feeds before, then you are missing out on one of this past decades most important web browsing and development tools. RSS feeds are .XML files which store website content, e.g., blogs, articles and posts, into a universally readable format. You may view our RSS Feed as an example. Feeds make it easy for webmasters and web surfers alike to embed, syndicate and view website content without having to actually visit/embed actual websites.

An RSS Icon

Subscribing to a feed is quite easy. Simply look for the RSS icon or link to the feed on your favorite website. When you open the feed, it’ll give you the option to subscribe to the feed. Once subscribed you may use your favorite browser, email client (e.g., Outlook or Thunderbird), Google Reader or a locally downloaded application to read them.

Google Reader – we recommend using Google Reader to subscribe to all of your feeds. Google reader is free and will be important later in this article when we discuss reader synchronization. You may sign up for Google Reader here. There are many apps for android and the iPhone which make it easy to use Google Reader. Since Google Reader stores your feeds in their cloud, then you’ll be able to access them from anywhere by simply logging into your Google account.

Work News and Personal News

If you are like me, you’ll have a list of news sources you read related to your specific profession and then other news whether it be politics, entertainment, science, etc. Google Reader will allow you to categorize these into different folders. So each day you can quickly skim through your folders depending on what news you want to read that day.

FeedDemon

While Google Reader is great and it comes with powerful reading tools, there is just something about having a local application on your computer that is unmatched by the storm of cloud based applications coming our way. FeedDemon offers a free version of it’s program which allows you to synchronize your feeds to Google Reader, so you may install FeedDemon on your work desktop and personal laptop, while keeping them synchronized through Google Reader.

FeedDemon makes it very easy to view your feeds, subscribe to new feeds, find new feeds and keep track of your unread and starred (i.e., items you bookmark for future access) articles. It’s like having your very own Future Digital Newsstand right on your PC. The reason I find it so useful is because it’s more user friendly than Google Reader and it is more formal than visiting a website/web-based application. Additionally, it offers an excellent tool for those of us subscribed to many feeds: the Panic button! The panic button is a shortcut to mark all of your articles older than a specified time frame as read. This removes them from your newsstand, helping to keep you from becoming overwhelmed by thousands of potential unread articles. The Panic button is just one of their many great features. Visit feeddemon.com to download the program and learn more about it’s benefits over traditional RSS readers.

At Web Ventures Plus™ we setup RSS feeds and blogs for clients all the time. If you need help setting up your own feed and/or help with any of the above, please use our contact form to request assistance.

By: Jonathan Gibbons
Web Ventures Plus
Owner & Chief Webmaster

Google Enables Multiple Users in Latest Chrome Release

December 14th, 2011 by Chief Webmaster

The latest version of Google Chrome is now available and it supports multiple users/profiles. Back in October we released a blog explaining how to setup multiple instances of Google Chrome on your PC. I still use this technique today and have found it very helpful to keep my Google business chrome separate from my personal Chrome. Through using Google Chrome’s synchronization feature, one may keep their chromes synchronized across multiple computers, but before this latest Chrome release you’d have to invoke a few operating system hacks to run multiple versions of chrome on a single PC.

Now with the latest release of Chrome, multiple users/profiles are enabled. If you share a computer with someone else, then you’ll find this feature helpful.

How to Add Users

Current Chrome Version: firstly, make sure your Chrome is up to date. Chrome automatically updates itself, but sometimes you have to do it manually. In Chrome click the wrench and then click “About Google Chrome.” This will run a check for any available updates and will automatically install them. Please wait until it is complete. Then restart your browser.
Accessing New User Tools: in Google Chrome >> click the wrench >> click the options link. Under the optinos window click on the personal stuff tab. You should now see a new section in your personal options which says Users. Click on Add New User.
Synchronizing New User: once your new user is setup, you’ll want to synchronize this user to a Google account so you can login to this user from any Google chrome on any computer. You’ll be able to setup this Google account under this same section.
That’s it! now when you open Chrome, if you have more than one user enabled, you’ll see a small avatar on the upper left of the browser. Simply click on this icon to change users.

Limitations

While this new feature is certainly great, I have decided to continue using multiple profiles the way that I did previously. There are three reasons for this decision:

Privacy: using the new user feature doesn’t actually create a new instance of Chrome. Therefore, locally stored cookies, variables, etc., will be storied in the same place as other users; only separated by a few folders.
Customization: using the old method to achieve multiple chrome profiles, you are able to create unique program shortcuts on your desktop and application launchers.

This image above shows how you can completely separate your different chromes in Windows 7, be creating different application shortcuts and icons.
Usability: it’s easier to click a single shortcut icon rather than having to open up a new user window by first clicking your regular Chrome shortcut.

We are thrilled that Chrome has enabled this new feature and it should prove very useful to diverse web surfers.

By: Jonathan Gibbons
Web Ventures Plus
Owner & Chief Webmaster

Google Chrome – Multiple Profiles

October 26th, 2011 by Chief Webmaster

12/15/11 UPDATE: Google enabled user profiles in its’ most recent release. We’ve posted an article on how to use this new feature here. We still recommend reading this post, however, because this method keeps user data better separated.

Google Chrome Tip (difficulty – intermediate):

How to Create Multiple Profiles (i.e., multiple instances of the Google Chrome application). I’ve long used Chrome for personal use, Firefox for business use and Internet Explorer for education use. This made it easy for me to test multiple browsers and have unique settings for each one as well. For example, I have a different set of bookmark bar links on each of them. These bookmarks are relevant to the task (e.g., personal use, business and education). As many are beginning to find, Chrome is simply the fastest and most efficient browser on the market today. I found myself using Chrome for everything as the other browsers, Opera and Safari included, couldn’t keep up with the pace I work at. But there was a dilemnia, my business shortcuts, passwords and logins are different than my personal, so I needed to run a seperate instance of Chrome.

Google Chrome has a built in multiple profile feature, but it’s currently only in developer status (type “about:flags” into the address bar and then enable multiple profiles) (note: it was taken out of standard release just recently). Eventually this will be easy to achieve, but until then Google has very simple documentation on how to accomplish this outside of Chrome itself here.

Here are the steps (for Windows 7 but will work for Windows XP and Vista as well, note the target link will differ):

1) Create a new Google Chrome shortcut on your Desktop and rename it Business Chrome – create one more Google Chrome shortcut on your Desktop and leave it named as Google Chrome

2) Go to your C:\ drive and create a new folder called BusinessChrome

3) Right click the Google Chrome shortcut on your Desktop and go to properties. You’ll see something like the following listed under target:

C:\Users\YourName\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe

4) Add the following to the end of this [with a space] –user-data-dir=C:\BusinessChrome

So it should look something like this

C:\Users\YourName\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe –user-data-dir=C:\BusinessChrome

5) Click Apply and OK

6) Now double click the Business Chrome Shortcut

You should see a blank Google Chrome browser. Don’t worry you haven’t lost any of your Google Chrome bookmarks, they are still on your other Google Chrome Shortcut. Double click your Google Chrome shortcut on your Desktop (not the Business Chrome.) You should see your Chrome as it’s always been.

Customizing your new Chrome Profiles:

Change the Shortcut Icon:By right clicking on the Business Chrome shortcut you can click “change icon.” This will give you an option to pick from other default shortcuts. You may alternatively visit this website and download other neat Chrome icons. Simply download the icon and then put it into your C:\BusinessChrome folder and then browse to it to change the icon.

Change the Chrome Theme:

In Chrome > click the wrench icon > options > personal stuff > get themes Install a theme. This will help you differentiate which Chrome profile you are using.

I created three profiles for Chrome and put their shortcuts in my taskbar (see image below.) They each synch up with seperate Google accounts so that I can install Chrome on any computer and access my browsing data; this also keeps my Laptop and Desktop’s favorites synched up through Google’s cloud. Have questions? Comment below.