Google Buzz, a name that has been a buzz word since the launch. It looks like sooner or later people are going to embrace Buzz, those who will embrace it sooner will have an upper edge. Anyway, I am the Buzz admirer and hence I decided to share few cool Buzz tips with everyone, whether you are a Buzz fan or not these tips will be useful for you.

1. Find someone’s comments

Getting to know on what buzz posts your friends have commented allows you to take part in conversations that might interest you, or you might find something useful. You can even find the posts where you have commented for follow up. So lets see how to actually search for the buzz posts commented by someone. You need to use the special operator “commenter:” followed by the username, email or name of the user. Like for example if you know someone’s email address you can use commenter:username@gmail.com or just commenter:username. If you don’t know the uemail address then you can specify name too. Like if you want to search the posts where I have commented you can search for “commenter: Hameedullah Khan”

2. Filter Google Buzz

If you like me don’t want to see Buzz updates in your inbox and keep your inbox and Buzz separated you will definitely love this tip which I first read on LifeHacker. Just create a filter with “label:Buzz” and select “Skip Inbox”. For more detailed step by step tutorial read Hide/Remove Google Buzz Updates from Your Gmail Inbox on lifehacker.

3. Access amazing Buzz for Mobile from your PC

Buzz for mobile not only supports collapsing comments and Buzz but it also allows you to view Buzz updates from the nearby user. By viewing updates from nearby user the opportunities to connect with other people are endless. Try Buzz for mobile here.

4. Search Buzz from specific sources.

While searching Buzz you can specify source of the updates you want to see, for example if you want to see Buzz updates that are posted from Twitter only use “source:twitter” operation in your search query. You can prefix the source operator with hyphen to filter out the Buzz that were posted from Twitter, example: “-source:twitter”

5. Post your Buzz on Twitter

Post your Buzz updates to Twitter in real time, just follow the steps below to setup posting buzz updates to twitter.

1. Visit http://profiles.google.com/me, which will redirect to your profile
2. Copy your profile URL (e.g. “http://www.google.com/profiles/dclinton“)
3. Visit http://feedburner.google.com/ and sign in with your Gmail account
4. Paste your profile URL under Burn a feed right this instant
5. Click next and then click Skip directly to feed management
6. Click the Publicize tab on the top
7. Click the Socialize tab on the left
8. Click Add a Twitter Account
9. Sign in to Twitter and click Allow to allow Feedburner to post
10. Change Post Content to “Body Only” (important!)
11. Click Activate

reproduced from work shared by DeWitt Clinton

6. Follow Google Buzz team on Buzz

Follow the Google Buzz team, to stay updated on release of new Buzz features and tips and tricks from the Buzz team.

7. Bonus TIP: Follow me

You should follow me on Google Buzz, if you want to stay updated on Google Buzz developments and want to learn such new tricks every now and then.

What do you think about these tips? Are they useful? Do you have any tricks to share?

Google Buzz, the new social kid in town is very adorable and people are finding it useful. There was much of the hype created when Google first announced it that will go away and no one needs another social network. But looks like the Gmail users have proved this other wise. Not only they do use Google Buzz but they are also getting addicted to. Google Buzz which is still new and learning its way from user’s feedback to grown into a fully use social network.

No more Auto Follow

After the launch Google has announced second update to Google Buzz. The biggest cry of Buzz users was that their was an auto follow setup for them, as soon as they signed up for Buzz they used to see that they are already following few people from their contact list. I myself didn’t like this feature but thanks fully Google has listened to the feedback and have stopped Auto Follow. Now the new Buzz user gets to see a list of Suggested Contacts, which the user can review and make changes to the selection to the list of people the user will follow.

No more Auto Connected Sites

Until now if you had a Google Reader or Picasa account and you signed up for Buzz, Google automatically adds those two sites to your connected sites and hence share your public shares and photos on Buzz. But users don’t like most of the auto stuff and eventually Google has to stop this auto connect feature too. Now if you want to connect your reader you can do it, but it won’t be auto connected on signup.

The new Buzz Tab

The most important update in mew opinion is the new Buzz Tab under Gmail Settings. The first time I signed up I went to the settings page to see what configuration options are available for me but I was very disappointed to see no Buzz configuration options under Gmail Settings. But once again Google have responded to the Feedback and this time very quickly and have added Buzz Settings Tab under Gmail.

What’s next?

The new features are still not rolled out to everyone yet and will be rolled out this week. There are still many basic features missing in Google Buzz, but Google Buzz time seems to be working very hard to make every required feature available ASAP to make the Buzz experience more Buzzier. Have you signed up for Buzz yet? How was your experience? What are the new features you would like to see in Buzz?

Google Buzz is the new buzz out there, but it comes with its privacy flaw. Imagine everyone out there able to see your contacts, by simply visiting your Google Profile. Its a nightmare for many of us, I don’t want everyone to get to know about my contacts and I am sure you don’t want this either. Let me show you how can stop Google Buzz from displaying your contacts to everyone.

If you goto your Google profile, you will find out that anyone can see your contacts by clicking on the “People you are following” or “People following you” links.

To stop Google Buzz from display your contacts click on the “Edit Profile”.

Then uncheck the checkbox saying “Display the list of people I’m following and people following me”.

Then click “Save Changes” button at the bottom of the page. You should now see the links but with the text that only visible to you.

Congratulations you have just stopped Google Buzz from displaying your contacts to everyone. Do you think it was a privacy flaw? Or it was a feature of Google Buzz? Will you disable display of your contacts?

Have you been keeping post revisions for all your posts. You might have been storing post revisions for posts that you don’t touch anymore. There is no point storing post revisions if you are not making any changes to the post. Post revisions serve as a backup if you mistakenly change something in your post and then you have to revert back. But its very rare that you have something on posts older then 2-3 months. Also in my last post I showed how you can completely disable revisions, so if you had it enabled you might still have those old post revisions in your database.

Why should you delete post revisions?

• Clean up your database.
• So you don’t accidentally revert back to an old revision.
• Free up some space.
• To decrease the database overhead.

Delete revisions older then x days.

You have revisions enabled and just want to delete revisions on public posts older then x days, you should use revision delete! plugin. Revision delete! automatically deletes revisions on posts older then x days. Install the plugin and then configure it under Tools.

Delete redundant revisions.

Delete Revision is the revision manager that allows you to delete redundant revisions in bulks and hence reduces the load on database and makes your wordpress blog faster.

Delete all of them.

You have already disabled the revisions, now you just want to get rid of those old revision lurking in the database. So you can increase the performance of your blog. Access your data using your favorite client, and then select your blog database. After selecting the blog database run the following query and you are done.

DELETE FROM wp_posts WHERE post_type = "revision";

Conclusion

I am wondering how many other wordpress bloggers out there use revisions? So, have you used revisions? How do you manage? Have you disabled them altogether? Do you use a plugin to manage revisions? Have you ever reverted or had a need to revert to old post revision?

Stats, stats, stats!!! Every blogger love their stats, specially if the graph is moving up. You might already be using Google Analytics to track visitors on your blog. From where they are coming, what articles they are reading. But won’t it be great if you knew what user clicked on adsense ad? On what page a visitor clicked on adsense ad? How they came to your site? With the tracking information in front of you, you can optimize your web site for your visitors to increase conversions. I won’t be teaching Analytics here in detail, but if you have any issues or don’t understand anything you should ask.

To better integrate Google Analytics with your wordpress blog, I would recommend you use a plugin because adding tracking manually in your template is prone to errors and you might mess up your theme. I personally use Google Analytics for WordPress and you can get it from here.

Once you have installed Google Analytics for Wordpress, goto Google Analytics configuration page and enable “Track Adsense clicks“.

Save your settings and then login to your Google Analytics. We will be creating new Goal on Google Analytics, if you are wondering what is a Goal? it lets you track conversion rate. You can evaluate your traffic in terms of money and much more. When you are logged into your Google Analytics account, goto your Website Profiles and click Edit in front of your website profile.

Now you are on Profile Settings page and you should now be seeing a section Goals. By default there are 4 sets of Goals available for every profile and you can add upto 5 Goals in every set.

Click on “Add goal” to add new Goal. Once you are on Goal Setting page to add new Goal. Enter your Goal Name we will use “Adsense Clicks” for this example and select URL Destination as Goal Type.

As soon as you will select URL Destination as your Goal Type, the Goal Details panel will be shown. Enter “/outbound/asclick” as the Goal URL, you can also enter your optional Goal Value.

Click Save Goal and you will see the new Goal listed under Goals on your Profile settings.

From now on Google analytics will track your adsense clicks. You can track your conversion rates under Goals while viewing reports of your site.

This is how I have setup my adsense tracking, do you have suggestions to improve it? Do you know how else can those adsense clicks can be tracked?

Wordpress being most popular blogging platform has been used by hundreds of thousands of bloggers. As we all know that Wordpress is an Open Source software that is in continuous development. With every release numerous new features are added to the platform. Not every new feature is suitable for everyone and this is what is good about Wordpress. You can disable most if not all of the functionalities or features that does not suite you.

Post revisions is a feature that was added in Wordpress with version 2.6, it is useful for most of the bloggers. But suppose you have thousands of posts and you are hard core fan of Wordpress Post Editor so you only use it to edit posts. Wordpress saves copy of your posts while you edit them, by default its every 60 seconds. So suppose you create a new post and it took you 15 minutes to write it, there will be 15 revisions of the same post in your Wordpress database. By the time you reach 1000 posts the number of revisions will be 15000. Though revisions may be useful for some cases but not for everyone. Wordpress saves a revision of every post when ever you will make changes to it while in Drafts or after publishing.

Few drawbacks of Post Revisions are:

• Wastes space
• Makes db slower
• Makes editing slower

I am sure there will be more drawback. But for me it is enough that if I am not using or do not want a feature I can disable it. I am sure you will want to disable it too until there is an absolute need for it.

Lets see how we can disable the post revisions. After installing Wordpress open your wp-config.php in your favorite text editor and add the following line:
define('WP_POST_REVISIONS', false );

In case if you do not want to disable it but want to limit the number of post revisions you can change false to number of revisions you want to allow, e.g:
define('WP_POST_REVISIONS', 5);

Save the file and you are done.

Do you use post revisions? Do you know any other drawbacks of using post revisions?

Apple’s announcement of iPad has sadden the fans. There are plenty of die hard fans of Apple that are not happy with new Apple device. They think iPad just doesn’t stand upto Apple’s reputation. iPad that uses the same iPhone OS lack many features that are supposed to be in a tablet. But looks like Apple was in a hurry to get their Kindle killer in market they even didn’t bother to add very basic features to the OS. Yes the OS still lacks multitasking, I ain’t kidding you.

Not only that iPad lacks multitasking but other features which would have definitely made iPad a usable device. But one thing is sure, the version that Apple announced on Jan 27th is not a game changer, may be the next version will be. Below are the few things that I personally think iPad should have and without them its not worth it.

• First and foremost multitasking.
• Camera
• USB Support
• Headphone Jack
• Print

With out the above features iPad is nothing more then a bigger size defected iPhone which cannot make calls. Do you think iPad is not just bigger iPhone? If yes, then share some features that makes it different from iPhone. Why would someone on the earth will buy an iPhone then an iPad?

Versioning which does not exist in dictionary yet but have very valuable meaning to all the geeks. In case if you don’t know, versioning means storing every copy of your file or data, whenever it gets modified the previous version is archived with date and time of modification. Versioning simply allows you to go back in history of any file or any data. You need to know what it was 2 months ago, you can check that. You want to see how many times it has been modified since then you can see. So its very useful and in some cases (e.g software development) it is the only way to store data.

Now back to topic, Amazon has recently announced versioning support for Simple Storage Solution aka S3. The versioning support is still in beta and is only available to “us-west-1″ region. So if you need versioning for your bucket then you need to create it in “us-west-1″ region, this is because it is still in beta as Amazon is testing waters. If the users accept versioning and it works out they will surely be enabling it on all the regions.

It is not enabled by default, so you have to enable it for your bucket. Once enabled every object in your bucket will have it and from there on all the versions of the objects will be archived. Even if you mistakenly delete an object you can get it back. For more technical details see Amazon S3 Versioning Proposal.

It will not be wrong if I say everyone is going crazy about Apple announcement. The Apple event will start in few hours from now. But I am impressed by the craziness of Apple fans. Be it a top blogger Sobleizer from USA or a tech blogger from Pakistan, they all are excited about the event, they all are talking about it. The reason as always for the excitement is that Apple will be announcing something new. Most of the internet is full of leaked pictures of Apple Tablet. So, even if they weren’t planning to launch that Apple Table they will have to do it now because they just can’t disappoint there fans.

Scobleizer has even said, I will stand in that line again to get Apple Tablet the day it is available. He also shared his story that he and his son were the first ones in line of thousands of people who wanted to get iPhones.

People are so crazy about the Tablet that they have started running the contests. Guess the weight of the Apple Tablet and win iPod Touch. Mashable reports that Stand Alone Inc is working on the first game for Apple’s Table.

I am not an Apple fan, neither I am an Apple hater. I have always admired Apple’s hardware because in my opinion it is second to none. Lets see what Apple will be announcing after few hours, will it be a tablet? or a new iPhone OS? or an Apple-TV? or something really different? I am not that excited what ever it is and like Robert Scobleizer I won’t be buying what ever it is but definitely I am interested to know. What do you think it will be?

P.S: Picture from http://sciblogs.co.nz/

We all love new features, specially the features that makes using the service more easier. Facebook has always care about their users and it is that care that they have deployed a new feature few days ago. You can now reply to comments via email. Suppose you are on the road and away from computer and you got an email notifying that someone has made a comment. It doesn’t matter if they have commented on status update, on a link or a photo or video you uploaded. You can reply to every type of comments via email. Lets see how its done.

I wrote “Happy Birthday!!” on one of my friends wall.

He commented on the wall post thanking me and I got the email notifying that my friend has commented on the wall post.

Now you don’t have to do much, just hit the reply button of your email client and compose your reply.

Hit send and you are done.

This is a really great feature from Facebook. It will make replying to comments a lot easier. What you think about this new feature? Will it make replying to comments easier for you?