More than a month ago, I wrote a post about how you can look up links sent on your Twitter account using ReadTwit with Google Reader. Today I want to share with you about how to convert Twitter Lists into RSS feeds. It will make life a lot easier by allowing you to access webpages with links posted on Twitter.

I think following a Twitter List in RSS is a lot more helpful than having all links show up. This way I can narrow down the information coming in especially if you are following 100s of accounts.

How to get RSS feed of a Twitter list?

• The RSS feed can be generated at the Twiterlist2rss Appspot page. The page is pretty self explanatory and you need to type in URL of the Twitter list. Here I used Twitter list of all the blogs we have at rtBlogs.

• Then click on ‘Get an RSS Feed‘ and it will create a URL for RSS feed of your Twitter List.
• If you want to read this feed with Google Reader, just click on ‘Add a Subscription‘ while on Google Reader and paste the URL of the RSS feed from Twitter list into it.

• You are set and ready to read links from Twitter List in RSS with Google Reader.

If you are on Twitter follow Devils Workshop @devils_workshop and you can follow me @bombaypirate. The List that I took as an example has feeds from all blogs on rtBlogs network. You can follow the list @bombaypirate/rtblogs.

Link: Twiterlist2rss Appspot

Related posts:

• Bulk following starts with Twitter Lists
• Convert your Mails into RSS Feeds
• Taming the RSS Beast – Getting Best of your favorite feeds!

I came across Script Converter which is in Google Labs with Google’s Indian domain. This looked like a great way to write using English alphabets phonetically as if writing the Indian origin language and it would convert the script. Script Converter does not translate pages and is not useful to translate websites or documents. What it does is converts the script retaining the phonetic context rather than keeping is contextual in meaning.

Script Converter supports Bengali, English, Gujarati, Hindi, Marathi, Nepali, Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil and Telugu. It can convert anything written in HTML. But Script Converter cannot convert text which is not HTML, for example text written with Java Script cannot be converted.

How Script Converter is useful?

• It is very useful to write a text in a different language using the English Keyboard by using phonetics. For instance to write a Hindi word you have to spell it out in English and then click on convert with the selected language and you get the word in Hindi. This is great to insert sentences in Indian languages in your messages or texts.
• The other useful application of Script Converter is that it is perfect for someone who might know how to speak the language but not necessarily adept at reading that language in its original script. For instance I am very fluent in Marathi when it comes to speaking but I am not very comfortable reading Marathi script as I have not read much of it since school. Script Converter can really help here if I came across a website with content in Marathi. I could change it to English in phonetic terms and continue reading the content.
• This is something that is quite unique with India, as most people can speak more languages than just English and might want to access information in that language but find it difficult to read the script.

This is an web application which is still in labs and hence being tested. I did not come across many instances of mistakes and seems to be quite accurate when it converts scripts from one language to another. Go ahead visit Script Converter and try it out, let me know in comments your opinions.

Related posts:

• Gmails New Feature – Compose Emails in Indian Languages
• LangID: Identify an Unknown Language for Free!
• Convert PDF files to DOC,HTML and TXT format easily

Contact Form is must for every blog in order to provide a platform for the users to interact with the owner of the blog. In  WordPress one can use Contact Form 7 Plugin and can place them in the menu bar or can embed in the posts wherever necessary by installing this plugin, where as for blogger blogs there were no tailor made plugins to insert contact form/pages. One has to edit the Html or create their own custom code to do this.

Here are the best available options for a Blogger Blog to insert Contact Form:

FormSpring – Forms can be added easily by editing HTML.

Features:

• Smart Routing
• Spam Protection
• Website Integration
• Easy Form Builder
• Custom Confirmation Emails

123 Contact Form – You can integrate the code easily by  placing the link, No programming or HTML knowledge is required to use this. Adding email forms, web forms, polls and other types of html forms to your website is very easy.

Kontactr – You have to place the  JavaScript into your Blogger post. It is Clean and Simple, It uses CAPTCHA Protection hence forth it is secured and it is highly customizable and the best of all is it free.

My Contact Form -  Using MyContactForm is as simple as 1 2 3,  After Creating the contact form, Click on “Get HTML” to get code and paste blogger post in HTML mode. That’s it you are done.

Pow Page Contact Us -You can create or place a text link either in the menu or sidebar to click on to go to form.

EmailMe Form – You’ll find a code to add a link that points to the contact form generated, or click on “Get the HTML Code” and get the code to insert directly into your site. It is secure and works with any platform.. You can use it for your  Wordpress blogs too.

If you too like to write for Devils Workshop, please check this. Details about our revenue sharing programsare here.]

Related posts:

• Creating Spam-Free Contact Page in Minutes [Wordpress Plugin]
• Blogger + Adsense Hack: Show ads after each post to earn more from your blogger beta blog!
• Using IF ELSE in Blogger Blog

This is a quick post to announce winner of Blogger of The Month contest for October 2009.

“Blogger of The Month” for October 2009

In October 2009, 54 posts were published by guest authors out of a total of 82 posts.

24 posts which are close to half of all the guest posts were written by guest author Sauravjit Singh.

Clearly Sauravjit has made the first hat-trick of winning Blogger of the Month contest.

Everyone at rtBlogs network team congratulate him for winning the contest yet again and thank him for his extraneous efforts on Facebooknol.

Below is the breakdown of the posts published by guest authors in October 2009.

Just another point, Blogger of the Month Contest is held for all guest authors across all blogs on rtBlogs network. So feel free to contribute to any one of them, they all count for Blogger of the Month.

Keep reading, Keep writing

Related posts:

• [Result] Blogger of The Month – August 2009
• [Result] Blogger of The Month – July 2009
• “Blogger Of The Month” for September 2009

Here comes Monday and it starts a new week for us here at rtBlogs. The previous week has been quite a busy week with the launch of our new blog WpVeda. Also a post I have written at DW got referred by a reputed tech blog website called Computer World.

WpVeda: A new blog about Wordpress

WpVeda is our new blog on rtBlogs network and dedicated to Wordpress. Why wordpress you might ask? But this is a blog which will not cover daily news about Wordpress instead will be a playground for ideas and projects around Wordpress.

The concept of WpVeda germinated with an idea to have an internal wiki for rtCamp employees. We felt later that giving our developers a public forum to showcase their talents would be more inspiring and hence now we have WpVeda.

Pleasant Surprise

At the cost of looking like I am blowing my own trumpet I must share with you that Deepak Jain last week noticed that a post I wrote on DW about Microsoft Security Essentials was featured with credits in the popular tech blog Computer World. It was shared as a part of various views on Security Essentials by Richi Jennings a independent consultant who writes for Computer World.

Top Posts

We did not get a many posts from our guest authors for DW last week, so in this section I have included a couple of posts from WpVeda which you might find interesting along with a post of mine which has got most comments over the last week.

• Buddy Press media Component by Rahul Bansal at WpVeda
• Support for Kaltura CE is added BuddyPress Media Plugin by Rahul Bansal at WpVeda
• Is Internet Explorer’s fate tied to Windows 7 by Aditya Kane (that’s me) at DW

Follow DW on Facebook and Twitter

Related posts:

• Monday Morning Blues
• Monday Morning Blues [Oct 26]
• Monday Morning Blues [2nd Nov 09]

The latest ace up Twitter’s sleeve will be a project that will reduce irrelevancy on trends. Trends seem to be a great way to follow news items or current events on Twitter. But now a days the moment a trend is up on Twitter it gets inundated with many spam and unrelated tweets which are trying to desperately switch your attention somewhere else.

With the recent add-ons like Lists and Retweet, clearing up the junk in Trending topics just might make Twitter the preferred website to follow events online.

Twitter Trends and problems with relevancy

• Trends are a way for users to promote information. I was looking for the cricket score and following #cricket and I found that almost 1 in every 4th tweet there was irrelevant.
• The reason irrelevancy comes into the picture is not always because of spammers but it also happens inadvertently. Sometimes people end up discussing something unrelated when on that particular trend because of the open nature of Twitter.
• Twitter has promised that it will devise a way to make trending topics more relevant and cut down the tweets from spammers.

What Twitter might do?

I had discussed Bing Twitter in a past article which is a feature with the search engine Bing that allowed search users to look up relevant Tweets about a particular topic. I think Twitter will take search engine results and other ways Tweets are looked up online to rank them within a trend for relevancy. I think all of this will take place behind the scenes as Twitter did announce in its blog that the results of Twitter trends becoming more relevant won’t be seen immediately but see over time gradually.

Follow me on Twitter: @bombaypirate

Follow DW on Twitter: @Devils_Workshop

Related posts:

• BingTweets: Fusing Twitter Trends with Bing Insights
• Trendy!Bing = Google Trends + Bings Results
• Search Twitter with Bing

Friend Connect is quite a potent way for website owners and bloggers to become micro-sensitive to visitors. There are many new changes with this service and it allows for a greater amount of information to be shared in the form of interests and hence allowing visitors to find relevant people and websites online.

How will Friend Connect help?

Friend Connect will allow visitors on a website to share information through member gadgets and can have relevant ads from Google Adsense using information taken with the various interactive web gadgets. For example if you put up Nokia as your favorite mobile maker while on a mobile review website, Friend Connect will get you relevant Nokia ads with Google Adsense.

This can be quite handy as it will actually increase the chances of someone clicking on the ads being displayed on the website. This may not be very handy for big websites as the assumption with Friend Connect is that all your visitors might have a Google account especially for certain features but it is very handy for bloggers as it is mainly an interactive tool to help make the content on your website sensitive to what visitors are interested in.

What is Friend Connect?

• Friend Connect has a lot of new gadgets you can add-on to build a community for your blog. It allows you to send newsletters, gather users’ interests and review data.
• It allows you to exchange messages on the website via poll gadgets or interests’ section can be included on to a website using HTML code which is generated by Friend Connect.
• A neat way to get feedback about your blog with Friend Connect is their Ratings and comments web-gadgets which can be great way to get instant feedback on the content of a website.

Links: Adsense Blog

Related posts:

• Google Friend Connect Now Speaks 48 Languages
• Google Friend Connect – Make Any Website Social
• Checking Adsense Revenue without Logging into Adsense Site [How-to]

Blogspot.com is a website from which we can start (or can think) to start a blog . But you must have noticed an ugly Nav-Bar given by Blogspot which shows links to a random next blogs. Actually Google wants to have links at the top of the page just like the new Orkut.

I am going to tell you a simple trick to remove this Nav Bar .

FOLLOWING ARE THE STEPS

1. Just go & login into your blogspot (or you can say blogger) account.
2. Then Click on Layout of your desired Blog  from the dashboard.
3. Now when the page opens Click on “Edit HTML” from the above navbar.
4. When the page loads, find the <head> tag inside the box under the heading EDIT template.
5. Inside that find the CSS paste the following code inside the box :  #navbar {display:none !important;}without any modifications.
6. Save the template and you are done.

Now go to your blog & have fun.

If you too like to write for Devils Workshop, please check this. Details about our revenue sharing programsare here.]

Related posts:

• Page Navigation Hack for Blogger (Blogspot)
• 5 Best Blogspot Blogger Hacks Everyone Should Use!
• Related Post Solution For Blogspot Blogger

Google has often said that it plans to be the one stop shop for organizing all information that is online. But if you have 10 different and not necessarily interlinked services and products it can end up being unstructured. This is where Google Dashboard comes into the picture and becomes a central nervous system for everything you might have on Google.

The idea of Google Dashboard is quite simple. Imagine that you have settings of Google Docs, Gmail, Google Chat, Blogger, Orkut, Google Talk and You Tube on one single page. That page is Google Dashboard. It is a single service which helps to set and access data for most of their services.

Google Dashboard

• Many people have expressed concern at all the data Google has as they use various services at various times and lose track of it.
• Dashboard is built with an aim to let users keep track of what exactly they store on Google.
• Google claims and I think correctly to be the only company to offer such a service.

I don’t see the average user on Google who uses Gmail or Google Search to find Google Dashboard all that interesting, but it can be a handy tool for webmasters around the world who are using Google Apps and services like Adsense and Analytics.

Below is a video presentation about Google Dashboard from their blog.

Link: Google Blog

Related posts:

• Google added Invisible mode to Gmail Chat [Google Talk]
• New in Gmail Labs: Covert Google Mails into Google Docs
• Google Manual for 21 Google Services: Adwords, Gmail, News, etc

Retweet is fast becoming a favorite feature amongst Twitter users to spread the word and has been incorporated into many Twitter apps. To Retweet from the Twitter website you still have to copy-paste the message with ‘RT’ at the beginning. That is about to change with Twitter announcing that it will soon roll out Retweet function on its website.

This could be ominous as a lot of casual users of Twitter probably use a desktop application only so they could easily organize the accounts they follow and also Retweet their favorite tweets. With Lists and Retweet functions Twitter might actually hurt twitter based desktop applications out there. Finally it also might help a lot of new users on Twitter to be not too confused. A familiar first Tweet for someone new on Twitter is often  ’Figuring out how Twitter works’

What to expect from retweet?

• It is clear from a previous thinking out aloud exercise by Twitter is that it will have some sort of visual feature to show up the Retweets.
• One way is when you moved the mouse over the Retweet it will show up more details the another approach could be a separate list where you can access all Retweets. I cannot confirm this as my Twitter account is not amongst the privileged ones Twitter is testing this functionality on.
• Another interesting feature which does not exist upto now is removing Retweet. Almost certainly there will be an option to remove a Retweet that you have made. The reason mainly could be a way to allow people to curb the spread of rumors on Twitter which has been happening a lot recently.

Follow on Twitter @bombaypirate @Devils Workshop

Image Credit: The WWW Blog

Related posts:

• Twitter testing a new feature called Twitter List.
• Add tweetmeme/ Retweet button in your blogger blog
• Twitter wants to cut down irrelevancy on trends