Save to Google

It looks the Google Save site is not restricted to bookmarking image search results. The "Save to Google" Chrome extension lets you save any web pages and add tags. "One spot for webpages and Images: Your saved webpages and saved images from Google Image Search will live together at google.com/save," mentions Google.

In fact, the saving feature from Google Image Search actually bookmarks the web page that includes the image and automatically selects the image you are saving to display it next to the site's name. The Chrome extension lets you save any web page and you can pick an image from that page.

If Google wants to create a general-purpose bookmarking site, then it could also integrate with Google Web Search and sync with Chrome bookmarks.

{ Thanks, Carlos. }

The Best Twitter Search Tricks

The Twitter Archiver and Twitter Bots app fire each time a new tweet is found that match your search query. You can write simple search queries (like #Oscars) or more complex query (like obama min_retweets:10 filter:news) that uses one or more Twitter search operators.

How to Search Twitter Like a Pro

Here’s a complete list of Twitter search operators that can help you perform more accurate searches on Twitter:

from:BarackObama
All tweets sent by a particular Twitter user

to:BarackObama -filter:links
Tweets sent to @BarackObama but not containing any links

elections list:TIME/time-staff
Search for tweets from users who belong to a particular Twitter list

youtube.com min_faves:100
Tweets containing YouTube videos that are favorited by at least 100 users

earthquake min_retweets:10
Tweets that have been retweeted at least 10 times

iPhone near:NY within:10mi
Tweets sent by users within the 10 mile radius of New York containing iPhone

#foodrecipe lang:en
Tweets sent in particular language (en = English)

iPhone Reviews since:2016-04-01 until:2016-04-09
Tweets sent in a particular time range (may not work with Twitter APIs)

YouTube good OR amazing OR awesome filter:links
Tweets containing YouTube videos that are described as awesome or amazing

#Emmys filter:images
Show tweets for a particular hashtag but containing images

Barack Obama filter:news
Show only tweets that mention a keyword and contain links to news websites

from:john to:peter -RT
Tweets from user @John that @mention user @Peter but exclude Retweets

family games filter:safe
Filter tweets containing adult or potentially sensitive content

tornado filter:media
Show tornado tweets containing images or videos

music concert filter:native_video
Show tweets that contain native video (uploaded inside tweet)

How to Find the Most Popular Tweets

The engagement filter inside Tweetdeck surfaces the best tweets and removes the noise from Twitter search results but the most surprising part is that Twitter has not made this filter available outside Tweetdeck. You don’t even have it inside the official Twitter app.

Well, here’s the trick. You can actually filter tweets by engagement level on the Twitter website or inside any Twitter app using an undocumented search operator that Twitter doesn’t want us to know about.

Go to the Twitter search box, type any search term and append the operator min_retweets:[number] or min_faves:[number] to filter your search results. For instance, here’s a sample search that will only shows tweets pointing to the labnol.org domain that have been favorited or retweeted at least 5 times.

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The story, The Best Twitter Search Tricks, was originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal on 10/04/2016 under Twitter, Internet.

How to Schedule Email Messages in Gmail with a Google Sheet

Have you ever wanted to write an email message in Gmail now but send it later? Maybe you are sending birthday wishes and would like to delay the delivery of the email message until the actual day. Or you have written an email but would like to schedule delivery in the recipient’s time zone when the message is more likely to get read.

Microsoft Outlook has a built-in email scheduler but you do not have a ‘native’ option to delay the delivery of email messages inside Gmail. That’s where Gmail Scheduler can help. It is an add-on for Google Spreadsheets that will not only help you schedule email messages inside Gmail but you can also send recurring email. For instance, if you would like to send an email reminder to your tenant on the last Friday of every month, you can do it with the scheduler easily.

Unlike extensions like Boomerang or Sidekick that are browser specific, Gmail Scheduler is available inside Google Sheets and thus works across all desktop browsers. The scheduler, written with Google Scripts, runs on Google servers and will automatically deliver the message at the time chosen by you even if the computer is switched off.

Schedule Emails in Gmail and Send Later

It take few easy steps to schedule email messages with the Gmail Scheduler. The basic idea is that you compose all the emails that you would like to be delivered later in Gmail, let them stay as drafts and then specify the exact delivery date and time for these messages in the Google sheet.

Watch the video tutorial (download) to get started.

How to Setup Gmail Scheduler

1. Go to Gmail and compose a couple of email messages. After you are done writing the emails, do not hit the Send button but let the messages stay in drafts.
2. Go to labnol.org/scheduler and install the Email Scheduler for Gmail inside your Google Spreadsheets.
3. After the add-on is installed, allow the add-on to access your Gmail and other Google Apps services. This is a one-time authorization and is necessary since all the emails will go out from your own Gmail account.
4. Inside the Google Sheet, go to Add-ons -> Email Scheduler -> Configure to launch the Email Scheduler.
5. You’ll see a list of Gmail drafts in the dropdown. Select a message, click the Schedule button and follow the wizard to schedule that message. Simple.

Your draft messages can have rich formatting, you can add attachments, signatures and even inline images. Make sure that you have included the recipient’s email address(es) in the TO/CC/BCC fields of the drafts.

The email are scheduled in the timezone of your browser. Also, the emails will be sent within +/- 15 minutes of the specified time. If you have multiple emails, you can also choose a different Gmail alias as the FROM address.

Email Scheduler for Gmail – Premium Features

The Gmail Scheduler is available in free and premium editions.

Features	Free	Premium
Support Gmail & Google Apps accounts	Yes	Yes
Emails messages you can schedule at once	5	No limit
Schedule Recurring Emails	No	Yes
Track Email Opens	No	Yes
Duplicate Gmail Drafts	No	Yes
Send emails from another email alias	Yes	Yes
Technical Support	None	Email
	Gmail Scheduler Premium

The premium edition lets you schedule more emails, send repetitive emails that are sent on a recurring schedule (hourly, daily, weekly, monthly or yearly), track email opens and you can are also entitled to technical support.

The daily email sending limit is based on the type of your Google account. Gmail users can send up to 100 email recipients per day while Google Apps for Work customers can email 1500 recipients per day. Check Email Quota.

If you have trouble using the Gmail Scheduler add-on, please ensure that Gmail & Drive SDK are enabled for your Google domain.

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The story, How to Schedule Email Messages in Gmail with a Google Sheet, was originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal on 10/04/2016 under GMail, Internet.

How to Write a Twitter Bot in 5 Minutes

Twitter Bots can do interesting things. You can tweet questions like “how many calories are in diet coke” to @DearAssistant and the Twitter bot, like Google Now or Apple Siri, will reply with the answer. The @HundredZeros bot tweets links to eBooks that are free on Amazon. Another Twitter bot @WhatTheFare will tell you the Uber fare between two locations.

A bot is a program that runs in the background and, when it encounters a command, it performs some action. For instance, you can have a grammar bot that looks for tweets containing misspellings and tweet the correct spelling.

A bot can automatically favorite or retweet tweets that match certain criteria. It can follow Twitter user who have tweeted a particular phrase. A brand may build an auto-reply bot that automatically responds when the brand gets a @mention on Twitter. You may have a bot that auto-sends a DM (direct message) to users who follow you on Twitter.

Writing a Twitter bot is easy and you can get one up and running in 5 minutes. Our Twitter bots run on Google servers and you don’t need any coding skills to create the bot. The bots are internally written using Google Scripts.

How to Create your own Twitter Bot

The basic idea behind bots is simple. You specify a search phrase and choose an action. The bot will find all tweets that match the search phrase and perform the associated action on those tweets.

Step A: Make an App for the Twitter Bot

1. Create a new account at Twitter that will work as a bot. Then go to apps.twitter.com, sign-in with your new Twitter account and create a Twitter app. Give your app a name, description and put any URL in the website field. Agree to the developer terms and submit the form.
2. Once the Twitter app has been created, click Modify App Permissions under Application Settings and change the access level to Read, Write and Access Direct Messages.
3. Next switch to the Keys and Access Tokens tab and click the Create my Access Token button. Twitter will generate the Consumer Keys and Access tokens that we will need in a next step.

Step B: Configure your Twitter bots

1. Go to labnol.org/bot to open the Twitter bots application. You may have to authorize the bot once.
2. Edit the values of Twitter Consumer Key, Consumer Secret, Access Token and Access Secret that were generated in the previous step.
3. Next you need to specify the search phrase for the bots. The app will find all new tweets that match this search phrase and process them all, one at a time. If you have the premium version, you can create up to 5 bots in one go.
4. Click the Create to initialize the Twitter bot. That’s it. The bots are now initialized and they’ll auto-run in the background.

Twitter Bots Video Tutorial

Please watch the Twitter Bots Video Tutorial (download) for a more detailed getting started guide. It is important to note that Twitter TOS discourages automation so you may want to test the waters with a test Twitter account.

You can use Twitter search operators to find more specific tweets for processing through bots. For instance, use min_faves or min_retweets operator to filter out spammy tweets from search results. Here are some area where bots are handy:

• If you are changing your Twitter username, set an auto-DM bot for the old account so followers can know about your new screen name.
• If you are offline during specific hours, setup out of office replies so people can expect a delayed response.
• Follow users or add them to a Twitter list who tweet on particular topics.

Twitter Bots – Unlock Premium Features

The Twitter bot is available in free and premium editions. The latter includes more features and you are entitled to technical support for 3 months.

Features	Free	Premium
Favorite Tweets	Yes	Yes
Retweet Tweets	Yes	Yes
Auto-Reply to Tweets	Yes	Yes
Emoji Support	Yes	Yes
Run bot at specific time	Yes	Yes
Follow Users	No	Yes
Add Users to Twitter List	No	Yes
DM New Followers	No	Yes
Reply via DMs (to users who allow)	No	Yes
How often do the bots run?	Once per hour	Every 15 minutes
How many Twitter bots can be created?	One	Five
Support options	None	Email
	Buy Premium Edition

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The story, How to Write a Twitter Bot in 5 Minutes, was originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal on 09/04/2016 under Twitter, Internet.

Google Animal Sounds

Google has a special card for animal sounds. Search for [cat sound], [what sound does a zebra make], [animal sounds] and you can actually play the sound directly from the search page.

This works for a lot of animals: tiger, lion, elephant, zebra, ape, sheep, duck, rooster, turkey, owl, cat, pig, cow, dog, moose, raccoon, horse, humpback whale, bowhead whale.

{via Mashable}

Thumbnails Next to Google's Results for Similar Pages

If you click the small arrow next to the URL of a search result in the desktop Google interface, you'll usually see 2 menu items: "cached" and "similar". The second option lets you find related pages and it's rarely used.

It looks like Google now shows thumbnails next to the search results if the query includes the related: operator. Here's an example for [related:https://avocado.io avocado], a query automatically triggered by the "similar" link.

Save Images in Desktop Google Search

Last year, Google added a feature that allowed you to save image search results and organize them using tags. This feature was only available in the mobile interface, but now you can use it on the desktop too. Just click the "save" button next to an image search result and then click "view saved" to go to google.com/save and manage your saved images.

"This feature is currently available in the US when you search for images on desktop and in your mobile browser. To try it out, make sure you're logged into your browser with your Google Account; then you can start image searching and saving," informs Google.

The site mentions that the "website links you save using the Save to Google extension for Chrome can also be found here," but I couldn't find this extension. There's a Save to Google Drive extension, but it only saves images and screenshots to Google Drive.

Google April Fools' Day 2016

April Fools' Day is an important day for Google because there are a lot of hoaxes and crazy features to show.

Google Japan announced a Physical Flick Bluetooth keyboard (translation). It's called Furikku and the circuit board and firmware are open source. The keyboard is actually the hardware version of Google's Japanese input software for Android.

"The device consists of a button that users can ‘push’ and also a sensor that detects ‘flick’ actions. There are 12 sensors and 8 complementary action buttons so a total of 20 sensors in the device. This device can be employed by users who are accustomed to typing letters on their smartphones, but not on their desktop keyboards," mentions Google.

TO BE CONTINUED...

Google Knowledge Graph Cards Add Share Button

Google's Knowledge Graph cards added a button that lets you share the search results pages on Facebook, Twitter, Google+ or by sending an email. You're actually sending a link to the entire search page, not just to the card.

Knowledge Graph cards include a lot of useful information extracted from various web pages and other resources: images, official homepage, social network pages, Wikipedia descriptions, useful facts, events, quotes and more.

Google's Blogs Move to a Custom Domain

Last week, John Mueller announced that Google is moving all of its blogs to a custom domain: googleblog.com. For example, Gmail's blog has a new URL: gmail.googleblog.com, which replaces gmailblog.blogspot.com.

"Google is moving its blogs to a new domain to help people recognize when they're reading an official blog from Google. These changes will roll out to all of Google's blogs over time. The previous address will redirect to the new domain, so your bookmarks and links will continue to work."

A long time ago, many people thought that this is an official Google blog and I had to keep explaining that the blog is not affiliated with Google. I added more and more disclaimers, but that's still not enough for everyone. Now that Google's blogs move from blogspot.com to googleblog.com, it's much easier to tell things apart.

Smart Reply in Desktop Google Inbox

If you're getting a lot of emails and you're tired of writing replies, Google's Inbox service has a feature that suggests 3 short replies. It was first added to the Inbox mobile apps and now it's available in the desktop site. Apparently, 10% of all the replies on mobile already use Smart Reply.

Smart Reply uses machine learning to figure out if a short reply is appropriate and then predicts likely responses. "The Smart Reply System is built on a pair of recurrent neural networks, one used to encode the incoming email and one to predict possible responses. The encoding network consumes the words of the incoming email one at a time, and produces a vector (a list of numbers). The second network starts from this thought vector and synthesizes a grammatically correct reply one word at a time, like it's typing it out. Amazingly, the detailed operation of each network is entirely learned, just by training the model to predict likely responses."

{ Thanks, Jonah Langlieb. }

Metronome Card in Google Search

Google shows a special card when you search for [metronome]. The default beat rate is 120 BPM, but you can change the value from 40 to 208 BPM by pressing the "+" and "-" buttons. Google plays a sound, shows an animation and changes the color of the UI, depending on the selected value.

According to Wikipedia, "a metronome is any device that produces regular, metrical ticks (beats, clicks) — settable in beats per minute. (...) The metronome is used by musicians to help keep a steady tempo as they play, or to work on issues of irregular timing, or to help internalize a clear sense of timing and tempo."

{ Thanks, Mukil Elango. }

How to Track Google Spreadsheet Views with Google Analytics

You have been using Google Analytics to track visitors (or page views) on your website but did you know that the same analytics service can also be used for tracking views inside Google Spreadsheets. You insert a little snippet of tracking code inside your spreadsheet and when someone opens the sheet, that visit will be recorded permanently in your Google Analytics account.

Google Analytics provides a JavaScript snippet that can be inserted into web templates for tracking visits. You cannot insert JavaScript inside the cells of a Google Spreadsheet but we can use the IMAGE function combined with some Apps Script to enable tracking inside spreadsheet. The visit is recorded as an “event” and not a “page view” and thus your spreadsheet opens will not artificially inflate your Google Analytics reports.

To get started, go to your Google Analytics dashboard and make a note of the Google Analytics tracking ID which is a string like UA-12345-67. This web tutorial explains how you can locate the ID inside your Analytics dashboard.

Now open any Google Spreadsheet that you wish to track and go to Tools, Script Editor and copy-paste the following code. This is a custom Google Spreadsheet function that will embed the 1×1 tracking GIF image in our spreadsheets.

/**
 * Track Spreadsheet views with Google Analytics
 *
 * @param {string} gaaccount Google Analytics Account like UA-1234-56.
 * @param {string} spreadsheet Name of the Google Spreadsheet.
 * @param {string} sheetname Name of individual Google Sheet.
 * @return The 1x1 tracking GIF image
 * @customfunction
 */

function GOOGLEANALYTICS(gaaccount, spreadsheet, sheetname) {
  
  /** 
  * Written by Amit Agarwal 
  * Web: www.ctrlq.org 
  * Email: amit@labnol.org 
  */
  
  var imageURL = [
    "http://ift.tt/1jZhjuD",
    "&tid=" + gaaccount,
    "&cid=" + Utilities.getUuid(),
    "&z="   + Math.round(Date.now() / 1000).toString(),
    "&ec="  + encodeURIComponent("Google Spreadsheets"),
    "&ea="  + encodeURIComponent(spreadsheet || "Spreadsheet"),
    "&el="  + encodeURIComponent(sheetname || "Sheet")
  ].join("");
  
  return imageURL;

}

Save the code, close the Apps Script editor window and return to the spreadsheet.

Click an empty cell and insert the following formula. The cell will be blank but it contains an embedded image. You may want to change the background color so it is easy to figure out which cell in the spreadsheet contains the tracking formula.

The GOOGLEANALYTICS() formula takes 3 parameters – the analytics ID, the spreadsheet name and the sheet name. This helps if you would like to separately track individual sheets inside a spreadsheet.

Now open the spreadsheet in a new browser window and go to Google Analytics, Real Time, Overview to test if the tracking is working. It may sometimes take a minute to record the visit. If you would like to see all the visits, go to Behavior – Events – Overview and click on the Google Spreadsheets category.

Also see: Track Gmail Messages with Google Analytics

The tracking would work even if the user has enabled ad blocking and that’s because Google Spreadsheets, like Gmail, serves images through a proxy server. The downside is that you will never know the location of the visitor since all visits will be show up as United States (the location of Google servers).

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The story, How to Track Google Spreadsheet Views with Google Analytics, was originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal on 09/03/2016 under Google Analytics, Google Docs, Internet.

How to Make eBooks with Google Docs

Adobe PDF may be the most popular document format on the web but there’s a reason why eBook lovers prefer the ePub format over PDF. PDF documents have a static layout with fixed page breaks but the layout of an ePUB document is “responsive” meaning it will automatically adjust for different screen sizes.

You can read an ePub book on your desktop or inside the Google Play Books app on your Android phone and they’ll look good. Also, since ePub files are essentially HTML5 documents under the hood, the text size and font family can be easily adjusted for an improved reading experience.

How to Create your ePUB eBooks

Adobe Stanza and Calibre are popular desktop software for  creating ePub ebooks but now can now easily make one in the browser using Google Docs itself. Just write a document in Google Document, or upload an existing Microsoft Word file to your Google Drive, go to File menu and choose download as EPUB publication.

Here’s an ePUB version of this article, generated with Google Docs.

You get an ePub file that you can copy to your mobile phone or, better still, upload the ePub to the Google Books website and access the ebook from anywhere. You can even read it in the browser. To upload an eBook to Google Books, go here and click the Upload Files button. The files are only visible to you.

ePub files are readable on iPad, Nook and Google Play books. Amazon Kindle doesn’t support the ePub format but there’s an easy way to convert ePub into MOBI format that is supported by Kindle.

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The story, How to Make eBooks with Google Docs, was originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal on 08/03/2016 under Convert, Epub, Google Docs, Internet.

How to Make Org Charts with Google Sheets

Do you need a quick organization chart to show the hierarchy of employees in your business? Well, just open a blank Google Spreadsheet, put the employee names in a column and your org charge should be ready in minutes. Here’s a sample org chart created with nothing but Google Sheets.

Create Organizational Charts with Google Spreadsheets

Here’s how you can put together an org chart in Google Sheets. It will be a live chart meaning as you update the employee names or hierarchy in the spreadsheet, the org chart would update itself. Let’s get started.

Step 1. Open a Google Sheet and put the employee names in column A and the names of the immediate managers in Column B.

Step 2. Select the cells that you’ve just entered and choose Chart from the Insert menu in the spreadsheet.

Step 3. The Chart Editor will open inside Google Sheets. Switch to the Chart Types tab and uncheck the option that says “Aggregate Column A.” Then scroll down the list of available chart types, choose “Organizational Chart” and click Insert to add the chart into your spreadsheet.

Unlike flowcharting tools like Visio, you don’t have enough formatting options for org charts in Google Sheets except for changing the background and fill colors of various nodes in the chart. And if you hit the little drop-down arrow in the chart box, you’ll see an option to download the charge as a PNG image for embedding on other websites.

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The story, How to Make Org Charts with Google Sheets, was originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal on 22/02/2016 under Charts, Google Docs, Internet.

How to Use Github for Hosting Files

Github, in simple English, is a website for hosting source code. The site is built for programmers and, if you are not one, it is highly unlikely that you have ever used Github. Repositories and Forks, the basic building blocks of Github, may seem like second-nature to developers but, for everyone else, Github continues to be a complicated beast.

Github isn’t just a place for developers though. The site can be used a writing platform. It can host HTML websites. You can use Github to visually compare the content of two text files. The site’s Gist service can used for anonymous publishing and as a tasklist. There’re so many things do on Github already and you can how use it as a free file hosting service as well.

How to Host Files on Github

It takes few easy steps to turn your Github into a file repository. You can upload files from the browser and you can add collaborators so they can also upload files to a common repository (similar to shared folders in Google Drive). The files are public so anyone can download them with a direct link. The one limitation is that the individual files cannot be larger than 25 MB each. There are no known bandwidth limits though.

Step 1: Go to github.com and sign-up for a free account, if you don’t have one. Choose the free plan as that’s all we need for hosting our files.

Step 2: Click the “New Repository” button, or go to github.com/new, to create a new repository for hosting your files. You can think of a repository as a folder on your computer.

Step 3: Give your repository a name and a description and click the Create button. It helps to have a description as it will help others discover your files on the web. You can have Private repositories too but that requires a monthly subscription.

Step 4: Your repository will initially be empty. click the Import Code button on the next screen to initialize the repository.

Step 5: Paste the URL http://ift.tt/1OpAlq3 into the repository field and click Begin Import to create your Github repository for hosting files.

Upload Files to Github

Your Github repository is now ready. Click the Upload Files files button and begin uploading files. You can drag one or more files from the desktop and then click Commit Changes to publish the files on the web. Github will accept any file as long as the size is within the 25 MB limit.

Github has a built-in previewer for PDF, text and image files (including animated GIFs) so anyone can view them without downloading the actual file. Else there’s a simple URL hack to get the raw (downloadable) version of any file hosted on Github.

Direct URLs for Github Files

After the file has been uploaded to Github, click the filename in the list and you’ll get the file’s URL in the browser’s address. Append ?raw=true to the URL and you get a downloadable / embeddable version.

For instance, if the file URL is http://ift.tt/1OpAn0V, the direct link to the same file would be http://ift.tt/1KDmLEG. If the uploaded file is an image, you can even embed it in your website using the standard img tag.

Here’s a sample file repository on Github. The T-Rex image is here and the direct link is here. You can go to the Repository settings and add one or more collaborators. They’ll get write access to your repository and can then add or delete files.

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The story, How to Use Github for Hosting Files, was originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal on 22/02/2016 under Embed, Upload, Internet.