Embed SlideShare Presentations without Flash

Your PowerPoint presentation is hosted on SlideShare and you want to embed it onto your website? That’s simple – just grab the embed code for the presentation and copy-paste it anywhere in your site.

There’s however a small problem here. SlideShare uses the Flash Player and thus, your embedded slides won’t be available to visitors who are either using mobile devices or don’t have the Flash plug-in on their computers (like the new Macbook Airs).

Christian Heilmann, former Developer Evangelist at Yahoo, has come up with an excellent solution to this problem. Go to icant.co.uk, enter the URL of your SlideShare presentation and the tool will generated an IFRAME based embed code that will work in all web browser without requiring the Flash player plugin.

Internally, the tool takes the mobile version of a SlideShare presentation and wraps it as an image slideshow using the YUI library. The full code is available on GitHub and you may even host it on your own web server.

To give you an example, here’s a Slideshare deck embedded using Flash Player..

..and this is the same deck embedded using plain HTML. All it misses is the full-screen mode.

Also see: Embed YouTube Videos in Flash & HTML5

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Prevent Unnecessary Printing of Docs with WWF

The signature of your email reads – “Please consider the environment before printing this email” – but some of your colleagues don’t seem to care. What do you do next to discourage them from printing email attachments and other useless stuff?

WWF, the organization that is focused on the conservation of our environment and wild-life, have come up with a unique idea to prevent such “casual” users from sending print commands.

They have created a new file format called WWF that is exactly like PDF except for the print functionality. That is, a document saved as WWF can be read inside any PDF reader but the person won’t be able to print it.

To get started, install the WWF Software and then use “Save as .WWF” while saving your documents, emails, web pages, etc. The software is currently available for Mac only though the Windows version is expected to become available soon.

Technically, the WWF format is just another PDF file but one that cannot be printed out. If you have a PDF writer installed on your machine already, you may check the “disable printing” option while creating PDFs and it will also have a similar effect.

Also see: Ways to Reduce Printing Costs

Thanks Myrtille.

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FeedDemon 4.0 Goes Freemium

FeedDemon 4.0, the most popular RSS Reader for Windows, is now out of beta and you may download the latest version from feeddemon.com.

This release offers significant performance enhancements and the newspaper layouts have been completely revamped thus vastly improving the reading experience. FeedDemon 4.0 also includes a brand new sidebar where you get a river view of all unread items coming from your social subscriptions like Twitter and Facebook.

From Adware to Freemium

FeedDemon previously followed an “adware” model – everyone had access to all the features of the software and one could pay $9.95 to to do away with the advertisements.

FeedDemon 4.0 however takes the freemium approach and is available in two editions – FeedDemon Lite which is a free and ad-supported version but with a reduced feature set while FeedDemon Pro has all the goodies and no ads.

FeedDemon Pro vs FeedDemon Lite

Both editions will sync with Google Reader but with FeedDemon Pro, you have the prefetch option that will download the images / web pages linked to the feed items and thus you may read them offline in their full glory.

The Pro edition also lets you subscribe to private feeds (secure feeds protected by a password), something which you cannot do even inside Google Reader. This page has more details on the differences between FeedDemon Lite and FeedDemon Pro.

The Pro license for FeedDemon 4.0 is available for $19.95 but if you already have a serial number for a previous version, the upgrade will cost you $9.95. Or if you don’t mind working with a reduced feature-set, FeedDemon is still free for you as before.

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What’s wrong with PDF Format?

Can you spot what’s wrong with terms like “SMS service”, “XML Language”, “ATM Machine”, “HTTP protocol” or the “PDF Format.”

Here’s a quick clue:

And it’s not just us who are making these silly mistakes. Even Adobe is using the term “PDF Format” on their PDF specific site.

Illustration courtesy geek & poke. Thank you Ashu Mittal for the tip.

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How to Temporarily Block Time-Wasting Websites

You have certain important tasks to complete in the next hour or so and yet you have trouble staying focused for long because of all these online distractions coming through Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and other websites.

It maybe slightly unfair to categorize some of these sites as “time wasting” but at the same time, the endless stream of new content available on these sites can consume lot of your precious time before you even realize it.

LetMeWork – A Toggle Switch for the Time-Wasting Web

If you have trouble exercising self-discipline and can’t seem to stop yourself from constantly checking your social sites and email accounts for new updates, here’s an easy solution.

Download and unzip the file – LetMeWork.zip – to your desktop and double-click it to instantly block some of the distracting sites on your computer. When you are done with your work, double-click the same file again to unblock access to all the sites as before.

[*] You may see a User Access Control warning dialog in Windows Vista or 7 – just say yes.

How the script blocks and unblocks websites

The standard way for blocking any site on your computer is through the HOSTS file that’s available in the Windows directory.

It does take some effort to edit the HOSTS file and what the above script (source code) does is hide all the complexity from the user and lets you block as well as unblock sites with a click.

The list is customizable. You may open the vbs file in notepad and edit the WebsitesToBlock array to include any other website(s) in the banned list.

WebsitesToBlock=Array("twitter.com", "www.youtube.com", "facebook.com")

There are some browser extensions that seem to solve the same problem but this script is run-once, use-everywhere. You execute it from the desktop and it will block /unblock access to select sites across all browsers.

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Dropbox 1.0 RC is here!

Dropbox, a hugely popular online storage solution that also helps you keep files across multiple computers in sync, has just hit a milestone. The team has released Dropbox 1.0 RC for Windows, Mac OSX and Linux – more than two years after the first beta hit the tubes.

Dropbox 1.0 contains numerous bug fixes, performance improvements and should consume less CPU resources than the previous versions.

Among the new features, Dropbox 1.0 includes Selective Sync – you can instruct Dropbox to keep certain file folders in the cloud only and not download them to your computer’s hard drive.

To give you a practical example, let’s say you have a 500 MB file on computer A that you only want to backup online and not sync across computers. You may configure Selective Sync on computer B and that particular file won’t download on the second computer thus saving you plenty of bandwidth.

The other very useful enhancement is that you may now share even non-public folders on Dropbox with anyone outside. Just right-click on the file in Windows Explorer and choose “Get Shareable Link” to get a secure (https) short link powered by db.tt that anyone may use to access that file.

However, you’ll be a bit disappoint to know that the Dropbox team has skipped the most-requested “Watch any Folder” feature in the 1.0 release even though it was in the initial plan as per the Votebox. That means you’ll still have to copy your files to the “My Dropbox” folder for keeping them in sync.

I have been using Dropbox v.0.8.x for some time on Windows and have found it to be pretty stable so far. The 1.0.0 RC is a direct jump from 0.8.x builds.

Your copy of Dropbox will auto-update once 1.0 final is available but meanwhile, you may download the first release candidate from Dropbox forums.

See more Dropbox tips.

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Display Readability Levels in Google Search Results

There are certain mathematical formulas, like the Flesch-Kincaid test, that can analyze a document for their “readability level” or the ease at which that document can be read. The score is calculated based on the average number of syllables used per word and the number of words used per sentence.

Readability scores generally help teachers decide if a particular book is suitable for students of a particular grade /age or not.

Readability Level of Web Pages

Earlier, if you were to calculate the readability level of any web page, you would have to copy-paste the text content of that page in a external tool* like Flesh but not any more.

Google has added a new advanced search option that lets you display the readability level of web pages in the search results itself. So if you want to read a page that’s written in simple English, click the result that’s marked as “Basic reading level.”

You can also filter search results in Google by readability level. For instance, set the “reading level” option in Google Advanced Search to “show only basic results” and it should remove pages from search results that may be slightly hard to comprehend.

[*] You could earlier calculate readability scores of documents directly in Google Docs but looks like the features has been dropped now. You can however use Microsoft Word for the same.

Related: Find Errors in your English Writing

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Distribute Your Blog Through Nokia’s Ovi Store

While Nokia gets little love from tech pundits in the west, Symbian powered mobile phones still command the highest market share worldwide and this number is significantly higher in Asia, South America and African countries.

Nokia’s Ovi Store has around 140 million users worldwide and thus, if you are content creator, the store presents an excellent opportunity for you to showcase your stuff to such a large audience in the form of an app.

Build an app in 60 seconds

If you have ever tried building an app for your blog for distribution through Apple’s App store, you know the drill. First, it requires you to have the technical know-how, you need an Apple developer account and, if you are writing the app on your own, you also need to have a Mac.

With Nokia’s Ovi Store, a person with no programming skills can build an app in minutes through an online wizard – all they need is a blog with an RSS feed. There’s no fees involved and your Ovi App created through the wizard can be downloaded on almost all Nokia devices except for some of the recent ones.

The wizard offers limited customization options –  you may change the background and text colors but nothing beyond that. If you have more than one feed, you may publish them all in a single app without having to merge them separately.

To give you an example, I created this mobile app for Digital Inspiration using the wizard, it got approved by the Ovi QA team in about a day (they need to confirm that you own the content) and now anyone, anywhere may download the app on their mobile through the Ovi Store.

How is the app any different from directly reading an RSS feed on the phone? Well, the biggest advantage is that the Ovi app optimizes your blog images for the mobile screen and thus the entries should load a lot quicker.

Also, when people have your blog installed as an app on the home screen of their mobiles, they’re probably going to check it more frequently.

Related: Publish your Blog to Amazon Kindle

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