I have released new little extension for Opera, which will display bit.ly button in the top-right corner of the Opera browser window. Clicking on the button will summon bit.ly Sidebar allowing you easily shorten current page URL or even publish it directly to Twitter and much more.
I have been searching this possibility for a while, but I have not found any easy free solution to allow me do this. The first thing I wanted to do was to publish to Google+ Page using Hootsuite, but I found out that this functionality is available for Enterprise accounts only, which I obviously does not have. I don’t even really want this highly priced account, because I would not found any use for that.
So the second thing I thought about was getting data from Google+ Page. Again I was not really successful. There were some tools which should transform Google+ Page to RSS feed, but they did not work, because of some changes made by Google or something.
Since Google+ API is already accessible for some time I wondered if I could write some little service which would make a RSS feed for my Google+ Page. After some hours of work I came out with the first version. I called the service Google+ RSS.
As I said I use Google+ API to access the data and because Google has some quotas to access it’s API you have to create your own API key to use Google+ RSS. So here is a How to guide to get desired RSS feed.
First of all you have to create new project using Google+ API. Go to Google APIs console and from the drop down on the left side of the page create new project. You can use whatever project name you want. I created this service because I wanted to access data for Necronomicon magazine, so I called the project Necronomicon Google+ RSS. After you click OK you should be redirected to API Access page and you should see you new API key there.
Also make sure that Google+ API is turned ON in the Services page.
Now you have the API key. That was the harder part. The second thing you have to know is Google+ profile id of your page or some other public profile. To get this go to your Google+ Page and look at the numeric part of the URL.
Thats it! Now you have all data you need to generate your Google+ RSS feed. Go too the Google+ RSS service and put API key and Google+ profile id there.
Click on the Generate RSS button. You should be redirected to the final RSS feed page. Save this URL somewhere. You can use it in any RSS client.
It’s good we can get data from Google+ page in some generic format, but we want to send them to Facebook and Twitter or others.
To accomplish this I use RSS Graffiti for Facebook and twitterfeed.com for Twitter. Those services will check your generated RSS feed in specified interval and post data to your Facebook wall or Twitter.
Note that there is access limit on Google+ RSS. You can access your generated RSS page 3 times in 30 minutes. So just have it on mind when testing. Otherwise you will have to wait 30 minutes when you reach this limit.
foobar2000 is my favorite music player. It is very lightweight program which even runs on Linux under Wine. It is components based so you can install additional features into it like users can install plugins to improve Winamp. I would like to list some of the best components you should install:
When you install JoliOS you are not able to customize the top panel. This is quite uncomfortable. I would like to display Tomboy applet and hide Notification area, because icons on this applet are automatically resized to fit the panel size which makes some of them look really ugly (e.g. the Wuala icon).
To make the panel customizable like in other GNOME based distributions you have to go to the ~/.gconf/apps/panel folder and rename applets to for example applets_bak. After that logoff and login again. You should se a blank top panel ready to be customized 🙂
I don’t have any of the VMware products installed on my PC, but I have some VMDK virtual machine disks which I run inside VirtualBox.I had trouble installing some update on one of my virtual machines because I did not have enough space. I needed to make it larger, but I was not able to find some easy solution without having to install VMware Server or similar robust not free software.
I used to copy virtual disks using CloneVDI tool and I realized that it is possible to resize the virtual machine disk during cloning. This tool is very simple to use and does not require to be installed.
You can download it from VirtualBox forums or you can download it from my site mirror.