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August 21, 2012

How to Find the Sender’s Location in Gmail

 
 

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When John sends an email message to Elizabeth, the IP address of the sender (John's computer) is included in the header of the outgoing email message. The receiver (Elizabeth) can then perform a simple geo-lookup against that IP address to find the approximate geographic location of the message sender.

Both Yahoo! Mail and Hotmail include IP addresses in outgoing message headers but if John is sending an email address using Gmail, or Gmail for Google Apps, his IP address won't be included in the message.

IP addresses can be considered sensitive information. As such, Gmail may hide sender IP address information from outgoing mail headers in some circumstances.

If the IP address of John is not available, because he is sending email using Gmail, how can Elizabeth determine John's geographic location? There two options:

Option A: Gmail may include the IP Address

senders ip address in gmail

Gmail doesn't include the IP address of the sender when the sender is using Gmail's web interface to send email. However if he or she is using a desktop client (like Microsoft Outlook) or a mobile device to send that email, the IP address is often included in the outgoing message.

Open the message in Gmail, click on More –> Show Original and search for the line "Received: from " – it may have the IP address of the sender that you can map to a physical location with the help of Wolfram Alpha.

Option B: Find the Sender's Time Zone

When the IP address is not available, you can determine the sender's very-approximate location from the time-zone of the originating computer. Go your Gmail Labs page and enable the "Sender Time Zone" feature.

Now open any message in Gmail and click on the down arrow that says "Show details". The message will display the the current time in the sender's time zone as shown in the following screenshot.

senders time zone in gmail

Next you can use this timezone map to determine countries where the current time is the same as the time displayed in the Gmail message. Obviously this not the most foolproof method as two different countries can be in the same time zone but when the IP address is not available in Gmail, this is the closest you can get.

On a related note, the time zone of your outgoing Gmail messages is determined from your computer's time zone. If you would like your Gmail messages to show a different time zone, just go to your computer's data and time settings and change the time zone.

More ideas: Find the Person Behind an Email Address

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Digital Inspiration @labnolThis story, How to Find the Sender's Location in Gmail, was originally published at Digital Inspiration on 03/04/2012 under GMail, Internet.

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Take a Virtual Tour of The White House

 
 

Sent to you by rak77 via Google Reader:

 
 


whitehouse virtual tour

If you are curious to know what it is like inside the residence of the world's most powerful person, take a tour from the comfort of your couch.

Search for 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington DC on Google Maps and drag the street view icon on the White House building. Or maybe you can use this direct link. Once inside the building, you can use the arrow keys to walk through the various public rooms and halls of the White House or click the level numbers (1 or 2) to switch to a different floor level.

You may also want to visit the official White House website – whitehouse.gov – to learn about the history of the various rooms and to explore sections of the building that aren't covered in the Street View project.

And here's a behind-the-scenes video that shows how Google photographed the various public room to create these virtual tours.

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Digital Inspiration @labnolThis story, Take a Virtual Tour of The White House, was originally published at Digital Inspiration on 03/04/2012 under Google Maps, Internet.

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How to Create Web Content that Works

 
 

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Good Content is Liked and Shared

Writing for the web is no different than writing for print except for the fact that your online readers are constantly distracted and most won't read your content word by word. Here are some tips to help you create more web-friendly content that your online audience is more likely to read and share on the social web. These notes were initially part of a presentation that I delivered at the India Social summit.

Create Good and Effective Web Content

  1. The web is like a battleground where you are continuously fighting against so many factors to grab the attention of the reader. He has unread messages in Gmail, someone pinged him on Facebook – there are so many distractions that it will be hard to hold his attention. If your content is short, precise and well-presented, he will appreciate it.
  2. People on the web have short attention spans – they'll read the headline of your story and probably the first few lines and then zoom off. Thus you should use the inverted pyramid approach to catch their attention – put the most important parts of the story at the top that can be seen without using the scroll bar.
  3. The headline is almost as important as the story because it will be visible in search engines, RSS readers, email newsletters and social shares. Good headlines are like short summaries of the article but free of jargon – the reader should be able to guess what the article is all about just from the headline itself. Here are some good headlines.
  4. Eye-tracking studies suggest that people don't read web pages, they scan pages in an F-Pattern. Thus you need to present content in such a fashion that important parts don't go unnoticed. Add a table of content if you have a long article. Use headings and sub-headings (like h2, h3, etc.), add captions to images, use italics or bold text to emphasize important points and put interesting information in pull quotes. Use short paragraphs and each paragraph should convey exactly one idea.
  5. When you are writing on the web, you are writing for a global audience and therefore you should avoid using jargon or complex language in your content. Make no assumptions – you know what NSFW stands for but not everyone does so spell out the acronyms. Use humor and slangs with care as what's considered funny in your culture may not be so in other countries. Also use the Readability Test to know if people who are less fluent in English can easily grasp your writing style.
  6. Sometimes you have to use numbers in your content that can be difficult to visualize. For instance, the US spent anywhere between $4-$6 billion fighting the war in Iraq. How big is that number? If you can add another number to the same story saying the US spent X amount on medical research or that Y amount is enough to feed million people, your readers will be able to connect better with your story. Apple didn't stress the number of pixels in the new iPad, they said it has more pixels that your HDTV.
  7. When you are writing about a product, a service or maybe a restaurant where you had dinner last night, try to put yourself in the shoes of the reader and think what additional questions they may have related to that topic. Your content should answer all of them. Your aim should be create a page that is the best resource on the web for that topic. Use Five Ws, a proven journalistic technique, to get the complete story on a subject.
  8. Make sure that all information in your content is accurate and comes from trusted sources. If you are using facts in your content – like the average age of an African elephant is 70 years – you should cite credible sources to support that fact.
  9. If you have an idea for a story, don't publish it right away – think over it for a day or two, edit and the final product will almost always be better than your initial draft. Darren Rowse calls it the idea marinating process.
  10. When you are writing on a not-so-unique topic that dozens of other sites have covered in the past, analyze what others have missed or how you can make existing content better. For instance, you can include fresh data, you can include quotes from experts, you can create videos around the topic, you can present information in an alternate form – like a chart, a presentation or even as an ebook.
  11. Spend some time reviving your old content. Sometimes your content doesn't get the attention it deserves and it just sits there in the archives gathering dust. You can use Google Analytics to learn about stories that didn't click with your readers, analyze the missing pieces, think how you can make the content better, and push it again. If you include "factual" content on your site – like which is the most popular social site – this kind of data needs to be updated regularly because that what your readers will like.
  12. The content that you create must be readable across difference devices and platforms that your audience are on. Often times we create content that looks good on the desktop but that quality is lost as soon as we switch to a different device – say a mobile phone. That's a missed opportunity. If you have embedded YouTube videos in your content, make sure you offer an alternative thumbnail that links to the YouTube video for environments that don't support Flash or HTML5.
  13. Users will consume your content in different forms. Some will save your stories to InstaPaper for reading later, some will print your articles as PDFs while others may send your stories to their Kindle. It is important that your content looks good when it is saved across different mediums. Do not ignore the print stylesheet because if you create good content, some people will print it on paper.
  14. The first image and the thumbnail image of your story, or the image that your have specified inside the OpenGraph tags, should be clear, high-quality and predictable. That's because these images will appear when your stories are shared on social networks like Pinterest, Tumblr, Facebook and even Google Plus. You may have a  great headline but if the attached image thumbnail isn't great, the story can sometimes go unnoticed.
  15. The other reason to have good images in your content is that they "pause" a reader when he or she is scanning your content. Use an image format depending upon the content of the image – for instance, images that have text are best served as PNG files. Avoid using stock images on your content especially the ones that are very common. Use the Similar Images option is Google Images to determine how popular a "stock image" is and if it returns too many results, don't use that image.
  16. Do not ignore video. It does take some effort to produce videos but it will be well worth the effort. YouTube is the world's second largest search engine and if your produce video content, you have an opportunity to show up there. Also, Google is no longer a collection of 10 blue links but a mixture of images and videos. Good videos have great audio. Shoot and record at 720p (1280×720). Apply to become a YouTube partner and that will help you add custom thumbnail images to your videos. Keep you video length short, really short because it is difficult to hold a user's attention for more than a few minutes.
  17. SEO is no rocket science. This starter guide [PDF] from Google covers nearly everything that you need to do to make your good content more search friendly. Use good headlines, the content should be scannable, use good-quality images with captions, have an easy to navigate site structure and use Sitemaps to help search bots discover your content. Here's more useful SEO advice from Google.
  18. You should know how people are consuming and sharing your content. The new social analytics feature of Google Analytics can help track most of the social activity happening on your site and, accordingly, you can put the right social sharing buttons around your content.
  19. You may think that Page Views are the best indicator to determine the success of content but that may not be the case. A reader lands on your page from Facebook, scans it for a second, doesn't find anything interesting and leaves. This activity registers as a pageview in Google Analytics but the visitor didn't find anything useful. The metric that gives a better idea of user behavior is "average time spent on a page" – if they are just coming and leaving, there's definitely something wrong with the page content or there's a mismatch between your headlines and the story.
  20. You might think that the web has an infinite appetite for content and the more you feed it, the better. That's not the case though. It takes effort, time and lot of thinking to produce good and useful content and that will clearly not happen if the goal is to publish as many words as possible in a day.

Recommended reading:

The Facebook Like illustration is courtesy Charis Tsevis.

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Digital Inspiration @labnolThis story, How to Create Web Content that Works, was originally published at Digital Inspiration on 04/04/2012 under Blogging, Internet.

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Track your Train’s Location on the Indian Railways Website

 
 

Sent to you by rak77 via Google Reader:

 
 


The Indian Railways operates nearly 11,000 trains everyday and you can use their website – trainenquiry.com – to know the current running status of any train. You can either enter the the name of the train, or the train number if you remember it, and the system will tell you whether that particular train is delayed or running on time.

That's good to know but where exactly is your train?

CRIS, the IT wing of Indian Railways, is beta testing an improved and clutter-free version of the Train Enquiry website that is far more useful than the existing one. The new website will not only provide the running status of trains but will also help you track the exact location of trains across the country.

running train status

There are plenty of new features to appreciate about the new website. You no longer have to remember train numbers – just enter any two station names (like Delhi to Hyderabad) and it will bring all the trains available on that route. The Indian Railways website is using AJAX probably for the first time and thus you get search results as you type which is very handy.

Once you spot your train in the search results, you can learn about the train's departure time at the previous two stations that the train has crossed, how far are the next two stations on the route and what's the expected time of arrival at these stops. All these details will help you better plan your visit to the station.

The new website should go live in the next few weeks but if you would like to try it right now, go trainenquiry.com/searchtrain.aspx and choose the New Look option. It's still in beta so you may encounter a few bugs but great effort overall.

The website is not exactly mobile-friendly at this time but you get the details on a mobile as well. Also, I think it would be more useful if the same information could be visually presented on a Google Map. Thank you Sunil Bajpai.

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Digital Inspiration @labnolThis story, Track your Train's Location on the Indian Railways Website, was originally published at Digital Inspiration on 05/04/2012 under India.

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Save Web Pages as PDFs Without Installing Extensions

 
 

Sent to you by rak77 via Google Reader:

 
 


While there are plenty of PDF writing software and online conversion services around that can help you save web pages as PDF files, the fact is that you don't need any of them as long as you have Google Chrome on your computer.

Open any web page inside Google Chrome, press Ctrl+P (or Cmd+P if you are on a Mac) to open the Print dialog and change the destination printer to "Save as PDF." Hit the Print button and the current web page will instantly download as a PDF document. Simple!

save web page as PDF

You neither have to install any software on your computer nor any extensions in your browser because Google Chrome itself acts as the PDF writer.

This is especially useful for downloading PDF copies of web pages that involve transactions or session data – like the checkout page on a shopping website – because you often cannot pass such pages to any online PDF conversion service.

One more thing. You can also use Chrome's PDF engine to convert your local image files, text files and any local HTML web pages to PDFs – if you an open a file in Chrome, it can convert the file to PDF.

I am not sure when PDF writing capabilities were added to Google Chrome but a big shout out to Ashwan Lewis and Sachin Kalbag for bringing this to my attention.

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Digital Inspiration @labnolThis story, Save Web Pages as PDFs Without Installing Extensions, was originally published at Digital Inspiration on 11/04/2012 under Google Chrome, PDF, Software.

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