Introducing VServices

On a daily basis, we are dependent on many utility services which are scattered on the web. VServices is an attempt to bring together all the services under one roof. It is a collection of services to make your life easier on the web. These services are developed and curated by me. VServices is powered by Google App Engine. I have spent some time in setting up a platform where in I can build services with ease. The first addition to VServices is YouTube Download Helper. I have included some web development tools also to VServices. More services will be added soon.

YouTube Download Helper

Recently a friend of mine (@psankar) posted a nice article about downloading all YouTube videos of an user. He has employed a technique using shell script. Performing the same task using a Firefox plug-in / GreaseMonkey script will be an overkill for the download server. (Downloading a single video is an easy task. Downloading multiple videos and bundling them as an archive file is not so good for the server). The only manual task in the technique recommended by @psankar is the construction of a list of video URLs from the user’s page. You can use “YouTube Download Helper” to automate this task. 

Access “YouTube Download Helper” here. Enter the YouTube username whose videos you wanted to download. You can select the uploads or favorites of the user. YouTube Download Helper uses the YouTube API to fetch the videos of the user. Click on “Download Video URLs” as text file and feed it to the shell script written by @psankar. For downloading individual videos, click on the download button in the table. It opens http://keepvid.com to download the video. Note: Downloading YouTube videos is against TOS of YouTube API. I claim no responsibility for any legal issues in this regard.

-- Varun

Facebook’s Analytics Tool - Insights

In the era of internet and social media, even the person running a small business is going behind Facebook to promote his / her  business. You can create a Facebook page / application to promote your business on Facebook. To make your campaign a successful one on Facebook, you may want to know who is accessing the page and the effectiveness of your engagement, etc. Facebook has built an analytics tool called “Insights” and it is live for about six months now.  Facebook Insights give an insight into some of the key performance indicators like Monthly fan size growth, The average number of likes and comments, Unlikes and attrition rate, Demographics, etc.

Facebook Insights

“Facebook Insights provides Facebook Page owners and Facebook Platform developers with metrics around their content. By understanding and analyzing trends within user growth and demographics, consumption of content, and creation of content, Page owners and Platform developers are better equipped to improve their business with Facebook.” – Facebook

  

Insights dashboard is the single source for all your Facebook analytics needs for:

• Websites: Fully-integrated sites and those that use social plugins, or add a non-integrated domain in one easy step
• Applications: Including canvas, mobile, device, and desktop applications
• Facebook Pages: Including Pages created on Facebook.com and those that are part of the Open Graph protocol

Facebook has been continuously improving the dashboard with new metrics and making it easy for the admins to monitor. Apart from viewing the metrics on the Insights dashboard, you can also export the data as an excel sheet(xls) or Comma-separated file(csv). The accuracy of the count and external referrers for the page has been improved recently. Access Insights dashboard here. More information can be found here.

-- Varun

Voice Search in Google Chrome

If you are a smart phone user, you would have definitely tried any one of the “Voice Search” applications. Voice Search provides a method  to search by speaking to your device. I use “Voice actions” on my Android quite extensively and it is very useful to me. Now, there is a Chrome extension to get the same functionality on Google Chrome browser as well. The extension is still under development and you can’t expect it to be 100% perfect.

  

Voice Search Chrome extension

• Install “Voice Search” extension by pointing your Chrome to this URL.
• If you are using Chrome 9 or higher, you may need to explicitly enable speech input. To do so, start your Chrome instance by setting the flag “--enable-speech-input”. It will be enabled by default on Windows. If you are on Mac or Linux, you can use this flag to enable speech input.
• Whenever you visit any of the popular services, you will find a small microphone (like the one shown in the screenshot above) in the search box. Default services: Google, Wikipedia, YouTube, Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, WolframAlpha. It also works with any website using HTML5 search boxes.
• Click on the microphone icon and start speaking. The extension will recognize the search terms and will populate the search box. Note: The extension is still under development. So, don’t be surprised if it gives out totally irrelevant text.
• You can enable voice search on your favorite site by adding the same from the options page.

-- Varun

[How to] Setup a mobile version for your blogger blog

Google is taking its battle with Wordpress to the next level with the introduction of mobile optimized blogs. Undoubtedly Wordpress is the supreme full-featured blogging platform when compared to Google’s Blogger but Blogger is closing that gap by adding lots of features this year. Some of the cool features introduced this year include static pages, real-time stats, dynamic template, spam filtering, etc. The latest addition to that pack is Mobile templates (Available only in Beta). Enabling this feature will offer a mobile optimized version of your blog.

How to enable mobile templates

• Open http://blogger.com from your browser. Go to the dashboard. It will list all your blogs.
• A popup will appear asking you to enable Mobile templates. Click on “Turn on mobile templates”
• Alternately, you can click on the “Settings” option of the blog and go to the tab “Email & Mobile” to enable / disable the mobile templates.
• You can access the mobile version by pointing your mobile browser to “<blog_address>/?m=1” (Ex: http://blog.varunkumar.me/?m=1). QR code for the same will be shown as soon as you enable the mobile templates.

How to setup a custom sub-domain

• After enabling the mobile template, you may want to setup a custom sub-domain to point to the mobile version. Most of the sites use m. as the sub-domain.
• You can achieve this by setting up an URL forwarding from your domain manager. If you have bought the domain from godaddy.com, you can follow the instructions here.
• Add sub-domain ‘m’ and forward it to your mobile blog address.
• Now, share this mobile address with your readers.

-- Varun

Google eBooks for Android

We know this has been coming and Google eBooks Store is finally here. The store which is currently available only in the U.S. hosts over 3 million Google eBooks. The best thing about Google eBooks is that its open and supports many devices. You can read it on the web, or your tablet, or your smartphone. Native apps for Android and Apple devices are also available. Font, font size, day/night reading mode and line spacing are all configurable. You can discover and buy the new eBooks from Google eBooks Store or from any of the partners.

Google eBooks for Android

The free application is already available in the market. If you are not finding the application in the market, you can get the .apk from here. I tried out the app and the interface is pretty neat. I have not used Kindle or any other book readers but the usability of the Google eBooks is just awesome. Google is definitely getting better on its mobile user interfaces.

 

-- Varun