Over the past year I’ve written several posts about different Google applications. These include Google search, Google Reader, Gmail, Google Maps, and more. In case you’ve missed some, here is your chance to catch up with some great Goolge practices and tips (note that some of them where published on MakeUseOf.com):

Google Reader

• Google Reader Tips and Practices for Power Users
• 4 Steps to Optimize Your RSS Subscription List in Google Reader
• Before Google – Use Your RSS Reader as a Search Engine

Gmail

• Top 5 Gmail Keyboard Shortcuts to Boost Your Productivity
• Make Gmail More Secure By Setting It to Use HTTPS Connection
• The Easiest way to Create a New Email Message Instantly

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Two weeks a go I gave a lecture in a social media seminar. Now I’ve translated the presentation I used into English and made it easier to understand without seeing the actual lecture.

The presentation describes 20 social media practices that will help you in your daily life. It includes tools to monitor your web presence, ways to track interesting topics and conversations, methods to find people and to get answers, and more.

It revolves around the following seven categories:

1. People Database
2. Keeping in touch and more
3. Conversation
4. Search
5. Collaborating
6. Monitoring and News
7. Self monitoring

I’ll be glad to get your feedback and thoughts about it.

A few days ago, 38 information security experts submitted a public letter to Google, asking it to make Gmail more secure. More specifically, they’ve asked Google “[to] protect users’ communications from theft and snooping by enabling industry standard transport encryption technology (HTTPS) for Google Mail, Docs, and Calendar.”

Google responded saying it is “looking into whether it would make sense to turn on HTTPS as the default for all Gmail users”

If you don’t want to wait for Google to take the decision you can change the connection type to the more secure one (HTTPS) by yourself.

Change the connection type to HTTPS

To use always HTTPS connection in Gmail, do as follow:

1. Click ’Settings‘ at the top of any Gmail page.
2. Set ‘Browser Connection‘ to ‘Always use https‘ (see image below)
3. Click ’Save Changes.’

choose ‘always use https‘

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Once in a while I’m offered by a web service like Facebook, LinkedIn or Digg to give away my email username and password so that it could offer me new friends based on my contacts list. Being the key to all my other accounts and containing a lot of personal information, I’m not that thrilled to give away these details. The solution to that problem is to export your contacts to a file and then import it into the web services. Here is how to do that:

Example – Synchronizing Gmail with Linkedin

As an example, I will demonstrate how to import your contacts into Linkedin from your Gmail account, but the same apply for other web services and other email applications, including Outlook.

Export contacts from Gmail

1. Go to the “Contacts” sections.
2. Click “Export“.
3. Under “What format would you like to export to?” choose “Outlook’s CSV format“.
4. Click “Export” and save the file to your computer.

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Having needed to clean a Word file from tag extensions in order to submit a guest post, I found the following solution.

Word to HTML

1. (Optionally) remove pictures from the document.
2. Send the document as an attachment to yourself via Gmail.
3. Open the email and click “View as HTML“.
   (Notice: use Firefox for the next step)
4. Right click inside the new page and choose “save page as“. In the dialog, Change “save as type” to “html only“, and save the file on your desktop.
5. Upload the saved file to Textism, which converts Word files to HTML for free (providing they’re under 20KB).

Update 14 August 2009: You may also want to try using Doc To HTML Converter (Via AddictiveTips)

Ever read a post or article and wanted to email it to others? Use The following bookmarklet to ease things up.

How to use it

To use the bookmarklet (which is a piece of code saved as a bookmark), simply add it to your bookmarks bar. Right click the button below and choose “Bookmark This Link” or just drag and drop it to the bookmarks bar:

Right click the button and choose “Bookmark This Link”

What it does

Whenever you click the bookmarklet, it’ll do the following actions:

1. Create a new email message (in a new window).

2. Set the title of the webpage as the subject.

3. Add a link to the webpage in the body of the message.

4. Copy all the text that was selected when you clicked the bookmarklet into the body of the message (see images below).

While you’re at it, you might also want to configure an new-email keyboard shortcut.

Gmail lab feature “Multiple Inboxes” allows you to have more than one ‘inbox’ in your default Gmail view. You can have up to 5 additional panels and set them to display labels, your starred messages, drafts or any search you want next to your inbox. Here is how to start using Multiple Inboxes and 7 great things you can do with it.

Enabling Multiple Inboxes and setting panels

First, to enable Multiple Inboxes go to settings > labs > enable multiple inboxes

Enable multiple inboxes

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Using Gmail keyboard shortcuts makes reading and organizing your emails easier and more efficient. Here are the five Gmail keyboard shortcuts I found the most useful.

(to enable shortcuts Go to settings > general > Keyboard shortcuts > enable)

the shortcuts

Keyboard shortcut: [ (left bracket)
Action: archive current email and go to the next one
Tips: ] does the same but goes back to the previous email.

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Save some precious clicks by configuring a shortcut that instantly opens a new email. No need to open the inbox first or minimize other programs – Since the shortcut is “universal”, it can be activated no matter if the browser is open or active.

configure a new-email keyboard shortcut

1. Log in to your email account and create a new email.
2. Copy the new email’s URL. ‎

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