iBooks Author, as this video demo suggests, is like a WYSIWYG editor for eBooks. It is nowhere as complex as some of other book authoring programs (for example, Adobe Indesign) and yet you get nice professional-looking eBooks that may also have an element of interactivity.

The downside is that Apple has developed iBooks Author exclusively for the Mac platform and second, eBooks created using this authoring tool can only be sold through the iBookstore. You are allowed your give away your eBook as free PDFs but you cannot sell them outside the iTunes store.

If you are fine with the various restrictions of Apple and are looking for some help to get started with iBooks Author, here’s brand new title from O’Reilly Media – Publishing with iBooks Author – that should definitely interest you.

This 94-page eBook, authored by Adam Witwer and Nellie McKesson of O’Reilly, discusses every single feature of the iBook Author app but my favorite parts are the little tips and common pitfalls that you are less likely to find in the official help manual. For instance:

1. You can ditch the Media Widget and just drag and drop an audio or video file right from Finder or the Media Browser onto a blank spot in your book, but the end result is the same.

2. If you managed to get Author working on Mac OS X Snow Leopard or earlier, you don’t get to play with the 3D chart options. These depend on the Scene Kit framework, available in OS X Lion. It may seem like you can add one, but Author slows to a crawl and your chart just looks like a garbled mess.

The eBook is available as a free download on the O’Reilly website and you can have it in either PDF, ePUB or MOBI formats depending on where you want to read that book.

Publishing eBooks with iBooks Author – Apple Demo

This story, Learn How to Create eBooks for the iPad with this O’Reilly eBook, was originally published at Digital Inspiration on 15/02/2012 under Ebook, Ibooks, Mac, Software.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y3ao7QXMhC4

The search team at Google has created a short video that puts all the useful stuff you can do on Google.com, plus some related search tips and tricks, in one place.

If you are a “power” Google user, you may not find anything new in this video but for the rest of us, this is a good recap of the kind of searches you can perform at Google.com.

And I just learned that you can drag images from the desktop and drop them on to the Google Images website and it will find  similar images on the Internet – that’s much faster than using the “Browse” button.

This story, All the Google Search Tips in one Video, was originally published at Digital Inspiration on 15/02/2012 under Google, Internet.

Techmeme recently added an events section to their website – see techmeme.com/#events  – that lists upcoming (and newsworthy) events focused on the tech industry. It’s a pretty useful list, curated by Techmeme editors, and includes tech events around new product launches, upcoming conferences, earnings calls of tech companies, webcasts, and related events.

The Techmeme blog has more details on how event organizers can get their own event listed on Techmeme. If you are organizing a Tedx or a BarCamp in your city, Techmeme may not find that very interesting but if you are doing a WordCamp that people like Matt {Cutts|Mullenweg} are attending, your event will probably make it to the Techmeme events page.

Subscribe to Techmeme Events in your Calendar

The Techmeme Events page currently doesn’t offer an ICAL / ICS feed so it is difficult to keep track of upcoming tech events in your Microsoft Outlook, Apple iCal or Google Calendar. There’s however a little workaround.

You can use either of the above links to add Techmeme events directly to your web / desktop calendar. These are standard ICS files that should be compatible with most calendar application across all platforms.

Thus, if Apple is scheduling an event during the first week of March, it should automatically pop-up in your calendar courtesy Techmeme. [Picture Credits: Wired]

The Source Code

The above ICAL/ICS files for Techmeme are generated with the help of some PHP and web scraping. The script basically downloads the Techmeme events page, extracts all the event related DIVs and formats everything in the iCalendar format. Should you be interested in enhancing / modifying the script, here’s the full source code:

<?php
$url  = "http://www.techmeme.com/events";
$day  = date("Ymd");
$file = 'techmeme.' . $day;
$feed = 'calendar.ics';

//Grab the Techmeme Events page once per day
if (!file_exists($file) || !file_exists($feed)) {
 $html = file_get_contents($url);
 $fp   = fopen($file, 'w');
 fwrite($fp, $html);
 fclose($fp);

//Declare header for Google Calendar
$header = "BEGIN:VCALENDAR
 VERSION:2.0
 PRODID:-//Techmeme//Events v1.0//EN
 CALSCALE:GREGORIAN
 METHOD:PUBLISH
 X-WR-CALNAME:Techmeme Events
 X-WR-TIMEZONE:UTC
 X-WR-CALDESC:Upcoming Tech Events curated by Techmeme";

$events = "";
$next   = false;
$year   = date("Y");
$html   = file($file);

//XPath for Event DIVs
foreach ($html as $line) {
 if(preg_match('/<div class="rhov">
       <a href="\/goto\/(.*?)"><div>
       (.*?)<\/div><div>(.*?)<\/div><div>
       (.*?)<\/div><\/a><\/div>/',$line, $match)) {
  $eventURL   = "http://" . $match[1];
  $eventDt  = $match[2];
  if(preg_match('/(.*)?-(.*)/', $eventDt, $date)) {
    $eventDt = $date[1];
  }

  $eventTitle = $match[3];
  $eventVenue = $match[4];
  $month = substr($eventDt, 0, 3);

  //Advance the year after December
  if ($month == "Dec")
   $next = true;

  if ($next && $month != "Dec")
   $eventDt .= " " . (date("Y") + 1);

 //Write an All-Day event to the Calendar
  $events .= "\n" . "BEGIN:VEVENT";
  $events .= "\n" . "DTSTART;VALUE=DATE:"
           . gmdate("Ymd", strtotime($eventDt));
  $events .= "\n" . "DTEND;VALUE=DATE:"
           . gmdate("Ymd", strtotime($eventDt . " +1 day"));
  $events .= "\n" . "SUMMARY:" . $eventTitle;
  $events .= "\n" . "DESCRIPTION:" . $eventTitle
           . " " .  $eventURL;
  $events .= "\n" . "UID:" . strtolower(ereg_replace
             ("[^A-Za-z0-9]", "",
             $eventTitle . $eventVenue . $eventDt)) .
             "@calendar.techmeme.com";

  if ($eventVenue != "")
   $events .= "\n" . "LOCATION:" . $eventVenue;

  $events .= "\n" . "END:VEVENT";
  }
 }

$header .= $events . "\nEND:VCALENDAR";
$fmeme   = fopen($feed, "w");

//Save the Parsed Events to a physical file
fwrite($fmeme, $header);
fclose($fmeme);
}

//Echo the Calendar .ICS file
header("Content-type: text/calendar; charset=utf-8");
header("Content-Disposition: inline; filename=$feed");
echo file_get_contents("$feed");
?>

This story, Subscribe to Techmeme Tech Events in your Calendar, was originally published at Digital Inspiration on 14/02/2012 under Techmeme, Internet.

1. When you want to convert a file, you have to upload it to the file conversion service. This is not an issue when you are converting files from the desktop but how do you upload files from iPhone, Android or any other mobile browser.
2. Sometimes clients will send you files in obscure formats as email attachments. In order to convert those files in a format that your apps can understand, you will download the attachments to your desktop and then upload them to the file conversion service. That’s work.

Zamzar, a popular tool for converting files online, has added a new option that lets you convert files by email itself. You can forward your email attachments directly to Zamzar, without downloading them to the desktop, and they’ll be converted in no time.

Convert Email attachment into Different File Formats

To get started, you need to forward the input (source) files to a specific email address like format@zamzar.com where format represents the file type of the desired output format.

For instance, if you have a Word document that you want to convert to PDF, you can send the file as an email attachment to pdf@zamzar.com. If you have a PDF file that you want to convert into an ebook, the corresponding conversion address would be epub@zamzar.com or mobi@zamzar.com depending on your ebook reader.

Here’s a complete list of input-output file formats that are currently supported by Zamzar. You can convert documents, presentations, ebooks, videos, audio files, archives and more.

In my test, the converted files were delivered quickly and the quality of the converted files was impressive. There’s no need to create any account at Zamzar and you can convert files up to 1 MB in a single batch. You may go for a pro account to convert bigger files that starts from $7 per month.

One more thing. You can only upload files by email and initiate the conversion process but you’ll still have to visit the Zamzar website to download the converted file. It stays on Zamzar servers for about a day and their download page is actually very confusing when accessed on a mobile phone.

This story, Use Email to Convert Files into Different Formats, was originally published at Digital Inspiration on 10/02/2012 under Convert, Email, Internet.

The team behind Shape Collage, a popular photo collage software, have launched Loupe, an online tool that will help you create collages using Facebook photos.

You can either use your own photo albums and turn them into collages or the app can also pull photos from the albums of your Facebook friends that are visible to you.

It takes just a few steps to build your first collage. Authorize the app to access your Facebook account, then select any of your photo albums (or that of your friends), choose a shape and your collage is ready. Hit the Share button to save that collage to your Facebook account or grab the permalink to share it by email.

The collages look impressive and if you don’t like the default layout, you can always move or delete any of the pictures on the pile. Here’s a quick video that shows how you can turn Facebook albums into collages.

The drawback though is the resolution. Loupe generates a relatively small image of your collage that will probably look good only on a mobile screen. Shape Collage says that will be introducing higher resolution images in the future.

Photo Collages and Facebook Privacy

Any photo collage that you create with Loupe is public and currently there’s no option to change the visibility to private. Thus, if you have any private photos on Facebook that you don’t want the world to see, it may not be a good idea to turn them into collages because others may then find them through search engines.

Also see: Create Picture Collage in Picasa

This story, Create Collages with your Facebook Photos, was originally published at Digital Inspiration on 10/02/2012 under Facebook, Internet, Photo Sharing.

When you delete a file on your Mac, it goes to the trash. You empty the trash thinking that all traces of your private files are now completely erased from the Mac’s hard disk but that may not be the case.

Files deleted from the trash in this manner can still be recovered unless the sectors are overwritten by other files. There’s an easy way though. If you would like to permanently remove your deleted files, just remember to use the “secure” option while emptying the trash.

Here’s how. Click and hold the trash icon on your Mac desktop and it will display the “Empty Trash” option. Now press the Command button and the Empty Trash option will change to Secure Empty Trash. Select it and the trashed files will be gone forever.

The concept is similar in Windows though there’s no built-in option in Windows to permanently delete “deleted” files. You can however make use of the free SDelete utility to ensure that deleted files cannot be recovered again.

Emptying the trash, or the recycle bin in Windows, is not enough.

This story, How to Permanently Delete your Mac Files, was originally published at Digital Inspiration on 10/02/2012 under Mac, Software.

What follows is a complete list of WordPress plugins that work behind the scenes to add new functionality to these sites that’s otherwise not available in the vanilla version of WordPress.org.

These are all free and open-source plugins and you can find them in the WordPress plugin repository.

The Best WordPress Plugins for your Website

1. Search Regex – This adds extremely powerful search and replace capabilities to your blog. You can find and replace almost any kind of data stored on your WordPress site including post titles, excerpts, comments, and meta data. It even supports regular expressions.

2. Redirection – If the URL of an existing post has changed or if an external site is linking to a non-existent page on my site, I can create redirection rules and automatically forward all the incoming traffic to the right pages.

3. Bing 404 – If someone lands on a 404 page for which redirection is not yet enabled, this plug-in will display links to relevant article on the error page. For example, a 404 page like labnol.org/googledocs will have links to my Google Docs articles.

4. WordPress SEO – This is probably the only SEO plugin you need for your WordPress blog. It helps you create better titles, you can block duplicate pages (like archive pages) from search bots, and it also adds the necessary meta tags required for more search-friendly Google snippets.

5. W3 Total Cache – This is possibly the best caching plug-in for WordPress and it will definitely help improve your site’s score as far as page speed is concerned. I was previously using Hyper Cache but W3 Total Cache does much more – it lets you minify scripts, cache database queries, add expiration tags to static images and more.

6. FB Open Graph – This plugin will insert the necessary Open Graph meta tags to your blog’s header so that you blog posts look good and have the right snippets when they are shared on Facebook or Google Plus.

7. 404 Email Notifier – This sends you an email notification as soon as a visitor lands on a 404 page on your WordPress website. The email messages have details about the visitor’s IP address, what browser they are using and the referral URL that led him to that broken link.

8. SlideShare – This helps you easily embed SlideShare presentations in blog posts with the help of short codes – see samples.

9. Smart YouTube – This lets you embed YouTube videos in blog posts using standing video URLs and the embedded player can be customized. It adds a thumbnail of the embedded video in the RSS feed and the same plug-in can also be used to embed videos from Facebook and Vimeo.

10. YARRP – The related posts plug-in adds links to old stories that may be contextually related to the content of the current story. It also helps expose your archived content to search bots.

11. WP Optimize – Use the WP Optimize plugin to clean-up your WordPress database tables. It can remove post revisions, trash spam comments and also optimize your MySQL tables so that it works more efficiently and also consumes less space.

12. WP-DBManager – This plugin will help you backup your WordPress database manually or you can set up a scheduled job for automatic backup and the database files will be sent to your email address at set intervals. Advanced users can use WP-DBManager to run SQL queries against their WordPress database without the phpMyAdmin tool. There are other plugins that can save backups to Amazon S3 and Dropbox.

13. Debug Queries – Is your blog slow? Use the Debug Queries plugin plugin to determine which MySQL queries are taking more time to execute and thus slowing down the blog. Debug Bar is another related plugin org that shows PHP warnings, queries and other helpful debugging information in the WordPress admin bar.

14. Auto Post Thumbnail – WordPress added support for Post Thumbnail Images in WordPress 2.9 but if you have been using WordPress for long, thumbnails may not be associated with your old posts. Use the Auto Post thumbnail plugin to automatically generate thumbnails for such posts using the first image found in the post content.

15. Regenerate Thumbnails – When you change the default size (height and width) of post thumbnails (or featured images) on your blog, you can use this plugin to regenerate thumbnails with the new dimensions.

16. Google XML Sitemaps – Since you want Google and other search engines to know about each and every page of your WordPress website, you need an XML sitemap and this plug-in lets you generate one in a click.

17. XML Video Sitemap – The plugin generates an XML Sitemap for your WordPress blog with all the YouTube videos that are embedded in your blog posts. I am also using XML Sitemap for Images and XML Sitemap for Mobile.

18. Date in a Nice Tone – This plugin offers an alternate way to display dates in your blog posts. It displays the amount of time – like “a few days ago,” or “in the last month,” or “over a year ago” – that has passed since a post or page was published.

19. SyntaxHighlighter Evolved – If you regularly embed code snippets in your WordPress blog posts, this plugin will help you highlight the syntax of the source code in different colors for more comfortable reading. Supports all popular programming languages.

20. Pubsubhubbub – This will help you beat content scrapers using Fat Pings. When you publish a blog post, it will instantly ping Google and that is a strong signal to the search engine that you are the original author.

21. WP-Associatizer – This plug-in will automatically rewrite any Amazon URLs in your posts to use your Amazon Associates ID.

22. Template Tag SC – WordPress offers numerous template tags – like wp_list_pages() or wp_tag_cloud() – that you can use in your theme files. The plugin will help you insert the sam template tags directly in your blog posts or pages using Short Codes.

23. Login Logger – This plugin logs the IP address and the exact date & time when a user logs into your WordPress dashboard. It also keeps track of any unsuccessful login attempts. Use this plugin in combination with Limit Login Attempts to automatically lock out users after they have made ‘n’ unsuccessful login attempts.

24. CF Shortcode – This helps you insert custom fields inside your WordPress posts using the visual editor. This comes extremely handy when you want to add custom JavaScript inside your WordPress posts.

25. Advanced Excerpt – The post excerpts in WordPress are fixed at 55 words and often displayed with [...] ellipsis at the end. This plugin lets you to specify a custom length of excerpts, you can get rid of the ellipsis and the excerpts can be configured to have full sentences so that there are no weird cuts.

WordPress Plugins – Retired but Useful

The first version of this list was published in 2010 and since then, I have removed or deactivated a few WordPress plugins. Here’s why:

1. WordPress.com Stats – I am using Google Analytics to track site stats and therefore it doesn’t make sense to have another tracking program for the same goal.

2. Akismet – The comments on this site are powered by Disqus and they seem to offer decent spam protection on their own.

3. WordPress PDA – This plugin helped serve the mobile version of this site based on their browser’s user agent. Digital Inspiration now uses a responsive design and thus the same site is served to both desktop and mobile users.

4. WP-Paginate – The paginate plugin provide better navigation and also helps search engines find and crawl deep content on your site. The new design of this site has pagination built-in and therefore this plugin is no longer necessary.

Also see: Essential Linux Commands for WordPress Users

This story, WordPress Plugins that Power Digital Inspiration, was originally published at Digital Inspiration on 10/02/2012 under WordPress, Software.

Amazon has released a new video commercial for the $79 Kindle that targets the one flaw (or limitation) of the iPad – it is nearly impossible to read books on your iPad while you are out in the sun because of the reflective glass screen.

The other point that Amazon is trying to highlight in the video is that Kindle is more value for money – you can get a bundle of two Kindle Fire units and one Kindle 5 unit for less than the price of an iPad.

Here’s the original Kindle ad that Amazon released about an year ago. It uses the same setting – a girl sunbathing near the pool and reading on her Kindle – and they have even hired the same actress – Anna Zielinski – to do the sequel.

On a related note, I have an iPad 2 and the new Kindle 5 (see setup) and I almost always prefer reading long form content on the Kindle. The iPad is good for flipping through PDFs or for watching multimedia content but Kindle is much better for reading text whether you are indoors or outside in direct sunlight.

The Kindle “Pool” Ad [Original]

This story, The New Amazon Kindle Ad Targets the iPad, was originally published at Digital Inspiration on 10/02/2012 under Amazon Kindle, IPad, Internet.

This Valentine’s day, try sending your geeky loved one a Google search query instead of an e-greeting and they may like the little surprise that’s in store for them.

The Heart Equation for Google

When you put any Math equation in Google, it will try to plot of a graph of that equation just like your scientific calculation. And one such equation, listed below, renders a heart curve that you can pass on to your Valentine.

To give it a try, just copy-paste the following query in Google. Thanks Suhel.

sqrt(cos(x))*cos(300x)+sqrt(abs(x))-0.7)*(4-x*x)^0.01,
  sqrt(6-x^2), -sqrt(6-x^2) from -4.5 to 4.5

This story, This Valentine, Send your Loved One a Google Search Query, was originally published at Digital Inspiration on 10/02/2012 under Google, Internet.

Facebook has rolled out a Google+ style photo viewer that displays user comments and ads next to the picture in an overlay window. Thus, you don’t have to scroll the page to read the comments and the photo viewer adjusts itself as you re-size the browser window.

Switch to the Old Layout of Facebook Photos

If you are viewing any photo in Facebook and would like to use the classic layout – where photos are displayed on a separate page and not inside a pop-up – you can do that in a couple of ways:

• While the photo viewer is active, press F5 on your keyboard (or hit the “reload” button in the browser) to refresh the Facebook photo page. This should open the photo without the overlay.
• Or go to address bar of your browser, remove the string “&theater” from the photo URL and hit Enter.
• Or the easiest option is that you hold the CTRL key while clicking the thumbnail of any photo on Facebook and this should open the corresponding photo in a new tab but without the lightbox effect.

Please see the following screencast for details.

This story, How to Get the Classic Photo Viewer in Facebook, was originally published at Digital Inspiration on 08/02/2012 under Facebook, Internet.