uhuroo - content collaboration made easy

Recently, I've started playing with this certain web app called uhuroo. My very first response was -"Lol! here comes yet another online file storage service". But after using it for about 2 weeks and experimenting with various useful features it had, I must admit that I fell in love with this wonderful app. Why? read on&ellipsis;

what exactly is this uhuroo thing anyway

Uhuroo is a web based tool for information sharing, which allows creating online folders where you can share documents with internal team members (i.e. specially in distributed locations), customers, and other external collaborators. You can also maintain document revisions in a centralized repository and also record everyone's feedback on the content

a closer look at uhuroo

Well organised information is always easy to retrieve. Uhuroo makes it possible to organise data efficiently by means of tagging, ranking and discussion which helps users Collaborate Effectively. I feel there are 3 important things to look for in any information processing system:

Information Storage

Storing information should be easy and the stored information should be secure.Uhuroo offers an easy way to upload files(information) through email push. Once you choose an email account for a folder, files can directly uploaded using email attachments. The subject becomes the title of the document and the body becomes the description and the attached file is uploaded which is stored securely in uhuroo's servers which have zero downtime. Uhuroo also provides a web interface, browser plugins and desktop addons to do the same. view the complete feature list.

Information Organisation

As I said before, well organised information is easy to retrieve. If you are logged into the web based uhuroo system, you have a number of social networking / bookmarking features: documents can be rated,tagged,ranked and commented on.

Information Retrieval

When you login into the web based uhuroo system, you are greeted with a dashboard which is a birds eye view of what is happening across all your teams. It also shows the ranking statistics based on some of the above information: most frequently read, downloaded, subscribed document, most discussed document, most popular post or author, most popular tags. The full text search helps us find data faster as it even searches within the files! One more feature that I liked in uhuroo is the filter option using which we can filter data based on Author, tags, date posted on and rank. Uhuroo also keeps you updated with the latest version of the document (in case someone uploads a new version) by sending you an email.

in a nutshell

• Uhuroo makes it really simple to share data with your group at the workplace. (Data meaning doc, ppt, xls, emails, pdf, images, video files)
• All this data is then accessible at one central location.
• Features like search within your content (even within the documents), tagging, ranking to make it easy to search through heaps of data.

Hence, it is really made for teams overwhelmed with content getting lost or going out of sync in email, folders or corporate LANS, and are looking for better ways to share and manage content internally and with, partners, customers or other collaborators
For more information check out uhuroo website

7 random things about me

I haven't been tagged by anyone for the "7 random things about me" meme. So I take the opportunity to start a meme myself.

meme?

A blog meme is a memesomething that requires active participation by the blogger and (rarely) traces back to an originating source. It is a question that a blogger answers to share some personal perspective or experience on random topics.

the rules

• Link to your original tagger(s) and list these rules in your post.
• Share seven facts about yourself in the post.
• Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
• Let them know they have been tagged.

7 things

1. When I was young, I wanted to become an astronaut.
2. I haven't seen the movie - Forest gump yet.
3. Once I fell in love with a cartoon character - jasmine, of Disney's Aladdin. She is still my crush ;)
4. I need food, water, air, sleep and a computer to survive
5. I've been awarded all the grades available except AA and AP. (yes! XX, II ,FR, FF … everything!)
6. I can write in reverse order (mirror writing) with the same speed as I write normally.
7. I hate JOOMLA (a Content Management System), Mallika Sherawat (who, by coincidence, shares by birthday) and CH101 (I still have an active backlog in it!)

7 people I tag

1. g2 - coz I simply love his humorous posts
2. vivek - coz he loves writing absolute random stuff
3. artagon - coz I wonder what his 7 things would be
4. pramod - coz he hasn't posted anything since a month
5. zubin - coz he compiled a long todo list
6. ravali - coz she has already posted 101+ things about her and I wonder which 7 will she choose.
7. manku - coz he remains a stupid!

PS: @ the above 7 people. Post a comment here once you are done with your 7 things.

blogger navbar hack explained

Many people use blogger to power their blogs and find the navbar at the top very annoying. Some of them came up with some nice tricks to hide/remove the same. In this article, I'll be explaining how the trick works.

#navbar-iframe{ display:none !important;}

you might have come across this code in many articles. Well... this is how it works.

blogger adds the following code to your blog.

 [iframe src="..." id="" navbar-iframe ...][/iframe]

If you observe carefully, this 'iframe' tag has an ID attribute set to "navbar-iframe". Inorder to hide it we set the CSS rule "#navbar-iframe{ display:none;}" which tells the browser that the element with the ID attribute "navbar-iframe" should not be displayed. However, Blogger adds the following CSS automatically

#navbar-iframe{display:block;}

And since this CSS rule comes after the one which we applied, the latter has more preference and our rule doesn't get applied. This is because of the CASCADING property of CSS. Inorder to override this, we have an "!important" declaration. A rule that has the "!important" property will always be applied no matter where that rule appears in the CSS document. So if you wanted to make sure that a property always applied, you would add the !important property to the tag. So we apply this "!important" property to our style:

#navbar-iframe{ display:none !important;}

Now, display of the tag with id attribute "#navbar-iframe" is set to "none" which tells the browser not to display the same. Hence, the navbar gets hidden.

The same thing can be achieved using javascript too.

document.getElementById('navbar-iframe').style.display='none';

This method has been used in http://apnerve.blogspot.com/2009/02/new-apnerves-hide-blogger-navbar-widget.html

PS: Few other CSS rules that work are:

#navbar{display:none;}

#navbar{visibility:hidden;height:0px;}

.navbar{display:none;}

.navbar{visibility:hidden;height:0px;}

twitterfilms

Today I got addicted to the new trending topic in twitter - #twitterfims Here are some of the best tweets I came across while madly adding few of my tweets too.

• Kyonki tweet bhi kabhi blog tha - @vivekk
• 140 ki last local - @rkavan
• kabhi tweet kabhi retweet
• 140 akshar prem ke - @me :)
• The retweet of extraordinary tweets - @me :)
• Twitterers of Carebbean : the dead man's tweet
• tweeting tiger … retweeting dragon
• saving private tweet
• tweets and the DMs

… and there are many many more sprouting up.

A comic is worth thousand words.

Everyone loves comics. I love them too. As a kid, I always loved Tinkle, tintin, Chacha chaudary, Nagraj, (and few others from RAJ and Diamond comics).

Years rolled by and my taste also changed. Now I like XKCD and AbstruseGoose. Both are aimed at geeks and are about programming, physics, math and some geeky stuff. Check them out.

A picture is worth a thousand words

Most of the companies have realized this recently and now they have blogs with comic strips instead of boring text bragging about their product. Google, as always, is the first one to use comic strips for promotion of their product - Chrome. Another such company is CollCraft. They are planning to launch their product - uhuroo in a short while. They publish wonderful comic strips about enterprise software, in their comic blog - uwoes. Webcredible uses comic strips, instead of boring articles on user experience.
Just imagine how it would be if our academic material were presented as comics. As for me, I promise, I would never leave any chapter unread. Cuz a comic is worth thousand words and everybody loves comics.

Comment and win prizes!

I never knew that we could win prizes just by commenting until I saw a tweet from @smashing regarding their "comment and win contest". After posting a comment I noticed a similar website called instantshift, which hosted a similar contest as per the entry - "comment-and-win-a-free-membership-to-elegant-themes". Without wasting a second I posted a comment there too.

Here is an excerpt from the post:

Taking part in this giveaway is easy… well, maybe not that easy. We’re keen on seeing a lot of comments and want to see at least 5,000 comments in this post, so spread the word and help us get to 5,000 or more comments and then win one of the smashing prizes below. The 5,000 comment challenge is important, folks. If we don’t reach that goal, then the prizes get torched. Okay, they don’t get torched, but the giveaway only kicks in after 5000 comments

I wish I could win one of them. Try you luck by commenting. May be you could win a prize.

apnerve's hide blogger navbar widget

One fine day, I posted an entry on removing the blogger navbar, which can be found at :: How to remove Blogger Beta Navbar. This trick involved editing the HTML template, which confused many people (here I must admit that my description wasn't very clear). So I thought of making this trick easier for everyone and the result - a navbar hide widget.

All you need to do is click on the "Add to Blogger" button.

Wasn't that easy?

ps: Using this widget, you can choose any template you want and still have your navbar hidden.

funny comment trick

Yesterday, I sat all night before the comp, customising my blogger template. Starting with a 565 template by douglas bowmann, I ended up creating a new template altogether - a 3 column template with good SEO (Thanks to amanda of bloggerbuster and Antonio Lupetti of woork). But...(there is always a but) I wasn't happy at the result. Why? Because my blog seems to be still one among the most ignored and unread ones. So to make myself happy, I devised a small, funny trick. To be precise, it is too simple to be known as a trick. I added the following code

a.comment-link:before{content:"476";}

...And wow! I made the "0" comments to "4760" comments. Lol! but (again) the fact remains that my blog is still the same old unread and ignored one :(. So I removed the code now. Well... you can try this one out if your blog also gets very less visits :)

Please consider commenting if you like this trick. :)

aamir khan at IIT Bombay

Aamir khan is in IIT Bombay, shooting for his forthcoming movie - "3 idiots". This movie is based on Chetan Bhagat's novel "five point someone".
UPDATE: Aamir khan was seen playing baddy with Mittal (Prateek Mittal, 3rd yr, B-Tech, Elec). y0! mittal \m/

1234567890 day!!

On this Friday, Feb 13 at exactly 3:31:30 PM (PST), Unix time will equal '1234567890'. You can check the exact time left for this time on the site http://www.1234567890day.com/. Happy 1234567890 day!!

ping.fm - one ping to rule them all

I just added the ping.fm's IM bot. Now I can update my twitter tsatus, tumblr, identi.ca, blogger, wordpress from gtalk using this bot.

Break!

I'm taking a break from blogging for few days till I come up with a new template(my own) and ideas. I'll be on twitter all time though. So follow me on twitter.

Anagrams

I've always been very fond of anagrams. As a matter of fact, "apnerve" is an anagram of my name "praveen". Today, I found these awesome anagrams while googling:

• Dormitory = Dirty Room
• Listen = Silent
• Madam Curie = Radium came
• A telephone girl = Repeating "Hello"
• The country side = No City Dust Here
• Evangelist = Evil's Agent
• Astronomers = No more stars
• The eyes = They see
• The cockroach = Cook, catch her
• Waitress = A stew, Sir?
• The centenarians = I can hear ten "tens"
• Desperation = A Rope Ends It
• The Morse Code = Here Come Dots
• The Meaning of Life = The fine game of nil
• Mother-in-law = Woman Hitler
• Funeral = Real Fun
• Sunshine and Shadow = Show in Sun and Shade
• Snooze Alarms = Alas! No More Z's
• Vacation Times = I'm Not as Active
• The Detectives = Detect Thieves
• A Gentleman = Elegant Man
• A Decimal Point = I'm a Dot in Place
• The Earthquakes = That Queer Shake
• Statue of Liberty = Built to Stay Free
• Eleven plus two = Twelve plus one
• Admirer = Married
• New York Times = Monkeys write
• Debit card = Bad credit