How to Delocalize Google Chrome

Do you live abroad or are traveling around the world and want to keep searching as if you were home?  Google Chrome is too smart in the sense that it detects where you are and redirects your searches to the local Google search engine.  Google Chrome is not too smart or too friendly when it comes to give the user the power to control if they prefer to use the current location or their original one when it comes to perform searches.
I live in Paris, France, but perform most of my searches in English and want results to be mostly in English language.  Here is how to cheat…
Go to Preferences/Basic and click on Manage to the right of Default Search.  Now double click on the first entry Google and make sure you have google.com and not google.fr or anything like that under Keyword. You must restart Chrome for this to work.
Next time you type your search directly on the address bar, Chrome will no longer automatically take you to your local Google but will retrieve the results directly from google.com
Another trick is that in order to delocalize your homepage, if you wish to have google.com and not google.fr or local Google as your homepage is simply to do the following once.  You type on your address bar google.com/ncr–this will do the trick.

Blogging speed at your fingertips: P2 theme by Automattic

Have you noticed that nowadays blogs are increasingly becoming shorter?
SEO privileges quantity over length, so sites that publish five short articles per day will rank higher in Google searches than sites that publish two long articles, for instance.
The WordPress theme P2 theme by Automattic is perfect for bloggers to quickly publish several articles as well as what Automattic calls updates.
You can see P2 theme by Automattic by yourself in this blog.
You can download P2 theme by Automattic for free for your WordPress blog or just activate it as your theme if you have a WordPress.com blog like this one.
P2 theme by Automattic is a very light and easy to use theme, but most importantly it lets you quickly create and edit articles from the frontpage itself. Unlike many other themes, you do not need to go to your dashboard to create a post, but you can do it directly from your frontpage.
P2 theme by Automattic has a tabbed menu on the frontpage with the items Status Update (the equivalent of Twitter), Blog Post (where you write an article), Quote and Link.
From the frontpage itself, you can Upload/Insert movies, images, sound, and other media, just like you do from the Dashbord. And what is more important you can also enter tags.
When you are done writing, you click on Post it and you start writing your next post.
So, if you want a theme that enables you to easily publish several articles a day, please give P2 theme by Automattic a try. You won’t be disappointed!

Introducing the P2 theme

►

http://www.electrobel.be

Create your own music station http://blip.fm/Imwinkelried

Etherpad does not take you to the Heavens, but it comes very close to it

I had been using Etherpad –http://www.etherpad.com–for a while, but had never experimented its potential as a collaborative tool in the classroom.

Etherpad is one of the best online-based word processors out there not only because it is free (and now open source since Google acquired it) but also because it enables users to create a public pad without having to sign up for an account.  Etherpad has many other wonderful features such as easy sharing, author colors and timeslider with different formats to save to.

Perhaps the most important feature for me is to be able to use an online-based word processor that I do not have to sign up for nor sign in.  Google Documents is great, but I need to sign in in order to access their word processor.  With Etherpad, I am only a click away from starting to type my document.

As soon as users create their public pad, Etherpad gives them a URL that users can email or IM to their collaborators.

Users have their texts highlighted with different colors and their names show up on the sidebar, also provided with a chat tool.

The Timeslider tool enables users to slide through the history of the document.  They can do this manually or by hitting play, and watching the history of the collaboration develop.  Etherpad offers several formats to save your document including HTML, PDF, Microsoft Word, or Plain Text.

Today, my first-year journalism students took full advantage of this great tool.  They wrote articles individually that they later shared with the rest of the class as they joined the public pad that I projected on the screen to the entire class.

The students would correct their documents themselves and also their classmates’.  The group-correction process is already a very rich one, and Etherpad only enhances it by the color-identity feature–students and teacher can make corrections and the student can easily identify the corrector by the color.

Students could eventually save the document so that they can review the corrections.

We ended the class with two presentations.  Presenters used Etherpad to write their keywords.  The rest of the class wrote notes and questions for the presenters using the Etherpad public document.

Etherpad is a free and no-signup-necessary application that offers plenty of possibilities including collaborative writing via sharing URL, highlighted text with a different color per user, a slick Timeslider tool to navigate through the document history, and plenty of formats to save your document.

Etherpad does not take you to the Heavens, but to heights with a great potential to be explored.