Thursday 13 December 2012

Feed Summary is missing in Thunderbird


   Recently, you might have noticed your Thunderbird doesn't show the summary for the feed you have subscribed. When you open the feed in a new tab or window the webpage for the feed appears without any issues and by changing the "Feed message body as" option to different values or by changing the "rss.show.summary" or "rss.show.content-base" keys in the config editor, you might probably succeed in getting the webpage view in the message plane. But the short cute summary that used to show for the feeds is  totally missing. Yes, I had the same issue few hours back. I browsed around different forums and changed around a  dozen settings. But nothing worked. Finally I figured out that it was something related to the theme that I was using for my email client.

  Only a few might face this issue. Especially when you were using a different theme rather than the default theme that comes with the latest Thunderbird. So this is basically some rendering issue with the theme that needs to be fixed for the latest version of the program. So if you face this issue just restore the theme to the default one and you will then notice the summary getting displayed properly for the feeds you had subscribed.


Hence the  solution.

Change the theme to the default theme of Thunderbird
and then the summary will be shown.


Yes, I understand. What if you want to change the theme? Drop a request to the developer of that theme to look into that issue. 

If you got any questions or better solution please do not hesitate to mention it in the comments.

Sunday 10 June 2012

Top 10 Google Chrome Add-ons!

  Here are some really awesome add-ons that you must have if you are a Google chrome user. If you haven’t used them yet, then you have really missed the best part of the browsing experience. These options should really be available with the original chrome release by default. But I am not sure why are these missed by the developer team. These add-ons complete the browser. Maybe Google have made it that way purposefully to earn revenue from the add-ons market? But whatever the plan is, we all deserve the best browsing experience. So lets wake-up and exercise our right for awesome browsing experience by utilizing the tremendous functionalities offered by the Chrome add-ons.

  First when you visit the Chrome Web Store you might probably be confused by the thousands of apps flooding around there. Also you might be lost, when you start trying each of those attractive applications. Some are really great and some are none other than time wasters. Many of those such as games and tools that duplicate the same functionality might only be attractive at first, but you will not be using them in the long run. Such unused tools are only going to consume you ram usage and slowdown you browsing. Yes you heard it right. The more apps you use for the Chrome browser, the more slower will be your browsing speed. Obviously this is because, some apps makes use of considerable internet data usage at the backend and also they consume annoying amount of ram and CPU usage.

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  This usage details can actually be easily found from Task Manager(As in the image below), if you were using Chromium Plus (now renamed as CoolNova), which I would recommend as a better version of Google Chrome, yet with an unpopular name. Also, it is safer than Google Chrome and has attractive functionalities even with out add-ons. Still you can achieve the same functionalities through add-ons support, if you are too shy in using unpopular browsers. So, the bottom line is you should be wise in choosing the add-ons. That doesn’t mean that you can better live without these add-ons. Because what could be the use if we are not going to utilize the advancements in technologies. So you may better start with using the below add-ons and feel the change. I have been using these for the past couple of years and they really support a productive browsing and they are also safe. Feel free to choose your own add-ons from different publishers, but be sure that you don’t miss the functionality that are offered in the below.
  • IE Tab – Many of the old websites are still supported only in Internet explorer. Especially some Banking websites and the corporate websites still feel the Internet explorer is safer. So these pages sometimes fail to render properly in other browsers. That leaves the user with no choice than switching back to the Internet explorer which is, as we all know is aimed to give the ______ browsing experience. So if you have a IE tab add-on then your browser meets one of the basic needs of a complete browser. These IE add-ons can remember your IE pages and preferences.
  • Super Drag -  Please, you should definitely use this add-on. Because there is no words to explain the simplicity it bring to browsing. Whether it is a word or a link or an image simply drag them around and drop them, they will be open in the appropriate manner in a new tab. For example when you drag and drop an actors name from a movie review, then a new tab will open the Google search result for the name  dragged and dropped. Isn’t it cool? If it didn’t sounded that cool, then it would probably because I had made a poor choice of words in explaining it. Because it gives more productivity to your browsing experience than what mere words could explain.
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  • Google Dictionary – Even if you are a scholar from the Cambridge university or a nerd from Einstein's club, there will be some or many places were you would need to do a search for the meaning for a word that you have found in  a search for the meaning for an another word. Yes a search inside a search like an inception movie. Here is an end to that mess. Google’s dictionary! Ok, wait I didn’t invent it, but Google did long before and there are millions of users already using it. But what happens to the rest still living in the inception? Wake up and say bye! bye! Here comes this dictionary as a Todem. Simply click on a word and a pop-up will tell you its meaning.
  • Google Quick Scroll – Quickly scroll to your the actual stuff you found in your search result. Example, you might be searching Google for an issue say “Get an iphone for 100$ offer ” :) You can actually get pretty excessive search results, but when you open a page, then the matter which you have actually searched for, may not just pop up in front for you. You need to scroll down or you might have to read the whole boring article to finally see that the page wasn’t much use. So this is where Quick scroll comes to the picture. In every page that you open from a search result, there will be  a popup at the bottom which highlights what is actually searched in the page when clicked.
  • Search By image – Ok, lets say you have been having your photo in the web for a public view in FB or any social share. And some enemy of you decided to spoil your reputation and morphed your face on a porn star and circulated it in the net. Oh God! how do you know it? So for this you can use the Google image search. Click on the camera button on your or any image in the social share and this will open a search result based on the image in a new tab. Every image or article that resembles or refers to the searched image will be listed and hence you can easily use the Google image search functionality.
  • Google Analytics Opt Out – Almost every websites nowadays have Google analytics tracking in their code. The analytics actually gives the site owner the details  of the visitor. Those details which are really privacy issues. They show the location, time, date, duration, browser, OS, ISP etc.. With some of these details some brilliant hacker can even hack into you system. So Google Analytics opt out can help you to say out from being reported as a visitor by the Analytics system.

  • Mouse Gesture – Scroll, close, open , back and forth and do everything in your browser with just a few mouse gestures. This can be very useful asset for a single hand browsing.
  • Hover Zoom – This is something I have been obsessed with lately. Hover Zoom. Any images, whether it is  in facebook or Google, just if you need to take a closer look of the original image, just hover the mouse over the image it will pop up the full resolution image. This really saves a lot of time, if viewing images is your favourite free time hobby.

  • Speed Dial – Everyone would be familiar with the newtab window in Chrome that has small thumbnails of the most recently or commonly visited sites in your browser. This add-on is a better version of the in-built speed dial function. Here you can have as many dials as you wanted and configure them individually. This attractive functionality is available in opera and with this add-on Google Chrome won’t be an exception from flexibility.

  • Incognito Switch – People who care about privacy and private browsing really should start using the incognito functionality offered in Google Chrome. With Chrome’s incognito mode you can make your browsing experience invisible to others. Do you watch restricted materials in public networks? So how do you do it? At the end are you cautiously clearing up the browsing history and data? Oh yes, everybody does that. Either stop them and be ethical or be perfect in being stealthy if you prefer not be be caught. Make use of the incognito browsing and for that first install this incognito add-on to your Chrome. This is just a switch that brings the Google chromes in-built incognito functionality in an user friendly way. Incognito browsing can also be useful when you want to login to the same site with 2 different users accounts (like logging into two Gmail accounts at a time) using the same browser.  All the add-ons will be disabled in the incognito mode by default. So if you prefer any add-ons to be available for your incognito browsing then feel free the enable the appropriate checkboxes in the add-on options.



  This is just a beginning and there is lot more and the choice is left to you. If you wish, you can even change your browser into totally something else. Maybe something better than an operating system.  So, try them and if interested let me know your feedbacks through your comments.