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Showing posts from April, 2016

Learning CSS with Cats and a Dinner Table

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CSS, short for Cascading Style Sheets, are rules (or “styles”) that define how content should look on a web page. To give you an example, if your web page contains a table, you can use CSS to specify the thickness of the border and the color of text inside that table. Learning CSS is easy. There are a plethora of good  online tutorials  or, if you prefer the traditional route, get a book. My favorites CSS books include HTML & CSS by John Duckett  and CSS Secrets by Lea Verou . You should also watch the YouTube series by Travis Neilson  and Guy Routledge , probably the best free video resources for learning everything about CSS. I recently stumbled upon a couple of web resources that take the help of cats and post-it notes and make learning CSS even more interesting and entertaining. CSS Basics with Post-It Notes ( link ) Designer Kaylan takes the help of colorful post-it notes for visualizing the the basic concepts of CSS. CSS Selectors Explained with CSS ( link ) If y

How to Create Multiple Copies of an Email Draft inside Gmail

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You have composed a draft inside Gmail and would like to send the same email message to multiple people, separately. The subject, the email body, the attachments remain unchanged and the only thing that differs in each message is the recipient’s email address. Maybe you are sending your résumé  to multiple companies. How can you do this without having to copy-paste the subject and body of the draft message multiple times? When you compose a draft email in Gmail and hit the Send button, the email is automatically removed from the Drafts folder and moved to the Sent Items folder of Gmail. Unlike Microsoft Outlook, Gmail doesn’t offer an option to create multiple copies of an existing email message. Create Duplicate Email Messages in Gmail There are two easy ways to create duplicate draft emails inside Gmail. You can either use Mail Merge for Gmail  or, if you are looking for a more simple one-click option, use my new Duplicate Gmail web app written with Google Scripts . Here’s ho

The Best Twitter Search Tricks

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The Twitter Archiver and Twitter Bots app fire each time a new tweet is found that match your search query. You can write simple search queries (like #Oscars ) or more complex query (like obama min_retweets:10 filter:news ) that uses one or more Twitter search operators. How to Search Twitter Like a Pro Here’s a complete list of Twitter search operators that can help you perform more accurate searches on Twitter: from:BarackObama All tweets sent by a particular Twitter user to:BarackObama -filter:links Tweets sent to @BarackObama but not containing any links elections list:TIME/time-staff Search for tweets from users who belong to a particular Twitter list youtube.com min_faves:100 Tweets containing YouTube videos that are favorited by at least 100 users earthquake min_retweets:10 Tweets that have been retweeted at least 10 times iPhone near:NY within:10mi Tweets sent by users within the 10 mile radius of New York containing iPhone #foodrecipe lang:en Tweets sent in

How to Schedule Email Messages in Gmail with a Google Sheet

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Have you ever wanted to write an email message in Gmail now but send it later? Maybe you are sending birthday wishes and would like to delay the delivery of the email message until the actual day. Or you have written an email but would like to schedule delivery in the recipient’s time zone when the message is more likely to get read . Microsoft Outlook has a built-in email scheduler but you do not have a ‘native’ option to delay the delivery of email messages inside Gmail. That’s where Gmail Scheduler can help. It is an add-on for Google Spreadsheets that will not only help you schedule email messages inside Gmail but you can also send recurring email. For instance, if you would like to send an email reminder to your tenant on the last Friday of every month, you can do it with the scheduler easily. Unlike extensions like Boomerang or Sidekick that are browser specific, Gmail Scheduler is available inside Google Sheets and thus works across all desktop browsers. The scheduler, writte

How to Write a Twitter Bot in 5 Minutes

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Twitter Bots can do interesting things. You can tweet questions like “how many calories are in diet coke” to @DearAssistant and the Twitter bot, like Google Now or Apple Siri , will reply with the answer . The @HundredZeros bot tweets links to eBooks that are free on Amazon. Another Twitter bot  @WhatTheFare will tell you the Uber fare between two locations. A bot is a program that runs in the background and, when it encounters a command, it performs some action. For instance, you can have a grammar bot that looks for tweets containing misspellings and tweet the correct spelling. A bot can automatically favorite or retweet tweets that match certain criteria. It can follow Twitter user who have tweeted a particular phrase. A brand may build an auto-reply bot that automatically responds when the brand gets a @mention on Twitter. You may have a bot that auto-sends a DM (direct message) to users who follow you on Twitter. Writing a Twitter bot is easy and you can get one up and run