UrTrix - UnRevealed Tricks

It is easy to embed a YouTube video but you’ll be surprised to know how much extra weight that embedded YouTube video can add to your web pages. The browser has to download about half a Mb of extra JavaScript files (see screenshot) for rendering the YouTube video player alone. And these files are downloaded even if the visitor never plays the embedded video. The embedded video not only increases the byte size of your web pages but the browser has to make multiple HTTP requests to render the video player. This increases the overall loading time of your page thus affecting the page speed score . The other drawback with the default YouTube embed code is that it isn’t responsive . If people view your website on a mobile phone, the video player may not resize properly for the small screen. Embed YouTube Videos without Increasing Page Size Google+ uses a clever technique for embedding YouTube videos – it just embeds the thumbnail image of a YouTube video and the actual video player is lo...

Google Forms are probably the best service for creating online forms but they miss a few key features found in commercial web form builders. Google Forms do not allow file uploads, there’s no option for adding CAPTCHA in forms to prevent spam and, what may be of interest to the legal and retail industry, Google Forms cannot capture electronic signatures. A school teacher may want a Google Form where students can upload assignments and the files are automatically saved to her Google Drive but in separate student folders. A company may want to build an online form where job applicants can upload their resumes in PDF or Word format. You cannot upload file attachments in Google Forms but there’s a workaround. Form with File Uploads – Demo | Buy License Open this sample web form and you’ll find that it has all the fields found  in native Google Forms but a few extra ones. There’s a file upload button ( demo ), an area for vis...

Would you like to receive instant alerts as soon as your website goes down or is inaccessible to users? Would you like to receive these downtime alerts as an email message or text on your mobile phone or both? Most  website monitoring services  follow the “freemium” model – they have free plans for basic downtime & uptime monitoring of a website but need to pay for unlimited email or SMS alerts. You may also need to upgrade to monitor multiple websites. There’s a good alternate though. Create your own Website Uptime Monitor with Google You can create your own website monitor that runs on Google servers and sends email alerts or SMS when your website goes down or is up again. It logs everything in a Google Spreadsheet or you can even store the downtime activity inside Google Analytics. How to Setup Website Monitor Here’s how you quickly configure Google Docs to monitor the uptime /downtime of your website. This has to be done j...

When you share any file or folder in Google Drive with another user, the shared links will work forever unless you manually change the sharing permissions. For instance, if you have shared a document with an external vendor, they’ll continue to have access to the file long after your business contract may have ended. In such a situation, wouldn’t it be nice if you could set expiration dates while sharing files in Google Drive? For instance, share a document temporarily for, say, 10 days and access to the file should be revoked automatically after that period has passed. Add an Auto-Expiry Date for Shared Links in Google Drive Google Drive does let you set expiration dates for shared links but this option is only available to paid Google App for Work accounts. Well, no worries. If you have a free Google account, you can still create temporary links that auto-expire after a certain time. Here’s a step by step guide: Go to labnol.org/expire  and authorize the we...

You may have been using Google Spreadsheets for budgeting and project management but did you know that the same sheets application can also help you create impressive pixel paintings in minutes? The Google blog recently published a story of two illustrators who created a bright and beautiful wall mural using Google Spreadsheets. Marina and Mallory connected on Google Hangouts to plan and sketch out ideas, and creatively “hack” Sheets in order to make art: resizing cells into thousands of pixel-like squares, merging cells to create color blocks, creating vibrant color gradients with conditional formatting and cell values, and other cool things we had no idea you could do with Sheets. The idea is simple. Each cell in the spreadsheet corresponds to a pixel in the painting. You compute the color of the pixel and make it the background color of the corresponding cell. Now resize the spreadsheet cells in small perfect squares and your spreadsheet will l...