22 Must-Have Chrome Extensions for Productivity (I Think)
Sure, I’m probably bad at coming up with catchy titles, but the following Google Chrome extensions I’ll be sharing with you are going to change and improve the way you’re able to do things around the web – may it be at work or just merry-browsing cat pictures (pow! right in the productivity).
While gathering ideas for a write-up about productivity, I found this post about Chrome extensions for link builders by Jon Cooper (his blog is a link building treasure cove by the way – check it out!). He made a great roundup of extensions, and some of it I just knew since I stumbled on that post. There are some though that I’ve been using but are not listed there. Since this is my online journal, I decided I might as well create a list of my own – not just for work purposes, but how I function around the web in general. Continue reading »
How to Create Copies of a Google Docs Collection
Yesterday after writing a number of documents and grouping them into collections and subcollections, I thought I should make a backup of everything since I’ll be sharing those files with other people. To my surprise, Google Docs simply can’t do that. Even making copies of several documents seemed to be very tedious (imagine a hundred files) considering each had to be individually opened before getting access to the File menu where you’ll find the Make a copy option.
No copy functionality for collections? Okay.
I tried to google on how to create backups of Google Docs files in the cloud and to no avail only found these two Google Product Forums threads being the closest to my query, but both still left unsolved as of this writing. Downloading the whole collection, renaming it, and uploading it back? Maybe the GDocs team already has this functionality set for the next update.
To cut the supposed-to-be short story shorter (I’m sorry you had to read through my harrowing narrative), I realized I’ve installed Google Drive locally on my machine. Then remembering that all my Google Docs files in the cloud have been moved to Drive and that everything would just sync ala Dropbox…Eureka! Come, let’s jump right into the process. Continue reading »
Google Analytics Data on Geckoboard Custom Widgets via Google Docs Spreadsheet
About a month ago, I came across Bill French of iPadCTO (a really, really cool person by the way) who wrote on the Geckoboard Blog, April last year, about how Google Docs can be used to provide real-time data for Geckoboard custom widgets. With further modifications, the approach really proved its use in monitoring site metrics at a glance through Geckoboard dashboards though back then we had to manually update or “hardcode” the metric values from Google Analytics daily.
Enter Jamie Steven of SEOmoz who wrote on their blog, October last year, about using GA Data Feed API to fetch data from Google Analytics to Google Docs. To quote him: “Realtime Google Analytics data inside a Google Doc—a panacea!” Indeed. AutomateAnalytics.com’s Mikael Thuneberg was the person behind the nifty app script that drives the whole fetching process.
With the two methods now at hand, I thought to myself: hey, how about a combination of both? Aha! Automation.
Continue reading »