How to Create Data Validation Drop Down Lists in Google Docs Spreadsheet Cells Online

So many of us are now using online Google Documents Spreadsheets as an alternative to Microsoft Office Excel or many other popular desktop based software. Yes we get several advantages when we go online. Real time data synchronization and powerful spreadsheet sharing options has really made Google Docs Spreadsheets a success. Whether you stuck onto http://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ or http://spreadsheets.google.com/spreadsheet/, it is the same.

Now while creating Google Docs Spreadsheets we always want to have a drop down list of data validation menu from which we can choose some predefined data to fill in a particular column of cells. To have those Google Docs Drop Down lists in your Spreadsheets you just need to add Data Validation to that particular columns.

Steps to Add Google Docs Drop Down Data Validation Lists in Spreadsheets

Let us take a sample Google Docs Spreadsheet like this.

Mobile Phone Optimized Blogger Templates - Make Your Blogger Blog For Mobile Devices

Blogger or Blogspot has introduced several useful Mobile templates which can dynamically change your existing blog into mobile phone optimized site. This is something, I am sure, a big slice of Blogger users were waiting for long. Now they can be relieved to have a very easy way to transform their blogs into mobile compatible websites by just choosing an option to enable it.

How to Turn on Mobile Templates for Blogger Blogs?

Gmail Launches People Widget - Another Enhancement of Gmail or Just an Useless Addon?

Ya as you may have already guessed I am an extensive user of Gmail and none of the enhancements in it goes unnoticed by me. So this time its a new widget from Google which caught my eye. Actually, it was presented in such a way that it should caught the eye, something usual with Google product updates.

People Widget - shows up your contacts, who are mentioned in the current email you have opened, in the right top corner of the mail chain or as Google would say conversation list. I can understand Google realized it very strongly that emails conversations are all about the people you are communicating with. So they are showing additional information about that contact of yours.

So what additional information Gmail People Widget is going to show?

Those additional information includes the following -

It's Time To Act - Join Hands With Japan and Help Millions of Human Being

March 11 2011, 2:46pm JST, Japan: A massive earthquake of magnitude 9.0 hits the northeastern coast of Japan triggering extremely devastative tsunami waves which appeared in Japan just few minutes after the earthquake. This was the largest earthquake to hit Japan in a hundred years.

Warnings, precautions, and evacuations across the Pacific Ocean.

Effect till now: 7,508 people died, 11,700 people are injured or missing, and millions of people are affected by lack of electricity, water and transportation. Northeast Japan devastated. 6 nuclear reactors crippled.

If this is enough for you to react and start acting like a human being, then stretch your supporting arms of brotherhood to Japan who now needs international support to rebuild.

Support millions of people in Japan by donating whatever you can via The American National Red Cross.

You can also donate through Google Crisis Response

Gmail Changes Refresh Link to Button - A Notable Use Case for Information Architects

Now this time it is a relatively small change in Gmail that caught my eyes, but definitely it was not that small to remain un-noticed. Yes, the Refresh feature of Gmail. Frankly speaking I used this feature very less cause I was in a habit of clicking the Inbox link rather, and it was from the time when Refresh feature was not even available to Gmail.

Gmail Enhances Usability and Simplifies User Experience - Another Great Product Gets Google's Trademark

It was just another regular day of checking my mails on Gmail.
But aahh!!! So is it?
Great, so this time its Gmail. Its now Gmail which is showing the results of all the User Experience studies Google use to do on its products and also on others products. I was really surprised to see that pop-up within my Gmail window which also made me amazed of my web based email system being changed after a bit long time. At the first look it looked to me as the minimalist attitude Google has taken to this which is a kind of regular for Google. But second thought was obviously - Powerful, specially for Contacts.

Google Changes their Favicon Again

Yes, Google now changed their Favicon again. Last year at the end of May they changed their initial minimalist Favicon with that simple G in caps within a border of different colors of the Google logo. Then they came up with a more minimal design of the favicon with small g in blue and nothing else, which they said to be compatible for iPhones.

What is Validation and why validation is important?

Validation is a process of checking webpages against Web Standards, mainly those which are published by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Validation is done for HTML, XHTML, SMIL, MathML, CSS, RSS/ATOM Feeds, XML-derived Web document types, WapForum for WML, etc. Every language has its own grammar and syntax and so every document designed with these computer languages are expected to follow these guidelines and rules so that they are standard complaint. The markup languages of all versions use a specific declaration called Document Type Declaration (DTD) which is machine-readable grammar, inherited from SGML. When a webpage passes through this validation process then the page is called valid.

SEO Tip: Promote the links linking to you, backlink the links which are backlinking you

I think you obviously know that it is very good to get backlinks from different sites to your site. If you don’t know then please read what is Backlinking and how it can help you in SEO. Now you can find out easily that which sites are linking to your site and its content. This can be done through any analytics software you use or even through some free online tools available.

SEO Tip: What is backlink and how backlink can help you

Backlinks are incoming links to a website or a web page i.e. links which are linked to that website or webpage. This is an indication of the popularity or importance of that website or that page and also helps to determine the relevancy of the page. As per the number of backlinks to a website, the value of the website for search engines is evaluated. The backlinks to a page indicates how much people are interested in that page. It also means that if your site or a page in your website has many backlinks then many webmasters or bloggers are paying attention on your website or to that particular page. Backlinks are also called as inbound links, inlinks, incoming links, and inward links.

Noindex Meta Tag - Prevent Search Engines from Indexing a Page in your Site

So you want to hide a page in your website from the Search Engines. This can be easily done by just adding a Meta tag in the head section of the page which you don’t want to be indexed by the Search Engines. In this way you will be telling the robots (Search Enignes) not to crawl that page and not to store it in their search database. For this that page in your site will not show up in any search results and users will not be able to find that page through searching in Search Engines.

How to add noindex, nofollow in Blogroll for your Blogger/Blogspot Blogs

If you want to add a Blogroll in your Blogger Blog you can add it from your layout tab in your Blog's dashboard. You can add new page element and select the Blogroll element, where you specify the links you want to display on your Blog. You can choose the title of the section. Now if you want that Google don't share your Google Juice(PageRank value) to those sites, you can specify Google not to do that. For this you have to specify all those links to be non-recommended by adding a rel="nofollow" tag to those anchor tags.

Here is how you can do it by editing the html template of your Blog. Open the 'Edit HTML' tab in your Blogger Layout. Check the check box to Expand the widget templates. If your title for your Blogroll section is Blogroll, then find out for the following section in your template.

Adsense retiring Referral program from last week of August

Ya, you heard it right and this is what Google Adsense has to say for this.

We're constantly looking for ways to improve AdSense by developing and supporting features which drive the best monetization results for our publishers. Sometimes, this requires retiring existing features so we can focus our efforts on the ones that will be most effective in the long term. For this reason, we will be retiring the AdSense Referrals program during the last week of August.

Google donates 1.5 Million to relief efforts in Myanmar and China

As we got the disastrous news of earthquake in southwest China and Cyclone in Myanmar, Google come out to help the victims with utter consideration. Google not only donated 1.5 million us dollars to the related societies helping the victims out of the disaster, but now urging its Adsense publishers to provide optimum help from their part. Google has projected a help interface for China earthquake and Myanmar Cyclone victims. This enables people to provide their help to the victims easily and fast through Unicef, Direct Relief International, Mercy Corps and Tsinghua Foundation.