Showing posts with label browsers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label browsers. Show all posts

How to Embed a YouTube Video with Sound Muted

It is easy to embed YouTube videos in your website. You grab the default IFRAME embed code, paste it anywhere inside your web page and you’re done. YouTube offers basic customization – you can modify the player dimensions or hide the YouTube branding – but if you would like to exercise more control over the  behavior of the embedded player, YouTube Player API is the way to go.
This tutorial explains how you can embed a YouTube video that will automatically play when the web page is loaded but with muted audio.
For instance, a products website may use short screencasts to highlight features and these videos will autoplay when the page is loaded. The volume is however set to 0 and the user can manually click to un-mute the video. Similarly, if you are using YouTube video backgrounds, it makes more sense to embed muted videos that run in a loop.

Embed YouTube Player with Autoplay and Sound Muted

See the demo page to get an idea of what we are trying to do here. The page loads, the video plays but with the audio slide is all the way down.
This is easy. Go the YouTube video page and note down the ID of the video from the URL. For instance, if the YouTube video link is http://youtube.com/watch?v=xyz-123, the video id is xyz-123. Once you have the ID, all you have to do is replace YOUR_VIDEO_ID in the following code with that string.


  1. <div id="muteYouTubeVideoPlayer"></div>
  2.  
  3. <script async src="https://www.youtube.com/iframe_api"></script>
  4. <script>
  5. function onYouTubeIframeAPIReady() {
  6. var player;
  7. player = new YT.Player('muteYouTubeVideoPlayer', {
  8. videoId: 'YOUR_VIDEO_ID', // YouTube Video ID
  9. width: 560, // Player width (in px)
  10. height: 316, // Player height (in px)
  11. playerVars: {
  12. autoplay: 1, // Auto-play the video on load
  13. controls: 1, // Show pause/play buttons in player
  14. showinfo: 0, // Hide the video title
  15. modestbranding: 1, // Hide the Youtube Logo
  16. loop: 1, // Run the video in a loop
  17. fs: 0, // Hide the full screen button
  18. cc_load_policty: 0, // Hide closed captions
  19. iv_load_policy: 3, // Hide the Video Annotations
  20. autohide: 0 // Hide video controls when playing
  21. },
  22. events: {
  23. onReady: function(e) {
  24. e.target.mute();
  25. }
  26. }
  27. });
  28. }
  29.  
  30. // Written by @Allsoftlearn
  31. </script>
Next place the edited code in your web page and the embedded video would automatically play but the sound is muted.
You can further customize the player by modifying the various player variables as commented in the code. For instance, if you set loop as 1, the video will play in a loop. Set fs to 1 to show the fullscreen button inside the video player. Internally, the player is embedded using the YouTube IFRAME API. When the page is loaded, the onReady event runs that mutes the video.

                   The embedded YouTube video will autoplay, but muted.

Windows 10 - How to Change Cortana's Default Search Engine

The fact that Windows 10 doesn't provide any built-in option to change default search engine of Cortana led many people into thinking that the intelligent personal assistant works exclusively with Bing. Want to change the default search engine of Cortana or Windows Search? There exist a simple workaround that involves using Google Chrome or Firefox.


Prerequisites

- Donwload and install Google Chrome or Firefox
- Set Google Chrome or Firefox as your default web browser. 

Set your default web browser

Click on Start > Settings > System > Default apps > Web browser


Choose your default web browser. 

Change Cortana's default search engine with Firefox

Open Firefox, click on the Menu button > Options. Go to the Search section, select your default search engine (e.g. Google) and then tick the Use this search engine for searches from Windows checkbox:


Close the Options menu and try to make a web search with Cortana. 

Change Cortana's default search engine with Google Chrome

Open Google Chrome and then install the Bing2google extension from this link. Once installed, all your web searches made with Cortana or Windows Search will be redirected to Google.com: 


Want to redirect Bing searches to search engines other than Google? Get the Chrometana extension instead; It allows you to use the search engine of your selection.

Lightbeam plugin for Firefox - Who is tracking your web browsing


Lightbeam formerly named "Collusion" (Chrome version) is a plugin available for Firefox that reveals a hidden aspect of the web. 

Features

  • It shows interactive visualizations of your browsing behaviour.
  • It shows the relationships between the websites you visit and any involved third-party service.


Download



  • The circles represent sites you connect to and triangles symbolize sites tracking your navigation (you can zoom in/out using the mouse wheel).


Upon clicking on a circle or triangle, you can:
  • block the third party service or website.
  • Get more information such as the location of the server and sites that are attached to it


  • The filter at the bottom right, allow you to change the time period for which you want to visualize your browsing activities:

  • To switch to the List view:

  • Click on the Reset Data to update the list or graphics.
  • Click on Save Data to save your data to a .json file (human readable format).

Clear Cookies

Manually clear the browser cookies or use softwares such as:

Always Block Google from Accessing your Site’s Search Results

If you are using Google Custom Search or another site search service on your website, make sure that the search results pages – like the one available here– are not accessible to Googlebot. This is necessary else spam domains can create serious problems for your website for no fault of yours.

Few days ago, I got an automatically generated email from Google Webmaster Tools saying that Googlebot is having trouble indexing my website allsoftlearn.blogspot.com as it found a large number of new URLs. The message said:
Googlebot encountered extremely large numbers of links on your site. This may indicate a problem with your site’s URL structure… As a result Googlebot may consume much more bandwidth than necessary, or may be unable to completely index all of the content on your site.
This was a worrying signal because it meant that tons of new pages have been added to the website without my knowledge. I logged into Webmaster Tools and, as expected, there were thousands of pages that were in the crawling queue of Google.
Here’s what happened.
Some spam domains had suddenly started linking to the search page of my website using search queries in Chinese language that obviously returned no search results. Each search link is technically considered a separate web page – as they they have unique addresses – and hence the Googlebot was trying to crawl them all thinking they are different pages. 
Because thousands of such fake links were generated in a short span of time, Googlebot assumed that these many pages have been suddenly added to the site and hence a warning message was flagged.
There are two solutions to the problem.
I can either get Google to not crawl links found on spam domains, something which is obviously not possible, or I can prevent the Googlebot from indexing these non-existent search pages on my website. The latter is possible so I fired up my VIM editor, opened the robots.txt file and added this line at the top. You’ll find this file in the root folder of your website.
User-agent: *
Disallow: /?s=*

Block Search pages from Google with robots.txt

The directive essentially prevents Googlebot, and any other search engine bot, from indexing links that have the “s” parameter the URL query string. If your site uses “q” or “search” or something else for the search variable, you may have to replace “s” with that variable.
The other option is to add the NOINDEX meta tag but that won’t have been an effective solution as Google would still have to crawl the page before deciding not to index it. Also, this is a WordPress specific issue because the Blogger robots.txt already blocks search engines from crawling the results pages.

A Lynx-like Text Browser that Runs on Google Servers

Text Browser is a Lynx-inspired browser that lets you read the web in text and strips all JavaScript, images, videos and other rich content that maybe embedded inside a web page. Unlike Lynx that require installation and run locally, Text Browser is a web app and runs in the Google cloud.

To get started, click here and authorize the web app with your Google Account. It requires authorization to sign-in and also for fetching web pages on your behalf. It will neither track your browsing activity nor will have access to any of your Google Account data.
Once a page loads inside the Text Browser, any of the internal links will also open inside the same browser automatically.

Text Browser as a Proxy Server

Why would anyone want a basic text browser? Well, you can also use the Text Browser as a proxy server to access news articles and other text-only content on the Internet that may otherwise be inaccessible at your workplace.
When you request a web page through the app, the underlying Google Apps Script will fetch the page on Google’s servers and then renders the content on your screen using Google Apps Script. Thus, even if a site is restricted, you should be able to view the page indirectly through the Google cloud.
And if a website is down for you, use the Google text browser to confirm if the page is really down for everyone or it is just your Internet connection.

Why Is IE Saving Web Images as Untitled.bmp

Question: You right click an image on Flickr to save it locally – the file is in JPG format but your Internet Explorer (or Maxthon) browser won’t let you save it as jpeg, it only allows saving images as bitmaps and the name given to the image file is “Untitled”


Answer: You can tackle this problem in two ways.
1. Empty your browser cache (delete the Temporary Internet Files folder) or increase the size of your cache. [Tools -> Internet Options -> Browsing History]
2. Some of you may right click and copy the image address and then paste it inside another web browser or your favorite download manager. There’s a simple option. Just hold the mouse over the image and drag it your desktop. Simple.

How to Mute Individual Browser Tabs in Chrome, Safari, and Firefox



Web pages can automatically play audio thanks to HTML5, even if you’ve set Flash and other browser plug-ins to click-to-play. Most modern web browsers include an audio indicator that will show you which tab is playing sound. Most modern browsers also let you mute individual tabs.

This feature was available behind a hidden flag in Chrome for a while, and is now stable. Apple’s Safari was the first web browser that actually enabled it by default, and Mozilla is working on adding it to Firefox.

Google Chrome

This feature is now part of the stable version of Chrome and doesn’t require enabling any hidden flags to use. Just locate a tab playing audio — you’ll see a speaker indicator to the left of the “x” on the tab itself. Right-click the tab and select “Mute Tab.”

The audio indicator will turn to a crossed-out speaker icon, informing you that the tab isn’t allowed to play audio. Right-click it again and select “Unmute Tab” to change your choice.
This feature is now part of the stable version of Chrome and doesn’t require enabling any hidden flags to use. Just locate a tab playing audio — you’ll see a speaker indicator to the left of the “x” on the tab itself. Right-click the tab and select “Mute Tab.”

The audio indicator will turn to a crossed-out speaker icon, informing you that the tab isn’t allowed to play audio. Right-click it again and select “Unmute Tab” to change your choice.
























Apple Safari

This is also possible in Safari — Safari was the first browser that made this feature available to all its users.

As in Chrome, you’ll see a speaker icon to the left of the “x” button on an individual browser tab when it’s playing audio. You can click the speaker icon to mute the tab, and click it again to unmute the tab. You can also right-click or Ctrl-click the tab and select “Mute Tab” to mute that individual tab.

Unlike in Chrome, there’s no way to preemptively mute a tab. This option is only available when a tab is already playing audio.











Mozilla Firefox


Firefox is on the verge of adding built-in audio indicators on its tabs and a way to mute them. According to the bug report, this feature should be part of Firefox 42. It’s part of the latest experimental “nightly” builds of Firefox, too.

It works similarly to Safari and Chrome. If a tab is playing audio, you’ll see an audio indicator to the left of the “x” button on the tab. You can click that little speaker icon to mute a tab or right-click the browser tab and select “Mute Tab.”

Like Chrome, Firefox also allows you to preemptively mute tabs before they start playing audio — just right-click a tab and select “Mute Tab.”

If you’re still using an old version of Firefox, you can do this by installing an extension like “Mute Tab.” However, this extension doesn’t work as well — it only works with HTML5 audio. Thankfully, it’s possible to prevent plug-ins from automatically playing by setting them to click-to-play in Firefox.





















Microsoft Edge 

Microsoft Edge does at least include audio indicators on its tabs. Unlike all other browsers, however, those audio indicators are located at the left side of each tab.

Edge doesn’t yet offer a built-in way to mute tabs, and it doesn’t support browser extensions. Browser extensions — or Microsoft itself — may one day bring this feature to Edge. For now, Edge is still stuck playing catch-up to the features offered by established browsers.












You can always mute your entire browser to prevent all web pages from playing audio until you change your mind — assuming you’re using Windows or Linux. On Windows, right-click the volume icon in your system tray, select “Open Volume Mixer” and use the mixer to mute the browser or at least lower its volume. On Linux, you’ll usually find this option in your desktop’s sound settings, too — it’s offered by PulseAudio. Mac OS X doesn’t offer this feature.


How to Disable Internet Explorer

There's no doubt that Internet Explorer has been a prime target of attack for spyware merchants and other ill-intentioned goons. That's why many folks have turned to alternate browsers for their web surfing.
If you are using another browser and don't use Internet Explorer anymore, there's a case to be made that you should remove it from your system. It is, after all, a potential security threat so, if you don't need it, why not get rid of it?
Except, getting rid of IE is not that easy. In fact, with later versions of Windows there's no satisfactory way of removing it completely without risking crippling Windows itself.
That hasn't stopped folks from trying to remove IE, however, and you can find several techniques documented on various web sites. Instead of removing IE I favor the simple and safer approach of disabling it. Sure, it may not provide the same degree of security as complete removal but that's a small price to pay compared to the cost of potentially de-stabilizing Windows.
There are several disabling techniques but I suggest the method below as it's simple, easy to reverse and doesn't interfere with the operation of the Windows Update service. Furthermore it should work with any modern version of IE.
Step 1. From IE select Tools/Internet Options/Connections/LAN Settings.
Step 2. Put a tick in the check box next to "Use a Proxy Server for your LAN ...”
Step 3. Type in "0.0.0.0" in the address box and "80" in the Port box. Don't type in the quote marks of course, just what's inside them.
Step 4. Click OK.
What you've done is set up a dummy proxy server 0.0.0.0 that goes nowhere. With these setting IE cannot make an HTML connection to the internet and vice versa. You have simply and effectively disabled IE.
There's no magic in the 0.0.0.0 address, any dead proxy address would work just as well. I've used that particular address to keep things simple.
If you ever need to re-enable Internet Explorer start it up and select Tools/Internet Options/Connections/LAN Settings from the toolbar and un-check the box "Use a Proxy Server for your LAN ...”
If you really want to remove IE more completely then you can check out these resources but, as I said, I don't recommend it.

How to Display Alternate Content to AdBlock Users

Ad blocking software like AdBlock and Ghostery are installed on millions of computers and thus affecting the bottom line of web publishers who are dependent on online advertising networks like Google AdSense to pay their bills. It takes time and effort to maintain a website but if the visitors are blocking ads, the revenues are reduced. Ars Technica says this is equivalent to running a restaurant where people come and eat but without paying.
As a website publisher, you have a few options. You can detect Adblock on the visitor’s computer and hide your content if the ads are being blocked. That’s going too far but you may ask for donations (OK Cupid does this) or request social payments (Like or Tweet to view the whole page) from AdBlock users.
The other more practical option is that you display alternative content to people who are blocking ads. For instance, you may display a Facebook Like box or a Twitter widget in the place of ads, you may run in-house ads promoting articles from your own website (similar to Google DFP) or you may display any custom message (see example>>>)
to the visitor.




Before we get into the implementation details.  It contains regular AdSense ads but if you are using an Ad blocking software, a Facebook Like box will be displayed inside the vacant ad space.


It is relatively easy to build such a solution for your website. Open your web page that contains Google AdSense ads and copy-paste the following snippet before the closing
tag. The script looks for the first AdSense ad unit on your page and if it is found to be empty (because the ads are being blocked), an alternative HTML message is displayed in the available ad space.
You can put a Facebook Like box, a YouTube video, a Twitter widget, an image banner, a site search box or even plain text.

  1. <script>
  2. // Run after all the page elements have loaded
  3. window.onload = function(){
  4. // This will take care of asynchronous Google ads
  5. setTimeout(function() {
  6. // We are targeting the first banner ad of AdSense
  7. var ad = document.querySelector("ins.adsbygoogle");
  8. // If the ad contains no innerHTML, ad blockers are at work
  9. if (ad && ad.innerHTML.replace(/\s/g, "").length == 0) {
  10. // Since ad blocks hide ads using CSS too
  11. ad.style.cssText = 'display:block !important';
  12. // You can put any text, image or even IFRAME tags here
  13. ad.innerHTML = 'Your custom HTML messages goes here';
  14. }
  15. }, 2000); // The ad blocker check is performed 2 seconds after the page load
  16. };
  17. </script>
One more thing. The above snippet only detects blocking of AdSense ads and replaces them with alternate content. The process would would however not be very different for BuySellAds or other advertising networks.

How I Make Software Demos using Animated GIFs

Animated GIFs, like the ones you see below :
are easy to produce and can be used for short software demos, help videos and everything else that doesn’t require audio narration. Here are some reasons why an animated GIF may be a better alternative to screencast videos:

  • People love sharing animated GIFs on social sites, especially Tumblr and Google Plus. Facebook doesn’t support animated GIFs yet but that could change.
  • Animated GIFs render inside any browser without requiring plugins and, best of all, you may embed the GIF images in your email newsletters as well.
  • Now that Google Image Search supports GIFs, your image-only screencasts have a better chance of getting discovered. Remember to use proper Alt and Title tag swith the images.
Bret Victor’s excellent writeup on Learnable Programming includes several micro-videos that explain the concepts of programming. Bret has used HTML5 (MP4) videos but such short video demos are also a perfect candidate for GIF animations.

Screencasting with Animated GIF Images

I have previously written a guide on creating GIF screencasts using a free tool called Screencast-o-Matic but there are a few downsides with that approach – one, you need Java on your machine to record the screencast video and second, the GIFs carry a watermark (or you upgrade to the paid version).
There are other alternatives though.
The GIF screencasts that you have seen on Digital Inspiration are mostly produced with Camtasia Studio. When you are done recording your screen with Camtasia, press Ctrl+P to open the Production Wizard, choose Custom Production Settings from the drop-down and then select GIF for the file format.









                 Produce animated GIF screencasts with Camtasia Studio
GIF files can become large and it is therefore important that you choose the most optimized encoding options. Set Colors as “Automatic” or choose a lower value for lower file size. The Dithered Color Reduction should be selected only when you are producing GIFs from videos but not for regular screen recordings.
If you are not using Camtasia, LineCAP is a good option – it is a free and light-weight utility available for both Mac and Windows.
With LineCAP, you can record your screen as well as save the recording as an animated GIF in a single step. Launch the program and adjust the frame such that it entirely encloses the scene. Hit the “Record” button, choose a name for your GIF file and start the demo. You may also move the capture frame during the recording. LineCAP produces good quality GIF screencasts and animations are smooth though the files are often large in size.
The other choice would be that you record a screencast video, use any of thesescreencasting tools, and then use a GIF encode to convert the video file into a GIF. Instagiffer and QGifer are easy-to-use tools for making GIFs from video.









                             Make Animated GIFs from Screencast Videos
Instagiffer is Windows-only and more popular while QGifer is open-source and available for Mac, Windows and Linux. If you are planning to make a short video demo or screencast that is not more than 10-20 seconds long, consider producing an animated GIF image.

How to Uninstall MSN Toolbar in Internet Explorer

If you want to remove and uninstall the MSN Toolbar from Internet Explorer, follow these steps:

Uninstall MSN Toolbar in Windows XP
  1. Click Start, and then click Run.
  2. Type appwiz.cpl, and then press ENTER.
  3. In the Currently installed programs list, click MSN Toolbar, and then click Remove.
  4. Follow the on-screen instructions.
Remove MSN IE Toolbar in Windows Vista
  1. Click Start, and then click in the Start Search box.
  2. Type appwiz.cpl, and then press ENTER.
  3. In the Uninstall or change program list, click MSN Toolbar, and then click Uninstall.
  4. Follow the on-screen instructions.

OpenDNS ShortCuts Make Your Browser Address Bar More Powerful

Do you use the browser address bar as a Google or Yahoo search box ? Here's a much better and more useful solution from OpenDNS. 

Long time readers of Digital Inspiration may know that we are big fans of OpenDNS service as it makes our internet much faster and more secure with a very simple tweak.

Just change the default DNS server address provided by your ISP with the following DNS addresses and you may immediately notice that websites load much faster on your computer:
     208.67.222.222
     208.67.220.220
The DNS server can be changed from the TCP/IP Properties section. [Control Panel -> Network Connections -> Local Network Connection -> TCP IP Properties]


OpenDNS today launched another useful service today called OpenDNS shortcuts that make your browser address bar more useful and somewhat intelligent - you can control how the address bar reacts to your commands.

With OpenDNS shortcuts turned on, the address bar of your Firefox, IE or other browsers can be used to launch websites via shortcuts (like c for cnn.com or m for gmail.com) or web queries with parameters (like g for google.com/search/q=%s).

It is also possible to start your favorite messenger clients like AOL or Google Talk from the address bar and chat with buddies quickly. Haven't tried yet, but should be fairly simple to launch iTunes music software from the browser bar now.

A lot of IE and Firefox users set their address bars to behave as I'm Feeling Luckyfeature of Google. OpenDNS shortcuts, that will be switched on in few hours, will offer a more functional address bar not just limited to Google or Yahoo search.

Update: Though I am still waiting for an official confirmation, it should be possible to use the OpenDNS shortcuts feature with the modified keyword.URL property of Firefox

Save Your Favorite Websites To Google Bookmarks in Firefox

While you easily add website links to Google Bookmarks using the Google Toolbar in IE or Firefox, an option definitely worth considering is Yawas.

Yawas (short for Yet Another Web Annotation System) is a brand new Firefox extension that offers something extra which you may not see in existing social bookmarking add-ons.
You can highlight one or more blocks of text on a web page and they automatically get saved inside the notes field of your Google bookmarks account along with the address of that website.
The more interesting part is that when you revisit that web page in future, Yawas will automatically highlight the text portions on that web pages that you have earlier clipped to Google Bookmarks. So you immediately know about the sections that you earlier found to be interesting.
Yawas [Firefox 3 Compatible] Web Clipping Software