Welcome to another edition of Link Love. Here are some useful posts I came across this week.

Earlier this week Nirmal released an e-book with all the commonly used chat abbreviations.

Many softwares unneccesarily add their own entries to the context menu thus making it slow to load and cluttered. Shankar wrote about three free utilties that can clean up your context menu is a safe and hassle free way.

Keith wrote about a service that allows you to submit your article to 33 social networking/bookmarking/content sites.

If you are a blogger then you must have exprienced bloggers block. All bloggers (and writers) have those periods of time when they can’t think of what to write about. Webd360 has some tips to overcome Bloggers Block.

I am going to be visiting my relatives and would be out of town for about 10 days. During this time I would not have regular internet access hence I won’t be able to respond to email messages and comments. However, I am not completely deserting the blog. I have used the future post feature to schedule a few posts. They would be published during the coming week.

How appropriate! This information about do-it-yourself website buildingis just the kind of thing one can find with a little practiced websurfing. And, if you want to find other goodies, such as a loan calculator, how to improve Internet speed or how to install a satellite TV , visit a top-flight do it yourself website!

We already have several web based Office suites. Hence, it’s only natural that someone would come up with web based web-design tool. Here are three web-based web-design tools.

Synthasite : The newest kid in the block is Synthasite. It sports an advanced tabbed interface that is very similar to desktop based solutions. It offers a rage of templates to get you started. Synthasite is widget based and you need to drag and drop widgets to create your website. Currently not many widgets are available but that is again due to it’s young age. Synthasite is in early technical preview stage and there are many quirks. It also made Firefox unresponsive on a couple of occasions. Also note that the content created during tech preview may be lost when newer versions are released. South Africa-based Synthasite has ambitious plans. Expect a lot of new features in the coming days.

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Opera 10 (code named Peregrine) is slated to arrive later this year. As a long time Opera user I have my own expectations of Peregrine. Here, I present to you ten improvements that I want to see in Opera v10. I am not a codie so my wish-list doesn�t deal with under the hood rendering engine improvements (only exception being Wish #8), rather all of them are noticeable feature additions/improvements.

10. Better Download Manager : Opera already has an excellent download manager. In fact it’s much better than download managers integrated with other browsers. But there is always scope for improvement. I want to see ability to limit the bandwidth being used by Opera’s download manager. The ability to queue downloads would also be a nice addition.

9. Inline Spell Checker : The oSpell userjs is excellent as an inline spell checker. However, this is something that should be provided by Opera out of the box. Heck, even barebones Firefox has it!

8. Prioritize page loading : This feature was suggested by Scott at myOpera forums. He wants Opera to give higher priority to the foreground tab and load that webpage faster than the ones in the background. I think this is a wonderful idea and would definitely make Opera more productive.

7. Private Browsing : Safari has a neat little feature called Private Browsing. Firefox users can use extensions like Stealther and Distrust. Yes, Opera allows users to delete private data. But this is different. When it is enabled web pages are not added to the History, items are automatically removed from the Downloads window and information (including names and passwords) is not saved for Autofill. So only private data collected during Private Browsing is deleted. The utility of Private browsing is pretty obvious.

6. Rich Text Copy : Sometime back Opera removed rich text copy, apparently due to security concerns. Talk about paranoia! I hate the fact that they didn�t even give users the option. I hate the fact that I have to use another browser to copy text with all the formatting. Only other alternative is using a complicated solution devised by Lex1. I hope to see rich text copy back in next version. Plain text copy should remain the default (associated with Ctrl+C), but users should also be allowed to copy text with all formatting via the right click context menu and keyboard shortcut.

5. Activity Monitor : This feature is already present in Safari, and is extremely handy when you want to download streaming content. Currently I have to use Naviscope to monitor browser activity. This is something that should be built into Opera.
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Have you ever come across a wonderful video that you wanted to download, but couldn�t find a way to do so? If the answer is yes, read on.

Majority of the video content available on the web can be grouped into four categories: Windows Media Video, Apple QuickTime Video, Real Video and Flash Video. In this article I shall deal with each one of them. But before getting started you need to download few sofware.
All the utilities mentioned below are Freeware.

i) K-Lite Mega Codec Pack so that you can view the media files. Make sure you install Real Alternative, QuickTime Alternative and Mov downloader.
ii) Orbit Downloader to download files.
iii) GetASFStream to download ASF and ASX files.
iv) Naviscope
v) Any FLV viewer to view FLV files.
Now, let�s get started.
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You need to click on Download button to view full-size

Windowblinds : Arzo
Wallpaper : Q’s Varient X2
Icon Packager : Blend
CursorXP : MetalReligion

+ Object Dock + Widgets+ TopDesk

Do you want a desktop like this? Check out my comprehensive guide to Desktop Modding.

Searching for pdf conversion Check out all of the online services out there, such as pdf to excel and pdf converters, too.

This is my first batch of link love. I plan to do this every week or so. I will feature interesting blogposts not only from my readers but also from elsewhere in the blogosphere.Here are some interesting blogposts :

Manage your windows with Deskloops by Shankar

How To Decrease Size Of Powerpoint Presentations by Manas

MOBILedit- The Mobile Manager by Nirmal

7 Useful Wordpress plugins by Anand

Torrenting for Dummies by Aman

Top 10 English Grammar Myths and Superstitions in Essay Writing

Rich HTML email signatures straight from Gmail by Derek

That’s all for this week. I hope you found this list useful.

Welcome to another edition of Opera Bytes. Since I am blogging fairly regularly now, I plan to do this on a monthly basis. In this edition I look back at the month of May.

Opera v9.21 for desktop was released on 21st May. This release fixes a critical vulnerability present in Opera’s torrent downloader.

Opera is one of the applications nominated for Webware 100 awards. You can vote for Opera here.
CNET is known for being biased against Opera (and towards Firefox). That is again evident from the nominations. How did Greasemonkey get a nomination? Greasemonkey is nothing unique or extraordinary. Opera provides the same functionality out of the box and similar addons are available for other browsers too (e.g. Creammonkey for Safari). Even more surprising is the exclusion of Opera Mini from Mobile category. Opera Mini is innovative and useful. PC Mag had commented that “If you only ever download one cell phone app, download Opera”. According to Hitslink Opera Mini had 0.16% of the browser market share during May. That is huge for a mobile browser. Accoding to Sun Microsystems Opera Mini most popular Java Application for mobile phones in the world.

The next version of Opera Mini (code named “Dimension”) is coming soon. Little is known about it as the moment other than that it would feature enhanced navigation. You can sign up for beta testing here.
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