One of most performed action in Internet browsing is that we all download lot of music, videos, document etc. to our local hard disk for later viewing. A lot of time we view those files immediately and some time we want to do it later. If you want to view it later then you will need to know where exactly that file is stored. By default Google Chrome stores file at the following location.

This is location for Windows 7 and assuming C drive is your system drive. A lot of time I have run into situations where I have downloaded same files multiple times. Chrome and other browsers do a good job of renaming a file if it is going to duplicate copy of an existing one. Then you know that you really did not need this file because you already have it. But when you use multiple browsers then lot of time you have duplicate files at multiple locations. If you designate a folder on your machine where you want to keep downloaded files, then you can easily manage those files.

In Chrome you can change the default location of downloaded files as described below.

• Click on little wrench looking icon on upper right side of the browser bar and click on Options menu item.

  

• Now you will presented with Options screen in a new tab. Click on on Under the Hood option in left navigation bar.

  

• In Options - Under the Hood screen, in right view there is a section for Downloads as shown below. In this section you can change the default location. You will notice a check box that allows you to set the option so that browser will always ask for location where file should be saved.

  

You will find similar options in other browsers as well. This way you can consolidate downloaded files at one location.

As Google+ user base is growing, your Circle population is growing as well. You have more and more friends and family joining Google+ and you may have noticed that you email inbox is becoming active with all the notifications your are getting about all the activities. The reason you are getting all these notifications is that by default your account settings are set to recieve notifications for every single thing. If you have not changed your account settings for Google+, then it looks like the image below.

As you can see, all check boxes are checked. If you want to control the notifications, following these steps to modify your account settings for Google+.

1. After you log in to Google+ account in your browser, click on your name in upper right hand side of browser window. And it will bring roll down a window where you will see option for Account Settings.

2. Click on Account Settings option and it bring you to page where you have all your settings.

   

3. Click on Google+ link in left side and it will bring up settings. Look for the Receive notifications section in right side. Uncheck the options that you want to turn off.

Now you are free from all the notifications that you do not want.

It seems that Google has decided to open up Google+ invites to larger user base now. This morning I saw notifications in my inbox about friends and family adding me to their circles. Finally my streams are going to be little busy. Otherwise it was like a ghost town. It was catch 22 situation for Google as well. They did not want to open up the service too much without resolving some of the issues and making sure that Google+ was the right thing for people for make a switch from Facebook. But if they did not add more people that would mean people who were part of Google+ did not have any friends to talk to.

Here is the good news. Google is allowing Google+ members to invite their friends again. I was thrilled to see the following button in right side of my Google+ dashboard.

How to send Google+ invite

Process is very simple. Look in right side panel of your Google+ interface. If you see the link or button as shown in picture above, then click on it. It will bring up the following user interface.

Click on Add people to invite link the dialog box and enter email address of friends and family members who you would like to invite and you are done.

How to get invite to Google+

If you know of some one who is already Google+ user, just request him or her to send you invite. You can forward them this post if they are not sure about how to do it!

Facebook is known for bending the rules and making changes around privacy settings and exposing user's information that they really do not want to share. I thought Google+ will do a better job about it. From my limited tests so far, I see some of the same issues with Google+ as well. One of the things that I bothers me with Facebook is that once I can get hold somebody's profile, I can just navigate to all contacts of that person and then from contact's contacts and so on. So I decided to give it a spin in Google+. One thing Google+ is doing is that it is not handing you a very user friendly URL of a person's profile. You will see a profile URL like https://plus.google.com/114333649737.........../. Atleast it makes it hard to guess profiles by names. I took my profile's URL and put it in the browser. Well, It did open my profile's page and it showed people in my circle and people who have me in their circles. It is same thing as Facebook where you can see a person's contacts. One good thing that Google+ is doing is that it only showed people who have Google+ account. It did not show people who were added to my circles just based on their email addresses. Well that would have been total catastrophe. That would have been spammer's heaven. I like this aspect of security in Google+. But it still showed my circles. If you want to hide these circles from people other than people in your circles, then you have to opt out of it by editing your profile.

Hide Google+ Circles From World

• 

  Click on Profile icon in navigation bar as show in image above to bring up your profile.

• Click on Edit Profile button to right of your name at top.

• Notice that view has changed a little bit with some new icon(s) visible on top of sections. On left hand side where you have list of circles and people in it, a new circular icon, as shown in picture below is visible.

  

  When you hover on this icon, it will show you current settings in tool tip. For example in my case it says Visible to everyone.

• Click on the icon and you will be presented with following dialog box to modify privacy settings.

  

  There are 3 levels of privacy controls that allow you to control who can see what part of circle. Lets look at each one of these.

  Who can see my circles

  By default, Anyone on the web option is selected in top section. You can change it to Your circles if you do not want to make this information public.

  What circles to show

  In top section, there is a drop down list that has All circles selected by default. This means all circles are visible to whole world or your circles depending on choice you made above. If you want to control what circle to show and not to show, click on the drop down list and it will show you name of circles with tick mark to indicate what circles are being shown. You can click on circle names to toggle visibility.

  Who has me in circles

  Bottom section has option to turn off option to show list of people who have you in their circle(s).

• After making the changes, click on Save button and then click on Done Editing button at the top.

I hope this post provide you enough information to get you started with controlling privacy of your circles.

Tonight I was doing some testing with Google+ features. I saw some posts from some people about how you could use Google+ circle feature to send invites to your friends by adding their email addresses into a new circle. Then it struck me that Google+ does not prevent me from adding as many people as I want to into the circle just by using email addresses. And then I can post a message that will be shared with all people in that circle. Well, that sounds a like a perfect recipe for spamming as many people as I want to. A perfect spam tool that Google is handing over to spammers.

So I decided to check it out myself. I created a new circle and added one of my test email accounts into that circle. I went one step further. Along with a post, I included a link and shared it with my new circle. As I suspected, I got the message from Google+ saying Naveen has invited you to join Google+. Well as everybody is kind of trying to get their hand on this new Google toy, it is very easy for a user to fall for it and click on the link in that message. Only thing I have to do is just point that link to a key logger and get you to land on a fake Google+ page and your account will be my property.

Hack Prevention

It won't take long before you start seeing phishing emails in your mail boxes about invites for Google+. Here are some of the things you can do to avoid falling for the trap.

• Pay very close to attention to subject of the email. Sender's name will be in the subject. If you are not familiar with the name, do not click on any link in the email.
• There will be a button or link in the email that will say Learn more about Google+. Before you click on it, hover on it and it will reveal the URL behind the link in tooltip or in status bar. If the URL is not pointing to https://plus.google.com, do not click on it. Pay very close attention to the url. A hacker will make every attempt to make it look like that URL.

Yes, it is going to be very tempting to click on the link or button in the email but patience my friend patience. And force will be with you...Hopefully Google has something in works to fight the dark side.

One of my favorite features about Google+ is circles. This is one feature that sets Google+ miles apart from Facebook. Circle feature is intuitive and easy to use. What Circle does is that it draws a boundary around information and then you decide who can come inside the boundary to view that information. When you click on Circles icon in navigation bar at the top, you see following default circles.

As you can see, there are four circles created for you by default.

• Friends
• Family
• Acquaintances
• Following

Create new circles in Google+

You are not restricted to using four default circles. You can create new circles to create your own special groups and then add people to it. There is a fifth circle on the left of default four circles which reads Drop here to create a new circle. What this means is that drag one of the contacts from top of the page into this dotted circle to start creation of a new circle. As soon as you drop a contact in it, the circle text changes to a link Create Circle.

You can click on this Create Circle link to bring up user interface to add details about this new circle. You can click on Clear to remove all people from the circle and start fresh with your circle configuration. Once you save your new circle, you will appear it in your list of circles and a new dotted circle will appear on left side that you can use to create another circle and so on.

Share stream with new circle

After you have created new circle(s), these will appear in the drop down of circles when you want to share your stream(s). As you can see from image below that I have create a new circle named Home Sweet Home and it appears in my list of circles when I want to share streams or any information.

I am not sure how this feature will work if you remove any person from circle after you have started sharing information. Or how it will work if you add a person after the sharing session has been established for a while. Since the service is still in Beta, so I am assuming lot of details will change. But so far it looks pretty cool!

Yesterday I got an email from a follower about sharing her content from Google+ by adding me to Circle. First I was little hesitant to click on the link in the email because I know lot of people are waiting to get into Google+ and I am sure lot of phishing emails are floating around to prey on eager beavers. Finally I looked at the source of the email and confirmed authenticity of links in the email, I clicked on it.

To my surprise, I did not realize I was already invited to Google+. I have been looking forward to this invite. Did I tell you that I absolutely hate FaceBook. I will not go into this discussion. Anyhow, after going though few steps of accepting terms and conditions and all that good stuff, I was actually using Google+. Initially I was not sure about what I was looking at and what I am supposed to do. After looking at few icons and clicking around I found my way around. And I was finally able to write my first post. I thought I will post some introductory notes to using Google+ here.

Google+ Navigation

At the top of the page you will see the icons as shown in image above. These are four main navigation links in Google+. These icons are for Home, Photos, Profile and Circles.

How to modify profile in Google+

First thing you want to do is complete your profile. You can click on Profile icon in navigation bar at top. On right side of your name you will notice a button Edit Profile. Yes, click on it and you will be taken to page where you can modify your profile details. Unlike Facebook, I find modifying profile in Google+ easier. Best part I like is how you specify privacy. Click on any entry you would want to edit. That entry turns into an editable user interface, For example look at the image below where I want to edit my occupation.

You will see a drop down, as indicated with arrow, where you can specify privacy of information. From this list you can select the users who can see that part of the information. Unlike I facebook, I do not have to go through hoops to figure out what information is being shared with whole world and what is private. Once you are done with editing, click on Done Editing button at top of that page and you are actually done.

In subsequent posts I will write more about other features of Google+.

Recently I was working on adding Google Affiliate Network to my list of affiliate program list to ad to revenue streams. After I applied for the program, I got approval confirmation email in 2 minutes. Well I have been part of Google Adsense for quite some time, so there was not much for google to review I guess. Anyhow, after approval I logged into network account. Every time I clicked on Advertisers or Links or for that matter anything related to getting advertisement specific information, I kept on getting following error message at the top of the page.

This was little strange that I am logged into Google Affiliate Network and site can not find the account. After I did some research, I found few suggestions.

• Clean browser cache
• Enable SSL 2.0
• Make sure Javascript is enabled

So I just went along with these suggestions and It still did not resolve the issue. I tried on 3 different machines at this point. After I waited for about 30 minutes and logged into Google Affiliate Network portal, I could access all links without any problems.

After adding some advertisers to my list and getting approvals, I noticed that my list of approved advertisers was empty. Again it did not make sense. From this experience here is the conclusion that I have reached that Google's site has some caching going on which is not getting updated for 10-30 minutes. Although you think that your data has been added, the web site does not think that way. If you are running into these issues with Google Affiliate Network site, my suggestion is to have little patience. After you have updated your information wait for about 15 minutes for it to reflect in the portal.

Last week I was updating the site to include some new features. I realized that I was missing a very important component on the blog and that was google search box. I had this search on my other sites for quite some time. I remember that I had to deal with the fact that Google Custom Search script is implemented as a POST FORM with the action set to a URL that will be used to display results.

First you have to deal with the fact that ASP.Net framework does not allow you to have multiple FORM tags on the page. But if you want have more than one then only one can have runat='server' attribute on it. And then you have to make sure that your FORM tags are not nested. Well, depending on your layout of the site and implementation, you may or may not be able to control location of this google search form. Here is the solution that I implemented few years ago and deployed on this site as well.

Use of iform

Yes, took the Google Custom Search script and put it in a static HTML page. And then put an IFRAME on the page where I wanted to display the search box. This is where you will have to be little careful. You will have to make sure that style of the HTML page matches your main site. Next make sure that height and width of iframe is big enough to accomodate the search box otherwise you will end up with horizontal and vertical scroll bars around the frame and that will not be a pretty sign for site users. You want to give the illusion to users that this search box is sitting on the page itself. Now perform search and it works. But there is a problem. Search result target URL is being opened in the frame where search box is. Well that is a little problem.

Fix target of FORM

This is where you will have to make a change in the script that Google Custom Search generated for you. In FORM tag, set target to _top. Now when this form is submitted, the action is sent to page contained this iframe. The following snippet is what I have in my HTML page.

<div class="cse-branding-bottom" style="background-color:#FFFFFF;color:#000000">
  <div class="cse-branding-form">
    <form action="http://localhost/ByteBlocksWeb/SearchResults.aspx" 
      id="cse-search-box" 
      target="_top">
      <div>
        <input type="hidden" name="cx" value="partner-pub-xxxxxxxxxxxxx:wcbg5i-ahdn" />
        <input type="hidden" name="cof" value="FORID:11" />
        <input type="hidden" name="ie" value="ISO-8859-1" />
        <input type="text" name="q" size="60" />
        <input type="submit" name="sa" value="Search" />
      </div>
    </form>
  </div>
  <div class="cse-branding-logo">
    <img src="http://www.google.com/images/poweredby_transparent/poweredby_FFFFFF.gif" alt="Google" />
  </div>
  <div class="cse-branding-text">
    Custom Search
  </div>
</div>

Now perform a search and you will notice that your results show up in main page and not in iframe anymore. Give it a try right here in this site by using search at top of the page and see how it works.

Every now and then I get question from somebody, How may google ad units I can place on my page?. All this information is actually available on google's site. I will just put that data in a nice table form so it is easy for you to refer to it. I have extracted this data from google's site. I will suggest that for more accurate and upto date information you do visit the link that I have supplied at the bottom of the post.