I used to hate those millions of Farmville and Mafia war’s feed on my Facebook feed. I blocked them, they got added to the blocked app list. But trust me when you actually start playing these you have hard time surviving without those feeds. Now when I want to enable them i find no option to do it. Facebook changed its interface recently just after the “birthday”. Everytime Facebook changes its look, its like “you better devote some time to find all those misplaced areas”. I did that. I found where the applications can be added to the feed again.

The trick is to move to “Top news” first. The most used “most recent” page doesn’t let you do it.

• Go to Top News link on the top of your feeds.
• Now navigate to the end of the page and find “Edit Options”
• Go to the “applications” tab in the floating box.
• Click on the “add to news feed” button. You are done.

The catch here is that you’d kill yourself from frustration after not finding any such options under the “Most Recent” page. True that you never go to the “Top News” page. But for this you’ll have to go. There is no other way on the present Facebook interface to unhide applications from your news feed.

P.S. You also find blocked pages there.

Start pages are always a mess in web browsers. Firefox put up a design contest for users to design a perfect start page recently. Be it Chrome’s most used pages or Firefox’s default Google search page. Well, Chome does the work to a pretty good extent not to mention opera’s and safari’s speed dial pages. But it is totally a different experience when you have the start page on the cloud that is perfectly customized according to your needs. All those web services on your home page for you to access at a click. Doesn’t that seem perfect.
Symbaloo - Start simple, is a simple interface that basically focuses to refine your first contact with the internet everyday. The symbaloo pages houses draggable boxes that link to your favorite web services like feeds, mail, radio, search, translate and what not. If even that doesn’t make you scream enough. You have free places where you can add your own boxes that link to a service specified by you. Now that’s too much YOU.

To set it as a start page. Just click the button at the bottom of the page that says “Set as startpage“. The following light box a the center of the screen gives you the instructions. OR simply drag the link http://www.symbaloo.com to the home in firefox.

Youtube is testing a new service. The Youtube Disco. It is a one stop for all your music needs. Where you can listen to all the full music for free with videos. What’s more? There is a tab on the second page that finds you similar artists to the one you entered on the first page. Similar artists are found using some algorithm that comes from user choices. It has some very good advantages over other such services like last.fm and Pandora. Pandora isn’t even available in India.

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ONLY FOR U.S. Schools

Google invites U.S school students to submit their artistic and creative imaginations for the Google logo on its home page. Last year winner Christin Engelberth’s entry. Some important dates are as follows:

School Registration Deadline – March 17, 2010

Early Bird Submissions -Win Netbook Computers – March 10, 2010

Doodle Entry Deadline – March 31, 2010

State Finalists and Regional Winners Notified – May 17, 2010

Online Public Vote – May 17-24, 2010

Awards Ceremony and National Winners Announced – May 26, 2010

Winning Doodle on the Google Homepage – May 27, 2010

Are you concerned about your website taking long load times. This could be your internet connection or really a fault with your website. To find out Pingdom tools is the best place. It analyzes your load speed on a standard internet connections. Anything less than 12 seconds is fine. If you have something more than that, it could be a reason to worry.

Pingdom tools gives you a list of objects in a particular order (default in the order they load) and their load times. This helps you find the area of fault. A graph generated is something like this:

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• 15 Free Web Services and Tools To Monitor Your Website Uptime and Downtime (steppinoutblog.info)