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You normally use the English language to post updates on Facebook and that helps because majority of your Facebook friends can understand your message even if English is not their first language.

There are however instances where you just want to post stuff on Facebook in your native language – it could be a link to some hilarious YouTube video, a joke that was forwarded to you via SMS or even a regular status update.

For instance, Orli is from Israel and frequently uses a mix of English and Hebrew in her Facebook page. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with expressing yourself in your mother tongue on Facebook but the only problem is that such “status updates” don’t always make sense to your global friends who don’t know your language.

Eyal Sela, who also happens to be from the same country, has come up with a brilliant solution to fix this problem. Eyal’s idea is that you create a new list with friends who don’t speak your language. Next, when you post an update in your native language, just make sure that the update stays hidden from that Facebook list.

For instance, if you are from Spain, you can create a new list that says “Don’t know Spanish” and add all your English-speaking friends to that list. While posting an update in Spanish, change the visibility settings and none of your non-Spanish friends will ever see that message.

This of course requires effort but if you only have a small network of friends on Facebook , you can give this a shot.

Do You Speak Multiple Languages on Facebook?

Originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal.

When you create a Google Account, you automatically get access to web-based office apps, email, calendar, file storage, tasks list and instant messaging but one piece that’s still missing from the Google cloud is “project management.”

Even Google Apps, a service that is so popular among businesses, doesn’t have any project management related features to help teams plan and coordinate better. Some people use spreadsheets in Google Docs and Gmail for co-ordinating tasks but isn’t that complicated.

If you are a Gmail or Google Apps user and are looking for an online project management app that can integrate with your other Google services (mainly Google Docs and Google Calendar), Manymoon could be a good choice.

Getting started is easy. You can sign-up using your standard Gmail Account or Google Apps account. Then create a project and add users to the project by manually entering their email addresses or you can even import contacts directly from your Google Apps, Outlook, LinkedIn, or Yahoo accounts.

Once your project is setup, you can add tasks and assign them to yourself or other team members. You can attach existing Google documents to individual tasks or upload new files from your desktop into Manymoon and the service will automatically save a copy of these files into your Google Docs account.

Similarly, once you associate your Google Calendar with your project, all events, pending tasks and project milestones that you create inside Manymoon will automatically show up in your Google Calendar.

You can then view your project calendar from within the Manymoon project or the regular Google Calendar interface.

Manymoon also offers time-sheets to help project teams track the time team members spent on tasks and other project items.

The basic version of Manymoon is free and still offers unlimited users and projects but you only get 5MB space for storing files and one project calendar. If you are a Google Apps Premier user, you can get up to 1 GB of storage space for free.

Though the programs lacks some advanced features (Gantt Charts and Invoicing for example), what I really liked about Manymoon is the uncluttered interface and every feature that’s there just works as you would expect.

Zoho Projects is another useful web-based project management software that, like Manymoon, also integrates well with Google Apps.

Manymoon, an Online Project Management Software for Google Users

Originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal.

The winner for week 3 of the Intel Contest is Namita Guj from Navi Mumbai, Maharashtra. Navi gets a digital music player from Sony courtesy Intel India.

The winner for Week 1 was Eeshan Chatterjee from Manipal, Karnataka while Viren Mehta won the Week 2 round.

If you haven’t participated in the contest yet or want to submit another entry for the contest (yes, that’s allowed), please click here.

The contest is only open for another five days. The grand winner will get a Core i5 powered laptop computer from Intel.

For detailed terms and conditions, please click here. Should you have any queries, please send me an email at amit@labnol.org.

The Winner for Week 3 of the Intel Contest

Originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal.

Amazon or eBay? If you are wondering which of these online shopping sites would offer you the cheapest rates for that book or music DVD, here’s help.

Amazon and eBay Comparison Shopping

Q-Compare is a useful tool that will let you compare prices of products from both eBay and Amazon marketplaces on the same page. You may use the service to compare the current prices and shipping charges of books, DVDs, electronics and all the other product categories.

What’s unique about Q-Compare is that it works for all countries where eBay has a presence. For instance, you can select “India” as your country and the tool will only display products that are available for auction / sale on the eBay India site (ebay.in).

All prices are listed in USD but if you open the actual eBay listing, they will be converted into your local currency. Thanks Phil Bradley for the tip!

Related guides:

• Add Price Comparison to any Shopping Website
• How to Buy Books Online for a Discount
• Which Amazon Store Should You Use for Buying Books
• How to Buy Software Online for a Discount

Compare Product Prices from eBay and Amazon

Originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal.

You are surfing the web with Internet Explorer, there are about a dozen different websites loaded in various tabs and suddenly the browser freezes up. The menu bar, the close button and all the tabs have become unresponsive so what can you do to restore the session?

Internet Explorer (version features “automatic crash recovery” so if a single tab crashes due to, say, a bad plug-n, IE will automatically restart that tab alone without touching the other open websites.

However, when the entire browser comes to a halt, try this tip.

Start the task manager (Alt + Ctrl + Del) and sort the process list by “memory.” Now select iexplore.exe processes that are consuming the least amount of memory (from bottom to top) and end them one by one by hitting the delete key.

Your frozen IE application should terminate in the second or third attempt. Restart the IE browser and it will show a dialog asking you to confirm whether you really want to restore the previously open websites – say Yes and that’s it!

This trick comes very handy when you have dozens of iexplore.exe processes listed in task manager or when you are running multiple instances of Internet Explorer and only one of them has become unresponsive while others are working normally. I don’t know the logic but the trick always works for me.

What to do When your Internet Explorer Hangs?

Originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal.

Just search for the term “wordpress backups” in the official WordPress plug-ins directory and you’ll be surprised to know that there exist over 100 plug-ins just to help you easily backup your WordPress database and other associated files.

There are so many choices but most backup plug-ins often work the same – they’ll take a full dump of your MySQL database and will then save the zipped file into the same server that is hosting your WordPress blog. Some plug-ins can even send you backup file as email attachments.

If you are on Amazon S3, I highly recommend that you use the WordPress plug-in from Dan Coulter to automatically backup your blog to the S3 cloud. Here’s why:

Reason #0. There’s absolutely no configuration required – just add your Amazon S3 access keys and the plugin will do the rest. It will even create S3 buckets for you where the WordPress files will get saved.

Reason #1. The plug-in won’t just backup your WordPress databases but it will save a copy of your WordPress themes, plug-ins and other important configuration files (like .htaccess, wp-config.php, etc) to Amazon S3.

Reason #2. Amazon S3 charges you for every byte of data storage so you can set the plug-in to automatically delete backups that are older than a month.

Reason #3. You can either run scheduled backups (once per day, or per month) or take snapshots manually. The backup happens in the background and you don’t have to wait in the browser for the process to complete.

The Automatic WordPress Backup plugin is available on wordpress.org but before you hit the download button, here’s a word of caution.

The plug-in, once installed, will automatically add links to the author’s site in your WordPress blog without even asking you. That however should not prevent you from using this extremely useful plugin as the links can be easily removed from the options pages (see the second screenshot).

Backup your WordPress Blog to the S3 Cloud

Originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal.

For example, look at these guys. Tell me they’re not having fun. (They are.)

Longing for your next chance to put on, say, a bunny suit and cheer on your favorite team? Here’s the schedule. Also, the results of previous games.

The full list of which team won which medal, and when. I choose to think of this information as relating directly to what their fans wore. What I’m saying is: If you want your team to do well, you better come up with some sort of costume. Bonus points if you make your friends dress up, too.

We’ve got ten categories here, from Best Multimedia Site to Best Blog. It says something about me that I skipped straight to Best Humor Site, skipping the arguably more valuable Reference and News categories. (But if you can’t laugh, what point is knowing everything?)