Customize Your Google Background

Google has a feature that brings the personalization of Google a notch higher. Now, Google lets you add your favorite photo or image as the background of the Google homepage, replacing the plain white default of Google. Photos can be chosen from your computer, your own Picasa Web Album or a public gallery hosted by Picasa which includes a selection of beautiful photos.

Customizing Google.com with a background image will not slow the search engine's load time.

For those  who want to enjoy the clean, simple look of Google as well as the personalized view, Google made it  easy to switch between the customized search page and classic Google.

Customization is done by clicking the a link in the lower left-hand corner of Google.com that says "Add background image".

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The anatomy of a WordPress theme

With all the WordPress theme frameworks that arose over the past few years, you'd almost forget what a normal WordPress theme looks like. Almost, because Yoast has got your back and we're about to remind you! Check out our anatomy of a WordPress theme infographic:

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Android Mobile Application Development

Android's upcoming release is named as Ice Cream Sandwich. A name that continues the previous alphabetic series. Google's upcoming Android OS promises to be a very important update for both Android users and Android application developers. Now when you next time think to hire Android application development services from any developer or a company – don't forget to ask if they have worked or at least have knowledge of Ice Cream Sandwich. 

At the Samsung's Google Nexus Prime handset presentation it was due to be officially released, but the launch was postponed due to Steve Jobs's death. Ice Cream Sandwich is numbered as Android 4.0. This new versions of the OS is said to be fit for both Android Mobile app development and Android Tablet application development. 

Now you as being an Android application developer don't need to worry for the two different versions of the Android app to run on Smartphone and tablet. Ice Cream Sandwich mobile application development will help you tackle the fragmentation issues that have been plaguing Android. It is the first version that finally helps you develop applications that work on both smartphones and tablets.

With Honeycomb-style interface, it won't be sort-of-very-different in look and feel. You will be working with the same holographic UI, resizable widgets, multitasking panel and app launcher things and the same will look on your users' Android smartphones and tablets. But be ready to take advantage of multiple additional features of this latest version that will help you offer your expert Android application development services to clients whose customers' use latest and next generation Android smartphones with multiple capabilities. 

One other feature that users and app developers both will love is the ability to use your Android device as a USB hub. After its launch it won't remain tough for you to attach external peripherals such as a keyboard or mouse without hassle. Clicks an idea in your mind? Yes you can develop multiple apps that are related to peripheral devices' usage with your Android phones. for this you need top rated company for android application development services.

Face-recognition and head-tracking will help you develop the next generation video-conferencing apps. By using the enhanced feature of voice and video recognition anybody who is speaking during a video chat can be focused from the front camera. It will also be able to track the movements of your own head and adjust the picture accordingly when viewing a 3D image. Simply it will open the doors of an era where facial and voice recognition Android apps will be on boom. 

Last but not the least Google Music and Google+ support in this latest OS, you'll be able to develop next generation social media and entertainment apps. As Google started this OS and continuous updates are also supported by Google, there is huge potential if you develop such social media apps that revolve around Google. Because there will be huge potential in such applications. And don't forget Google+ will soon be updated to version 2.0 with a complete new and attractive look. So be ready to develop apps that will use it. 

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Google Sitemaps

Google Sitemaps are XML files that list the URLs available on a site. The aim is to help site owners notify search engines about the URLs on a website that are available for indexing.

Webmasters can include information about each URL, such as when it was last updated and its importance in the context of the site.

A site map (or sitemap) is a list of pages of a web site accessible to crawlers or users. It can be either a document in any form used as a planning tool for web design, or a web page that lists the pages on a web site, typically organized in hierarchical fashion. This helps visitors and search engine bots find pages on the site.

While some developers argue that site index is a more appropriately used term to relay page function, web visitors are used to seeing each term and generally associate both as one and the same. However, a site index is often used to mean an A-Z index that provides access to particular content, while a site map provides a general top-down view of the overall site contents.

XML is a document structure and encoding standard used, amongst many other things, as the standard for WebCrawler's to find and parse sitemaps. The instructions to the sitemap are given to the crawler bot by a Robots Text file. Site maps can improve search engine optimization of a site by making sure that all the pages can be found. This is especially important if a site uses a dynamic access to content such as Adobe Flash or JavaScript menus that do not include HTML links.

Google Sitemaps Benefits:

1. Alert Google to Changes and Additions to your Website Anytime You Want.
2. Your Website is crawled more efficiently and effectively.
3. Web Pages are categorized and prioritized exactly How You Want.
4. Speed up the process of New Website and New Web Page Discovery.
5. No Waiting and guessing to see when Spiders crawl your web pages.
6. Google Sitemaps is likely to set the standard for Webpage Submission and Update.

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Post Facebook Updates to Twitter

It's not as simple if you want to update Twitter from within Facebook, but there are a couple of options available. You can easily update your Twitter account from your Facebook fan page, but to do so from your personal profile will take a little bit more effort.

Twitterfeed

In order to post your Facebook status updates to Twitter, you will need to find your status update RSS feed. To do this, go to your notifications page by clicking See All Notifications.

Right click Via RSS and click Copy Link Address.

You're going to slightly alter the link – the part of the link that reads 'notifications.php' should be replaced to 'status.php' while the rest remains the same. In TwitterFeed click on Create a new feed and use the altered RSS feed from Facebook.

In the advanced settings, for Post Content, select 'title only' and for Update Frequency, 'Post up to 1 new update at a time,' and make sure that 'Post Link' is unchecked.

Authenticate your Twitter account and all status updates will now be automatically pushed from Facebook to Twitter.

The tweet will also include your Facebook name which is less than ideal, but may be a small price to pay for the automated service.

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