Blogger (Blogspot.com) Introduces The Label (Tag) Cloud Gadget

One of the most requested gadgets for Blogger was the Label Cloud (or tag cloud). Previously, the label gadget showed a list of labels:

Users can also select which labels to be displayed:

To add this tag cloud to your blog, log-in and in your Blogger Dashboard: Layout > Page Elements, click on "Add a Gadget" where you want the tag cloud to be displayed, then select "Labels" from the Basic gadget list. P.s.: don't forget to check the "Cloud" box in the labels options!

Disqus Comment System Gets Updated to V3

Disqus V3 is being rolled out today and promises to be the biggest change to the product since its inception in 2007.

With the ability to sign on with existing social networking accounts like Facebook or Twitter, Disqus offers lots of advantages to both users and publishers. Users benefit because they get a platform that lets them keep the same identity across multiple sites and easily comment without having to create yet-another account. Publishers benefit because they don’t have to worry about running comment registrations themselves, plus they get to easily integrate other social networks directly into their blogs.

The new Disqus Comments improved automated tools for dealing with spam or abusive comments. There is a restricted word filter that will trigger moderator approval on comments and you can whitelist or blacklist a certain e-mail or username.

A new addition I really like is the new Narcissus theme (no need for a screenshot, we already switched to this theme, here, on Web Upd8, take a look below).

Disqus Comments can import IntenseDebate and JS-Kit comments and export comments back out too. Additionally, the Moveable Type and WordPress (WordPress) plugins have been updated and allow for full comment synching.

Registered users will have their comments number displayed next to their username - another addition I really like:

Now if I could only see the total number of comments for my blog...

Again, Disqus Profile isn’t another profile, but a management tool for commenters to better keep track of and control their comments, subscriptions and various profiles. You can search through the comments you have left on other sites and edit or delete them without having to go back to a specific site or blog entry. You can also easily add-in your various social profiles from Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter and OpenID and choose to syndicate your comments to some or all of those services.

You can also merge your profiles together. This is great for those of us who often forget that we sign-up or login with something and then end up with multiple accounts for the same thing.

The best addition in my view is that now, after you post a comment, the page won't need to reload. This can easily be set for any blog. For Blogger Blogs it may seem tricky because it requests you enter a url to a blank.html page or to /does-not-exist/ hosted on your domain. But this can easily be done by entering http://YOURBLOG.blogspot.com/blank.html (or any other URL which redirects to a 404 page) in the corresponding form field (Disqus Dashboard > Settings > General at the bottom of the page). You can test this feature by commenting to this post ;)

And the last new addition I noticed: Disqus now supports FeedFlare for FeedBurner, meaning it can display the number of comments from your blog, right on your feed. To enable this, login to your Feedburner account, go to Optimize > FeedFlare, enable it and in the "Add new flare" field, enter http://YOUR_BLOG_DISQUS_NAME.disqus.com/~feedflare/comments_link.xml , obviously replacing YOUR_BLOG_DISQUS_NAME with your blog name on Disqus (Example: http://webupd8.disqus.com/~feedflare/comments_link.xml)

Please note there could be other changes / improvements too, but Disqus hasn't publish any info just yet.

[via mashable.com]

LazyFeed, The Realtime Interest Feed Reader Is Now Live

Lazyfeed, the realtime interest feed reader that launched last month in private beta, is opening up publicly today for anyone who wants to sign up.

What exactly is Lazyfeed?

Instead of signing up for a long list of blogs and news feeds, all you have to do on Lazyfeed is type in a topic and Lazyfeed will show you the most recent posts and articles with that tag from the one million blogs that it now indexes. (This number is up from 100,000 blogs at launch). Headlines and excerpts containing that tag appear in the main window, and if you want to follow that topic, you can save the tag in a column on the left. As you save more tags, your interests appear as a list, which reorder themselves according to the latest posts.

So instead of a list of blogs, you have a list of interests, and Lazyfeed goes out and discovers content for you around those interests. For any given tag you put unto the search bar at the top, it also supplies you with related tags just underneath that you can click on to explore further. If you don’t like a particular blog, you can remove it from your results. Another new feature since the private beta launch is that you can now share any post on Twitter, Facebook, or email.

I have been using it for about an hour and I must say I really like it, but I definitely won't give up Google Reader for it. Instead, I might use them both.

[via techcrunch]

Rhythmbox 0.12.4 Released - Ubuntu .deb Download

Rhythmbox, the default audio player in Ubuntu was updated recently to version 0.12.4. Among the changes:

Interesting changes:
* New HAL-free media player detection code (using GUdev and the media-player-id collection of device info files); improved MTP device detection allowing multiple devices and devices not explicitly supported by libmtp (Jonathan Matthew)
* Audio CD improvements: allow metadata retrieval to be retried, link to the musicbrainz submission page when data is missing (Bastien Nocera, Matt N)
* Configurable action for mouse-wheel events on the status icon (volume control or next/previous track) (Gustavo Mora)
* Rearranged to link properly (should help building on Windows or with -Wl,-as-needed, probably) (Jonathan Matthew)
* Variety of crashes fixed (Jonathan Matthew)
* Occasional transfer problems with MTP devices fixed (Jonathan Matthew)

Bugs fixed:
322265 - Can't reload CD metadata
376863 - option to configure default action of mouse roll event on tray icon
437110 - librhythmbox-core.so missing some library links
535065 - If a cd is not listed in musicbrainz it can not be added
561953 - Scan Removable Devices don't works with MTP music players
563544 - rework MTP device detection for libmtp 0.3.0
580440 - lists with only one song don't repeat with both "repeat" and "shuffle" selected
585595 - crash at end of playlist with crossfading disabled
586598 - use streaming song titles for lyrics searches
587662 - improved warning message in python plugin support code
588248 - link last.fm plugin with libsoup-gnome
588257 - occasional crash on shutdown
590108 - crashes if there are no saveable metadata types
591874 - pack right sidebar with shrinking disabled
592325 - crashes initialising an iPod Touch

You can download Rhythmbox 0.12.4 from HERE or add the GetDeb repository (although it will some time till it gets updated here).

Preview And Install / Uninstall Fonts In Windows With Portable Application NexusFont

NexusFont is a font manager for Windows. If you have many fonts and you need to choose the fonts you want, this program is for you. You can compare many fonts at once. and there are useful functions to manage font files like install / uninstall, etc.

NexusFont is freeware, portable and works on Windows 2000/XP/2003/Vista. You can download it from HERE.

[via Freeware & Tutorials]

Opera 10 RC1 Released, Final Version To Be Launched September, 1

Opera Software has just released Opera 10 RC1 to the masses and has announced it will be debuting the final version of its upgraded desktop browser next week on September 1. You can download the release candidate and get more information right here.

Opera 10, formerly codenamed Peregrine, will feature an improved user interface, increased web standards support, bug fixes, performance improvements, and new tools for web developers. Opera 10 Final will also include Opera Turbo, the new bandwidth-booster for slow Internet connections, and a revamped Opera Mail, its built-in e-mail client. Also worth testing when it comes out: Opera claims the next version of its desktop browser will be significantly faster on resource intensive pages such as Gmail and Facebook, deeming it more than 40% faster overall than Opera 9.6.

Where To Host Your Blogger Blog JavaScript Files?

We all know that having your blog hosted at Blogger (blogspot.com) isn't that easy. One of the issues which Blogger users have to deal with is hosting their JavaScript files. Once, everything was easy, by using Google Pages. Some time ago I was telling you how to 'tweak' FileDen to host your JavaScript files as .txt but 5 GB bandwidth per month is not enough so I searched for something with unlimited bandwidth and found quite a few alternatives:

1. The most obvious choicee is Dropbox which can be used to host any kind of files for your blog. Dropbox is a sync and backup tool but it's server lets you host 2 GB of files to their server, and also, inviting friends to join can get you 3 more GB of space (5 GB total) - all for free. Dropbox can be used for other things too, like i told you HERE and HERE.

2. Office Live Small Business offers, among others, a solution for building a website. You can use this to host your files (free). It offers 500 MB of space, but that should be enough to host some JavaScript files, isn't it? :)

3. Lycos Tripod, the Spanish version of the website still offers unlimited traffic and 1 GB of space, for free (unlike it's .com version which only offers 20 MB space and 1 GB monthly bandwidth for free). The only downside is the web interface which is in Spanish. But you can use Google Translator for that.

Do you know any other hosting solution with unlimited monthly bandwidth, for free? If so, please share it using the comment form below! Thanks!