Saturday 26 May 2012

Shortcut to directly link Australia Post Tracking Number in the URL

The Australia Post tracking page is a place to monitor items that are being tracking using their tracking numbers.

The page consists of a form with fields and buttons, click, type, click, wait....

Some times it is important to send this tracking number to a customer, but to have them reenter a number into a form is not efficient.

Here is a way of integrating the tracking number directly to the URL via a query.

auspost.com.au/track/track.html?id=XXXXXXXXXXXXX

Where XXXXXXXXXXXXX is the tracking number.

Be sure to try it before sending it off to people via email.


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Wednesday 16 May 2012

How to get writing text back on gmail icons button labels

Ever since google changed the gmail interface, the labels on the buttons have changed from English text to some crappy symbols which have no apparent meaning.  We are talking about the "Archive" "Refresh" "Delete" buttons..

They have made excuses to people like, the position has not changed or the labels have the meaning when you hover over them with the mouse, but should we have to swallow this BS just so illiterates can use their email without feeling violated?

Anyway, google has succumbed to public pressure and made a option for uses to go back the having text on buttons in the gmail online interface.  The switch is easy:

In the gmail interface, click the gears icon.  Then click settings.
In the General tab, you will see "Button Labels", change this to text.
Relax, and enjoy  your new freedom.




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Workaround for drive.google.com being blocked at work docs.google.com docs drive

Anyone that has changed over from google docs to google drive, will learn that it is a one way process with no looking back.  They will also learn that some companies have blocked access to cloud sites, such as google drive.  Hence a complete denial access to any documents.

The problem is usually caused by a denial to the URL drive.google.com  This will block access to the list of documents and any further access to documents in a corporate environment.  The documents have a URL of docs.google.com/... which is usually whitelisted.

There are a few workarounds to this issue, one is to gain access the URL of your document on a non blocked computer and emailing it to the blocked computer.  The URL of the document will begin with docs.google.com, which is not blocked in my case.

If you need access to the documents list and documents then do this:
1.  Login to the gmail account where your blocked documents are kept within
2.  Go to Jolicloud and sign up
3.  Go to my.jolicloud.com/#!/dashboard and click the green + icon in the top left hand corner
4.  Do a search on Jolicloud  for the app "Google Docs", its the one with the subtitle "Google Docs that isn't blocked by some businesses or secure networks."
5.  Install the app and authorise it to access your documents from your goggle account.
6.  Go to my.jolicloud.com/#!/files and click the Google Docs  icon and your google documents will "magically appear"

I have no picture, but can confirm that this works.  If your organsiation has blocked access to jolicloud, then try the first method.







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