We Have Moved, Please Update Your Bookmarks

The new home of Digital Inspiration is www.labnol.org - Please update your bookmarks.

The site has switched blogging platforms from Blogger to WordPress but you can still find our RSS feed at feeds.labnol.org/labnol.

Charlie Ayers - Google Chef Now a Millionaire

Chef Charlie Ayers joined Google as their first cafeteria chef in 1999.

Though Charlie is no longer an employee of Google, he owns 40k shares of GOOG and that are alone worth $26 million.



He also had plans to write a cookbook titled "Revealing the Secrets of the Google Kitchen" - that never happened but Chef Charlie is now busy consulting tech companies on deciding good food for their employees.

Update: Chef Charlie Ayers wife Kimberly  just informed that the Cookbook is happening. It will be released in April/May of 2008. Also, Charlie is opening a restaurant in May/June of 2008.

Read more about Google Chef Charlie on NYTimes or watch this video on "How much is the Google chef worth?" at MSNBC News.

[Charlie Ayers - From managing the Google kitchen to managing millions]

Webmaster Central Error : URLs Restricted by Robots.txt

For some reason, Google's Webmaster Dashboard says that access to following blogspot URLs is restricted by robots.txt.

http://labnol.blogspot.com/2005/05/guide-for-google-adsense-publishers.html

http://labnol.blogspot.com/2005/05/us-government-rss-library.html

http://labnol.blogspot.com/2005/08/screen-capture-ocr-for-text-and.html

http://labnol.blogspot.com/2005/12/anonymous-email-that-disappears.html

http://labnol.blogspot.com/2006/03/great-firewall-of-china-blocks-skype.html

http://labnol.blogspot.com/2006/03/online-logo-generator-text-logos-made.html

http://labnol.blogspot.com/2006/03/waterfalls-and-kazaa-are-bad-for-your.html

http://labnol.blogspot.com/2006/04/blogging-stocks-aol-blog-experiments.html

http://labnol.blogspot.com/2006/05/adobe-employees-excited-about.html

http://labnol.blogspot.com/2006/05/interesting-forms-of-art-from.html

http://labnol.blogspot.com/2006/06/louis-vuitton-ruling-could-mean.html

http://labnol.blogspot.com/2006/07/please-join-my-frappr-google-map.html

http://labnol.blogspot.com/2006/11/cropping-pictures-with-adobe-photoshop.html

http://labnol.blogspot.com/2006/11/windows-vista-upgrade-advisor-can-go.html

http://labnol.blogspot.com/2007/01/world-time-clocks-visual-guide-to-time.html

http://labnol.blogspot.com/2007/04/privilege-of-being-adsense-premium.html

http://labnol.blogspot.com/2007/07/livesearch-from-yahoo-better-than.html

http://labnol.blogspot.com/2007/10/modify-pdf-documents-without-adobe.html

How to Add Star Rating Widget To Blog Posts

Blogs that are on Blogger or WordPress can add the wonderful Outbrain star ratings widget to their blog posts.

This ratings widget has been under a closed beta for some time but they finally made a public release today.

Outbrain Ratings widget is light, requires no registration and intuitive - visitors can hover the mouse over the five stars and click any of them to rate your current blog post.

Even if you have a regular website that's not a blog, this ratings widget can be installed on your site as well.

You need such a rating widget to get feedback from all those reader who are subscribed to your blog aren't contributing to the discussion because they are probably too lazy to write a comment.

Give them a system like this ratings widget that requires no effort and they'll be happy to say if enjoyed or disliked reading your blog post. Get the Ratings Widget here.

If you are using Windows Live Writer to insert ratings in your blog posts, make sure you remove the link breaks from javascript else this may not work.

Ticker Symbol Lookup in Yahoo! Finance

When I wrote this story comparing Google Finance with Yahoo! Finance, the one area where Google had a lead over Yahoo! was ticker symbol search.

While Yahoo! Finance required you to enter the exact stock ticker symbol in the search box, Google Finance would offer matching suggestion as you type the name of the company or stock symbol.

Today, Yahoo! Finance have enhanced their quote lookup search box and it looks even better than Google - you can now find quotes for a company even if you don't know the stock symbol.

The other nice addition is multiple search - you can look for stock symbols of multiple companies in the same search box - just separate the names by comma. When you hit Go, stock data for all those companies will appear on the same summary page.

Upload Pictures to Flickr From Windows Live Photo Gallery

This is exciting news for people who use Flickr for storing photographs on the web but prefer Windows Live Photo Gallery on the desktop for managing their picture and video collection offline.

Microsoft today released a  new version of Windows Live Photo Gallery that lets you send pictures to Flickr directly from the desktop using Windows Live Photo Gallery. You can also bulk upload images and folders to Flickr using this new feature of Photo Gallery.

Like the official Flickr uploader, this one from Microsoft will also resize your pictures before uploading them onto Flickr (optional). You can also specify the photo set where that picture should be uploaded to.

Related: Compare Picasa with Windows Live Photo Gallery

If you operate multiple Flickr accounts, Windows Live Photo Gallery lets you add them all to the Flickr uploader.

You can download this Flickr enabled version of Windows Live Photo Gallery through Windows Automatic Updates (kb943550) or the common Windows Live Installer here.

Related: Download Flickr Photos in a Batch

Can You Spot This Secret Feature In Facebook

Here's a simple question for anyone who has been on Facebook for some time now.

How do you create a photo collage of your Facebook Friends (as shown above) without using any of the available Facebook Apps or third-party tools.

And no matter how large your Facebook friends list is, the whole process should not take more than 2 seconds.

Hint: This secret feature is available right inside Facebook though Mark Zuckerberg and his team never told us about it.

Answer: Once you finish exploring all the options in Facebook, read the solution.