I use Craigslist a lot. I have found free boxes for moving, a couch, a car vacuum and many more things from my local sellers through Craigslist. In fact, my wife even finds some freelance web development/WordPress work through Craigslist.

Craigslist operates with the less is more motto. No web 2.0 graphics. No ajax. No poncy logo. They have managed to stay in the 90s with their looks but you cannot beat the power this simple site offers. It probably owes its popularity by making it easy to use for even the not-so web savvy folks as well. That’s a good thing.

Crgslst comes to offer an alternative interface to Craigslist users. I for one welcome Crgslst with open hands for the excellent features it offers to the goldmine of Craiglist data.

Crgslst Quick Look

• A simple Ajax interface with the search form to the left
• A way to save your favorite locations and keep them visible for easy access - very useful for me as I tend to search different locations for different things. For eg: when I am looking for a furniture I will be looking for something close for easy transportation and when my wife is looking for some freelance gig, distance wouldn’t matter
• It also shows your past searches - great for quickly searching the same item day after day. There’s a clear button if the list gets too long or if you don’t want it
• The search results are neatly displayed sorted by the date of posting and the actual title of a Craigslist post.
• Another great feature I like is that you can ‘remember’ the results you like for easy access later. Right now it shows a serial number for the post in the items that remembers and it’ll be helpful to see atleast the first few words of a title instead. I also like that it highlights a whole listing in yellow if you have already saved it to ‘remember’.

Crgslst is in beta and are saying that they are adding more features soon. I am really looking forward to seeing those but I will be content with just the functionality they have given already. It just has made my Craigslist surfing 100x faster.

There have been a couple of attempts such as this in the past but were shutdown because they were burdening Craigslist’s servers. I am not sure how the earlier attempts worked but Crgslst say they are working off of existing Craigslist feeds to show us the information and they don’t serve multiple city search at the same time so they don’t bring down Craigslist’s servers.

When you click on a Crgslst result, you still see the original post in Craigslist so I don’t see the harm of this new service to Craigslist.

What do you think of Craigslist alternative, Crgslst? Can you think of a reason why Craigslist might get pissed off by this new service?

[via Download Squad]

Hello newcomer, did I say welcome to ShanKri-la yet? Before you move on, just wanted to thank you for visiting and we hope you come back and see us again!

Bookmarklets are tiny useful javascript nuggets that can be easily dragged and dropped to the bookmark toolbar in a modern browser such as Firefox, Opera, etc. They can be used to quickly perform a task without having to visit the website/web service with just a single click.

I have compiled a list of bookmarklets that I find useful and use regularly.

• Stumble This! - StumbleUpon Toolbar less stumbling link. Very useful if you don’t want any other extra features that the toolbar provides. Become a power stumbler quickly! [via Firefox Facts]
• Gmail This! - One of my most used bookmarklets. Opens up a compose window with the url I am at in the email body and the title of the page in the subject. Based on a reader request, i previously showed how to create a custom gmailthis bookmarklet out of this for your most frequent contacts.
• Google Notebook - Note This bookmarklet now lets anyone to quickly select a block of text and hit the bookmarklet to save it in Google Notebook. Don’t select anything and hit the bookmarklet to save the url of the page you are in.
• Share This! - A very useful WordPress plugin also comes as a bookmarklet that lets you share a link via different social networks or by email.
• Digg Submit - Submit a site to Digg easily with this bookmarklet
• TwitThis - Send a quick Tweet if you have a Twitter account. (my Twitter account)
• TinyUrl! - Make a long url a short one with TinyUrl with this bookmarklet
• Subscribe.. (Google Reader) - Subscribe to a website/blog’s RSS feed with Google Reader in one click. You could also try a Google Greasemonkey script to do this automatically when you hit any RSS feed.
• Analytics Today (Google Analytics) - This bookmarklet will take you to your Google Analytics account and show you today’s stats for your site. You have to edit this url and insert your Google Analytics id (you’ll see it in the location bar when logged in) where it says .
• RSSFwd - It’s a bookmarklet for a service that lets you have any RSS feed emailed straight to your inbox.
• PassPack It! - This is a bookmarklet for my favorite online password manager program, PassPack. Once setup, it lets you quickly login to websites with your saved username/passwords.
• Add to RTM! - A bookmarklet to add tas
• Google Talk (gadget) - Opens the Google Talk gadget. Read how to open Google Talk gadget in Sidebar here.
• Enlarge Text Areas - Use this to enlarge text areas in forms in any website or blog.
• Zoom images in - This one lets you zoom into images in any website
• Map your Flickr Photos - A very cool bookmarklt that enables mapping, geocoding and geotagging directly in your Flickr photo page [via Sumaato]
• All-In-One Video - The all-in-one bookmarklet supports YouTube, Google Video, Metacafe, Myspace, Break.com, Putfile, Dailymotion, Sevenload, MyVideo.de and Clipfish.de. Bookmark the link below and access the bookmark when looking at videos on any of the supported websites. The bookmarklet will give you the download-link(s) for the video you were looking at.
• SecondBrain - You can easily add websites to your SecondBrain account. (3/13/08)
• PricePinx - Just highlight the price in a product page and use this bookmarklet to receive price drop alerts from ProcePinx. (3/13/08)

A great resource I found while collecting bookmarklets I could use and that might be of interest to you, is Jesse’s Bookmarklet site. He has nicely categorized various bookmarklets into different sections.

Do you know of any other bookmarklets that’ll make this list better? Let me know in the comments and I’ll add them to this list. As the other posts in the Top Stuff series (look below for other posts), this list will be an evolving one with updates as I come across useful ones.

We had a nice relaxing weekend this week and I am just sitting down to sharing some good finds I bookmarked this week.

• 7 Interesting and Useful Things to do with your USB Pen Drive - Shankar Ganesh of Killer Tech Tips
  Have a usb flash drive in your keychain? Check out this post from Shankar for more ideas on how to use it.
• How US tax system works - ProBargainHunter
  A very funny way of looking at US tax system.
• Reformatting WordPress - Weblog Tools Collection
  If you have a self-hosted WordPress blog and considered the possibility of reformatting WordPress, check out this post for the pros and cons.
  
• Easy Ways to Improve Your Vision - Readers Digest
  I wear glasses and spending 10+ hours in front of a computer everyday, this was very useful tome. [via Lifehacker]
• How to Herd Organic Search Traffic to Your Blog - ProBlogger
  I am recently seeing a little surge in search engine traffic lately but this post has given me a lot more ideas to try and improve it.
• 3 Free & Easy To Use Screencast Recording Tools - My post at Techie-Buzz
  If you’ve tried troubleshooting or try explaining a computer task over the phone, you’ll be really grateful for screencasts.

Hope you enjoyed this week’s round up and will see you soon with more fun posts.

Firefox 3 has been getting a lot of coverage here. We saw the release of Firefox 3 Beta 3 , which I am really fond of as well as the new Firefox Add-ons site that’s about to debut with the release of Firefox 3.

Let’s look at some of the Firefox Extensions that I came across this week.

• Quick Preference Button: If you tweak of lot of your options time everyday and if you are tired of clicking through to find various options, this extension gives you a menu option to quickly access your various preferences. Not sure if it justifies another extension to get this functionality but some may find it useful.
• Platypus: How would you like to create your own Greasemonkey scripts? That’s right. This extension lets you make changes to a web page as you see it, like remove parts you don’t like, rearrange the layout a little, insert your own HTML code, etc and save it as a Greasemonkey script so you get the changes everytime you visit a page.
  This sounds like an awesome tool and I will have to set aside some time to maybe come up with some examples to show you.
• iGoogleBar: A treat for the Google apps addicted user - this changes the top apps bar in Google Apps to use favicons as well as act as triggers to the iGoogle Gadgets. They also show unread counts from Gmail and Google Reader. For eg. you can see the iGoogle gadget for Google Calendar right from within Google Docs.
• Twitterfox: I am a late adopter of Twitter and find it very interesting in the last couple of days I have been using. I use the Samplace extension for GChat & to keep track of Twitter updates but this Firefox extension is also a really cool one of you just want to follow tweets. Yes, that’s what they call the twitter updates. Add me (KIntheHouse) if you are on Twitter too.
• 8aweek: It seems employee spends an average of 8 hours a week in the Internet. This extension tracks your Internet activities and shows you a neat graph of where you spend most of your time and helps you restrict time wasters and get more productive.I know, you are probably thinking ‘they underestimate the power of Internet’. It should have been named more like 19aweek.
• Multi-Sidebar: As the name implies, this extension lets you create multiple sidebars at the same time. Useful for times when you really can use more than one. [via CyberNet]

I would love to hear from you if you have used Platypus or already have examples of its uses. Also, I have been thinking about maybe showing my Twitter updates in the sidebar and kind of use that as a sideblog for things I don’t get to link here normally. I am sure there are WordPress plugins out there that make this easy, but I would like to hear from you if you have any thoughts on that.

Also, it looks like Feedburner is having some problems this morning as it seems to have dropped the RSS subscriber numbers for me from around 350 to 180! I hope I didn’t piss off my readers to see such a drop in a single day..

Thanks to all those who stopped by to wish me on my birthday. I have spent the last year learning, growing and having a lot of fun in the blogging world. Here are some great posts that I came across since my last roundup.

• Booking a hotel, the ProBargainHunter way - ProBargainHunter
  One of my favorite bargain sites shares ideas and tips when you are booking a hotel through sites such as Priceline, Hotwire, etc.
• 8 Characteristics of a Well Designed About Page - Tish of BloggingGal
  I have long neglected my about page and Tish has given me the motivation to sit down and re-work it. Check out her convincing reasons to see why you should do it too. Also, check out her monthly contest where she gives away a cool 125×125 ad space to one winner who subscribes to her RSS feed. She is giving away an ad space to read such quality content! No kidding.. just add the feed already!
• Check Pagerank of all Internal Pages on your Site - Fahad of Technodorm
  Fahad is sharing how you can see Google PR for links in your site live in a visual way. It even shows the nofollow links with a red cross. Check out this post on other options of doing this as well.
• Don’t Let Your CommentLuv Be Stolen Away! - Stephen of More Than Scratch the Surface
  I really enjoy reading Stephen’s well thought-out, incisive, to-the-point writing style. This time he is writing about the merits of CommentLuv WordPress plugin and how you could take advantage of it. Also, take note of the section where he mentiones how Feedburner url redirection could be hurting your Google juice in this context. Excellent post, Stephen!
• Passive Income, or How To Make Money Without Trying - RT of Untwisted Vortex
  I started blogging with monetizing my blog at the farthest corner of my mind but it has become a reality in a year. So, if you haven’t yet considered it atleast read this excellent post by RT and see if you are sitting on a gold mine. I am far from making a bunch but in the last couple of months I have made enough to more than cover the costs of hosting. My next goal is to see if it can cover maybe the cost of a nice dinner and a movie every month.
• Download BitTorrent Files Without A Client - My post at TechieBuzz
  BitTorrent is a great way to share and get files for legitimate reasons even though most often it is usually identified with illegal file sharing. Find out how you can download files ia BitTorrent from a browser without a bittorrent client. Also, check out Keith’s post on a call for help. Silki an author at TechieBuzz just like me, could use some for her brother who is ill.

Also, check Kontera’s Video contest where you could win some cool cash prizes ($500, $200 & $100). Thanks Matthew of Blog About Your Blog for the heads up.

Hope you enjoyed this week’s round up. Hope you found a couple of new blogs to add to your feed reader as well.

I delve a little bit into web development and WordPress theme customization as you can see right here. One tool I find indispensable is the Firebug Firefox extension. I can view/edit and play with live HTML/CSS code for any web page and see the possible results live for the tweak I am doing.

You can browse through the DOM tree of a webpage with Firebug. It also helps me to look up HTML & CSS code for various parts of a website using the ‘Inspect’ tool. This works great for troubleshooting or developing and viewing sites in a Firefox browser.

For those odd occasions when there is a problem in just Internet Explorer, I have always been at a loss of not having a tool like Firebug.

Until, I came across Developer Toolbar for IE developed by Microsoft recently. Even though this tool has been around for a while, it must be a well kept secret or I must have just gotten my head out of the sand.

I found it useful to troubleshoot some IE-only CSS bugs on some themes my wife and I were customizing. Let’s look at a few things this toolbar will you give after installation:

IE Developer Toolbar Quick Facts

• An easy access button to toggle the toolbar to view or hide
• Lets you view DOM for the current page in a tree view - similar to Firefox’s DOM Inspector
• Selecting an element in tree lets you view attribute and the current styles for the element
• You can disable images, javascripts and css
• Style Tracer - helps you find exactly where and which style sheet, a rule is effecting a particular element.
• Offers a View Source that lets you view source of the original page, currently rendered page or just the selected element. I like the way it shows the current styles associated with elements right in the view source.
• An Outline option outlines DIVs, images, tables, table cells, etc.
• A Validator tool cal validate HTML, CSS, Feed & Links in a webpage
• I like the Find & Cache options as well.

If you have used Firebug or Web Developer Toolbar for Firefox, a lot of these features will be very familiar to you.

Download IE Developer Toolbar

Even if you are not a web developer, if you occasionally tweak HTML & CSS for your website/blog, I highly recommend getting used to a tool such as this one. I use it as a learning tool to see how someone has coded something or used CSS to style an element that I find interesting when I am surfing the web.

Plus, I can make changes to fonts or any CSS code for my blog in Firebug without and have a preview without having to modify any code in the server.

What kind of tool do you use for your web development needs?

I have been working on this theme mod for a bit and it is almost a whole month late in making its way here. I meant to release it for the New Year’s day but my day job kept me busy to complete the stuff I wanted done. So, instead here it is for your eyes today. If you are reading this in a RSS reader, please click through to check out the design effort.

Why modify instead of a new theme?

You might be thinking why I took the trouble of clobbering an excellent theme. I will have to take you back to the reason I started blogging in the first place. It was my interest in learning web development and I did not imagine I would try to make money off of it when I registered ShanKri-la (Sep 20, 2006). What better way than to get your own domain name and run a live website? After a few months of fiddling with cPanel & learning HTML & CSS, finally installed WordPress and started blogging towards the end of Feb 2007.

I am still learning various aspects of web development and have become quite adept at helping others with their WordPress theme customization. I loved the current theme I was using but wanted ShanKri-la to have it’s unique look. So, here we go with my custom modification of the Saur theme.

I have to mention a very helpful WordPress plugin that let me work on this new design while you were still looking at the old one.

Theme Test Drive WordPress plugin lets you chose a theme - in my case I made a copy of current theme to a new folder - and after activating the new theme in the plugin menu, you will see the new theme while you are logged in as Admin. Everyone else will continue to see the old theme.

Direct Advertising in ShanKri-la

I have finally opened up direct advertising in ShanKri-la. This was another reason for making the theme mod so I can implement the ad scheme the way I wanted to. A lot of themes seem to put more focus in that than usability and I wanted to strike a good balance for my readers. I would love to hear what you think about it.

Also, you won’t see Google Adsense ads anymore if you are a regular reader here or if you come directly from someone else’s site. I have made it so the ads are visible only to the search engine visitors as they are more likely to click on ads anyways and it would make it pleasant reading for my readers.

For those interested in advertising in ShanKri-la, you can get details of various advertising options from the ‘Adevrtise’ page.

Areas of Improvement

If you have a keen eye, you would probably notice all the changes but I am going to list them here quickly if anyone is interested in things of that sort.

Header area

Just some minor tweaks with the search bar gone from here to make way for a premium 468×60 ad space.

Content & Comment Area

Not any major change except the Adsense ads won’t appear for my regular readers (tell me if you miss it ) plus I have removed other ad programs that weren’t performing well.

Sidebar

This is where the big changes are done. I am a strong believer in using tags and tag clouds for easy navigation. Hence the prominent area for the tag cloud. I think the dark colored block stands out highlingting the tags, subscription options & the search field.

Also, added the 125×125 ad area for direct advertisements here.

Footer

Footer is another area I have modified a lot by moving some of the clutter from the sidebar to the footer so I can free up the sidebar space for more relevant things. Plus, the slow loading widgets such as MyBlogLog, BlogCatalog, etc won’t be a concern anymore as they will be loading after everything else in the page loads up. One major advantage to this is that the sidebar now can show more and longer comments hopefully helping everyone to see the conversation going here.

I am going to concentrate next on improving the load time of the blog as well. I would love to hear any suggestions or your experience in tackling the load time problems.

After all, I have done all this to in an effort to make ShanKri-la a better reading experience for you and would love to hear how you perceive this change.