Last week Gmail released 5 new themes, and so far my favorite by far is Tree Tops. For me, a theme has to do more than just look cool, the theme has to mix well visually with Active Inbox (a GTD spin-off I use for Gmail). Plus, on my high screen resolutions I see a lot of the screen, and the themes’ use of color has to be very well done so that the text, message highlighting and all the the Gmail labs features I use look well mixed in a particular theme.

Thats a lot of words just to say that I really am enjoying the Tree Tops theme!

Soon I will be adding 2 new subjects to this blog, Diabetes and Working at Home.

DIABETES
As a Type 2 Diabetic its time to be more serious about my knowledge of type 2 diabetes and my diet (diet as a lifestyle, that is — not a temporary fad). A great way for me to learn, is to blog about what I’m learning, so here it comes.

WORKING AT HOME
Anyone that knows me will be laughing now, but you can make a good living working at home – either as a primary or secondary source of income. But you must plan and be organized.

I wonder why so many blogs these days, and even ever more often use black text for navigation? I learned “old school” some basics I stick to when I design sites myself, and using a different color for nav links and other text links is one of the basics and inviolable, IMO.

At any rate I’m very pleased with this theme, and we’ll see how it turns out over the next several weeks.

This holiday season, as a token of our appreciation to our most enthusiastic fans, we’ll snail-mail a free holiday postcard on your behalf. Yes, through the mail and everything.

- Gmail Blog, Spread some holiday cheer, one card at a time

So get on over to that website and send a free “Gmail Card” to the Google fan in your life, or maybe that person in your life who doesn’t use email (yet).

Once you turn on this feature, Gmail uses Gears to download a local cache of your mail. As long as you’re connected to the network, that cache is synchronized with Gmail’s servers. When you lose your connection, Gmail automatically switches to offline mode, and uses the data stored on your computer’s hard drive instead of the information sent across the network. You can read messages, star and label them, and do all of the things you’re used to doing while reading your webmail online. Any messages you send while offline will be placed in your outbox and automatically sent the next time Gmail detects a connection.

- Andy Palay, Gmail engineer, Gmail Blog

Gmail says Offline Gmail will be available to users of Gmail in US or UK English over the next couple of days (as of Jan 27th).

Google continually evolves everything and Google Maps is no exception to that rule. During the past month or so I’ve noted some really cool new features like updated zoom/pan/navigation controls, new My Maps features, and navigable street view is available in some areas.

Let’s take a quick look at new My Maps features, here’s a list:

• Google Real Estate Search
• Hot Spots Guide
• Island Guide
• Videos from YouTube
• Photos from Picasa Web Albums
• Gas Prices from GasBuddy.com
• Distance Measurement Tool
• Places of Interest
• The Weather Channel
• The Tap Mapplet

Recently I was grabbing a cup of coffee at Burger King with a friend and I was sending an invite through Google Calendar and I wanted to include a link to a map of the store’s location. The first place I went was the Burger King site and used their Store Locator and it didn’t list the restaurant I was looking for.

GOOGLE MAPS TO THE RESCUE

I went to Google maps and mapped a nearby location and went into My Maps, checked the “Places of Interest” checkbox then selected Fast Food in the new window. A bunch of local restaurants popped up as little purple dots on the map and I clicked the one I wanted, and got not only the address, but the phone number, too!

I added that info into my invite and fired it off, sure that my friend would be able to get directions if he needed them. Ironic that Google Maps could provide all of that info along with a street view of that particular Burger King, and the official Burger King website could not. UPDATE: While writing I checked again and it seems like Burger King or MapQuest caught up. Maybe one of them is just a day behind Google Maps!

INTERESTING GOOGLE MAPS NOTE

On another note It seems there are all kinds of cool Google map hacks out there, too, and some of them look really useful and the idea of hacking Google maps as a whole is promising and probably has many developers salivating over the possibilities.

Figure 1: JustJared.com

I’m amazed at times to I see high profile websites breaking what I consider to be unspoken “laws” of web design. One of the first of which would be to insure that visitors to your site can distinguish between clickable and non-clickable text. For example, you want readers to easily see at-a-glance how to navigate through your website.

This unspoken “law” is broken by some of the biggest web sites, and even some very popular blog templates which can become high profile sites.

I will be picking on the incredibly popular JustJared.com tonight because I happened to walk by my wife when she was on this site and I wanted a good example of exactly what I would not do to a site.

Area 1 (see figure 1 near logo at top): Check out the link below and look at the main logo where it says “TOP CELEBS” on the left and has a list of celebrities (I’ve highlighted it orange). Tonight the list’s upper left says Angelina Jolie and ends at the bottom right with Zac Efron – but you cannot tell at-a-glance that these are clickable links.

Area 2 (see figure 1 above article): These are older and newer links which take you to the post before and after the current post. Again you cannot tell at-a-glance that these are clickable links.

Area 3 (see figure 1 right edge): Here again is black text hiding its “clickability”. There’s a link above the banner for potential advertisers to click if they are interested in advertising on JustJared.com and then below the banner is a list of designers – designers of what I do not know, but again they are black and you cannot readily tell they are clickable.

Another way to put this idea is that as much as is possible you want to make your web sites as easy to use as possible. You don’t want visitors looking around trying to learn how to use your site, you want them clicking around reading stuff and clicking on stuff without any thought whatsoever – okay, you do want a little thought, but you want their thoughts to be about your content, whether or not to click your ads, and whther or not to buy something on the site.

A little bit beyond that, check out 5 Tips to Better Technorati Indexing including this great bit:

If your blog software supports categories and RSS/Atom feeds (like Movable Type, WordPress, TypePad, Blogware, Radio), possibly your categories will be read as tags automatically.

- QuickOnlineTips.com

I thought it was really interesting to know that your blog’s categories are read as “tags” on Technorati.

Gmail lover that I am I’m going to rate this one next to useless, unless you are trying to break yourself of the habit of sending emails consisting just of subject lines. My favorite recent Gmail feature is themes (check out my favorite Gmail themes), that became available in my Gmail account the day after I blogged about it.

Forgotten Attachment reminder: ok
Empty Email Reminder: yech
Gmail Themes: hooray!

Computer maker Lenovo is shipping a malware-infected software package to Windows XP users, according to warning from anti-virus researchers at Microsoft.

Its unusual, but not unheard of, for a computer manufacturer to accidentally distribute software that’s infected with malware. Some years ago a computer manufacturer was shipping brand new computers pre-infected before they caught it. I’d hate to have been a customer service rep at that company explaining to people why their brand new computer was already infected when it was not yet even connected to the Internet!