Showing posts with label Internet. Show all posts
Medium has become an incredible platform for writers
to get their voices heard, or rather their words read. Yet as Medium
has grown since its launch in 2012, it becomes harder for new writers
with a small or non-existing network to obtain readers on the site.
Additionally, Medium, unfortunately, eliminated several features that
once provided an easy way for new writers to grow quickly.
Still, Medium offers great opportunities for writers. There are
features built into the platform that can help you spread the word. In
addition to those, you can take your own steps on Medium as well to
ensure you build a loyal audience. Don’t necessarily expect overnight,
viral success — just a slow and steady improvement.
First, type out your entire blog post on Medium. Do this by logging into your account and clicking Write a story at the top of the page. Make sure it has a central theme, which in itself is great for obtaining an audience as opposed to typing out sporadic thoughts. When you’re ready to publish, click Publish and note that the pop-up has an area to type in tags.
You can add up to three tags per post. If you start typing, Medium will provide a list of suggested tags as well as how many posts have that tag already. Try to pick tags that aren’t too unpopular, but also aren’t too popular. If a tag is rare, people probably aren’t looking for it, yet if a tag has thousands of posts yours might get lost in the crowd.
View publications on Medium by clicking your avatar at the top of the page and choosing Publications. You’ll see any publications you’re a member of and which ones you’re following. You can also search for publications at any time at the top. For the purposes of building an audience relatively quickly, creating your own publication is not recommended.
When you find one you want to join, your best bet is to click the About link at the top of the page while viewing that publication. Here is where you’ll see the editors and likely a brief description about the publication. If you’re lucky, this will include instructions on how to submit to that publication, which are completely up to the editors.
Otherwise, check out the editors list and click one of their profiles to see if they’ve listed any social media or contact information where you could submit a personal request.
Read other posts that are relevant to the content you write and be sure to follow the authors. Click author names at the top and then click Follow on their profiles.
Then, on the posts themselves, be sure to leave comments or annotations that are pertinent and insightful, potentially referring back to something you may have written as well. Click the Recommend button at the end of their posts as well to show some love for the quality content. This increases the likeliness that the author may check out your content, follow you back and recommend your posts.
These tips on Medium are ultimately good for your content and even better for your own personal brand, so keep at them until you see results. Good luck.
A good publishing platform plus a solid game plan often amount to a successful blog | Shutterstock
1. Tag Your Posts
Tags are relatively new to Medium, but they’ll help out significantly with increasing your potential audience. They’re basically categories that people can either search for or manually click on Medium to see new and popular posts within them. When you add specific tags to your blog posts, you are essentially categorizing it so that it shows up to readers with similar interests.First, type out your entire blog post on Medium. Do this by logging into your account and clicking Write a story at the top of the page. Make sure it has a central theme, which in itself is great for obtaining an audience as opposed to typing out sporadic thoughts. When you’re ready to publish, click Publish and note that the pop-up has an area to type in tags.
You can add up to three tags per post. If you start typing, Medium will provide a list of suggested tags as well as how many posts have that tag already. Try to pick tags that aren’t too unpopular, but also aren’t too popular. If a tag is rare, people probably aren’t looking for it, yet if a tag has thousands of posts yours might get lost in the crowd.
Tip: If you have published posts already that you want to tag, you can view the story and click Edit at the top at any time. Then click Publish and add your tags the way you normally would, to update it.
2. Submit to Publications
Publications are collections of stories that anyone can create or follow. Previously, anyone could also submit a story to one but Medium took that feature away. If you want to submit your story to a large publication, you’ll have to request from one of the editors to become a contributor.View publications on Medium by clicking your avatar at the top of the page and choosing Publications. You’ll see any publications you’re a member of and which ones you’re following. You can also search for publications at any time at the top. For the purposes of building an audience relatively quickly, creating your own publication is not recommended.
When you find one you want to join, your best bet is to click the About link at the top of the page while viewing that publication. Here is where you’ll see the editors and likely a brief description about the publication. If you’re lucky, this will include instructions on how to submit to that publication, which are completely up to the editors.
Otherwise, check out the editors list and click one of their profiles to see if they’ve listed any social media or contact information where you could submit a personal request.
Tip: Not all editors are open to
accepting new contributors. If you find this is the case for a
publication you’re after, try finding a different one.
3. Interact with Other Medium Writers
The last way to build your audience on Medium (and expand your network overall) is by interacting with Medium writers. This can be done in three ways: following, commenting and recommending.Read other posts that are relevant to the content you write and be sure to follow the authors. Click author names at the top and then click Follow on their profiles.
Then, on the posts themselves, be sure to leave comments or annotations that are pertinent and insightful, potentially referring back to something you may have written as well. Click the Recommend button at the end of their posts as well to show some love for the quality content. This increases the likeliness that the author may check out your content, follow you back and recommend your posts.
These tips on Medium are ultimately good for your content and even better for your own personal brand, so keep at them until you see results. Good luck.
Whether you are tethering your phone or you’re lucky enough to have LTE built into your Chromebook, you probably have a data cap. Some careful planning will make your Chromebook useful without blowing through your data plan.
Don’t be sad just because you have a data cap | kjarrett
Begin With the End in Mind – Use Offline Apps
Whenever possible, search for an offline alternative for your apps. Both Gmail and Google Docs have offline equivalents. When you are on a free Wi-Fi connection, launch these apps and load your data into them. Pocket is a great resource for this. Add long web pages you want to read to Pocket. Then launch the Pocket app on your Chromebook and it will download the pages.
For content that doesn’t work in Pocket, try putting it in Evernote. Evernote works offline if you install the Android version along with Android Runtime for Chrome (ARC). Clip the pages or resources you want and then sync it with your Chromebook. You’ll have that content offline again.
Want more Android Apps? ARC Welder lets you run most Android apps on your Chromebook.
Use an Extension Manager and Create an “Optimized Bandwidth” Group
Chrome extensions customize your Chrome and Chromebook experience. Some of them also use bandwidth. For example, I have a grammar check that sends everything I type back to the servers. When I was tethering off my iPhone, I saw a huge spike in traffic even though all I was doing was typing a letter.
It’s not always easy to know which extensions uses extra data, so I use the minimal necessary to get the job done on a metered connection. The bonus is minimal extensions save my battery. My preferred extension manager is Simple Extension Manager. I right click, pick my Optimized Bandwidth Group and I’m ready to go.
Need A Chrome Extension Manager? Check out our list of other extension managers.
Turn Off Automatic Flash, PDFs, and Other Content
Chrome has its own Flash player and PDF viewer. Clicking on a link could download a huge file or animation you don’t need. From the Omnibox type chrome://settings/content and scroll down to Plugins. Select Let me choose when to run plugin content.
When a webpage has a plugin like Flash, you can control+click and run the player just on the content you want. That prevents it from loading automatically. Some sites don’t like this extra step. For those sites use the Manage exceptions option. Click the box for Manage exceptions and put in the website you want to load automatically and the pick Allow on the right-hand side. I keep this setting on all the time because pages load faster for me.
Chrome lets you turn off images in that same area by scrolling down to Images and Do not show any images. The web doesn’t quite look the same without images, but it will save you data.
Use the Data Saver (Beta) Extension
Google developed a Data Saver extension just for these situations. We covered this extension before. With a Chromebook on a metered connection, this is one of the best ways you can keep your browsing fast and lean. Since you can’t switch to an optimized browser like Opera, this is the next best thing.
Internet Slow on Chromebook? Test it with Google’s Chrome Connectivity Diagnostics.
Suspend Unused Tabs
If you keep multiple tabs open on your Chromebook, those tabs could be updating in the background. That’s costing you bandwidth. Two extensions I use are The Great Suspenderand Tab Wrangler. Either of these extensions (don’t use both at once) will suspend an inactive tab. This prevents it from updating and wasting both bandwidth and battery.
It seems like every time Facebook introduces a new feature, people are polarized in all kinds of ways. I still remember when The Wall was taken down and something known as Timeline was introduced. It took me a while to get used to it, but I used to grumble about these changes every day.
Ready to sign out because of auto-playing videos on Facebook? | Shutterstock
Another such change lately is the ability to let user uploaded videos to play automatically. Oh, this not only is an annoyance (especially if you’re at work) but also a bandwidth hog. On a computer, it won’t make such a difference, but on a limited data plan, it’s a pain in the wrong places.
Thankfully, there is an easy to turn it off and carry on Facebook-ing peacefully. Let’s see how to do that.
On Computers/Laptops
Once you are logged into your Facebook account from your computer/laptop, you will need to find the Settings option on the top-right corner menu.
Once there, on the left hunt for the Videos option, which should ideally be dead last. Click on it and on the right, there are only 2 options, the second one is which you need to pay attention to. Hit the drop-down button and select Off for the Auto-play Videos option and breathe a deep sigh of relief.
On iPhones
Whether you are on the latest iOS or not, if you have an iPhone, you need to first head over to the Settings menu of the phone. From here, navigate to Facebook and then to the Videos and Photos section. Here you will find an Autoplay option which wasn’t available earlier. Tap it and then select Never Play Videos Automatically, which will ensure that you won’t be interrupted while scrolling through your Facebook feed.
On Android Devices
Android being Android, you get the right settings directly from the app. So, open the Facebook app and tap the hamburger menu on the top-right corner. From here, head to the App Settings and here you will need to select Videos Play Automatically.
Once you change the option to Off you know that you are never going to see those annoying videos on your Android device ever again.
Facebook app alternative: If you’re looking for alternatives to the default app on Android, look no further than Metal, which we’ve quite liked here on GT.
Breathe Easy
These simple steps are all it would take for you to disable auto-playing Facebook videos on all platforms. While the number of views on some of the videos seems ridiculous, I’m not sure if this can be the way for Facebook to grow. But that’s just my opinion, join us in our forum to have a cold glass of your favorite ale and discuss it sensibly?
A new report from the White House and the Broadband Opportunity Council (BOC) states that broadband internet in the US is no longer an “optional amenity” but a core utility that is now “taking its place alongside water, sewer, and electricity as essential infrastructure for communities."
The BOC, which is chaired by the heads of the Commerce and Agriculture departments, spent five months reviewing every major Federal program that provides support for broadband access, from the Department of Housing and Urban Development to the Department of Justice. The report presented a list of 36 actions that the government needs to implement over the next 18 months in order to improve broadband access, including:
- Modernize Federal programs valued at approximately $10 billion to include broadband as an eligible program expenditure, such as the Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Community Facilities (CF) program, which will help communities around the country bring broadband to health clinics and recreation centers;- Create an online inventory of data on Federal assets, such as Department of the Interior (DOI) telecommunications towers, that can help support faster and more economical broadband deployments to remote areas of the country;- Streamline the applications for programs and broadband permitting processes to support broadband deployment and foster competition; and- Create a portal for information on Federal broadband funding and loan programs to help communities easily identify resources as they seek to expand access to broadband.
President Obama claims that since he took office over 45 million people have gotten online, but the BOC’s report suggests there’s still much more work to do. Other recommendations it makes include implementing outreach programs to Native American tribal lands to improve broadband access in those areas, and that federal agencies promote "dig once" policies that put fiber or fiber conduit underground when streets are dug up for other purposes.
In July, the White House launched the ConnectHome project across 27 cities. The program aims to bring high-speed broadband to a number of low-income families in the US. 275,000 families have since benefitted from the initiative’s offer of free or very low-cost broadband services.
Back in the days of yore, Adobe’s Flash used to rule the internet. Everything from the tacky animations to navigation was built on Flash. Not to mention the millions of small browser based games. Of course, this was before the smartphones took over. In 2010, Steve Jobs openly banned Flash from iOS devices (and it doesn’t come installed on Macs). Soon Android followed suit and just like that, almost all of mobile web was Flash free.
To disable or not to disable?
But that’s just mobile web. Of course, the fact that developers are using HTML to code up responsive, mobile-first websites means the advantages have clearly transferred to the web at large. But still, a lot of stuff on desktop web pages does run on Flash.
Recently, there’s been a movement online to kill Flash once and for all – Occupy Flash. I’m not joking. It’s an actual movement. They have a manifesto and a website and everything. It’s like Occupy Wall Street, only this time, it might actually work.
But why does everyone suddenly want to kill Flash? What did it ever do to them, or us? Can we, the people who spend 8 hours a day essentially in the browser live without it? Read on to find out.
Why Flash Must Go
It’s not that Flash is clunky and not modern or sophisticated. Tons of legacy software still survives. It’s that Flash just went from being annoying to being downright dangerous. We all know that Flash is a battery and performance hog, especially when flash games or apps are poorly coded.
It started when the Hacking Team leaks emerged. The company known for producing malware and selling it to the highest bidder seemed to be exploiting a vulnerability in Flash that instantly put millions of users across the world in danger. When the reports came out Adobe quickly released fixes. But then a couple of days later new vulnerabilities surfaced and let me tell you,this isn’t going to end.
Since then Facebook’s Chief of Security has called for Flash’s demise. Even Mozilla has said that they’re going to disable Flash till Adobe solves all the major vulnerabilities that recently came to light.
Yes, even if we disbar everything else and just look at it from a security standpoint, Flash must go.
Force HTML5: While YouTube has now mostly switched to HTML5 videos, there might still be times (may be on other sites) where you’re served Flash videos when an HTML5 alternative clearly exists. In those moments, try these extensions to force the website to load HTML5 content.
Can Desktop Users Live Without Flash?
This is the interesting question and the answer as always comes down to – “depends”. But let me elaborate. The biggest sources of videos – YouTube, Vimeo and Facebook are not dependent on Flash. And most websites don’t use Flash anymore.
I turned off Flash a couple of days back and whenever I came across Flash based content, I didn’t care for it. It was either an embedded video in an article from big news site, or one of the annoying auto-play video ads on sites.
An in-line video I couldn’t care much about, blocked because I have disabled Flash.
If you feel like taking the plunge, type “chrome://plugins” in Chrome’s omnibox and from the plugins list, disable Adobe Flash Player. If you have Flash installed on your computer, follow these guides to uninstall it from your Mac or Windows PC.
It’s important to note here that Chrome’s version of Flash is sandboxed. In that, it runs in its own little environment inside Chrome and its code isn’t spread across your OS. This means the chances of infection when using Chrome’s built-in Flash are much less.
Flash When You Want
This is the perfect compromise. Flash stays far way most of the time, saving you from battery drain and from security issues. But when you do want it, it’s just a click away.
Most modern browsers have a click-to-play feature when it comes to plugins and the same can be achieved for Flash as well.
So for instance in Chrome, instead of disabling Flash, go to Settings -> Show advanced settingsand from Privacy, click Content settings and scroll down to Plugins. From here, select Let me choose when to run plugin content. For a detailed look at how to do this on all major browsers, check out this guide at How-To Geek.
You Should Try Giving It Up
Seriously, the days of Flash are nigh. I’m just waiting for Chrome to make a move. Once Google does that, Flash is as good as dead. But we can all do our part in the process of killing Flash and seeing it replaced by HTML5 or some other open source technologies. And it starts by you disabling Flash.
Occupy Flash.
Consider the fact that we as consumers only get to know about the vulnerabilities when a hacker/media organization highlights them. There’s a lot more going on in the background. And because Flash is a proprietary format, we’ll never really feel safe with it.
It was always surprising that Google didn’t have a strong product for photo management.Picasa barely qualifies as an actively developed product and while Google Drive is great for managing documents but fails miserably when it comes to media. There’s Google+ Photos, but the problem is that it’s a solution deeply embedded in Google+. What if Google finally came to its senses and freed it from the clutches of the failing social network? It did. Welcome to Google Photos.
Google’s standalone, platform-agnostic, cloud backed photo management system is finally here. And boy it’s a doozy. Let’s find out more about what exactly it is and if should you jump on it.
TL;DR: The Pitch
- Google Photos is born out of Google+ Photos and is a standalone service with apps for Android, iOS and a website.
- You can upload unlimited photos to the service for free (more on the specifics below). Photos, once uploaded to the cloud, will show up on all your devices.
- The app will automatically tag photos depending on location, facial recognition and time. They’ll be intelligently pooled together. Manual organization options are available and there’s a powerful search feature as well.
1. Unlimited Free Backup
Yup. Free, unlimited backup for all your images and videos. The photos that are automatically backed from your camera roll, the specific folders you assign in the Android app, the ones you manually upload from the web, all of them.
Yes, there’s a fine print. All the images till 16 MP will be stored in original quality and for videos, that’s 1080p. Anything higher than that will be downscaled.
What this means is that all the photos from my iPhone or OnePlus One will be stored in Google Photos, without any compression, for free. But images from my DSLR will be downscaled. Of course, you can choose to have your images stored in full-res, but that storage will be counted against your Google account. Here you get 15 GB for free and 1 TB plan is $10 a month.
But you know what, I’m going to back up all my DSLR images to Google Photos anyway (manually, via the website). I don’t mind downscaling from 24 MP to 16. I love me some free, reliable cloud storage.
About image compression: Even if you upload photos of 16 MP or lower, Google is still going to compress them. But, as one user on Reddit found out, while the difference between the size of the compressed image is significant, the drop in quality isn’t nearly as drastic. Much like the machine learning based scanning, Google’s compression algorithms are quite sophisticated. They seem to be only removing data that doesn’t affect the quality of the image to an average user’s eye. See the comparison between Google Photos and other compression services yourself here.
2. It’s No Longer Connected to Google+
This has to be one of the best things about Google Photos, other than the free unlimited thing of course. A lot of what the Photos app does was already possible with Google+ Photos. But the problem was that you needed the Google+ app, and you had to go to the Google+ website to access all your photos, use their library for viewing images and while all photos were private by default, I personally still had problems with trusting the system.
Now though, Google has rinsed the + moniker off this baby and it’s ready to rule the world.
3. iOS Users, Pay Attention
I’m guessing Apple’s answer to Google Photos isn’t to0 far but right now, there is no free unlimited backup for iOS users. And backing up thousands of photos to your iCloud account costs money.
The good news for iOS users is that there’s a Google Photos app and it’s pretty good. Again, it’s a standalone app with no Google+ intrusions. The only problem is that unlike the Android app, it doesn’t have true background sync. But that’s iOS’s limitation. So if you decide to upload all of your thousands of photos to Google Photos, you’ll need to plug in your iPhone, turn off the auto sleep feature and let it do its thing for couple of hours.
But once that’s done, you should be fine. Users at this Reddit thread are reporting that the app is fast and stable and one user has replaced the Apple’s Photos app with Google Photos. He/she says “I’m not going to lie, I replaced the stock Photos app for this on my iPhone 6. It’s leaps and bounds ahead of the offerings of the stock Photos app in my opinion.”
4. Automatic Tagging and Organization Is Wonderful
Google has something else Apple doesn’t – all your personal information, amazing cloud prowess and years and years of studying un-humanly quantifiable data on the internet. You name it, Google has scanned it for all sorts of information. Yes, that’s creepy but if you’ve ever used Google Now, you know it’s also useful.
When you upload your entire photo library to Google Photos, Google will go through it and start automatically tagging stuff. It already knows what you look like, and when it won’t know the specifics of other faces in the photos, it will still know it’s that one person in all those photos. So even though your 5 year old niece has never seen the internet, Google will still have a tag with just her photos.
This also works based on location and time. Google will create automatic collections for trips you take or photos you took at home or work or a party. Google will also go one step forward and automatically create a highlights video from the footage, along with background music, so you don’t have to. All of this, of course, is editable by you, the user. The Photos app also comes with basic photo editing features along with an auto-enhance feature.
The little tips and tricks: The Photos apps are littered with small things like a fast way to select multiple photos (hold and swipe), quickly switching between days, weeks, monthsMoments view (two finger pinch in and out) and more. We’ll talk about those in detail in a future article.
5. Backed By Google Search
Once Photos has scanned all your photos you can search for them for location, time and even things. Because Google knows the difference between a dog and a cat, you can search for dogand all your dog photos will show up. Same for photos you took in New York.
6. The Price of Free Is Peace
There’s a quote that tech journalists like to tweet from time to time “When the price is free, you are the product”. And that’s true with all things Google. It just shines really brightly with Photos. Now if you’re a nervous-nelly when it comes to privacy, you probably should stay away from Google.
After all, a computer somewhere is scanning all your photos, analyzing it for details like location and faces. Yes, the service is largely free and yes, you’re paying by letting Google use your personal data. But if you’re fine with it (it is, after all, a computer), the upsides are tremendous.
Let me just say this – Photo management is hard.
So hard in fact that I’ve tried to take care of it several times and then given up. When you have thousands of photos and when you’re not willing to part with most of them, you start to run out of options.
Google Photos for you, is the easy way out. Just upload all the photos and let some computers take care of the mess.
And when you want to take matters in your own hand, there are features that will let you quickly select multiple photos and create albums on the fly. Sharing images is also easy. You get a web link that contains all the photos in one place – this can be accessible by anyone you share the link with, regardless if they have a Google account or not.
7. The Competition Isn’t close
Amazon is one of the few companies offering unlimited photo backups, but again, not for free.Flickr has 1000 GB free tier but you won’t get Google Photo’s intelligent organization features.Everything else from Apple, Dropbox and other cloud storage services costs a couple of dollars a month once you cross the 5 GB mark (which, these days, is very easy to do).
Should You Try It Out? Yes
The service is free and frankly, if you already have an Android phone and use Gmail, you should be fine with the intelligent scanning features.
Because it’s free, anyone can use it, and everyone should. Dropbox will ask you to pay after 2 GB, iCloud after 5 but the Photos app never will.
Because it’s made by Google and is using technologies and server based automation that the likes of Apple and Dropbox just can’t do, it’s actually better than the paid options. If you’ve got a photo overload, just test it out and thank me later.
While iPhoto has been the go-to app for Mac users to manage their photos for several years, the application didn’t evolve much and has become quite complex for the requirements of most users nowadays. Apple noticed this and released Photos for Mac not too long ago in an effort to streamline the photo management process. However, there are a few aspects of the new Photos app that are still not very clear.
The new Photos app. (via Apple)
Let’s take a look at how Photos compares to its predecessor and how the new (optional) photo storage options differ from what we have today.
Let’s get started.
Photos vs iPhoto
Speed
The first thing that stands out about Photos is how fast it is when compared to iPhoto, which at least on my 2011 Macbook Air, tends to struggle quite a bit. On the other hand, browsing my content on the Photos app is certainly faster and smoother.
Organization
One of the aspects that I felt was sorely missing from iPhoto was a better organization system for its content. Photos in Yosemite solves this issue in one sweep by adopting the look of iOS, which not only is very familiar for most Apple users, but is also better organized, with separate sections for Photos and Videos, Photo Stream, Projects, and Shared Albums.
Navigation
This is another big area in which the adoption of the iOS criteria has positively influenced Photos.
When viewing groups of photos, you can zoom out and see them grouped by date and location, just as on your iOS devices. Additionally, you can also mark photos as favorites with one click, which in my opinion is an improvement over the rating system used by iPhoto.
Then we have the contextual buttons that show up at the top of each group. These include:
- Play: You can use this button to start a slideshow of selected photos.
- The + sign: This button can send the current selection to an album, book project, calendar, and more.
- Sharing: Use this button to share your selected photos via Mail, Messages, iCloud Photo Sharing, and social networks.
Photo Stream vs iCloud Photo Library
These two terms are perhaps among the most confusing for those who have just upgraded to the new Photos app in Yosemite. So let’s take a closer look at what each of them means.
Photo Stream
Photo Stream on Photos is exactly like the one on iOS devices, and is also the same as theiCloud section we used to have in iPhoto.
Here is where all your most recent photos are stored regardless of which device you use to shoot them. On your Mac, you can access them via Albums > My Photo Stream. Although all photos you shoot now also show up on the main Photos section.
And don’t forget you need to be connected to a wireless network in order for Photo Stream to be updated.
iCloud Photo Library
This is the new feature widely available since the release of Photos. In short, what iCloud Photo Library does is allow users to have all of their photos on the cloud via their iCloud account.
This means that once all your photos have been uploaded, you can effectively delete your originals from your devices, saving you space on your devices’ hard drives.
In practice, this feature works really well. However, you are limited by the storage on your iCloud account, and if you have a pretty large photo library (as most users do), then you will be forced to upgrade. Fortunately, the different iCloud storage plans have gotten pretty cheap, but once you upgrade, you have to keep paying every month.
And there you have it. It is pretty clear that while iPhoto has served us well throughout the years, Photos is the future, as it’s packed with features that make it easier to use. Just remember to back up all your photos before getting rid of iPhoto entirely or before upgrading to iCloud Photo Library.
Keynote address or cricket match, you can watch anything on YouTube these days. Believe me when I say that I have not renewed my TV subscription for almost 2 months now. A high speed internet connection is all you need – and a casting device like Chromecast takes things to a whole different level.
When it comes to streaming music on YouTube, I don’t have many complaints. The tab just sits in the background and streams my playlists. But while watching interesting videos, I often face issues when I accidentally switch tabs. Whether it be a friend’s ping on Facebook or an colleague’s query on Slack, the video keeps on playing in the background. And when I return to the video, I have to navigate back to the place I left off. A real mood killer!
The idea is to automatically pause these videos whenever I have to switch tabs to attend to other issues. Also, I will show you how to get a video to force buffer even when it’s not being played. As always, there’s an extension for that and we will be using two of them designed for YouTube. So let’s have a look at them one by one.
Smart Pause for YouTube
Smart Pause extension is available for Chrome and Firefox and it automatically pauses the video if you switch to a different tab and automatically resumes playback once you return to the page. After you install and activate the module, you will see a pause button near the YouTube player. Whenever you need to auto-pause a video, click on the pause button and it will activate the extension for the particular video.
The extension works flawlessly and you can auto-enable the settings for all the videos on YouTube. But you might want to skip on that setting if you listen to a lot of music with YouTube. Apart from that, there is nothing much to configure in the extension
SmartVideo for YouTube
SmartVideo is yet another extension available for both Chrome and Firefox and it helps to force buffer videos for those on slow connections. You can also select the default quality of streaming for videos and auto loop a video if required. After the extension is installed, you will see the settings when you hover the mouse over the video. Here you can choose to force buffer a video.
To open the full settings, click on Global Preferences. Here you can configure the force buffering, auto loop, and playback quality of videos.
There is a different section for videos that are embedded on other websites and the ones you watch on YouTube – changes have to be made to each of them. A few features are experimental for HTML 5 videos, but it worked fine for me in the initial testing.
Conclusion
Those were two of my latest favorite extensions, and I am quite pleased by the fact that YouTube now works a bit smarter on my computer. Like me, users who consider YouTube to be their daily source of entertainment, news, and music are going to enjoy these two extensions. If you would like to recommend any of your favorite extensions for YouTube that you think can be useful for our readers, please comment. Who doesn’t like a healthy discussion?
