Gmail, Google reader and the time settings of your computer

Weird thing happened today. Suddenly Gmail webpage wasn't showing up anymore, it was reloading and reloading and reloading... Greader was saying that there were unread items while not showing any of them. I tried with Firefox, nothing. With IE nothing as well.

Reinstalled in order:
* Java
* IE
* Firefox

Nothing... same as before.
In the end I checked the date and it was one month later than today... well, believe it or not, that was the problem... After fixing the date everything bakc to normal.

So if Gmail or Greader don't work, take a look at the your date settings ;)

Gmail: new interface

Our beloved Gmail doesn't seem that much different but it changed radically. New things are:
* the new contact manager (really nice and neat)
* New "mute conversation" option (automatically archives the conversation)
* Some more option in the contacts
* Speed improvements (it takes a lot of time to render the first time but then it goes faster)

Anyway the Firefox extension I was using it doesn't work anymore with the new version of Gmail and, especially, I miss the keyboard shortcuts.

Luckily lifehacker.com prepared a new version of BetterGmail that works ;)

You can find it at lifehacker.com

Firefox gives you Better GMail

I use quite heavily GoogleReader and I love its keyboard shortcuts (thanks quijote for the advice ;). I was trying to find a way to improve the keyboard shortcuts in GMail also on the style of GReader. So I came across this incredible add-on for Firefox that gives to GMail just what it was missing. The extension is called Better GMail. Apparently it is out since April this year, but I haven't really heard that much about it. It's a collection of all the bests GMail greasemonkey scripts.

Greasemonkey is a Mozilla Firefox extension that allows users to install scripts that make on-the-fly changes to specific web pages. As the Greasemonkey scripts are persistent, the changes made to the web pages are executed every time the page is opened, making them effectively permanent for the user running the script.

Intrigued by the screenshots I installed it and, well I've been playing with it since 3 hours now and the usability improvement is really astonishing.
I'll list here the features that I like the most:

• Bottom post in replies
• (thanks to Jesus now I hate top-posting)
• Filter Assistant
• Force https connection in Gmail
• Improved keyboard shortcuts
• TinyURL auto conversion

In addition to those ones there are many other features and, trust me, you want to try them ;)