Google Public DNS Launches
I’m not sure how many readers of this blog have actually used alternate DNS solutions, but those numbers will grow.
Google has officially announced Google Public DNS in both the Google Code, and the Official Google Blog. It’s too soon to tell how reception will go, but it is an interesting move. › Continue reading
Speed Up Google Analytics: Use Async
Saw a great post at High Performance Web Sites blog, Google Analytics goes async. The author is Steve Souders, who works at Google on web performance. So this is from the horses mouth.
Think about it, why would you care when the Google Analytics code is loaded? All it does is capture data, as long as Google gets it — it may as well go out at midnight. The new code enables an “async” request in HTML5. › Continue reading
Google History: Distorts Search Results (Warning for SEO experts)
A growing sector in web development nowadays is the SEO “expert”.
With the blossoming effects of social networks and rapidly developing online presences, many people consider themselves SEO experts because they can gain visibility for your site.
One could argue, that’s exactly what SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is, making sure your site gets visibility.
I’m going to stay neutral on that subject, but say that SEO should generate organic traffic to your site through cooperation with modern search technologies. Proper SEO shouldn’t be a Boom and Bust scenario, but a constantly growing user base.
With all of these new SEO experts comes a group of individuals who are NOT skilled in all the fundamentals on the internet.
Google History
One warning I wanted to throw out there, is Google distorts search results for users based on sites they have clicked on previously. Take a look at Google History, and you’ll see what I mean.
Google History takes your previous browsing behavior and organizes it. That information is used to tailor your search results, and I’m sure for Google to customize their search engine performance overall.
When doing SEO you frequently search for a few search terms every day, and may click on the results you like.
SEO experts should know that the results they see may differ wildly from the rest of the world.
All SEO experts should use “neutral” browsers without Google Toolbar installed such as Firefox or Safari (yes, it’s available on the PC too — and it works pretty well) to test the search placements of their clients.
Additionally, if you have hired an SEO expert, be sure to cross reference their results with searches on indepedent computers. Your SEO expert may say your site is now “top 5″ when it is in fact only in the top 20. This is because their computer is biased based on that user’s history.
Google Sync: Now for the iPhone!
Go to www.google.com/mobile/default/sync.html
It enables push notifications for contacts and calendars (on both the iPhone and Windows Mobile)!
I’ve been waiting for this one for quite a while. Currently I used a complex scheme of Outlook, Google Calendar Sync, and still don’t get all the great contact functionality (I could, but it was too annoying to setup — plus I hate all of the useless Gmail contacts).
If you have push notification enabled on your iPhone, you get push updates.
This is essentially an extension of the push functionality for Exchange servers.
Some others have posted on this:
Google Mobile Blog – Google Sync Beta for iPhone, WinMo, and SyncML Phones
Mashable – Finally: Google Sync Comes to iPhone and Windows Mobile
VERY IMPORTANT:
In looking at the instructions, they say that all of your contacts and calendar information will be deleted. You should backup your data:
PC Instructions
Mac Instructions
Below is a video of how Google Sync works:
In Google We Trust
I hear about the anti trust lawsuits against Microsoft. Honestly, I think they are a little bit of “hey, lets get the big guy — he’ll pay us to go away” — but still, we’re protecting our bests interests.
We trust Google. Google has always been the digital apple of software user’s eyes. Think about it, when was the last time you were pissed at Google? So we trust google. We trust google’s famous mantra “Do No Evil”. We trust all of our emails with Google. We trust Google with our digital lives, and sometimes more (how many of us acknowledge Google’s Picasa web albums as what we consider acceptable backup of some of our most precious moments. We condiser Google a member of our family, someone we would trust with most of our private information.
We need Google. On my daily routine, I must use some aspect of Google every 5 minutes. It’s disgusting if you think about it. How much we rely on certain things, notions, and ideas to be constant in our lives. How much of the web relies on Google? Lets look at what I use Google for:
- My Gmail account
- My seangw.com email (I won’t even get into how much of my life depends on that email service)
- My calendar gets sync’d with my google calendar
- Support for all of my technical issues
- Reference material for my profession
- IM
- It’s where I send my family to see photos
- This blog submits every post to Google
- This blog uses Google’s Adsense, for advertising revenue (however small that may be)
- 80% of the traffic on this blog comes from Google
- I throw out those pesky outdated firmware CD’s that come with hardware, because I can google for updated drivers and firmware
- Desktop Search
- Web traffic analysis (analytics)
- SEO tools
- You Tube (enough said)
I’m sure there are dozens more uses I have on a daily basis for Google’s technology.
Now what if one day I couldn’t log into any of the services I use at Google? We depend on google. I think if I found out I couldn’t use Google products and services, my life would change dramatically.
An article on Chris Brogan‘s blog, When Google Owns You, describes the story of Nick Saber, who loses his Google account.
The problem with monopolies is that we end up relying on them. Even if there is no mal-intent, what if a mistake occurs? A simple keystroke on a keyboard somewhere can probably delete our online lives.
When do we trust a company too much?
Google likely knows more about you, than your significant other. Additionally, you probably rely on Google (funtionally at least) more than your spouse.
I’m going to think about Google in a different way. They have a lot of control, for a company who has automated email responses.
After all, individually, Google doesn’t need us.
Got unused domain names? – Try Google Adsense for Domains
I never knew I could take some of my unused domains, and hand them over to Google (why do I even link “Google”? Who doesn’t know where Google is?) to try and monetize some of the wasted traffic.
Looking through Google’s Adsense interface earlier this week I found a new option — Google Adsense for Domains.
I’m not an advocate of parking domain names. If you happen to have some extra domains sitting around it’s a great idea.
The steps are simple:
- Create an Adsense account - https://www.google.com/adsense
- Purchase Domains (if you don’t already have them)
- Setup the Domain for use with Adsense for Domains (there’s a guide at https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=100301&sourceid=aso&subid=ww-ww-et-asui&medium=link)
- Add Unused Domains to Adsense
- Modify domain registrar settings (setup a blank A record to the IP 216.239.32.21, and setup a CNAME “www” record pointing to pub-xxxxxxxxxxx.afd.ghs.google.com, where “xxxxxxxxxxx” is your provisioned Adsense ID)
- Request Approval of the domain from Google (they are very helpful)
- Configure some basic options (color, channel names, keywords if you want to hint the ads in a specific direction)
- Profit
It is important to note that you can only do this with a domain that you don’t use for any other google hosting services (such as Sites, Apps, etc).
For me it’s been worth it. I made $0.32 today that I wouldn’t have otherwise made.
The best part is just to see how many people visit your defunct domains. I love knowing how many people are just typing in a domain, or linking to it on accident.
I haven’t figured out how to run both this service, and Google Analytics.
35 Tutorials to get started with Photoshop
Adobe Photoshop is an amazing tool for web development, and image processing in general. I remember my first experience with Photoshop when I was back in Massapequa High School. There was an after school program that brought a local web designer in to help the kids work with websites and such.
My first creation was a series of boxes swirled. It looked cool, and was so easy to do.
Now Photoshop places a large role in our everyday computer usage. Everyone has a digital camera nowadays, and those with digital cameras should know how to use Photoshop to process those photos (deleting that annoying beach guy in the background who doesn’t understand you shouldn’t wear a “sweater” to the beach, or just to balance out colors).
Of course there are excellent alternatives now, such as Google Picasa or the Adobe Lightroom.
If you go the Photoshop route, check out this post at Six Revisions — 35 Basic Tutorials to Get You Started with Photoshop.
Front End Performance
We’re all web developers here right?
Most of us?
At least, I am.
An article posted at DrunkenFist.com, Why Front End Performance Matters to Everyone, Not Just the High Traffic Giants, goes into why front end performance is important on all sized sites.
The article quotes a commonly spoken theme in web development:
That stuff is for the Googles of the world. We don’t really need to focus on that with what we do.
I hear it all the time from people. That there isn’t a need to worry about that 35k 120×120 JPEG on the home page. Lets make it animate, even if the single function adds 28k to the page download.
What sticks with people is hearing that when google shaves off some small amount of file size, the result is something like $50,000 / hour in return. This number is made up, but meant to illustrate a point. To small store owners, $50,000 is a large number. To google, it is very small. Small business will possibly realize a few dollars a month with extensive optimization, assuming their hosting plans are even based on that at all.
What’s the point in optimization if we only make a few dollars a month?
The end user experience. The user experience is not quantifiable in terms like “$10 / hour”, it is just as important. A faster web page, more solid web page, reflects the business itself.
If a company is always interested in making all of their processes more efficient, then it is more likely that whatever they do for revenue has the same types of optimizations. Over years, optimizations can become quite dramatic.
If this year a website only gets 1000 visitors, and of that only 10 of the users realized the benefit of the optimization — that doesn’t mean much. However, what if one of those 10 users just happens to run a blog in your industry?
The point of all of this, front end performance is important. You can almost always improve the user experience.
As an exersize try to build a standard webpage with a miniscule allowed footprint. I’ve always had the most fun with flash banner ads that must fit into 10k or 20k file sizes. You will gain an understanding of what you are working with, and become more of a craftsman in your work.
Flash banner customization has helped me understand the following skills:
- Embedded fonts — picking which letters to embed and fonts to embed
- Sometimes vector art in Flash is much more efficient than imported graphics
- Sometimes vector art in flash is NOT as memory efficient as imported graphics
There are always tradeoffs in everything we do. Until we push our work to the edge, we rarely see how to control it.
Flash on the G1, Android OS — it works
We’ve been waiting for it, and the G1 has now demoed running Flash Player 10.
Andy Ruben has demoed that Flash can run on Android. In Andy Ruben demos Flash on the G1; it won’t be long now, we read that on November 17th at the Adobe MAX event Andy Ruben was able to demo Flash.
See the video below:
Please share, it makes me happy:
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