Archive for the ‘Recent News’ Category

Firebug Impacts Google’s GMail Performance

Thursday, March 4th, 2010

If you’re a web developer or web designer you’ll need to read this support article I located on Google.

For the best Gmail performance, we suggest disabling Firebug for www.google.com.

Windows or Linux Users

To disable Firebug:

Open the Firebug pane in your Gmail tab by clicking the Firebug icon.
Click the down arrow next to the Net tab, and select Disable monitor for mail.google.com
Repeat Step 2 on the Console and Script tabs.

If you’d like to keep Firebug running, you may improve Gmail performance by following these steps:

Click the green or red icon in the bottom right corner of the browser window to open Firebug.
Click the Console tab.
Select Options.
Uncheck Show XMLHttpRequests.
Click the Net tab.
Select Options.
Check Disable Network Monitoring.

Mac Users

To disable Firebug:

Click the green or red icon in the bottom right corner of the browser window to open Firebug.
Click the bug icon in the top left corner of Firebug and select ‘Disable Firebug for mail.google.com.’

If disabling Firebug for Gmail doesn’t improve performance results, you may have to entirely disable Firebug.

Here’s the link to the original article. Google support document.

Posted in css, debugging, firebug, gmail, Google, html, Plugins, Recent News, Technology, web design, web devegloper | No Comments »

WordPress.com Stats Plugin

Thursday, February 18th, 2010

Going in and out of a number of wordpress instances that I manage I found this very useful wordpress plugin called wordpress.com Stats. It’s pretty decent to give you a quick indicator of the traffic you site receives. By no means is it exhaustive but if you see a decent amount of activity or an unnatural spike you can then know to pop over to Google Analytics or Omniture or your website analytics package you have gathering all the data. I simply use it as a stats quick view and have it placed on my wordpress dashboard in the upper right corner. You can locate the WordPress.com Stats plugin at the url http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/stats/

According to the plugin site, “Once it’s running it’ll begin collecting information about your pageviews, which posts and pages are the most popular, where your traffic is coming from, and what people click on when they leave. It’ll also add a link to your dashboard which allows you to see all your stats on a single page. Less is more.

Finally, because all of the processing and collection runs on our servers and not yours, it doesn’t cause any additional load on your hosting account. In fact, it’s one of the fastest stats system, hosted or not hosted, that you can use.”

I’ve found it to be a quick install and the developers are pretty proactive with keeping it up-to-date and backwards compatible.

Posted in google analytics, Recent News, stats, website analytics, Wordpress | No Comments »

IE6 being pushed out by Google…FINALLY!

Monday, February 1st, 2010

Someone finally stands up to IE6.

Here’s the email I recieved:

Dear Google Apps admin,

In order to continue to improve our products and deliver more sophisticated features and performance, we are harnessing some of the latest improvements in web browser technology. This includes faster JavaScript processing and new standards like HTML5. As a result, over the course of 2010, we will be phasing out support for Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 as well as other older browsers that are not supported by their own manufacturers.

We plan to begin phasing out support of these older browsers on the Google Docs suite and the Google Sites editor on March 1, 2010. After that point, certain functionality within these applications may have higher latency and may not work correctly in these older browsers. Later in 2010, we will start to phase out support for these browsers for Google Mail and Google Calendar.

Google Apps will continue to support Internet Explorer 7.0 and above, Firefox 3.0 and above, Google Chrome 4.0 and above, and Safari 3.0 and above.

Starting this week, users on these older browsers will see a message in Google Docs and the Google Sites editor explaining this change and asking them to upgrade their browser. We will also alert you again closer to March 1 to remind you of this change.

In 2009, the Google Apps team delivered more than 100 improvements to enhance your product experience. We are aiming to beat that in 2010 and continue to deliver the best and most innovative collaboration products for businesses.

Thank you for your continued support!

Sincerely,

The Google Apps team

Email preferences: You have received this mandatory email service announcement to update you about important changes to your Google Apps product or account.

Google Inc.
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View, CA 94043

and heres a link to an article for it: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2010/feb/01/google-docs-dropping-ie6-support

Posted in Google, ie6, internet explorer, Online, Recent News, Software, Technology | No Comments »

Remove Feedburner Post

Friday, December 11th, 2009

Working with Google’s Feedburner

While managing one of the many feeds I setup or maintain I had to claim the post in Technorati and in doing so I needed to create a post so Technorati can confirm I’m an authorized person. That post requires that I place a code into the blog, which ends up in the feed, because Feedburner works PDQ. This is not a problem on a new feed but can result in spam for an existing subscriber base.

Feedburner Troublshootize:
“As a last resort with a regular feed or a podcast, you can resync your feed. You should only resync if your feed is more than 1 hour out-of-date and pinging FeedBurner does not update it or your podcast files are not being turned into enclosures by our SmartCast service.”

Although it’s really not that drastic, the key point you should take away is that your feed MUST BE 1 hour out-of-date! I tested the ping Feedburner a number of times and it errored with a “full throttle” message.

Deleting an Item From Your Feed. It’s more like refreshing your existing feed.

Follow these steps to delete an item from your feed:

1. Remove the item from your blog’s feed. When dealing with WordPress, there’s two ways of doing this. You can either set the item to be a draft again, or delete it. If you aren’t dealing with WordPress, this is a fairly simple task so you can probably figure it out for yourself. In general, if the post does not appear on your blog’s index, it probably isn’t in your feed.

2. “Nuke” your feed in Feedburner. You can do this by heading over to Feedburner and then clicking on the ‘Troubleshootize’ tab. Scroll down until you see the header ‘The Nuclear Option: “Resyncing” your feed’ and click the button to ‘Resync Now’. It’s kind of odd to find this option here, so that’s why I’m making a blog post about it. It was the last place that I decided to look. The option is also hidden under the page fold so it’s harder to find.

It’s as simple as that. The resync option is played up to be a catastrophic event (”nuking” your feed), but it’s painless. Your feed will be rebuilt from your updated blog feed that does not include the extra post instantly.

Posted in delete, feed, feedburner, Google, Online, post, Recent News, rss, Technology, Wordpress | No Comments »

Caught in a Google Experiment as Test User

Wednesday, December 9th, 2009

Google Search Experiment

Look ma’ no hands!! While looking into an issue (beyond the fact that I misspelled Atlanta in my search) as a web developer and seo practitioner I ran into a Google search results page that displayed far more than I was expecting. I came across an article on Mashable that said Google randomly selects people for beta testing. Although, a cursory search did not locate the article (I’ll update with a link once located).

There are pro’s and con’s to that, which I’ll outline later but an FYI would have been appreciated. I’ll see if Google equally surprises me with a phat fat check!

I’ve since learned that I accidently enabled an SEO toolbar and Firefox plugin that modified my Google SERPs.

Posted in Google, Online, Professional, Recent News, search, seo, Technology, web developer | No Comments »

Web Developer Firefox Plug-ins

Saturday, November 14th, 2009

Firefox Addons

As a web developer I often need a “fix”. No, not caffeine. Ok, well maybe I don’t need “the fix” but some of the web sites I inherit do or a new feature being implemented may have some conflicts so I need to do some debugging in order for the site to work correctly and in many browser types and versions. Alas, I have a little army of grunt software that gets me from point a to point z much more quickly than sys.outs or alert messages. I’ve saved numerous hours using the following set of Firefox Plugins. I’ll briefly outline them and provide a link. My favorite is Firebug and YSlow is pretty damn cool also!

Firefox Plugins

Firebug: You can edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page. Website http://getfirebug.com/

FireFTP: FireFTP is a free, secure, cross-platform FTP client for Mozilla Firefox which provides easy and intuitive access to FTP servers. Website: http://fireftp.mozdev.org/

FoxyProxy: FoxyProxy is a set of proxy management tools for Firefox, Thunderbird, Seamonkey, and Songbird: Website: http://foxyproxy.mozdev.org/

GreaseMonkey: Allows you to customize the way a webpage displays using small bits of JavaScript. Website: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/748

IE Tab: This is a great tool for web developers, since you can easily see how your web page displayed in IE with just one click and then switch back to Firefox. Website: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1419

Screengrab: It will capture what you can see in the window, the entire page, just a selection, a particular frame… basically it saves webpages as images – either to a file, or to the clipboard. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1146

Web Developer Toolbar: The Web Developer extension adds a menu and a toolbar with various web developer tools. Website: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/60

YSlow: YSlow analyzes web pages and suggests ways to improve their performance based on a set of rules for high performance web pages. Website: http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/

Below is a view of the FireBug console.

Firebug Plugin

Posted in add-on, firebug, firefox, foxyprox, greasemonky, ie tab, javascript, Online, plugin, Plugins, Professional, Recent News, screengrab, Software, Technology, toolbar, web developer, yslwo | No Comments »

Google’s Gmail Pop3 refresh script

Friday, October 23rd, 2009

Finally, I’m not going to have to manually fetch my POP3 accounts I setup in Gmail! The hell you say? Ok, here’s the deal, I often get time sensitive emails I need to respond to and I only want to manage one email interface. Gmail has the ability to connect my non-gmail email and set them up to the Gmail Inbox using the Settings > Accounts & Imports.

Google Gmail Settings

Although an awesome feature I have to go to this page a number of times throughout the day because there is no way to configure the fetch to occur more or less frequently. When I forget to do check I may get an important email 45 prior to an auto-fetch when the email required a quick response. That’s where the solution comes in.

The solution does not configure an increase in auto-fetch of pop3 accounts in gmail but rather provides functionality to the Gmail Inbox interface so I can push one button to fetch (refresh) my Inbox page. Thanks to the script called GMAIL POP3 Quick Checker written by Tim Smart http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/51516 I can now effeciently keep up with all my emails. This script will add a “Refresh Pop3 Accounts” link just above the first email in Gmail’s Inbox of your account.

Gmail POP3 Quick Checker Link

You first need to add the Firefox plugin from GreaseMonkey https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/748 and then go to the script and click the install button.

Posted in fetch, gmail, Google, greasemonkey, Online, Plugins, pop3, Professional, Recent News, script, Software, Technology | No Comments »

EditPlus no longer free after 30 Days

Thursday, October 15th, 2009

Back in 2000 when I started programming for The True Value Company I was introduced to an powerful but light weight editor called EditPlus. When ever I was working at an organization where I required the use of EditPlus it was always purchased but for my personal use I never paid for it. It’s reason like this that the developer of EditPlus has an “optional” patch that, unknowingly to me, disallows the use of EditPlus after the evaluation period. I downloaded and installed it thinking I was applying a possible security patch as it’s available without a description or purpose (sneeky bastard). Anyway, one of the few times I thanked Microsoft because the restore feature un-applied (not sure that’s proper english) the patch! Now I can use EditPlus forever and ever and ever… for free!

EditPlus Beyond Evaluation Period

Posted in editor, editplus, Recent News, Software, Technology | No Comments »

Google Calendar for Holidays and Sports

Tuesday, October 13th, 2009

Some of you may have noticed that Google has updated a Calendar feature. Google provides holidays for a number of countries that you can add to your personal calendar. You can also add your favorite teams to your calendar so you don’t miss a game! Simply go to your Google Calendar and in the upper right corner you will see a link in red called New Sports Calendar. Click on that link and you’ll see a screen in your browser similar to the one below. It will have three tabs called holidays, sports and more.

Available Team Schedules in Google Calendar

Once you find the team you want to incorporate into your calendar simply click subscribe and watch the magic happen!

Chicanog Bears Schedule in My Google Calendar

Posted in Blog, Calendar, Google, Online, Recent News, Software, Technology | No Comments »

TweetDeck

Saturday, October 3rd, 2009

As everyone around me seems to be using tweetdeck I figured I begin to see learn more about the software and see how others are using it. To download it go to http://tweetdeck.com/beta/