Webdev

Google associaties most of your sites with your Google account by default. You can add these to your Google Buzz feed with a click of a button. But, what if you blog isn't listed among the options?

You can manually associate your site with your account by adding this piece of code to your html code's header part. Just replace profilename with your Google profile name. Usually takes a few days for Google to pick-up the information.

<link rel="me" type="text/html" href="http://www.google.com/profiles/profilename"/>

By default most of us use our ISP's DNS to resolve web addresses into IP numbers. Google came up with a Public DNS system, which is is supposedly faster (and perhaps safer) than using the ISP's DNS. If you want to test it on your Mac it's really easy to set it up.

1. From the Apple menu, click System Preferences, then click Network. If you are prompted for an administrator password or confirmation, type the password or provide confirmation.
2. Select the connection for which you want to configure Google Public DNS. For example: To change the settings for an Ethernet connection, select Built-In Ethernet, and click Advanced. To change the settings for a wireless connection, select Airport, and click Advanced.
3. Select the DNS tab.
4. Click + to replace any listed addresses with, or add, the Google IP addresses at the top of the list: 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4.
5. Click Apply and OK.

Google isn't first with the idea for a faster public DNS. I've been using OpenDNS for years, which is a really nifty service offering many features.

Google enables you to create a translation of your website on the fly. All you have to do is add a piece of code to your html anywhere on the page. Users will be able to select the langauge of their preference and the page will immediately will be translated to the chosen language. Naturally machine made translation is not as good as if it were done by a human, but it's good enough for people who do not speak the original language of the site to be able to understand the content.

Google launched Sidewiki, a new feature of the Google Browser Toolbar. It let's you comment on web pages in an collapsing side window. See the video for details.

It will be interesting to see how Sidewiki deals with spam and abuse.

If you're operating a website, it is probably a good idea to install Google Toolbar to check what people are saying about your site, even if it's only visible to Sidewiki users. Unfortunately the toolbar isn't available for Safari, but Firefox and IE.

Excerpted from Search Engine Advertising: Buying Your Way to the Top to Increase Sales, 2nd Edition (New Riders)
By Kevin Lee, Catherine Seda
Dateline: August 6, 2009

You can’t manage and optimize a campaign unless you measure the results. Over the years, the advertising community has split itself into two camps, each with their own set of metrics. Direct response marketers measure sales and leads that turn into sales (or those that don’t). Rarely will you hear die-hard direct marketers use the words branding or brand lift. Similarly, although “awareness” is something a direct marketing campaign generates, direct marketers don’t generally use the measure of awareness as a metric. The direct response marketer has a laser focus on measurable results and the media driving those results. Branders, on the other hand, have a whole set of metrics designed as proxies for success, which attempt to quantify the influence that marketing, PR, and advertising have on eventual purchase behavior. When conversions to leads, sales, or other positive behaviors can be tracked, direct marketers scoff at branding metrics, and branders fire back that direct marketers are too myopic, focusing only on obviously traceable behaviors.

According to Google speed is everything. I personally agree. I can't stand slow sites. Speed is probably the second most important thing for me after content.

Here is a list of tips from Google on how you can improve your site's speed:

1. CSS: Using every declaration just once
2. How gzip compression works
3. HTTP caching
4. Improving website performance with Page Speed
5. Minimizing browser reflow
6. Optimizing JavaScript code
7. Optimizing web graphics
8. PHP performance tips
9. Prefetching resources
10. Properly including stylesheets and scripts
11. Reducing the file size of HTML documents
12. UI messaging and perceived latency

Drupal, the CMS engine behind creativebits uses many of these techniques successfully to speed up pages. It compresses the CSS files and it can pack several files into one single CSS file. It can cache pages so there are less php and mysql requests.

On Ads of the World because of the huge traffic we had to use http caching on top of Drupal's built in features as well.

Practically everybody is using Google to search. But, is Google giving you the best search results? Here is a page where you can blind test Google, Bing and Yahoo! against each other. Pick the column that you think gives you the best results for a query and find out which search engine was it. Interesting to see that Yahoo! is winning so far: Google: 23%, Bing: 19%, Yahoo: 57% | 58,985 votes

Several of my friends own many domain names. These assets are usually sitting unused in their domain registrar accounts. If you also have such domains or planning to register a few for future use read on.

With relatively little time you can start making a bit of money from these domains. Get a Google Adsense account, make up a fake page with some relevant text full of valuable keywords and put up a large google ad. Make sure you provide a contact email on the page in case somebody wants to offer to buy the domain.

If you have no time, another way to make use of these unused domains is to park them. Parking companies like sedo allow you to do two things: they display ads that you profit from and provide potential buyers with an escrow system in case somebody wants to buy your domains. You can set the prices and you pay 10% for the transaction. If the domain is popular enough, you can easily make up the price of the yearly registration or even more with the ads even if your domain doesn't get sold.

Another advantage of using a parking service is that parked domains show up as available to buy in domain registrar searches.

Here is how one of my parked domains look like: Theme Fair.

Google were going to buy digg.com for around 200 million last July, but apparently they couldn't work out a deal. So, google decided to build its own digg and make it available to its millions of users in form of an iGoogle gadget called What's popular.

The features are somewhat simpler than digg's, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. It may even be an advantage if Google wants to reach a wider audience than digg's technocrats. You can pop (vote in Google's terminology) stories up / down and you can add your own urls for others to pop. Relevant stories are suggested to you using an algorithm that finds interesting content from a combination of your submissions and trends in your activity across a variety of Google services, like YouTube and Google Reader.

Tweetmeme (Tmm) is a service built around the highly popular Twitter micro-blogging service. Tmm counts the number a certain web page has been tweeted about. If a certain page gets a lot of tweets it hits the Tmm front page, which will generate even more traffic.

Currently the Tmm home page only gets a few thousand visitors, so it's not even comparable to the traffic that digg can generate. However as twitter becomes more and more popular the content appearing on the Tmm homepage will become increasingly more relevant and interesting. The advantage of Tmm over digg, reddit or slashdot is that links do not have to be manually submitted and the number of votes are automatically given by twitter users regardless if there are aware of Tmm or not.

Tmm with 1M+ Twitter users vs Digg's 3M+ Tmm is already comparable and as Twitter grows it will become even more so. You can embed a Tmm button (just like a digg button) that automatically shows the number of tweets a certain page got and allows people to re-twitter it easily.