Recommended reading

• While You Slept, They Hacked #tcdisrupt – Watch the video, some interesting hacking projects
• Google i/o 2010 – GWT + Spring – This is one of the more impressive videos from this year's Google I/O event, here you can see how VMware (of all people) organised an effort to combine the predominant backend Java framework, Spring, with the leading frontend framework, GWT, and came up with quite a harmonious result – recommended watching

I thought it was strange when I noticed that the search result position of a customer’s site, Eureka Financial, varies depending on whether the customer was logged in or not to their Google account. It should be noted the customer is running Adwords campaigns for their site.

But it gets even stranger – can you believe that what browser you’re using affects the result position?

Here are the variations I’ve seen so far on searches for the phrase “financial training uk”:

• customer logged in, result position #2
• customer not logged in, result position #40
• me logged in (different Google acct), Safari: #37
• me logged in (different Google acct), Firefox: #40

When you’re using a Safari browser, Google adds a client param to the url, ie, client=safari, however for firefox the param is not added.

Go figure.

Are you using WordPress for your blog?  Who isn’t 🙂

But a fairly simple sounding task like tracking conversions for Adwords campaigns actually requires a bit of work.  Here is the system I found works best, you can get it up and running in only a few minutes.

The goal is to be able to track when contact enquiries result from a paid campaign.  I’m using this systems at http://seagullsystems.com.

• the contact form plugin you need is cForms, version 1.5 or later (scroll down past the pluses, big banner on left hand side)
• install the plugin, you will probably need to create the file abspath.php manually
• configure a basic contact form, for example name it “my_form”
• insert the form in your relevant page by pasting the html comment <!–cforms name=”my_form”–>
• in the cformII options panel select Form Settings
• make 2 settings:
  • disable the Ajax mode in the first section
  • in the Core Form Admin / Email Options section, tick Enable alternative success page (redirect) and enter a Thanks page URL you previously created inWordpress
• in your Thanks page paste your conversion javascript code provided by Adwords

And that’s it!  Any probs please mention in the comments.

Or maybe just Google Apps – either way they are so frequent these days I’m regretting having moved over.  C’mon guys, I never expected this level of outages from the great Google!

Gmail outages

“Detailed technical info” … wtf?

Well, by ready I mean it’s available, and apparently it’s one of the first usable builds.  Seems pretty cool though, and definitely blazingly fast already.  See the whole story.

Aside from great performance with Google apps/products, I’m looking forward to per-tab performance monitoring, I always get one tab that kills my whole Safari instance, have to re-start, put all the windows back in their respective spaces, PITA.

In case you haven’t heard yet, Google now makes it possible to synch all your iCal data to your Google Calendar account.

So Mac users can now take advantage of all the OS X integration features of iCal, and still have their data up to date in their Google Calendar account, which they probably obliged to use at work to share data with non-Mac colleagues.   Two way synching is supported, so enter your event in either source and moments later the other one gets it.  And maybe you have 10 or so Google calendars, no probs, you can add them all to iCal.

Great to hear this news as I was just on the edge of paying $25 for the un-named commercial product that also manages similar synchronisation.  

And if you’re really keen you can setup a mobile me account, so any dates entered in your iPhone 3G also get synched to your iCal and Google calendars.  I guess it won’t be long before your iPhone senses that it’s lunchtime, knows your location and schedule, and suggests a list of highly rated Indian restaurants in your area, knowing what cuisine you love 😉

Quite a nice snippet from the php_london ML by Michael Stillwell

Site searches are really really bad. Even from organisations that should know how to do search. I really don’t understand why.

Try, e.g.

http://search.oracle.com/search/search?start=1&nodeid=&fid=&keyword=oracle+client+download&group=All

(Business Intelligence Beans Installation Guide and Release Notes as first result)

versus

http://www.google.com/search?q=site:oracle.com+oracle+client+download

Or

http://www.mysql.com/search/?q=query+browser+download&charset=&x=0&y=0
(Greek as first result)

versus

http://www.google.com/search?q=site:mysql.com+query+browser+download