"I would love to change the world, but they won't give me the source code." - Blogging RockStar
Archive for the ‘Google’ Category
Adobe’s Flash Videos now Searchable through Google
July 1st, 2008 by Blogging Rock Star
Talk to most website designers and most will tell you to be weary of Flash contents when building your site.
While the temptation is great to use Flash to deliver an impressive and flawless presentation to your clients, such usage may also bring about other problematic issues.
Perhaps the most pressing one of them all is the fact that search engines, like Google and Yahoo!, are not able to crawl through the dynamic contents in a flash set up.
This makes it impossible for search engines to rank these web pages and link users to them.
However, times have changed and technology is starting to catch up.
Adobe System Inc. has just announced that they are releasing a customized version of its Flash Player software, which enables search engines, like Google and Yahoo!, to “see” the elements of the web pages embedded in the Flash files. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Google + SEO + Web Design | 
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How Do I Get My Site Listed On Search Engines?
November 25th, 2007 by Sean
Before your website can get listed on a search engine, the search engine must first of all know that your website exists. Search engines do this by using a web crawler.
A web crawler is a program that methodically browses through the websites on the internet and allows the search engine to index them. How a web crawler works can be crudely summarized by these steps.
1. The web crawler visits the webpages that it has previously indexed.
2. It searches those webpages for outbound links.
3. It visits those links and indexes the pages that are new.
These steps are repeated as new webpages are found.
As you can see, the best way to get the search engine to index your page is to get another webpage that is already indexed to link to yours.
The other, less recommended, way of getting your webpage indexed is to submit your webpage URL to the search engine directly. This lets the search engine know that a webpage exists and needs to be crawled. However, this does not guarantee that your webpage will be crawled.
Here are some of the URL submission pages for the more common search engines.
Google - http://www.google.com/addurl.html
Yahoo - http://docs.yahoo.com/info/suggest
MSN - http://beta.search.msn.com/docs/submit.aspx
If you want to submit your webpage URL to the search engines directly, it is recommended that you submit it to Google, Yahoo!, and MSN. This is because online sources say that these search engines sell their search results to the other smaller search engines.
Remember, when building a website, CONTENT IS KING. If you website has good content and is updated frequently with fresh material, people will come and naturally link your webpages.
Posted in Google + SEO | No Comments »
Google Brings Premium Pricing to Online Storage Options
August 12th, 2007 by Sean
Google on Thursday, August 9, 2007 augmented the free storage it offers to users of its online services with the option to buy additional storage.
Users of Picasa Web Albums and Gmail and soon Google Docs & Spreadsheets, can now choose from several expanded storage options: 6 Gbytes ($20 per year), 25 Gbytes ($75 per year), 100 Gbytes ($250 per year), or 250 Gbytes ($500 per year).
Picasa users currently receive 1 Gbyte of storage for free and Gmail users get 2.8 Gbytes, which is more or less in line with the storage available from other online service providers.
Microsoft on Thursday announced a free online storage service called SkyDrive that offers 500 Mbytes of storage. Yahoo Mail offers 1 Gbyte of storage for free and 2 Gbytes for $20 per year. On Tuesday, Apple upgraded its .Mac service to include 10 Gbytes for $100 per year.
As a way to make Google’s online applications more useful, additional storage options will surely meet with user approval. But parking files with the Internet’s big brands carries a premium.
- Mozy.com, for example, offers unlimited online storage for $5 per month or $55 per year. (While unlimited storage generally has some undisclosed limit, I currently have about 60 Gbytes of data stored there, making Mozy’s rate about one-third of Google’s for that specific capacity.)
- JungleDisk, which uses Amazon.com’s S3 storage service, charges, $0.15 per Gbyte per month of storage used, $0.10 per Gbyte transferred in every month, and $0.18 per Gbyte for first 10 Tbytes of data transfer out every month. Excluding transfer charges, storing 60 Gbytes of files would come to $9 per month or $108 per year.
- MediaMax sells 25 Gbytes of online storage free and 100 Gbytes for $5 per month or $45 per year (premium account). For $30 per month or $290 per year, it offers 1 Tbyte of online storage — four times the capacity of Google’s most capacious storage option at just over half the price.
Granted Apple, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo have services associated with their online storage, but judging by the prices available from dedicated storage services, the larger players could afford to offer more for less.
Posted in Google + Web Hosting | No Comments »
Validate all your HTML from a Google Sitemap
August 2nd, 2007 by Blogging Rock Star
Thanks to a few Google searches, I came across a cool web application to help automate and simplify the process which uses a sites Google sitemap to help validate pages.
That’s right, validate your entire website in one shot! No need to manually check pages anymore. Just set it and forget it.
The application written by Chris Riley is called Website Validator. Pretty catchy name don’t you think?
How it works is you enter your sitemap URL in the box and hit Validate. Bam. You’re done.
Magically it will validate each page in your sitemap and report back on any that don’t validate.
Keep in mind that if you have a large site full of content and dynamically generated pages, it could take a while to check everything.
Don’t worry because remember, it’s automatic. You can set it and walk away, then come back and check your results.
I ran my own site against it earlier and actually found a few posts that needed some fixing.
I still have a couple more to clean up but with this nifty web application, it won’t take long to track the issues down.
Posted in Google + HTML + Web Design | No Comments »
Make Your Own Google Cell
July 12th, 2007 by Sean
Google’s mobile offerings have grown significantly in the past year in the form of both Java-based clients and mobile versions of pages.
Most of the apps or mobile sites are Google-built (like Gmail Mobile and Google Maps Mobile), with the exception of a couple of applications from Shozu that let you post to your Blogger account and upload pics to your Picasa Web Album.
If you’re a Google nut on your desktop, why not take advantage of the same apps on the go?
An excellent place to start your online mobile adventures. You can select which modules you’d like in your mobile homepage based on your desktop homepage at google.com/ig/cp
2. Google Maps (and local search) Java client:
A Java client that shows map or satellite view of most of the world using Google Maps. Includes local search, driving directions and for select cities even traffic info. Confirmed to work in US, UK, Europe, and Australia – but it should work for any location that Google Maps supports.
The Google mobile calendar site will let you view your Google calendars in agenda mode. It lets you select which calendars you want to include as well as specific event details and adding new events but lacks the ability to modify or delete events.
Picasa has a mobile version that lets you view your albums. To upload images, Shozu provide an excellent free Java applet that’s available for most Java enabled phones.
5. Gmail mobile:
What’s a smart phone without email? The Java client is excellent – very fast and supports most Gmail functions. The web interface is good but lacks the bells, whistles and speed of the Java client. The POP3 settings lose all your Gmail features (like tags, stars) but work natively with your phone’s email program.
6. Google Reader mobile (RSS Feed Reader):
An optimized mobile UI for Google Reader. You have to set up your feeds in the desktop version but then you can read and filter (by star, tag or feed).
Shows Google News formatted for your phone. Lets you customize which news sections are visible, then you can expand or collapse whole sections at a time.
Newly updated, provides comprehensive mobile search that remembers your location to provide intelligent results for local businesses, movies and weather.
So there you go, eight Google applications for turning your current mobile phone into a “Google Phone”. Enjoy.
Posted in Google + Reference + Wireless | No Comments »
