www.GMail.co.za is NOT Google GMail – WARNING

Posted by James on Apr 26, 2010 in google | 1 comment

This is a short notice to say that www.gmail.co.za is NOT Google’s GMail.

GMail is obviously not GMail!

You’re probably asking yourself why you care, and why I’m stating something that could be obvious?

Well, because to a LOT of people, it’s NOT obvious.

Creating your Google Reader Application with Google Chrome

Posted by james on Sep 3, 2008 in google, interesting | 3 comments

Google Chrome was finally released, and I’ve been playing around with it for a few hours.

I decided to try out creating a “Google Reader Application” by making use of the “Chromeless Chrome” functionality.

In the images (click on them for a larger look) you will see the 4 basic steps to creating the Chrome-less application:

1 – The initial web site (Google Reader) in a basic/standard Google Chrome browser. You can see it’s still in the normal browser chrome because of the tabs and URL bar, etc.

2 – Click on the “page” icon to the right of the URL bar and click on “Create application Shortctuts…”

3 – You will then have a couple of prompts to answer and you can save your shortcut to the desktop. You can see that Google Chrome has chosen the Favicon as the “application icon”.

4 – In this last screenshot you can see what the Google Reader app will look like, now that it doesn’t have the usual “browser chrome”. (See my previous article about Google Chrome for more info on that).

And, we now have a “Google Reader Application“, especially since we don’t really need an internet connection if you’ve enabled Google Gears for this site.

Google Chrome – Google’s Free Web Browser

Posted by james on Sep 2, 2008 in google | 0 comments

Looks like all the MANY, MANY rumours of Google releasing their own web browser have finally come true.

Welcome, Google Chrome. (the link is live, go download Google Chrome)

Some Cool Features in Google Chrome

The developers of Chrome have really gone all out on the performance of this browser, especially with regards to JavaScript. Which is a GREAT thing, considering Google’s biggest apps use AJAX/JavaScript heavily.

One of the things I’m looking forward to seeing is the “Task Manager“. This window shows which tabs (and therefore, which sites) are causing the most CPU usage and memory usage. FireFox 3 really improved it’s memory handling, but every now and again, when I have about 15 tabs open (which I often do, while I’m writing this I have 9 open) FireFox hangs when opening GMail and Google Reader…

Here’s a screenshot of the Google Chrome Task Manager at work (click the image for a full-sized version):

The world has really been “raving” about IE8′s “porn mode“, which Microsoft have officially named “InPrivate”. While browsing in this mode your session will be undetectable (theoretically), and no trace of that session will be left on your computer. Google Chrome seems to have a similar feature, except you can select a specific tab that will browse without leaving any trace of it’s session on your computer. Great stuff if you’re reading personal ads while on your work’s computer.

Tabs and the way we use them have also completely changed. They’ve been inverted so they appear at the top of the browser, but that’s not just a UI change. You can now drag tabs between browser windows, and all of their history goes along with it. Effectively, each tab is it’s own browser (with it’s own URL bar, named “The OmniBox“), so it doesn’t matter where it sits…

Talking about the OmniBox, personally it looks like Mozilla’s Ubiquity has some similarities, being able to search and translate and complete your bookmarks…

Chrome without Chrome

The “Chrome” of a browser is the actual window with the toolbar, the URL bar, the bookmarks/links area.

Google Chrome looks like it now allows you to “create a GMail application”, in that it removes the browser chrome, so that you only see GMail’s website. This means that you hopefully won’t realise you’re using GMail inside a browser.

And, with the speed of the JavaScript rendering engine (and broadband), hopefully it won’t feel like you’re on the internet as well.

Of course, what about if you CAN’T connect to the internet? Well, there’s always Google Gears, which is built into the browser. Now, we only need GMail to support Google Gears. (If you’re looking for an example of the benefits of Google Gears, read my article “WordPress 2.6 and Google Gears“).

Here’s a pic of an example with Google Reader (so that I didn’t have to go blanking out all my email addresses for a GMail example). Click for a full-size version of the image:

(All these features are obviously available for any website, not just GMail).

The Usual Suspects

And, of course, along with the 2 cool features above, there seem to be some other more expected features, like “Autocomplete in your address bar”, funky favourites, and built in functionality that you needed extensions in FireFox to do.

Interesting Notes about the Development

You could probably just read all this from the comic (linked to below), but here are a few things that stood out.

The testing of the browser took place on millions of websites. But, probably not only the little lame homepages that would obviously look good (or look bad?). Because Google caches so many web pages while crawling the internet, AND, because they rank web pages, they know which ones have more chances of being visited, and they have easy access to them. So they were able to run automatic (and manual) tests against MILLIONS of sites.

The JavaScript Virtual Machine is supposedly SUPER FAST! Of course, that means browsing your mail in GMail and reading my blog in Google Reader just got a whole lot faster.

References

So, to see other people’s opinions on this, go visit Philipp Lenssen’s “Google Blogoscoped” blog.

You can also read Google’s official announcement.

Or, read the comic from Google with more info about Google Chrome: Google Chrome Comic (or download the PDF version – which doesn’t seem to work, oh well).

And, I’m eagerly awaiting Matt Cutts’ post with more info for advanced users (which I would consider myself ). He’s apparently been using the browser for a while now, so he should definitely know his stuff.

Final Thoughts

I guess it’s a good thing that Google and Mozilla signed their ad deal recently, renewing the deal until 2011, because with Google’s brand behind them, this will DEFINITELY give FireFox and hopefully Internet Explorer a run for their money.

It all benefits us, because the more competition, the more we’ll get from the browsers while trying to be won over…

Speaking of competition, I can’t wait for a Mobile Google Chrome. All I can say is, when that comes out, Opera Mobile and Opera Mini (which I love) better watch out…

GMail Unread Mail Shortcut

Posted by james on Nov 8, 2007 in google | 13 comments

If you use FireFox and GMail a lot, you might appreciate this little shortcut to view your unread mail in GMail that’s now possible since GMail “upgraded”.

Saving of GMail Bookmarks

A couple of weeks ago, GMail upgraded their application to allow the bookmarking of the different areas of the application, such as:

- Your Inbox: http://mail.google.com/mail/#inbox
- Sent Mail: http://mail.google.com/mail/#sent

and, of course, the most important of all:

Unread Mail in your Inbox: http://mail.google.com/mail/#search/is%3Aunread+in%3Ainbox

The unread mail shortcut is generated by doing a search in GMail with the following query:

is:unread in:inbox

Creating a FireFox Keyword Shortcut

Now, to create the FireFox shortcut of GMail shortcuts (that’s supposed to sound GRAND!), bookmark the search results. Or, drag the link above to your bookmarks toolbar. You can save it anywhere you like, as long as you can find it again.

Then do the following:

- right-click on the bookmark
- click “Properties”
- type in the letters “gu” in the “Keyword” field

What you’ve just done is created a “URL” for FireFox.

It’s easy to test. Just try the following:

- Close your GMail tab (or close FireFox and start it up again)
- open a new, empty tab
- type the letters “gu” (without quotes) in your address bar
- press enter

You should be taken to your unread mail in your GMail inbox.

You can obviously choose any letters you like, including single letters. Just test the letters beforehand to see if they’re already in use.

FireFox Power User

And to bring you into the FireFox Power Users group, try this little keyboard combination:

[CTRL]-T
[CTRL]-L
gu
[ENTER]

What it does is:

- Opens a new tab
- puts the cursor in the Address bar
- type in your shortcut and press enter

How easy was that?

Goodbye MFA, Thank you Google

Posted by james on Jun 26, 2007 in google | 10 comments

On the 1st of June 2007 Google supposedly closed down a lot of “Made For Adsense” sites.

I just thought I would share my excitement about this with you. You see, since around the beginning of June my AdSense earnings have at least doubled. There could be a number of factors at play here, but the coincidence is great. And, I know a lot of people are complaining about their adsense earning dropping.

So, take a look at these graphs.

AdSense Earnings Graph

If you can’t see it properly, the beginning of June is around the 3rd date from the right at the bottom. Of course, this might not show much other than an increase in clicks (which didn’t really go up). So let’s take a look at the eCPM.

AdSense Page eCPM Graph

It doesn’t seem to be as drastic, but there’s a definite (and more consistent) increase.

Do you think this has anything to do with Google removing the AdSense arbitragers? I do…

Depersonalising Google Search Results Bookmarklet

Posted by james on Jun 14, 2007 in google | 3 comments

This is probably not original.

This is probably not exciting.

But it’s something I’ve been looking for for a while, and here it is…

The route this piece of info took to get here was quite convoluted:

Danny Sullivan spoke about it on the Daily SearchCast…
… because Barry Schwartz wrote about it at Search Engine Land – “Easy Way To Turn Off Google Personalized Results“…
… because Aaron Wall wrote about it on his blog at SEOBook.com – “How to Turn Google Personalized Search Results Off Without Logging Out”

Anyway, after following the breadcrumb trail to ensure everybody got their credit, I decided to make the bookmarklet that I’ve always needed:

GdePWS

Sounds pretty dramatic, doesn’t it. At the very least, it sounds Dutch. It stands for “Google de-Personalise Web Search”.

To use it, just drag the link onto your FireFox bookmarks toolbar. Then, once you’ve performed a search in Google, if you’d like to see what the results look like without Google dishing out personalised search results, just click the link. It will perform the search again, only with the “&pws=0″ parameter appended to the end.

Let me know what you think.