Category: Web work

These days, most of my work is very related to the online world. Building web sites, reviewing web applications, integrating with web services, coordinating people who are far away from each other, etc. Whenever I find a new tool or service or an innovative, interesting idea about working online, I share it in this category.

Google does not use keywords meta tag

I’ve been explaining this to way too many people over the last few years – Google does not use keywords meta tag for ranking search results.  Which means you can totally drop it, or leave it empty, or fill it with whatever you want at all.  It just doesn’t matter.

And the reason for that is really simple.  SPAM and search ranking manipulation.  It started even before Google was around.  Back when Altavista and Yahoo were fighting for the title of the best search engine.  Altavista was using quite a bit of keywords meta tags.  And, as a result, you could often see sites which had nothing to do with the search query still rank at the top.  If I remember correctly, even Google paid some attention to that meta information at the beginning, but it was quite obvious pretty soon that it cannot be trusted.

Now, if you don’t believe me on this subject, either watch the video or read the explaination directly at the Google Webmaster Blog.  Satisfied?  Now stop spending hours upon hours of everyone’s time trying to develop the perfect tool and pick the perfect keywords.  It just doesn’t matter.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jK7IPbnmvVU]

Google Wave hits developer preview

Google Wave – a new real-time collaboration tool from Google has entered the developer preview stage.  About 100,000 selected people got invited to see and use the system.  Some of those people are already posting early reviews and screenshot tours.  Here is one such review in Lifehacker blog.

Google Wave default view

I personally haven’t tried the thing yet.  But from all the reviews, screenshots, and videos of Google Wave that I’ve seen, I think that I will either totally love it or really hate it.  There are some really cool things in it, like integration of email, chat, and rich-text which is almost as rich as an application.  But on the other hand, some of the integrated tools are those that I depend upon on a daily basis, and which I am very sensitive to changes at.  Until now, from those other people, I can’t figure out if that integration and all those improvements are something that will fit my personal use pattern.

The time will tell.  Hopefully it will go into public better sooner than later…

P.S.: does anyone else think that the default view looks very much like MS Outlook?  Weird.

A glimpse into Google Analytics power

For a few years now I always recommend Google Analytics to anyone who is looking for a statistical / analytical package for their web site.  While there are a few alternatives, I think that almost none of them can match Google Analytics in both ease of use and analytical power.

Easy installation (a copy-paste of provided JavaScript snippet), web-based reports available from anywhere, multi-user access, schedule reports, exports to several formats such as CSV and PDF, schedule reports, customizable dashboards, multiple site and profile management, A/B testing, goal conversion tracking, and much more – and all of it for free.  That’s hard to compete with.

Google Analytics help

And if you want to see how much you can get out of it and how easy that would be to configure, consider a recent example posted in Google Analytics blog – “Advanced: Structure Your Account With Roll Up Reporting And More“.

Gmail solves the “on behalf of” issue

This is the day I’ve been waiting for for a few years now – Gmail solves the “on behalf of” issue.

If you are not familiar with it, the essence of it is this.  You can use Gmail to manage your other, non-Gmail mail accounts.  You can either forward mail automatically to your Gmail inbox, or even set a POP3 fetching from a remote server.  In Gmail account settings you can add all the email addresses that you use, and then even reply from those email addresses.

However, due to Gmail not managing your other email accounts directly, it is forced to add a Sender header with a Gmail email address in it.  And some email programs, like MS Outlook either get confused by it or interpret it in a certain way.  So, if you use your me@gmail.com email address to manage your me@work.com email, and you reply to a message using a me@work.com in From, your colleague’s MS Outlook will show the email to be from “me@gmail.com on behalf of me@work.com”.  This is ugly and there was no easy work around this.

Today Google added support for external SMTP servers.  This way, you can configure your Gmail to use mail.work.com SMTP server when you send from me@work.com .  And it comes from me@work.com , not me@gmail.com on behalf of me@work.com .

With this feature, Gmail practically becomes a full featured email client with support for POP3 for incoming mail and SMTP for outgoing mail.  And these are great news!

The “on behalf of” issue was keeping quite a few folks from moving all their email accounts to Gmail.  And not that the problem is solved I think more people will move over.  Good times!

Google Reader : too user friendly?

I think of Google Reader as a very user friendly application. It clean and simple and only shows you things which you need to see.  Or does it any more?  Here are the options that I see for each RSS item:

Google Reader item options

Let’s see:

  • Add comment.  I can add comments to blogs posts and news and my friends can read those comments and reply and so on and so forth.
  • Add star.  Star is like a bookmark.  I can quickly find the starred articles with a single click.  And I can also share my starred articles by selecting so in the Settings.
  • Like.  I can “like” the article.  Other people can see that I liked it.
  • Share.  Share it with other people.
  • Share with note.  That’s like share and add comment in one.
  • Email.  This one is easy.
  • Keep unread.  So that I can easily find it and read later.
  • Add tags.  So that I can find it easily later and/or share it via Settings.

I am all for making sharing easy, but isn’t it too much?  I see it as a huge overlap in functionality.  Such huge that it gets confusing now.  What’s the difference between the “star” and “like”?  Do I “like” everything I “share”?  Do I “like” everything I comment?  Is it shared or “liked” if I just “Add comment”? How do I “star” or “share” everything I “like”? And so on and so forth.

I think this should be simplified in one action per option:  star, share, comment, email, tag.  If you want to bookmark, you “star” it.  If you want to share, you “share”.  If you want to comment, you “comment”.  If you want to star and share, then you actually click “star” and “share”.  If you want to comment and share, then add your comment and click “share”.  With boolean options everything comes back to the sane world – you either did it or not.

What do you think?