"Switch to a different publisher ID" doesn't work - More Google uselessness

It would be great if I could scrape up all the pennies from blogs I've published under a different name. But when I try to use the Google standard "Switch to a different publisher ID", it doesn't work and just does nothing.

Judging by their support response, apparently Google aren't really keen to fix it either ....

Wordpress Categories - where did they go ?

I have a Wordpress blog and I'm using version 2.6.2.

Recently, without having changed anything at all, all of my categories on posts mysteriously disappeared as well as my category list on the page.

I have combed the Internet for an explanation, but as yet - nothing.

Very frustrating. I'll let you know when I find a fix

Hotmail's annoying "Upgrade Your Web Browser" Message

Noticed that this message appears even for the latest web browsers ?

How annoying.

I'm running both Firefox v3 and IE 7 and I still get this message from time to time.

All the more reason to move to Gmail I suppose.

Cheapest .com.au domain names

I buy a lot of domains for clients and search engine optimisation campaigns and I've done a lot of searching, so I thought I'd post a brief review of .com.au (Australian dot com au) domain companies for 2 year registrations:
* SmartyHost - $20
* Jumba - $22
* Hostess - $25
* Domainworld - $25
* Crazy Domains - $25.90
* Web City - $34.95
* Planetdomain - $35.55
* Cheap Domains - $38
* Netregistry - $44.95

I've had a couple of poor experiences with Planetdomain, but SmartyHost has been outstanding.

How to get PayPal to validate as XHTML

I've been building XHTML strict websites for some time now, but only just started using PayPal on my sites.

Well I pretty soon discovered that the code that PayPal supplies does not validate out of the box.

But after a bit of massaging I finally got it to validate just fine, using some of the tips in this thread.

Cheap Web Hosting that I recommend

I often get asked about cheap web hosting.

Well the hosts that I use are:

* WebHostingBuzz - great support, very cheap web hosting
* Smarty Host - good local Australian support, reasonably cheap hosting
* FreeHostia - A great free option but requires delegation to the server

But I'll let you know if I change my mind .... ;)

URL cannot contain a google host - My latest Adsense headache

So with the release of Google Knol, it appears that Google Adsense are no longer allowing you to track Adsense revenue for their web applications, which of course includes the popular Blogger tool ....

It is very disappointing to discover when I already have several sites tracked under Adsense.

When you go to add a new Adsense Channel for Blogger or Knol, the following message appears:
"URL cannot contain a google host"

I have checked the Google blogs and support and they don't mention anything of these new restrictions.

A real shame and very frustrating indeed.

Easy Social Bookmarking using AddThis or ShareThis

Social bookmarking can drive more traffic to your website with people being able to tell others about your site by word-of-mouth. There are plenty of applications online, like Delicious, StumbledUpon and Newsvine to name a couple.

One way to make it easier for people to bookmark your website is to make it convenient for them to do it and offer as many popular social bookmarking options as you can.

This can make it difficult with a lack of available screen real estate to work with.

Fortunately there are plenty of drop-in applications out there.

The most popular is "AddThis" and I personally like to use this. It is responsive, looks great and can be easily added to Blogger, Wordpress, MySpace and a whole range of other Web 2.0 applications.

Another popular option is "ShareThis", which tries to use an icon to make it familiar. Unfortunately, unlike RSS icons, there isn't really a standard icon for social bookmarking and more people use AddThis at the moment, meaning that the ShareThis icon is unlikely to take off.

But check out the AddThis facility that I've used at the bottom of each post.

Figured a workaround for Google Adwords My Client Center

After agonising over no support from Google regarding their My Client Center not sending request emails to clients, I discovered that only once you have set up your client's first campaign through their login, it will prompt them to accept the link invitation. While there isn't much documentation on this from Google, it worked.

Still waiting to hear back from since the issue was "escalated" some time ago though in their last email they indicated that the problem was "of some concern" to them.

But at least I'm able to now use Adwords for my clients, though having to request their login details to do it, does kinda defeat the purpose of the whole My Client Center concept ;)

New Facebook review - in a word - " it sucks"

I've tried hard to like the new Facebook. I sampled it for a couple of weeks when they first introduced it, but decided it wasn't for me and then reverted to the old, familiar style.

You see, it just didn't let me easily access the applications, the wall, my news feeds, groups and all the other things I used to like about Facebook. It used to be on the one handy page, now in their pursuit of cleanliness, the interface is in fact an ugly mess.

About a week ago, Facebook, probably the most popular social networking application among adults, forced their new design onto their millions of users.

Well it seems that I am not alone. A protest group within Facebook called "I hate the new Facebook" has over a million members !

The Facebook people just can't seem to turn a trick. They've been criticised for privacy issues related to their news feeds and their horrible use of social advertising.

My use of Facebook is getting less and less, while I have been using applications like Linkedin more. If it wasn't a place where I have all my old contacts, I would have stopped using it long ago. Bebo and MySpace are unfortunately not for me. Come to think of it, should any new social networking application that is half decent has the ability to import my "friends" and contacts, I'd be to it in a minute.

Googling Google and Other Google Issues ...

I wonder if Google have noticed that when you type any query with "Google Help Centre" as keywords, it enters a circular abomination of a search.

Google redirects you to "Google Help" search. But when you click one of the links, it simply refreshes the screen with the keywords "Track ASP" (whatever that means) in the Search field.

Google Help is a misnomer, because it is completely not helpful, nor are their support staff, most of which don't have a clue what they are doing.

I have now waited 3 weeks for a reasoned response to the reason why my whole Adwords My Client Center broke down for me:

I've decided to escalate your issue to our technical team, which will perform a thorough investigation to determine the cause of the issue. These investigations can take some time, but I'll contact you to let you know when our specialists have found a resolution.

But after no response for some time, I emailed out of frustration ans here is the response that I received:

First, I would like to inform you that according to your screenshot which shows that there is no password field available and this is exactly the way it is. I apologize for any inconvenience caused due to any mis communication in the help center.

I note that they have since updated their Help Centre documentation on this, but for a while their documentation was completely wrong and they kept sending me incorrect advice. Unfortunately changing it does nothing to help my situation where clients are in limbo and cannot authorize me to manage their accounts.

And Analytics support is just as bad. It confounds me that in order to delete duplicate unused accounts that the delete button is greyed out and that you have to contact support, but then they don't actually tell you how you can contact support and do their best to discourage you. Then when you do manage to contact support through their online form and provide all the necessary information, this trivial issue requires toing and froing of about 10 emails until they understand what you actually want, but still can't manage to do it.

Hopefully Yahoo or someone else realises just how bad Google's service really is. There is a definite market there for any savvy competitor who can provide reasonable support and customer service. Afterall, it is not rocket science. I have no idea why Google decided to make their login systems so complex and convoluted that even they can't get a grip on them ....

Web browsing with Google Crome, Initial review

I've just been playing around with Google's new beta web browser and I thought I'd write a few things first up.

I'm actually using it right now.

At first glance, I think the whole "less is more" approach to user interface design has been probably a bit overdone.

The back, forward and go navigation icons tripped me up a bit initially, and I kept looking for the drop down list to access my recently visited sites. However I'm impressed with the way the recent and most visited sites with screenshots automatically appear when I open a new tab. Chrome really takes tabbed browsing to the next level.

Importing settings from Firefox seems easy on the surface, but even though I closed Firefox as advised, it still didn't recognise that Firefox was actually closed.

There are some interface bits and pieces to get used to. I found myself accidentally adding sites to my favourites. But Chrome is much quicker and easier to sort bookmarks into folders which is a definite plus.

It has taken a bit of time to get used to less right click options. In particular, I find myself looking for "Refresh" and "Find" options, only to find them in the toolbar. The page icon is a bit counter intuitive and a bit of a catch all and working out what is in either this or the Tool/spanner icon is a bit tricky at first.

I like the inbuilt developer tools and History tab is great.

As a web developer, I'm really interested in how it renders sites. But having checked out many of my favourite sites, I can't yet see any obvious rendering differences between Chrome and Firefox, which is another real positive. However I did notice that while Hotmail works, rich text editors on Blogger and many content management systems (CMS) don't. I'm told this is a problem WebKit, the engine that both Safari and Chrome are partly based on. But more on this to come soon.

Overall, Chrome Beta is not a bad first up effort by Google, although I still think Firefox is better and will probably remain my favourite browser ...

Are Google to busy creating new things to fix their current things ?

That is the impression that I get.

I am starting to get disillusioned by their systems because each one seems to be buggy and in beta, even those that have been around for some time.

Perhaps they are having growth problems, because there are real issues which I can't seem to get any quality support on with Adwords, iGoogle, Blogger and a whole range of other applications for that matter ....

YouTube is great and seems to be going ahead full steam, but most of what Google touches these days is far from turning to gold.

Google Adwords Login Issues driving me nuts

Trying to set up anything Adwords or Adsense related on Google is like trying to teach a baby to walk.

While managing Google's My Client Center, the amount of times I've dealt with emails not being sent by Google for Adwords invitations is unheard of.

And don't get me started on the whole "This account is already a login to another AdWords account. Please select a different Google Account login to access this account." mobius loop.

This thread at Webmaster World typifies the sorts of Google garbage I have to deal with on a daily basis.

Furthermore, Google's own Adwords Learning Center, at least for me, appears to have completely wrong details on how to link accounts. It says it can do it easily by:

1. Retrieve your client's AdWords external Customer ID and account password (which establishes your client's permission to link the account to yours).
2. Log in to your MCC.
3. Click the Link existing account link above your client accounts table.
4. Enter your new client's Customer ID and account password into the appropriate fields.
5. Click Submit.

However in my "My Client Center", there is absolutely no option to enter the account password and when I click submit - nothing happens. No email to the client, no notification in their Adwords account - nothing !

I'm nearly fed up with the then I get support people who don't even know what they are talking about and sent generic mail merged responses. If only they realised that if their systems were usable and they answered their support queries, they might actually get less of them.

No wonder advertisers are moving to Yahoo. Pretty soon I'll be one of them.

Bug Tracking Revisited: The trials and tribulations of "Fogbugz"

I started using Fogbugz, a web based project management system for work about 4 months ago. I'd previously used a hacked version of a PHP and MySQL program called Mantis, which I found to be adequate.

Fogbugz was hyped up as being the simple "be all and end all" solution to project management that would work out of the box, handle enquiries by magic automatically responding to email enquiries and help solve data duplication and a whole bunch of other problems. Certainly the sales pitches on the Fog creek website are pretty slick.

The interface, I was told, was so uber Web 2.0 and friendly that even a baby could use the thing.
In reality I was given a 1-2 hour second hand walkthrough.

The reality is far from easy. It certainly is different. In fact, personally I've found it to be one of the most complex and awkward tools I've ever used. After my walkthrough session I had absolutely no idea how to use the thing and a mountain of questions a mile high.

Well I guess I was always told that it wasn't like the many CRMs with bug tracking added on, and it wasn't a bug tracker trying to be a CRM, but many times you do need both.

I got sold the solution saying that it was going to be something that the programmers would use and it would have all sorts of poweful and useful reports like discrepancies in estimates, overdue cases and the like. But in reality, everything ended up getting pushed through the system, so reluctantly, I had to learn to work its way. And most of the reports turn out to be pretty useless.

I'm just now getting used to circumstances when I should use my own email and its email.

Then there is setting signatures. I was told that it was easy. So rather than ask for help (I'd rather use "user friendliness and initiative), I searched and searched my user settings and all sorts of other things. Nothing. So I did some Googling. By a couple of hours later I'd found that you can use some sort of thing called "Snippets". But further reading only discovered what they could do and not really how to use them. (If only I had a manual). Finally only after stuffing around for literally ages, I discovered that my laptop keyboard doesn't have the default snippet character ... great, so if only someone had told me I could change it from my options, I'd be a step further from smashing something. ...

Fogbugz also uses a whole lot of filters and reports and uses cookies to save queries. Which is fine until you want to do something and then spend whole minutes deactivating filters and trying to work out which filters have been set.

Then there are timesheets. Unless you're one of those people who works using "What am I doing now" style of worker with minimum distractions, the system is clumsy. I constantly find myself entering times for the wrong days, then entering a time only to find that I don't have the case number and guess what, those funky AJAX style floating box consistently sits smack bang on top of that case number and guess what, it won't move, so I have to close the whole thing off, remember the case number and start over.

Then there is the way that the system categorises things and of course being an email based system when you get bounce backs and spam, you have to deal with them too. As a project management tool I have to get used to this whole process of projects and releases and release candidates. But at the same time, its no web based project management tool either ...

So we're also at the point where we're again hacking it (not always progammatically though) just to try to get it to work the way we want. What was supposed to save time has, at least for me, become a huge time waster. And there is more duplication of data then ever.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. I'm not saying that Fogbugz is bad, just to scratch the surface of the slick sales pitch. Maybe I should have read the manual afterall ...

First impressions of Firefox 3.0

I've recently run an update of my web browser to Firefox 3.0 and I must say, superficially I can't see too many differences. Some of the interface elements have increased in size. Although I suspect many of the improvements are under the hood in terms of rendering and new standards support. However I have experienced numerous severe crashes, particularly on some sites and incompatibility issues with some rich text editors which has seen me go back to Internet Explorer.

Google Street View, Blogger and Firefox

Several times I've tried to use Google Street View and Blogger by embedding street views into my posts.

On Firefox at least, there seems to be some real problems with this. After doing so, you can no longer edit your post. It currently comes up blank in both "Compose" and "Edit HTML" views.

After upgrading to Firefox 3.0, it seemed to fix the problem.

YouTube goes Google with Insight video analytics and Google Maps integration

Logging into YouTube recently I first became aware of some new features I've had on my personal wishlist for some time.

Probably the most significant is Insight, which provides a Google Analytics type view of who is watching your videos. It has some great statistics including daily view charts, referrals (such as from related videos, YouTube searches or embedding) and even which countries the viewers are from and even some basic demographic information. All this is fantastic and really improves the experience for video uploaders.

The other features I've discovered is that you can now set a date and Google Map location for your videos. While I'm not sure how this benefits the video uploader in terms or exposure or how it will affect the search (I suspect they intend to add a whole range of new end user features around this), it is certainly refreshing and the whole interface now has more of a Web 2.0 feel than ever.

Google Street View - Awesome !

Check out the new Google Street view.

http://maps.google.com/help/maps/streetview/

Scary stuff.

Certainly makes touring the world a lot cheaper.
I think it could revolutionise city planning and community consultation.

Big Brother is watching ...

It also opens a minefield of potential problems. Scratch the surface of privacy issues and you'll find a plethora of potential problems. It could make life a whole lot easier for burglars for a start, and not to mention graffiti vandals and a whole range of other nasties ...

Template Monster Alternative - Open Source Web Design

Template Monster is easily the most popular place to get website templates on the web, but I've often tried to find free alternatives because the quality on Template Monster can often be a mixed bag. Some of the templates have terrible HTML with embedded tables with images used for headings, poor CSS and poor source PSD files or restrictive Flash/swf and a dose of general search engine unfriendliness.

So I recently discovered the whole Open Source Web Design movement, the quality and diversity of site templates is increasing all the time.
And here are some of the better sites I've found so far:

http://www.oswd.org
http://www.openwebdesign.org
http://www.opendesigns.org
http://www.oswt.co.uk

Dashes or Underscores in URL - Google no longer care

After months of re-optimising URLs on various blogs and websites, I discovered today via this announcement that is was all for nothing ...

Once upon a time people thought that search engines like Google recognised underscores. Apparently Google at least now recognises both dashes or hyphens (-) as keywword separators ...

I guess you can't win them all.

Personal Start Pages - iGoogle vs Netvibes vs Protopage

Those who know me well would know that I've always been a big fan of Web 2.0, RSS, the mash-up and its potential and I've been getting into personal start pages recently which are starting to see that potential realised. I've tried iGoogle, Netvibes and Protopage. Some of these things have been around since about 2005, but they were very clunky in the early days. With the widespread adoption of AJAX, they are becoming much faster, more usable and practical. As for my personal preferences, well While Protopage is probably easiest in terms of user interface and adding RSS feeds, I find that Netvibes to be a lot faster and more fully featured. Forgive me, but I just haven't managed to persevere with Google's offering. I think it is still in beta and it looks it. So full of bugs, I couldn't even get the basic weather widget to work. Plainly put, at least at the moment, iGoogle sucks ...

Royalty Free Stock Images - iStockPhoto vs stock.xchng vs Dreamstime

For royalty free stock images, I personally prefer Dreamstime. The prices are great (although not as low as they might appear). I used to use iStockPhoto exclusively, and even contribute photos, until their payments and criteria got too ridiculous and their prices for photos went through the roof after beinb bought out by Getty.

While stock.xchng is also good, it still doesn't offer the range or quality of Dreamstime.

Viewcount returns to YouTube

Looks like they listen afterall. YouTube has apparently overhauled their interace and put the sort by view count back - hooray !

Sort by View Count removed - Why I'm using YouTube less

I thought I'd share a frustration that I have with YouTube. Once apon a time, YouTube allowed you to sort videos by relevance, date and view count. For some reason, that I can't explain, in a recent site tweak they removed the ability to sort by viewcount and now you can only sort by relevance and date - which is annoying. This is one of the ways I'd tell which videos are the most popular and therefore worth watching. I guess they are trying to steer people towards viewing channels, categories and regions, which means that they can use this to upsell to premium channels in future. In any case, because of this feature, I don't find YouTube as useful anymore and find that I am using it less. But if anyone can explain the rationale behind this minor change it would be much appreciated.

Want to find out who owns a domain name ?

The best way to find out is by doing a "Whois" search.

Most domain registrar websites have a facility like this, but there are also a lot of dedicated websites for performing whois and all sorts of other searches which can tell you who owns and maintains domain names just by typing in the domain.

For Australian domains, in particular, there is Ausregistry.
http://whois.ausregistry.net.au

Some sites enable you to do multiple lookups, such as www.whois.com.au

For worldwide searches there are sites like www.whois.net