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 ...