Whilst trying to find something of mine via google I’ve noticed something new. LINICKX has now been accepted by google as a word, not back considering I made it up!
In the past if you googled for linickx – www.google.com/search?q=linickx – google would suggest “Did you mean links?“, but today I’ve noticed that is gone!
So it appears that my continued internet activity has made an impact on the wold wide web, Very cool!
Brilliant !
from: new york to: london – Google Maps
24: Swim across the Atlantic Ocean
This is one of those extensions I couldn’t live without !
Google Reader Notifier | Firefox Add-ons | Mozilla Corporation Google Reader Notifier by Mark D.B.D This firefox extension shows you how many unread items you have in your Google Reader account.
An absolute must for anyone who uses a google service, best enhancement is adding https to things like, docs, gmail & calendar !
CustomizeGoogle: Improve Your Google Experience — Firefox Extension
CustomizeGoogle is a Firefox extension that enhances Google search results by adding extra information (like links to Yahoo, Ask.com, MSN etc) and removing unwanted information (like ads and spam).
So firefox 2 was released yesterday , and I’ve just been browsing through the features list. The fact that some of the google toolbar features have sneaked in as default functionality doesn’t surprise me, for example the 
spell checker from the google plugin is an obvious feature for mozilla to include in the core.
What surprised me was how the anti phishing feature was just lifted:
 |
 |
| Google Anti-Phising | Mozilla Anti-Phising |
This is an excellent example of open source, and it’s really good to see google sharing their work , I just hope that anti customize google doesn’t sneak in or worse still targeted adversting !
For those who can’t wait for the fabled gdrive, this is worth a look, you get like an FTP style interface to gmail within firefox, I’ve found it useful for quick backups.
Gmail File Space
his extension allows you to use your Gmail Space (2 GB) for file storage. It acts as a remote machine. You can transfer files between your hard drive and gmail. This is similar to “Gmail Drive” on windows platform. Your gmail account looks like a FTP host and you can upload and download your files. After you install, you get an option called “GSpace” in your “tools” menu clicking on which opens the window for transfer of folders/files. Works great for photos and music files less than 14MB.
This is a really cool extension, if you want centrally held bookmarks, but want them private, and don’t need the full google sync functionality then this is for you !
Google Browser Sync
Google Browser Sync for Firefox is an extension that continuously synchronizes your browser settings – including bookmarks, history, persistent cookies, and saved passwords – across your computers.
I’ve been needing something like this for ages ! At the moment I have to use my USB key to transfer saved password etc from my work laptop to my home pc, but the issue of security is still a big one. I don’t save my on-line bank password anywhere so that’ll be alright, but I do save various e-mail account passwords, the issue being that a google employee could hi-jack one of my accounts, ok you have to enter a PIN to encrypt the passwords, but I can’t find anything that tells me how strong the encryption is! Humm I think a risk assessment is in order 
I’ve just noticed today, that google have added a new sharing feature to google reader.
The results are quite cool, they offer the standard ’share my feeds’ feature that other places offer, but what I like is being able to share ‘star‘ items. I subscribe to a lot of feeds (too many to read if I’m honest), but sometimes it’s handy to star them so I can come back to them. Now my interesting items will be visible to the world ! 
I link to google all the time (e-mails, web pages etc), one of the annoying things is that the URL is getting longer and longer…
This is what I mean: Your friends looking for foobar, you know there’s loads on google, so you search for foorbar, you then forward the link which looks like this….
http://www.google.co.uk/search?sourceid=navclient-ff&ie=UTF-8&rls=GGGL,GGGL:2005-09,GGGL:en&q=foobar
nice… NOT ! (Look, it doesn’t even fit on the page properly !)
So here’s the same thing but shorter…
http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=foobar
aah much nicer
I guess this post is mainly for me to remember, but hopefully it’ll brighten up someone else’s day to !
I’ve been putting off upgrading to firefox 1.5 for ages, but my curiosity for this extension finally got the better of me ! 
Blogger Web Comments for Firefox
Blogger Web Comments for Firefox is an extension that makes it easy to see what bloggers are saying about a page you’re viewing in firefox
I know this isn’t exactly new news , so there are lots of places to find out about it ! I’ve been playing with it a little today, and still am undecided on whether it’s cool or annoying.
Coolness: Visiting sites, and seeing what people say about them gives a good insight into the sites audience, and being able to leave comments on a site that doesn’t support them is also kind-a-cool… where it fall down is there is no default “this post is about this page” on your blogspot blog, so you have to remember to put one in yourself 
Annoying: It’s another “pop up”, and people are posting comments about google.com or mail.yahoo.com and I’m thinking, why ? what do I care ? and how is this relevant, there is no intelligent comment that can be made about mail.yahoo’s log in page ! I can think of two improvements I’m going to suggest
You can check out what I’ve said about websites on my blogger account. I’ve not used it for anything else much, so It’ll be interesting to see if I use it now !
For ages I could not work out why google ad’s included within a wordpress page didn’t work (in fact this applies to a post too). When google support pointed out that there was <br/> ’s in my code the penny finally dropped.
So here’s the deal, I pasted the following code into my page: (In the wordpress dashboard)
adsense ad
<!– Adsense Referral–>
<script type=”text/javascript”>
<!–
google_ad_client = “pub-6732086233580907″;
google_ad_width = 180;
google_ad_height = 60;
google_ad_format = “180×60_as_rimg”;
google_cpa_choice = “CAAQ__qy0gEaCP_s0gMhUOtXKL3D93M”;
//–>
</script>
<script type=”text/javascript” src=”http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js”></script>
and look what happens…..
firefox ad
adsense ad
Wordpress adds page formatting to the java script that is posted, so if you look at the source, what you actually get is…
… DOH !!!!!!
Here’s something cool to share.
My calcylator project is written in php, it’s one of those “on-line tools” where users can create an account, log in, and can calculate personal profit & loss sheets for ebay.
Like most websites there are “log in” sections, now these pages need to be dealt with differently for search engines & users. Search engines will not be able to log in, but you may still want to deliver some content to them. Take my example, calcylator is running google adsense, and for adsense to work the googlebot (search engine) needs to be able to “see” some content, thinking this through, every time googlebot visited the log in or other protected pages all it would see is “access denied” error pages.
To target google with some “special” content, google kindly present themselves as google in their agent string. Now php even provide a simple tutorial on distinguishing user agent, so this is all I needed to do:
function find_googlebot() {
# This is where we look for the googlebot
$user_agent = $_SERVER["HTTP_USER_AGENT"];
if (preg_match (“/[Gg][Oo][Oo][Gg][Ll][Ee]/”, $user_agent )) {
return true;
}
#For debugging, uncomment this and the agent will appear in the source of the html.
#echo “<!– $user_agent –>”;
}
if (find_googlebot()) {
include(“google-content.php”);
exit;
}
?>
If I quickly run though what I’ve done. We have a function called find_googlebot , we run a test (look for the word google), if we get a match, then we return “true” and run the php google-content.
Here is a working example, if you visit http://www.calcylator.com/index.php?cmd=myhome you’ll see a login page (or your account if you log in) and google will see:
http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:25ez2GhuhDQJ:www.calcylator.com/index.php%3Fcmd%3Dmyhome+site:http://www.calcylator.com
Have fun, just remember, google cache doesn’t update that often, so if you present a mistake, you may be stuck with it for a while
How cool is this google works as a calculator. 
Full instructions here.
