Wizard's Blog

Pixazza logo

Pixazza is an interesting service that Google recently invested in.  It’s similar to AdSense in that it lets you make money from your site by automatically adding contextual ads to your content.

Unlike Adsense, instead of adding text ads to text webpages it hyperlinks products in your pictures.  Since image recognition technology is in its infancy, the hyperlinks are created by people working for Pixazza.

Pixazza sample

I’m not sure I’d actually get much use out of Pixazza.  I don’t usually post a lot of pictures, and the ones I post are intended to support the blog post they’re on.  They therefore don’t tend to contain a lot of products or they only reference a blog post I’ve already written about.

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One of the most eagerly anticipated features for GMail is offline access, and today Google finally announced that it was available! (as a Labs feature)

Once this is finalized as a release quality feature for everyone to use, Google will have really closed the gap with Outlook.  Combined with Google Apps functionality for enterprises, Google Calendar and Google Docs, I can’t think of a compelling reason to keep buying new versions of Office every couple of years.

As expected, the GMail offline access feature uses Gears – same as the offline access in Google Docs etc.

As well as straight offline mode, it also has ”flaky connection mode”, which acts like offline mode in that you’re always dealing with a locally cached version of your mail, but also synchs continually in the background like online mode.  I imagine this will speed some mail functions in the same way that Outlook’s Cached Exchange Mode does because more of the processing happens locally.

Apparently they’re slowly rolling the offline feature out, so I haven’t been able to test it yet but I’m really looking forward to it.

Once the option shows up in your Labs, you enable offline access by following these steps:

1. Click Settings and click the Labs tab.
2. Select Enable next to Offline Gmail.
3. Click Save Changes.
4. After your browser reloads, you’ll see a new “Offline^0.1” link in the upper righthand corner of your account, next to your username. Click this link to start the offline set up process and download Gears if you don’t already have it.

EDIT: There appear to be some known issues – you can’t send an offline message with attachments and you can’t access the contact manager offline.  Forgivable in a beta, but these things will need to be fixed.

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Don’t you hate it when you do a search or follow a link or type in a URL and you get a domain squatter?

These are people that buy up thousands of domains and don’t use them for anything real, they just stick ads on a page with no actual content.  Why do they do this?  Because they make money from the 0.00001% of people that click on one of their ads – same logic as spam.

Even worse, they often buy domains for misspellings of real domains so if you type the URL in wrong you see their ads instead of the page you wanted (this is called typo squatting).  It’s internet pollution.

This is also why it’s pretty much impossible to get the domain name you want anymore – they’re all owned by domain squatters.

Now Google is helping these people (and hurting you) by creating an AdSense program specifically for domain squatting.  Because Google gets paid same as the squatters do when those ads get clicked on.

I guess “do no evil” gets trumped by “recession”.

Gmail tasks

Today Google announced the addition of tasks to Gmail labs.

They recently added a ”Add any gadget by URL” feature, and I was using the Remember The Milk gadget with that to add todo functionality to Gmail.

As Gmail tasks are brand new they’re not as comprehensive as Remember The Milk – there’s no way to set a task’s priority, they’re not sorted by due date and there is no use of color to visually deliniate tasks.

That having been said, it is better integrated into Gmail because it isn’t a gadget, and I will be using it for a while to give it a chance.

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Yesterday Google released an update to Reader.  The colors have changed, the corners are less rounded and they rearranged things a bit.

I’m not a big fan of the new color scheme – it’s a very stark white whereas I found the old light blue soothing.  I also preferred the rounded corners and drop shadows, it made everything feel softer.

I don’t have any numbers to back this up, but the new Reader does seem to be faster.

Google Reader refresh button

I like most of the layout changes, except that now the “Refresh” button is sandwitched between two other buttons.  I don’t know about how other people use Reader, but I press “Refresh” a lot.  I almost never use “Mark all as read”, and it would be a horrible thing to accidentally press, so why is it so close to the “Refresh” button?  The “View settings” button wouldn’t be so catastrophic to accidentally click, but I also would hardly ever use it, so it makes no sense where it is.

Speaking of the Refresh button, why can’t new items just be automatically added to the bottom of the list?  That has always annoyed me, and I keep expecting them to fix it, and they never have.

Finally, when you move the mouse over feed it highlights yellow, exactly the same as when a new iteam appears in the feed.  I don’t know a lot about design but that seems bad.

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Image via Wikipedia

Google have published a design document for adding extensions to Google Chrome.

It’s pretty comprehensive, and even exceeds Firefox‘s extension system in a few areas:

We should not need to disable deployed extensions when we release new versions of Chromium.

Unfortunately it’s fairly obvious that the extension feature is at a very early stage, so we probably won’t see it for a long time – at least months away.

EDIT: Google have published a new Extension Process Model document with some more details about how it’s going to work – interesting reading

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I just found a cool WordPress plugin to help improve the performance of WordPress blogs - Use Google Libraries.

WordPress uses some JavaScript libraries, like jQuery and script.aculo.us.  Google hosts copies of some JavaScript libraries on their AJAX Libraries API.  What the plugin does is make WordPress use the copies of the libraries hosted by Google instead of the ones bundled with WordPress.  The advantage of this is that it:

• increases the chance that a user already has these files cached
• takes load off your server
• uses compressed versions of the libraries (where available)

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Amazon AWS logo

As part of my job I was asked to take a look at Cloud Computing.

There were several obvious options – Amazon Web Services, Google App Engine and Windows Azure. Google App Engine was out of the running because it would require our app to be rewritten in Python.  Windows Azure was out of the running because it would require our app to be rewritten in a .NET language. This left Amazon AWS.

The main part of AWS that we’re using is EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) which provides virtual servers.  Fortunately Amazon recently added Windows support to EC2 – before it was Linux-only.  Although our platform (Jade) can run on Linux, we don’t have a lot of in-house Linux experience.

You start with a machine image that just has Windows 2003 server installed (they take care of licensing), install your software and save that as a new image.  You can then start multiple instances of this to provide your services.  You can start different kinds of instances that have differing numbers of cores and amounts of memory.  Amazon EBS (Elastic Block Storage) provides storage as a mounted drive for your application data (in our case a Jade database).  Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) is used for cheaper, larger storage, for example backups.  They have nice support for static IP’s and DNS so that you can add/remove/swap instances behind the scenes without negatively affecting your customers.

You pay a certain amount per hour for each instance, depending on what kind of instance it is (the cheapest is around $0.10 per hour), then you pay a few cents per Gb of storage and cents per Gb for network traffic.

All of the management of instances etc. is done using an API, so you can write management apps to monitor your instances and start new ones when need arises or if one crashes.  One wierd thing about this is that applications need to be written to use the API’s to do all of the management stuff, so it relies a bit on the community to build what you need.  Oddly, the best software I found to manage EC2 with is a Firefox extension called Elasticfox.

So far my experience with Amazon EC2 has been fantastic. We haven’t started using it in a live environment yet, but everything I’ve seen has sold me on it.  Basically you have access to an enormous resource of processing, storage and bandwidth so you can start your business off small and cheap and grow it without messing with hosting companies and hardware.

I wondered about moving my website onto EC2, but while the pricing of the service makes sense versus buying a server and paying to have it in a co-lo somewhere, $876 a year ($0.10 x 24 x 365) is a lot more than I’m currently paying.

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Image by pollyalida via Flickr

So Google SearchWiki has been out for a few days now, and I’ve finally had cause to use it.

In my job I use a programming language called Jade.  It was developed in New Zealand, and they haven’t put much of a push on selling it in the US, so it’s not very well known here.  It’s actually a very good language – strongly Object Oriented, powerful, easy to learn and free to develop in.

Anyway, if you do a Google search for “jade”, you get everything from the type of stone to the Mortal Kombat character.  Even narrowing it to programming related results just gives various Java based toolkits – the Jade I’m looking for is several pages down.

So – perfect opportunity to hit the little up arrow and put the result I want to the top of the list.  It’s not a change many people would want, so in this case limiting my changes to only affecting myself is the right thing to do.  I still haven’t felt the need to write a comment on a search result yet.

I haven’t gotten over my surprise that Google would make a change like this.  Their interface was so simple and clean, and they’ve added a lot of extra stuff to it.  They’re winning the search engine war, so why mess with what works?  There’s even been a pretty strong backlash against SearchWiki in the blogosphere.

Don’t get me wrong, I like the feature, but having it switched on all the time for everyone seems odd.  It only makes sense if they’re planning on collecting a lot of information that’s useful to them.  They’ve already said that they constantly check their results to see whether they are accurate, so I guess this feature gives them even more input on when they need to tweak their algorithm.

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Image via CrunchBase

A while ago one of Google’s experiments was the ability to adjust the ranking of search results and comment on them.

Today they’ve announced that experiment has been released as a permantent feature called SearchWiki.  You can adjust the ranking, delete, add, and comment on search results.  Your actions are stored in your Google account so they’re persistent (for you), but comments seem to be publically visible.

The first thing that comes to mind (other than that I can finally get rid of Experts Exchange!) is that this could be used to improve everyone’s search results, but Google have explicitly stated that this will not be the case (at least initially).  It does make sense – that kind of data would be very easy to mess with.

Frankly I’m surprised that they’ve made such a radical change across the board.  Don’t get me wrong, I like it, but I would have expected it to be a labs feature or at least optional to protect all the grandmas on dialup from being confused.  It’s a bold move.

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