markwilson.it

Tag: Google

  • Using Google Apps with Outlook 2007 to keep my personal and work life in sync

    Last year, I wrote a very long blog post on the problems I was having with calendar synchronisation but I never reached the point where I was ready to publish it. Almost a year on, and I finally have something that’s working well for me but, as it’s such a long story, I’ve tidied up the original post and published it (for the full history) and I’ll write a new one here that describes the working scenario.

    Calendar synchronisation… shouldn’t it all be a bit easier than this?

    First up – to recap on the original problems:

    • Due to limitations with Microsoft Office’s Online calendar functionality. I was synchronising local calendars at home and work, using Google Calendar (GCal) as an intermediary.
    • The main problem was synchronisation between Outlook 2007 and GCal and, after trying a huge list of products, each of which nearly worked, but not quite, I got it working using CompanionLink for Google; however the various other products I’d used along the way had left me with duplicate and missing calendar entries – and a sour taste in my mouth.
    • On the Mac at home, Apple iCal was working with GCal but there were still some issues around synchronisation with a local Exchange Server via Entourage.

    Back to the drawing board

    After having implemented Google Apps for my home/small business IT, I decided to have another go at calendar synchronisation.

    This time, to minimise the scope for synchronisation errors, rather than merging my work calendar into my home calendar, I decided to set up another Google Calendar to mirror the Exchange one I use for work. In addition, the process was simplified as Google now has a synchronisation product (Google Calendar Sync) which can handle the Exchange/Outlook-Google side of things and I am no longer using Entourage or Exchange Server at home.

    The whole thing looks something like this:

    Calendar syncing between home and work

    As can be seen in the diagram, I actually have three calendars:

    1. My work calendar exists on a corporate Microsoft Exchange server (accessible via Outlook Web Access but primarily used with Outlook).
    2. I’ve also created a Google Calendar to hold a copy of this “work” calendar in the cloud and Google Calendar Sync does the magic to keep the two in sync.
    3. Finally, there’s my “personal” calendar, which lives at Google Apps.

    Google Calendar sync is set up for a 2-way sync and, even though I can synchronise as frequently as every 10 minutes, Outlook performance suffers whilst the sync is taking place so I have it set to synchronise hourly. The main drawbacks with this approach are: the need for a client helper application; the 1:1 nature of the synchronisation (i.e. you cannot sync with multiple calendars); and the inability to set synchronisation schedules (or even to control the date range for synchronisation) – on the other hand, it’s free.

    In Google Calendar, I have given my Google Apps account access to my “work” calendar, which means that I have full read-write access to it from anywhere that I use Google Apps. That access could be via a browser, of using native applications on my iPhone, MacBook, or another device (e.g. a Windows PC). Basically, my work calendar is visible everywhere.

    My “personal” calendar is… personal. I can access it directly from any of the devices that I use for accessing Google Apps but I don’t want my colleagues to know that I have certain appointments and one thing I found with the Google Calendar Sync (luckily I spotted it early) was that appointments marked as private in Outlook were visible once they got to Google Calendar. I still need to think about how to pass my personal free/busy information back to Outlook/Exchange at work but, for now, my “personal” calendar exists in Google Apps and is visible in my “work” Google Calendar account but I don’t sync it back to Outlook. Basically, if I look at Outlook, I see work appointments but if I open a browser and got to the Google Calendar, I can see work and personal information.

    What does it all look like?

    In this screen-shot of Outlook 2007 connected to my corporate Exchange Server, my “work” calendar is visible but there are no appointments from my “personal” calendar:

    Outlook Calendar

    Viewing either of the Google calendars in a browser (in this case it’s Safari on a Mac) shows my “work” and “personal” calendars using different colours:

    Multiple calendars viewed in Google Calendar

    I can also subscribe to these calendars using the iCalendar protocol from Apple iCal, Windows Calendar (or another desktop client):

    Multiple calendars in Apple iCal
    Multiple calendars in Windows Calendar

    On the iPhone, I can use either the built in calendar application or a browser application (I prefer the browser version as the iPhone Calendar assigns different colours to the various calendars):

    Multiple calendars in the iPhone Calendar applicationMultiple calendars viewed in Google Calendar on an iPhone

    You may notice that I also subscribe to a public calendar which provides the details of UK public holidays. Doing this means that the public holidays show up in my calendar using a different colour to the other calendars but there are other calendars that I could subscribe to – for instance sports calendars (e.g. the Northampton Saints fixture list) – or anything that uses the iCalendar format described in RFC 2445.

    Summary and other points of note

    In all, this solution seems to be working remarkably well for me and provides a suitable level of abstraction between work and personal calendar details whilst still letting me (and my family – or anyone else that I share my calendars with) see everything that I’m up to. I still need to work on getting personal free/busy details to populate my “work” calendar but, other than that, I’m pretty happy with the solution – and all of the software involved is free (apart from Outlook and Exchange Server – for which the licenses are provided by my employer).

    I’m using Google’s technology but I could also have used Microsoft products, as Sarah Perez describes with Windows Live Calendar and the Outlook Connector. Either should work – it’s just a matter of preference – and as I was already using Google Apps for one part of the solution, adding Windows Live Calendar into the mix seemed to over-complicate things slightly for me.

    Finally, this information may be useful when diagnosing problems:

  • The browser wars just got interesting again…

    Microsoft Windows Internet Explorer 8 logoIt’s well known that, after Microsoft won the “browser wars”, development of Internet Explorer (IE) all but stopped at a time when use of the Internet was exploding and new features were required to keep up to date with the emerging technologies (and standards). That’s why, a few years ago, I was only too happy to promote a viable alternative (i.e. Mozilla Firefox) and Firefox has come a long way since then. Mozilla Firefox logoUnfortunately, it’s not been a bed of roses. I lost too many open tabs to Firefox 1.5 and 2 crashes so these days I only use Firefox when I’m testing new code on my website – Safari (with all its faults) is the default browser on my Mac and IE7 is my normal browser on Windows.

    Even so, if it hadn’t been for Firefox, it’s unlikely that Microsoft would have made the huge step forward that IE7 represents when compared with its predecessor. And, aside from the controversy over the various modes in which IE8 can work (I think that Microsoft made the right decision in allowing standards mode to be the default), it seems to be shaping up as another significant step forward for Microsoft (just as Firefox 3 is reported to have been for those who wish to use an alternative browser).

    From my point of view, it can only be good that for the last few years there have been two major competitors for our web browsing – choice promotes competition – and competition generally leads to an improved user experience. The need to develop for multiple platforms encourages web developers to adopt standards (at least in part) and the days of “this site is best viewed with Netscape Navigator 4 or later at 800×600 resolution” are, thankfully, a distant memory (as I write this in a maximised browser on a 1680×1050 display).

    Last week, Microsoft released a new beta of IE8 (beta 2), together with a fact sheet providing an overview of the new features and there is some really good stuff in there (the IEBlog post about IE8 beta 2 availability is worth a read too). Whereas beta 1 was targeted at developers, beta 2 is for anyone to look at. I’ll be installing it on my system (just as soon as I have worked through the seemingly never-ending list of tabs that I’m doing something with…).

    Google Chrome logoThen yesterday, out of the blue came a new twist – it seems that, after much speculation, Google is to launch a beta of it’s own web browser today. Whereas IE 8 carries forward a legacy of backwards compatibility, and Firefox is struggling to win back the hearts and minds of those who were burned by buggy releases with poor memory management, Google Chrome is concentrating on serving the requirements that today’s rich Internet applications require, whilst remaining stable, fast, secure, and simple to use (see the Comic book for more information). Sounds like a tall order but, if anyone can do it, Google probably can.

    It looks to me as though this just became a three horse race.

  • Getting started with Google Apps

    Google Apps logoEvery now and again, my ADSL connection hangs and I need to reset the router. If this happens whilst I’m away from home (as it has done on a number of occasions), e-mail doesn’t make it through to my server and a non-delivery report is generated for the sender. It’s an annoyance but I could also have lost important messages, so I signed up with a store and forward service called Dynu. Unfortunately, but no sooner had Dynu processed my credit card but their website went offline and I had to get my credit card issuer to refund the payment as Dynu was not responding to any support queries. I started to look into alternative services (like Exchange Hosted Services) but these are aimed at corporates – not small business like mine so, for the last week, the vast corporation that is markwilson.it (actually, it’s one person, albeit with enough IT to run a medium sized business…) has been running its core infrastructure on Google Apps (formerly known as Google Apps for Your Domain).

    I decided that I don’t have any privacy any more so I might as well cross to the dark side and let the big G index all my e-mail…

    …well, something like that anyway – in reality, as well as trying to improve the reliability of my e-mail service, I’m trying to reduce the number of servers (virtual or otherwise) that I’m running (I am, after all, just one person) and moving from Microsoft Exchange Server to a service “in the cloud” let me turn off another 2 virtual machines (both of which needed upgrading to the latest versions). Why was I using my own mail server at home when my hosting provider‘s mail service will work just as well for me? Because my original reason for using Exchange Server was to keep my Exchange technical skills up-to-date – but that’s less of an issue these days as I spend more time architecting solutions and less time getting stuck into technology details. Don’t misunderstand me – I’m not saying that corporates should dump Exchange Server (far from it) and, as I commented on a recent post comparing software as a service (the Google approach) with software plus services (the Microsoft approach):

    “I’m a one man band and I wouldn’t suggest [Google Apps] to any of my enterprise customers. In fact, I’m not convinced that anyone other than small-medium businesses and cash-strapped schools, charities, etc. will follow the SaaS route in it’s entirety (and it’s probably off limits for government departments – both local and central – as they will struggle to get around the various security restrictions).”

    For smaller organisations who don’t want the hassle of running their own IT infrastructure servers, Google Apps is a reasonable choice (just as is Microsoft Small Business Server for those whose requirements are a little more advanced). Microsoft also has a cloud based service for consumers and small businesses – Windows Live Admin Center (formerly Windows Live Custom Domains) but I decided to go with Google (largely because their website told me what I’d be getting, whereas it wasn’t at all clear from the Windows Live Admin Center site – frankly, Microsoft’s online offerings are a marketing mess).

    Once I’d decided which domain name to use, setting up Google Apps was straightforward – I simply completed the registration wizard, verified domain ownership (I had the choice of using either an HTML file or a DNS record) and switched the MX records to point to Google’s servers. I then set up a few users, associated another domain with my Google Apps account and started using the service.

    For a few hours after that I was receiving messages on both the old and new servers but, once the world’s DNS servers had caught up, everything was arriving in my Google Apps/GMail mailbox.

    I like the GMail interface a lot – for a start it challenges many of my preconceptions about how e-mail should work, storing almost everything in my Inbox and grouping it into conversation threads. I’m still not completely familiar with all the GMail settings but the first problem I came up against was how to implement Inbox Zero when GMail doesn’t support folders. It does, however, support a labelling system so I can apply labels to messages and use the labels for my various Inbox Zero states (and other IMAP clients – e.g. Apple Mail – see them as folders, although moving a message to one of those folders in another application does not assign the label to the message in the GMail web interface).

    Another minor annoyance is that the domain name I use for e-mail does not match the one I use for my Google Apps and so some e-mail clients will show my messages as sent from Firstname Lastname [user@googleappsdomain.tld] on behalf of Firstname Lastname [user@secondarydomain.tld] but that’s something I can live with for now.

    It’s worth pointing out that I’m not using all of the Google Apps features – at the moment it’s just for e-mail and calendar – but if I had people I needed to collaborate with then Google Sites would allow me to do so (my WordPress blog is still hosted externally – and will continue to be so for the foreseeable future). I have Microsoft Office 2007 so I’m unlikely to adopt Google Docs in any big way and, as for Google Talk, I avoid instant messaging when I can as I find it too big an interruption (and often an inefficient way to communicate).

    So, was it worth it? Almost certainly – I get no spam. Seriously. None at all. Zero spam messages in my Inbox for a week now (and no false positives in the 394 messages that Google has identified as spam and quarantined for me). And another huge benefit is search. I still use Xobni with Outlook 2007 at work (and I could still use Outlook as an IMAP client at home) but GMail’s search is excellent (as I would hope in a service provided by a company that has a mission to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”).

    In some follow-up posts, I’ll describe some of the challenges I’ve faced with keeping e-mail, calendar and contacts in sync across various platforms and devices, as well as importing my legacy messages into the 7GB of space that Google gives me for my mailbox.

    Further reading

    Lifehacker: What does Google Apps for Your Domain actually do?

  • Googling for information

    Just before Christmas, someone showed me how to use Google (yes… the search engine) to convert values between units (e.g. kilometres into miles). I didn’t know that feature was there in Google and it turns out there are many more useful search features too – things like the weather forecast, films at the local cinema, etc. (as well as the well known stuff like definitions, inbound links and Google’s cache).

  • What happened to not being evil…

    A few weeks back, I saw the number of browser visits to this site drop dramatically overnight whilst RSS subscriptions remained constant. Thankfully, traffic is now back up to the previous levels and there could be many reasons for this but I have to suspect it’s down to Google’s latest round of cat and mouse with the SEOs.

    Webstats for the last few weeks, showing a sharp dip and return to normal and last year's numbers for comparison.

    markwilson.it is not a big-shot technology website – just the blog of a guy who works in IT, writes down what he learns, and publishes it for others to read. I don’t charge for that content, largely because I don’t think anyone would pay for it but also because I don’t think that to do so would fit with the spirit of the Internet. I like it when I meet people that read my blog. And I like it when I write something and someone gives something back, like a comment that says it helped them, or that they have something to add to the story. I like it when I find myself in conversation with the public relations agencies of some of the world’s largest IT companies. I also like that the advertising revenues, though still small, have been enough to cover my hosting costs and maybe buy me the odd gadget. Or at least they did until Google made its latest round of changes.

    Google is trying to penalise paid links and, at the time of writing, I have a few (clearly marked under the heading of sponsors). There’s nothing wrong with what Google is doing (trying to increase the quality of the results in its index) but it’s the way they do it. I sell advertising here because I need to (somehow) monetise this site (although if I convert that into an hourly wage rate, I’m sure it will make me cry). Ironically, it seems to be OK to carry Google’s paid ads but not anybody else’s – even if they are relevant.

    Prominent Google blogger, Matt Cutts, said (in 2005) that:

    “Reputable sites that sell links won’t have their search engine rankings or PageRank penalized […] However, link-selling sites can lose their ability to give reputation (e.g. PageRank and anchortext).”

    That’s fair enough. It seems that I can take some revenue from selling links but it won’t help the sites that I link to gain PageRank; however, if the paid links are relevant, there is a chance that people reading my site will click through to them and everyone’s a winner. Except that now that seems to have changed and selling links can hurt Google rankings. For what it’s worth, I have a disclosure notice and the advertising, sponsorship and other forms of compensation received do not influence the editorial content on this site. I also use rel="nofollow" tags where relevant to ensure that I follow Google’s directions (although I acknowledge the contribution that comments make to the blogosphere by removing the rel="nofollow" as appropriate). And after two months of tweaking links to fit Google’s model, this week my biggest sponsor ended our contract prematurely because they are dropping this form of advertising altogether.

    Thanks for nothing Google. Cutts may be right when he asserts that:

    “[…] Google has the right to do whatever we think is best (in our index, algorithms, or scoring) to return relevant results.”

    but now they are hitting the small guys too. I can’t rely on AdSense alone. It varies too wildly (and has been declining in recent months, suggesting to me that people are spending less on Internet advertising – probably a reflection on the state of various western economies) and now you’ve started to hit the only form of regular income that this site has. What happened to the “don’t be evil” corporate motto?

    I will continue to blog about things I find interesting. Maybe some other people will find it interesting too. Perhaps they will link back here and maybe the number of visitors will start to climb again as I gradually increase my placement in the Google index (however I look at things, I’m still 34.95% up on unique visits so far this month, compared to the same period last year, 47.71% up in pageviews with average pageviews and time on site also on the up, and a falling bouncerate – so the metrics all look good, it’s just the financials that are suffering). Until then, I guess I won’t be buying the MacBook Pro that I’ve had my eye on for so long.

  • Calendar synchronisation… shouldn’t it all be a bit easier than this?

    It was supposed to be easy. All I wanted to do was to synchronise Microsoft Outlook 2007 (at work) with Apple iCal or Microsoft Entourage 2004 (at home) using Google Calendar (GCal) as a broker (also allowing access from the web, wherever I am). I know that there are three software companies there who are largely competitors, but surely someone has done this before and anyway, isn’t that what iCalendar (RFC 2445) all about – the exchange of calendar data between applications?

    Outlook 2007 also includes the ability to subscribe to other calendars using a process known as Internet Calendar Subscriptions but it’s a one-way process. The reverse process is known as publishing a calendar, either to WebDAV server (which I don’t have) or to Microsoft Office Online, which (in theory) is accessible from anywhere. This works, sort of, as long as I log in with a Windows Live ID or make my information public. The Windows Live ID option is fine from a browser but doesn’t work for other applications, such as iCal, which returns the following:

    Error subscribing to the calendar
    Unexpected secure name resolution error (code -9813). The server name calendars.office.microsoft.com may be incorrect.

    Meanwhile, making my information available publicly is not a great idea (although iCal can subscribe to this, albeit read-only).

    Next up, I tried getting GCal to subscribe to my Office Online calendar. Google refuses to read the webcal:// version of the address:

    Error
    Could not fetch the URL

    and if I try the https:// variant then it says:

    Error
    Could not fetch the URL because robots.txt prevents us from crawling the URL

    So that rules out the Office Online calendar.

    I had some success with RemoteCalendars following the advice on Jake Ludington’s Mediablab site with a couple of changes for Windows Vista/Office 2007:

    Unfortunately there wasn’t anything coming back the other way even though I was using version 6.3, which does include support for two way synchronisation and, despite checking the advice in the Grinn Productions post on incorporating Google Calendar into Outlook (there are lots of useful comments on this post), I didn’t get very far (the advice is to use a separate calendar in Outlook for a 2-way sync and that defeats the object of merging my individual work and private calendars into one universal calendar that I can access anywhere). I also noticed that somewhere along the way, my GCal entries were getting bumped forward an hour, probably as a result of timezone differences somewhere along the chain.

    Next I looked at GCALDaemon (complex configuration and lots of articles for how to use it with other mail clients but not Outlook… which I suspect illustrates a contempt for working with anything from Microsoft).

    SyncMyCal seemed to need me to make my GCal public (the opposite problem to syncing iCal with Office Online), so that’s a non-starter. It also threw an error during installation (probably because I had missed one of the many prerequisite applications that it requires) but then said installation had completed successfully, not exactly filling me with confidence in the error checking built into the product. Uninstallation also seemed to remove the buttons from the RemoteCalendars toolbar – possibly something to do with the fact that they both use the Microsoft Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO) second edition runtime.

    SyncUpwards seems to be a dead project as the website says the latest version is 7 August 2006 (over a year ago) and that it doesn’t work with the Outlook 2007 beta.

    I’d been avoiding one approach that appeared to be the holy grail of calendar synchronisation – using ScheduleWorld/Funambol to manage the synchronisation. it did look pretty good, but I didn’t really want ScheduleWorld (or any other Funambol server) in the middle of my architecture. Nevertheless, I gave it a go and it was reasonably successful but I had some issues with the Funambol client (v6.0.14), which seemed a little problematic with unhelpful error messages like:

    Sync not completed. Network Error.

    Most critically the Funambol Outlook Plugin kept on prompting me for agreement to use or register a product called Outlook Redemption which it was obviously using to work around some of the Outlook security restrictions. That meant three products working together… as well as Outlook, GCal and the others – this was all starting to look a bit too Heath Robinson.

    Then I panicked – all of a sudden Outlook had duplicate appointments, all an hour out of place and without any category information. It seemed that despite having supposedly uninstalled RemoteCalendars it was still working (I hadn’t rebooted) and I had a synchronisation loop from Outlook to Funambol/ScheduleWorld to GCal and back to Outlook. I quickly stopped Funambol and took full advantage of ScheduleWorld’s flexibility, deleting all entries in that calendar and forcing a one-way sync to GCal (effectively emptying that calendar too), which RemoteCalendars picked up and used to remove all the duplicates from Outlook. Phew! Once that was over, I rebooted the PC, removed Funambol and VSTO, and rebooted again, just to be sure that nothing was still running (I also manually deleted the RemoteCalendars VSTO toolbar from within Outlook).

    Googling for other products that might help me, I looked at GMobileSync, Goosync and GCalSync, but they all seem to be primarily for synchronising between GCal and a mobile phone. There was also the cleverly-named Calgoo but it required me to register for an account and (much like ScheduleWorld that I tried earlier).

    Then I found a link to David Levinson’s gSyncit. Not only is it a tidy Microsoft.NET application with minimal prerequisites that integrates well as an Outlook plug-in but its options appear to be well thought out and it is very clear about being able to perform single or bi-directional synchronisation between Outlook and GCal. I tried it out on a limited date range and synchronisation worked, including no timezone issues between the two platforms. Although I found the version that I used (v1.9.19) to be a little temperamental at times (sometimes clicking the sync button doesn’t seem to do anything, and annoyingly the GCal feed path changes of its own accord), when it works it does exactly what I need it to – bi-directional synchronisation between Outlook 2007 and a private GCal, although it would be nice if it also worked with Outlook in cached mode. I’ll was going to give it a bit longer and see if it settles down, thinking that if it works well enough then it would only be $9.99 to register but after waiting over an hour for it to synchronise almost 1500 entries with GCal, I noticed that some were missing. After a resync it didn’t copy the missing appointments to Google, instead it removed them from Outlook! Arghhh! If I can’t have 100% confidence in a synchronisation product then I might as well not bother.

    I decided to have a look at another product I’d found – Oggsync. Oggsync tries to install the Office 2003 PIA (even if the Office 2007 PIA is already installed) as well as VSTO and shared add-in extensibility/support updates for Microsoft .NET framework 2.0 (see Microsoft knowledge base article 908002 for details) but unlike some of the products I tried earlier (RemoteCalendars and SyncMyCal), the OggSync installer does the work for me (much better than having to install a bunch of individual packages before installing the application I’m really after). I really wanted to like OggSync, and then it started doing weird things like moving events out of Outlook and into Google and syncing only a fraction of my entries across a wide time frame. I was not impressed. Thankfully I was able to pull them back from a PST export of my Calendar that I had made earlier today.

    At this point, I was ready to give up on the whole process – but I decided to try one more option – CompanionLink for Google. Despite some initial synchronisation errors, the support team at CompanionLink were really helpful and I got it working quite well. I was seriously considering buying this product but my confidence in calendar synchronisation had been shattered by the earlier failures and I still hadn’t got everything working on the Mac end of things…

    I found that Apple iCal can subscribe to a GCal calendar (to private calendars too – not just shared calendars as shown in the article) but I still needed to work out how to get iCal to sync with a GCal private calendar (iCal can subscribe to GCal calendars but only for read-only access). Calgoo or Spanning Sync may have been able to help me out there. iCal automatically detects the presence of Entourage and can edit the Entourage calendar but I still needed some further work on 2-way synchronisation (not just display) between iCal and Entourage (it looks as though there is another product that could help here)

    In all, the whole experience was… problematic. I didn’t think I was trying to do anything difficult, but clearly there is still a long way to go before simple calendar synchronisation using the iCalendar protocol will be a reality for me.

  • Google Maps gets better and better

    I used to use the AA and RAC websites to plan routes but these days Google Maps is faster and easier. And I just noticed that the Google Maps service has been improved with the ability to drag and drop the route line to customise the route.

    Another feature (which may have been around for a while – it only seems to be available for US directions at the moment and I generally need to look at UK routes), is the ability to get directions using public transit. I’m planning my trip to the States next week (more on that in a couple of days) and it’s really useful.

  • Google web accelerator – a mixed blessing

    A few days back, I noticed that my PC’s IP address was reported by a website as being 72.14.192.45. That address isn’t in my IP stack, and isn’t my router’s ISP-provided IP address either.

    After checking the address out at DNSstuff, I found that address is registered to Google and then I remembered that I’d installed the Google web accelerator. As far as I can see, this is acting as a big proxy server, caching and prefetching my Internet search requests. It claims so far to have speeded up my downloads by 25% but there are some negative points too:

    It is possible to stop the web accelerator from caching certain sites, as well as switching it on/off without re-installing – details of this, along with how it all works can be found at the Google web accelerator support page, but to be honest, that’s a pain in the backside – I already have to switch my proxy settings when I jump from my corporate VPN to my home network and don’t want to have to think about another set of proxies. On that basis, I think the web accelerator will be off my PC soon.

    As a web site administrator, I’ll also be giving serious thought to implementing a Google web accelerator blocking method (and the update). Rather than blocking IP ranges, I’m more likely to reject x-moz: prefetch requests and, instead of sending back a custom HTTP error page, I’ll probably refer to no web accelerator (unnecessary proxying considered harmful).

    To Google’s credit, they have published web accelerator information for webmasters. What’s not clear to me though, is whether or not blocking/ignoring prefetch requests will also prevent Google from crawling my site. I’d rather lose a few bytes to a prefetch than see my page ranking start to slide.

    Whilst writing this post, I found that some versions of Firefox also prefetch by default (I’m using Firefox 1.5 and that certainly does). Most websites don’t seem to care about this as they are looking for Google’s web accelerator IP addresses, but any form of prefetch will load unnecessary content over slow links, or hit web servers with unnecessary requests. For details, read more about prefetching or to turn this off in Firefox’s about:config, set network.prefetch.next to false.

  • When blog spam goes wrong!

    A few weeks back, I wrote about a device (called Diesel Guard) that I’d been told to fit to my company car to help prevent accidental mis-fuelling. A couple of weeks later, someone posted a comment on the post about an alternative product (called MagneCap). At the time, I thought of it as a bit of friendly advice and I didn’t think anything more of it, but now it looks as if the comment was blog spam (which, incidentally, is specifically mentioned as prohibited in the rules for comments on this site).

    The thing is, that at the time of writing, this blog has a higher Google page rank than the official site for MagneCap. That means that if you search Google for MagneCap, what comes back is not what the owners of the MagneCap site would like to see:

    Google search results for MagneCap

    (especially as, out of context, the quote reads as if it’s MagneCap that’s the embarrassing product, rather than Diesel Guard!)

    Yesterday afternoon, I received an e-mail asking me if I had any ideas to correct the “incorrect heading” but there is absolutely nothing I can do about Google’s index (which is quite correct in quoting the title of the page and a couple of lines from the blog spam comment). Either I, or the author, could remove the original blog spam comment (in which case I would also remove the following two anonymous comments, which I also suspect are blog spam as the timing is remarkable at 45 and 50 minutes after the e-mail asking for help…) but Google’s cached version will still be available online. I also suggested that MagneCap take out a paid ad so that their site appears above Google’s standard search results. Because I genuinely believe that this was simple product placement and not malicious in any way, I’m also writing this post, so that hopefully Google will pick this up as the next entry and it might become clear that MagneCap was not the embarrassing device which I originally wrote about.

    Just like Aesop’s fables, there is a moral to this tale… if you feel like engaging in a bit of product placement on someone else’s website, ask them first. Or at least make sure the blog spam gives the message you want if only a few words are quoted out of context by a search engine.

  • Want to improve your Google search results?

    Have you ever wanted to improved your Google search results? I don’t mean getting a page to appear higher on Google’s rankings, but have you ever wondered why Google returns several million results from a search? To narrow things down a bit, try some of the tips from the Thoughtful Solutions Google searching quick reference card.