Google announced a page speed service which would allow webmasters to speed up their websites by pointing their pages to a Google DNS.
To see what kind of savings are possible they have set up a comparison page where you can enter your domain name and see the savings. After the test the page shows you a video of your website loading the way it does now, and the way it would with the new page speed service. Pretty Cool.

Here is a video of the improvements that would be made to searchengineland.com loading as an example (it adds about a second, to the loading of searchengineland!). This illustrates a basic problem with the service. It can hurt you.

While this service will be undoubtedly popular (even when they start charging for it), there do exist some major problems with such a service. Many of the things you can do to speed up your pages simply are not possible with such a service.

I am very interested in page speed and will be talking alot about it in the very near future. I am familiar enough with Google offerings to tell you that the mod_pagespeed apache module on which this service will be based on has some flaws and that the particular tweakings that need to be done to truly speed up your site will remain with webmasters and their servers.

The page speed service will be a great addition to the web by getting rid of most of the more obvious problems that are making webpages slow.

If they start charging for the service (which they say they will). I think people are going to start learning more about pagespeed since the majority of the web page speed problems out there are really easy fixes.

In fact, I am going to launch a site about how to solve page speed issues that is geared towards general users.

Googles page speed is a great thing for making the web faster, but it is not the final solution to the problem of slow webpage speed. Depending on the pricing, it may not even make a dent. Think about how hard it is to get across to newbies that they have to pay for a host and a domain name. Now think about asking them to pay for some other service too.

Unless webhosts take this on for their clients, I am not sure a paid model is the best thing here for Google to offer.

I am in Spain and have begun a long hiking trip that will take me through Spain, France, Switzerland, Germany, Belgium, Hungary, and Greece.  I started at a monestary named Monserrat which is in the mountains above Barcelona, here is a view of it after you have gotten above it…

I am following the European long distance hiking trail named E4. This is a 10000 km trail which just doesnt have much info about it in English. I plan to change that.

I have only been hiking a few days (the pic to the right is from yesterday).

There is alot of pretty to be had and I look forward to getting into the Pyrenees in the next week or so. I want to make a guide for this walk in English, and also a place where people who want to follow my progress can do so. That place will be E4hike.com (which isn´t set up yet but soon will be.)

The Canadian version of GetListed.org is now up at ca.getlisted.org

I am sick of fan requests from Facebook. Even if they change their name from “fan” to “like” I am still going to want to projectile vomit when I get one.
I do not understand the benefit or value of requesting this of me.
If I like bananas, I like bananas, if I am into bananas enough to be a fan of a banana Facebook page, I will do it without prodding.
If prodding is required, it probably isn’t very true or valuable. If one has to be probed and prodded to be a “fan” then how much of a fan is that person.
I have never interviewed a cow.
I bet if I did interview a cow, and asked it why it moved from one area of a field to another it would probably say something like “I liked the grass over there but then I got prodded to move over here.”
I am not not going to pretend that people understand how I think but to translate the last couple of sentences I wrote… I am not a cow.
All Facebook fan requests go right to my spam folder.
Prodded fans aren’t fans and do not indicate anything, and I guess you will all figure that out soon enough, just like search engines will.

Google has taken some steps that help you keep you claim your Google gadgets and allow you to remove gadgets that are claiming to be you or your brand, but are not.

This happened often, and made the google gadget directory look strange as shown in the screen shot.
There were over 100 “clones” of my gadgets in the directory alone. This is where someone has copy and pasted your code in it’s entirety and then submitted to the Google gadget directory.

When several people do this it causes many repetitive (spam) gadgets to be returned when someone is searching for a gadget in the directory.

How to remove clones of your Google gadget

iGoogle has a feature called Google gadget dashboard where you can claim your gadgets. This feature allows you to claim any gadget that is associated with emails that are yours. Once you claim all the gadgets associated with your email, you will have the ability to remove gadgets from the Google gadget directory. If there are clones of your gadget (someone pretending to be you) then you can now remove them.

1. To access your dashboard and claim your gadgets go here.

2. Follow the steps (this is basically an email verification process).

3. Claim one of your gadgets. When you do this, it will actually show you all the other gadgets associated with that email address and ask you if you want to claim those too. Claim them all.

Now you have a dashboard and all of it’s neat tools like stats of users worldwide and page views and graphs and such…

5. Now that your dashboard is set up, you will notice that some of the gadgets listed are clones. This can be seen rather easily as shown by this screenshot of part of my dash board….

I remember making that gadget once, but here are like ten different versions of it! These are clones, but now they are my clones and I have the power to remove them!

6. For each gadget clone go to right hand side and click “remove from directory” link.

7. You will now be prompted to go through another email verification process.

8. Once you verify, you will receive a message in your dashboard stating that the gadget will be removed from the directory within 48 hours.

This is a bit of a process, but understandable.

After you are through, you have just made the Google gadget directory a little bit less of a spam cess pool, and your name and email are not associated with spam gadgets anymore.

This as a parody of a Micheal Grey post…

This is my video response to Micheal Grey’s post “Is Google Stealing Your Content and Hijacking Your Traffic“.

He basically says that Google is evil and bad for providing free information about local businesses on the web.

This is a parody of that post. I feel his post is dumb as poo. So let me explain to you…

How Paper is is stealing your content and hijacking your traffic

Update: Micheal responded to my video with a video of his own. Here it is…

I was recently contacted by a fellow Google gadget developer and he mentioned his new venture called Snapabug.com and asked me to take a look.

I did, and I am pretty impressed.

It is a widget solution that streamlines a website/company support process.
Imagine someone is having a problem with your website and contacts your support team. Much of the required information necessary to resolve the problem is technical in nature.
What browser are you using? What version of Flash? What are you seeing?
Many normal web users simply won’t know this info and to resolve the issue is a whole bunch of back and forth communication.

Snapabug actually takes a screen shot of the users computer and reports the technical details of their computer automatically and integrates this info with your existing support system.

Visitors only need to enter their email address, a quick description of their problem and click “send”.

SnapABug collects all the information you need: email, description, operating system, browser, language, location, etc. Plus it takes a snapshot of the users screen.

Your support team and your customer can chat through this widget solution as well. A very impressive solution and great idea.

Explained in video below:

I can see many situations where this solution would be very useful. It looks very easy to implement as well.

The next 5 people to request a Google Wave invite will get one. Please email me or leave a comment.

Want to have your video viewed alot?

Here’s a great way to do so.

YouTube is asking people to submit videos about… YouTube help topics.

Videos like this one answering the question “Why isn’t my video showing up in the search results?” – This video has over 300,000 views.

Here is another with about 1 million views…

I am actually quite impressed that YouTube is calling for user videos to enhance their help documentation.

This idea would work well for most Google products. It also is good for the video creator. Good combo!

The YouTube help documentation will include relevant help videos on the individual help page. I can’t think of a better more trusted place I would want my videos at. A few such videos and I think your YouTube channel can get alot of trust points.

This is a great idea, and I hope it spreads to other help areas for Google. They even have a Google gadget for it….

Note to YouTube Gadget creator: You need an appropriate thumbnail and screenshot for this gadget. You should fix that.

This is the first in a series of tutorials which will describe how to create extensions, themes and gadgets for the Google Chrome browser and OS.

How to add an extension to your Chrome Browser

Chrome extensions allow you to customize your browser, just like Firefox extensions.

To use or create extensions requires the developer version of Google Chrome. If you do not have this version yet, it is just something that updates your browser to a newer version (build) of Chrome. It keeps all of your current settings.

Get the Developers version of Google Chrome here

Once you have your Chrome browser updated to the developer version you will now be able to install extensions.

Let’s start by adding an extension that adds a Google search box to your browser, use the link below to add the extension. (note: if you are reading this in Firefox or Internet Explorer the following link won’t work right. To add an extension to Chrome you have to be using Chrome!)

Add Google search extension

After you click that link, look at the bottom left hand of your browser, there will be a notice. It looks like this…

Click the continue button and you will see this…

Click install.

Congratulations! You have just installed your first extension.

In the upper right hand side of your browser you will see this…

Now when you click the search icon, a Google search box will appear…

What we have just done is the first two steps one must do to get started with Chrome extensions… first we got the developer version of Chrome, secondly we uploaded a .crx file (I will explain what these are in the next lesson).

The extension we just installed will be a sample extension we will use in later lessons of how to create, update, and share Google Chrome extensions.