LGR Internet Solutions » Google

Speed Matters in Ranking

LGR — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 00:10:36 +0000

Having a fast website has officially become more important this past week with Google’s announcement that they are now using site speed in web search ranking. I have always tried to make fast loading websites it is another factor that webmasters should pay more attention too if they want to not only improve their website visitors experience but also to improve their search engine rankings.

The Google blog post gives some good suggestions for tools to examine your websites speed but here are some common sense tips that can help you speed up your website quickly.

Remove extra widgets and gadgets – Things like the Twitter widget, MyBlogLog, Google FriendConnect and even Google Adsense can all slow down a website.
Combine your CSS files into one file – If you use WordPress this can get tricky depending on the number of plugins you use.
Compress your CSS file – Check out CSS Compressor to help you remove extra space and optimize your code.
Combine Javascript into one external file – This can get difficult if you are using WordPress or another CMS, but it can be done.
Compress Javascript files – Like compressing your CSS file. It helps remove extra space and comments to compress your Javascript.Javascript Compressor
Use Google Javascript Libraries – Google hosts several popular Javascript libraries that website can link to and load. This can improve your website speed since your visitor could possibly already have that file cached making your load time much faster. If you use WordPress check out the Use Google Libraries plugin to make it easy to start using the Google versions of those Javascript libraries. Thanks to Douglas Karr for that WordPress tip.
Speed Up Your Website with GZIP Compression – I have talked about GZIP compression before to speed up your website. Not all hosts offer the ability to enable GZIP compression, but if you can it can make a drastic improvement on the speed of your website.
Reliable web hosting – A fast and reliable web host is critical to server your site fast. If you are just starting out it can be expensive to get your own dedicated server to make sure your site is served fast. I do recommend you take a look at either iWeb or Hostgator for shared hosting accounts. Price wise they are competitive and I have been pleased with how fast they have been.

I am still in the process of doing some of these tips here on the LGR website as well. I have had GZIP compression enabled for a while and it has made a significant difference in the speed of the website. If you can only do one thing try to enable GZIP compression. Since I am using Wordress to power this website I have been slow to combine CSS and Javascript files and compress them. I do plan on doing more of that. Perhaps there is a WordPress plugin that can help to combine them and compress them on the fly. If I find one I will let you know.

Not sure where to start to speed up your website? Let me give you a hand. I can do a website speed audit to give you more ideas on how to speed up your website. Feel free to contact me and I will be happy to look over your website.Similar Posts:

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Blogger Shutting Down FTP Service

LGR — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 03:53:08 +0000

It seems like a long time since I logged into Blogger.com to update a Blogger.com powered blog. Blogger.com was the only service I knew of that offered FTP publishing. FTP publishing was a great way to publish a Blogger.com powered blog to your own domain name, before they started offering custom domains. Soon I will not be able too since FTP published blogs since Google and Blogger.com are closing down the FTP publishing feature effective March 26, 2010.

For those blogs that I did occasionally update I will have to consider switching them to a custom domain hosted on Blogger.com. This will have an impact on some of my clients, since it was an easy way for them to update a blog on their website that was easier to learn than WordPress. For those clients that this will effect I will be in touch with you later this week with some easy alternatives for you to continue updating your websites.

Here is a copy of the email that I recieved regarding Blogger.com closing down FTP publishing.

Dear FTP user:

You are receiving this e-mail because one or more of your blogs at Blogger.com are set up to publish via FTP. We recently announced a planned shut-down of FTP support on Blogger Buzz (the official Blogger blog), and wanted to make sure you saw the announcement. We will be following up with more information via e-mail in the weeks ahead, and regularly updating a blog dedicated to this service shut-down here: http://blogger-ftp.blogspot.com/.

The full text of the announcement at Blogger Buzz follows.

Last May, we discussed a number of challenges facing[1] Blogger users who relied on FTP to publish their blogs. FTP remains a significant drain on our ability to improve Blogger: only .5% of active blogs are published via FTP — yet the percentage of our engineering resources devoted to supporting FTP vastly exceeds that. On top of this, critical infrastructure that our FTP support relies on at Google will soon become unavailable, which would require that we completely rewrite the code that handles our FTP processing.

Three years ago we launched Custom Domains[2] to give users the simplicity of Blogger, the scalability of Google hosting, and the flexibility of hosting your blog at your own URL. Last year’s post discussed the advantages of custom domains over FTP[3] and addressed a number of reasons users have continued to use FTP publishing. (If you’re interested in reading more about Custom Domains, our Help Center has a good overview[4] of how to use them on your blog.) In evaluating the investment needed to continue supporting FTP, we have decided that we could not justify diverting further engineering resources away from building new features for all users.

For that reason, we are announcing today that we will no longer support FTP publishing in Blogger after March 26, 2010. We realize that this will not necessarily be welcome news for some users, and we are committed to making the transition as seamless as possible. To that end:

o We are building a migration tool that will walk users through a migration from their current URL to a Blogger-managed URL (either a Custom Domain or a Blogspot URL) that will be available to all users the week of February 22. This tool will handle redirecting traffic from the old URL to the new URL, and will handle the vast majority of situations.
o We will be providing a dedicated blog[5] and help documentation
o Blogger team members will also be available to answer questions on the forum, comments on the blog, and in a few scheduled conference calls once the tool is released.

We have a number of big releases planned in 2010. While we recognize that this decision will frustrate some users, we look forward to showing you the many great things on the way. Thanks for using Blogger.

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Booting ChromeOS in Virtualbox

LGR — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 17:06:43 +0000

Yesterday was Google’s big announcement and press conference about the Google ChromeOS. Apparently my invite to the press conference must have been lost in the mail, so I had to settle for reading TechCrunch and their post Live From Google’s Chrome OS Event. What is ChromeOS all about? Well Google made this video to try and explain it.

While that is all nice and good, I was happy to see this next post from TechCrunch on how to try out Google Chrome OS. As it happens I already had Virtualbox installed so it was a simple process to download the Chrome OS virtual machine torrent that TechCrunch mentioned. Once I was done downloading the torrent it took me about 10 minutes to get the Chrome OS virtual machine up and running.

There were a couple of tweaks that I had to do to make it run. The TechCrunch article talked about using Ubuntu as the OS when you setup the virtual machine. I could not get it to boot using that setting. Simply changing the OS setting in Virtualbox to Linux – Other got the OS to boot and start up. I also had to tweak the network settings on the virtual machine. Chrome OS is pretty useless with out a network connection, since it logs in using a Google Account. I simply set the network setting in the virtual machine to NAT. It defaulted to bridged when it was created and it would not connect. Once switched to NAT the OS was able to connect to the network and allow me to login.

Here is a screencast I took of the Chrome OS booting up in Virtualbox. It is not the fastest OS on the planet yet, and of course it only boots into Google Chrome. I used a temporary Google Account to test it out just in case there was any malicious code in there wanting to snoop my Google Account login. In fact that account and login are already deleted.

Google is keeping Chrome OS simple. It’s focus is web applications, like GMail, Docs, Reader etc. It is not going to replace your Windows, Mac or Linux desktop right now. As Mark Poppen pointed out in a tweet there are many applications that people use that do not have web application equivalents, yet. While Photoshop web applications are still coming along, and some are getting better like Aviary, the web versions still no not provide the experience that people need.

Chrome OS will not be replacing your desktop anytime soon, but if you have a Netbook and need quick access to your email, reader and other web applications Chrome OS could be the OS of choice for you soon. There are still a lot of questions about the OS and time will tell how the new Google Chrome OS works in the real world, not just Google’s pie in the sky world.Similar Posts:

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Feedburner – Email Subjects and Friendfeed Stupidity

LGR — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 03:14:47 +0000

I use Feedburner to manage my blog RSS feed like many other bloggers. Recently Feedburner has made two changes to their service that are worth talking about. One that many have been waiting for years to have and one change that has many of us shaking our heads.

First the change that many of us have been waiting for, Feedburner has finally made it possible for the subject lines of RSS to email to be customized. Feedburner has been providing an RSS to email service since before they were bought by Google. The emails were all sent out with the same subject line though, so email subscribers really had no clue what the latest post was about before they opened the email. This is a good move by Feedburner will make many bloggers happy.

Feedburner makes one good move with email subject lines, but not long ago they made a change that still dumbfounds me, they started counting Friendfeed subscribers as RSS subscribers. This move just makes me shake my head. It literally makes the Feedburner subscriber count useless. The idea is that the people who follow you on Friendfeed are subscribed to your blog, but the truth is that the majority of people that might follow you on Friendfeed might never actually notice your blog posts on their stream. For example, the majority of people that are subscribed to my Friendfeed account are my Twitter followers. The majority of those people do not follow my blog but my Twitter feed. Given the amount of noise that is on Twitter and Friendfeed they are not subscribed to my blog, they might not even notice my blog posts on those services. My ego might like seeing the inflated subscriber numbers but that is all they are, inflated and inaccurate. This move has made the subscriber numbers from Feedburner totally useless.

On the one hand it is nice to see Feedburner doing something. Many of us were starting to think that they might just be forgotten about by Google and left to die a slow death. Unfortunately with bad moves like adding Friendfeed subscribers to the numbers perhaps Google would rather force us all to abandon Feedburner so they can kill it. Similar Posts:

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Tweet from Google Reader

LGR — Tue, 05 May 2009 18:35:07 +0000

by byrion

I hate doing things twice. There are not many things that bug me but doing things twice has always been one of my pet peeves. Like many people I use Google Reader to read RSS feeds and as TechCrunch pointed out Google Readers social features are lacking. I was often reading posts in Google Reader and then tweeting them out to my followers but that meant visiting the original blog post, then tweeting it out. There had to be an easier, faster way for me to tweet the blog posts that I thought were interesting and might interest my followers?

Google Reader does offer a simple method to share posts that you like. Simply click the Share link at the bottom of a post and Google Reader shares the post with your friends on Google. Those shared items are placed on a new web page that you can find by clicking the Shared items under your stuff on the Google Reader menu in the top left. For example here is my shared items page. Google creates an RSS/Atom feed for this page so people can subscribe to it and follow what stories you are sharing.

Since Google Reader creates an RSS feed of your shared posts all it takes is a way to take that RSS feed and have it tweeted out on Twitter. The easiest way to publish an RSS feed to Twitter is to use Twitterfeed. Once you login to Twitterfeed you just need to setup a new feed that uses the RSS feed URL of your Google Reader shared items. Twitterfeed even allows you to prefix each tweet with some text. I simply added “Reading – ” to mine. Now everytime I share an item on Google Reader it is automatically tweeted out to my followers on Twitter.

Now you do not have to do things twice to tweet an interesting post you read in Google Reader. There is also the added benefit that if you read an interesting post on your mobile device, you can share it and have it tweeted out without leaving Google Reader mobile. I imagine you can do with with other web based feed readers. Give it a try with your favourite feed reader and leave a comment about how you share your favourite blog posts from your reader.Similar Posts:

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Google Friend Connect API and WordPress Plugin

LGR — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 17:30:06 +0000

Google just announced a new Friend Connect API is available for developers to use to intergrate Friend Connect more into a website. It was announced at #pubcon and there is an official blog post about it on the Google Social Web Blog.

It did not take long for the WordPress plugin guru Joost de Valk to take the sample code and create a Friend Connect commenting WordPress plugin. The plugin allows you to sign in to a WordPress blog using your Google Friend Connect account and comment. This is similar to how many Facebook Connect has been implemented on sites like TechCrunch for example. If you run a WordPress blog you might want to check the plugin out. It is easy to install and setup. I had it running here in under five minutes.

Once installed people should see an image below the comment for that they can use to login and comment using their Google account.
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Goodbye Google Friend Connect

LGR — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 17:13:18 +0000

I have removed the Google Friend Connect social bar from the site. It was an interesting test, but there are a few things that still need work with Friend Connect before I would really recommend it for most websites.

Coding Errors – Visit any website with the Google Friend Connect social bar, members widget or any Friend Connect widget and watch the Firefox error console. There are a number of coding errors that occur, some are CSS errors, some appear to be Javascript errors. All beyond a webmasters control.
Internet Explorer 6 – While I have no love for Internet Explorer 6, there is still a significant number of people that still use it. The Google social bar does not play nice with Internet Explorer 6. It appears fine on the first load, but scrolling down the page the bar does not stay locked at the bottom of the screen but scrolls up making it difficult for people to read the content. If you are still using Internet Explorer 6, please consider upgrading to a better browser, like Firefox, Chrome or even Safari.
Load Time – It is slow. Page load times are significantly slower when the social gadgets are install. This is expected when you add any gadget or widget to a website, but if you are concerned about load time at all Google Friend Connect might not be for you.

Websites where Google Friend Connect is great are sites where there is not a social component built into the website already. Blogs already have a social component built into them with commenting and the Google Friend Connect social gadgets tend to take away from that social aspect instead of adding to it. On websites without a built in social component the Google Friend Connect social gadgets can be a good compliment to the website.

I can see the potential of Google Friend Connect, but at this time I do not think I want it here. I will keep my eye on Google Friend Connect, and perhaps give it another try at some point in the future.

Update: Google has released a Friend Connect API and there is now a plugin to allow people to login and comment on a blog using Friend Connect. I posted about it here: Google Friend Connect API and WordPress Plugin and currently have the comment plugin installed. (Mar 12, 2009)Similar Posts:

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Web Forms with Google Docs

LGR — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 04:30:53 +0000

I was working on a contact form for a client this last week, and while I have a PHP form processing script that I like to use there are other alternatives to add a contact and other forms to your website if you do not happen to know PHP or you just need a quick form to help collect information for a survey Google Docs Forms.

The form below is a sample form that I created for you to tell me what your favourite websites are. The form took only a few minutes to create and embed into this post using an iframe tag.
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By submitting the form the data is automatically inserted into a Google Docs Spreadsheet that you can view, edit and of course share with the world if you like. Below is the spreadsheet that the information that the form above is saved into.

This is a very simple example of what you could do with a Google Doc Form and Spreadsheet. It makes it very easy for anyone with a website to add a web form to collect information, run surveys, polls etc with out needing to know PHP, PERL or any other server side scripting. I can see myself using a simple Google Form and Spreadsheet to manage entries from the Subscriber Bonus contests each month.Similar Posts:

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Friend Connect Social Bar

LGR — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 04:30:03 +0000

Thanks to a post over at TechCrunch I heard that Google Friend Connect has released a new social bar that you can add to your website. The social bar adds several of the Google Friend Connect widgets in a nice little strip that you can add to the top or bottom of your website.

Things that you can include are the:

Visitors can join your site or if they are logged in they can see their identity, and edit their profiles and settings.
There is an activity stream with the latest activity happening on the site.
You can include the wall gadget to let visitors add comments and read other comments.
The bar also allows easy access to see who else has also joined your site.

I was not really happy with the sidebar gadgets here, so I thought I would give the Google Friend Connect Social Bar a try. I like the fact that it can be placed either at the top or the bottom of the page. It actually appears to be more noticeable than the sidebar gadgets. You are welcome to join and leave a comment or leave a comment here about what you think of Google Friend Connect.Similar Posts:

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This Site May Harm Your Computer – The Day Google Broke

LGR — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 17:29:46 +0000

I do not get to see breaking news very often but once I awhile I am in the right place at the right time. Today was one of those days. I just happened to do a quick search this morning to see where I was ranking for “blog consulting” and noticed something odd. All of the sites listed were showing “This site may harm your computer” below them. I thought that was odd, so I did a search for LGR Internet Solutions, and again all the results were showing the same thing. Odd, as far as I know there is nothing on my website that will harm another persons computer.

LGR Internet Solutions search on Google on January 31, 2009 AM. Google falsely reporting it will harm a computer.

I then did a search on Google for Google and can you guess was I discovered? That is right, Google says that the Google website will harm your computer. I thought I would not get to see that again so I grabbed another screenshot and posted it to my Flickr account.

Google May Harm Your Computer

Taking a quick look at Twitter and discovered that this was going on all around the world. TechCrunch broke the story first. Google Flags Whole Internet As Malware.

The problem lasted for about 30 to 40 minutes with the entire Internet being flagged as malware by Google. Google’s blog states that is was human error and a problem with an update from StopBadWare.org. A post on their blog suggests it was not a problem on their end that was the cause. Whatever the cause Google appears to have fixed the problem.

If you are still seeing “This site may harm your computer” for results for your website, you should investigate your website in case it has been compromised. There is of course a huge question about the damage that Google can do to a company and website when errors like this occur. Google has caused problems in the past when their Google News service picked up an old story and published it as new news on Google News about an airline going bankrupt. Why did the Google team not check the update for such an error before pushing it out on to the production servers? I am sure this is not the end we have heard about this.Similar Posts:

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