More dysfunctional e-mail - Gmail

Is anyone else having problems with this annoying pop-up in Gmail?

It covers several menu items, and half of it seems to be hidden behind the browser tool bar, so there is no way of knowing what it is about and apparently no way of getting rid of it except by saying "OK" to something that one does not understand.

And Google have really shot themselves in the foot with this one, because of the things that is behind that stupid pop-up is the menu item for their much-hyped Google+. I normally go to it through Gmail, after reading my mail. But now that they've blocked it off, I don't go there any more. 

Google revamps Blogger -- is it worth it?

The last time Google revamped Blogger, it was dysfunctional for 6 months or more, and thousands of Blogger users packed it in and moved to Wordpress.I myself started a WordPress blog, and got ready to move completely if Blogger got any worse, but I kept this one open, and eventually Blogger was more or less fixed, and most of the stuff that was broken started working again. But my WordPress blog quickly passed this one in the number of readers, and still gets about twice as many readers a day as this one. 

Now they're at it again. According to their hype, "Introducing the completely new, streamlined blogging experience that makes it easier for you to find what you need and focus on writing great blog posts."

Does it live up to the hype?

Not really.

It actually makes it harder to find what you need. Perhaps some of that is unfamiliarity, and we'll get used to it, but the main change is that they've put everything into a smaller type in order to make it harder to read, and they've hidden a lot of functions behind cryptic symbols so you have to hover your cursor all over the screen to find what you're looking for. There used to be a clear and unambiguous label "Edit Posts" and you would get a list of recent posts and drafts that you could edit. Now they've hidden it away behind a cryptic symbol, but I can't remember what it is. In the past (and still on blog posts) they've used a pencil icon for "Edit Post", but now they sometimes use it for creating a new post, so it gets very confusing.

On improvement has been the linking. You can now, when you add a link, choose if you want it to open in a new tab or page by ticking a box, instead of editing it afterwards and typing in 'target="_blank"'. That's a definite improvement.

Another improvement has been in simplifyingt their HTML code. Now if you click on the i for italics it uses the code '...', which is better than the nonsense that the older editor produced, but is still not as good as WordPress's use of the standard HTML '...'.

It seems to put pictures where you want them in posts, rather than putting them at the top and leaving it up to you to move them down if you didn't want it at the top. But its picture placement is still not as easy to use as the one in WordPress. Where it scores over WordPress is in the same ways as it did before -- the use of Javascript widgets, for example.

And then there's some weird stuff:.

On the new Blogger dashboard they say:

Connect Blogger to Google+ and get a suite of new features that will help you build and engage your audience. Learn more.

Well, I clicked on the "learn more", and learnt nothing, zilch, nada.

All it does is that it gives you some hype about Google+. It tells you nothing about what happens when you connect your blog to Google+, which is what I wanted to "learn more" about. It also doesn't tell you if you can disconnect it if you don't like what happens.


And this seems to lead into and link up to this: Can We Still Trust Google? – Danny Brown

Google bewitched?

A few weeks ago a book I contributed to was published. It is on African Initiatives in Healing Ministry, and it was published by Unisa Press.

The marketing department of the publishers are supposed to place a web page for the book on their site, to say what the book is about, explain how to order it and so on. I wanted to see if they had done so, so that I could refer to that page when I wrote to people who might be interested in buying it.

The quickest way to see if the page was up, I thought, was to Google for the title of the book. So I did that. And what did Google come up with?

This.

Powerful witchcraft Spell
www.profzamba.co.za
Extremely Powerful Spells, Love Money, Revenge, 082 257 2395

Extreme Spiritual Healing
www.extremespiritualhealing.co.za
+27 73 476 3119 Love, Good Luck spells and more
Voted #1 Spell Caster

www.3witches.co.za
Call the most powerful spell caster today ..Dr Kubo +2776 53 74611

I suspect that someone must have cast a very powerful spell on Google to get it to return that as the top three results on a search for "African initiatives in healing ministry".

People who are looking for SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) need look no further. Don't call an "SEO consultant", call a witch.

Hackosphere: The Web is not ready for Chrome yet!

At last, a good reason not to try Chrome.

Hackosphere: The Web is not ready for Chrome yet!:

It is an understatement to call Chrome as a browser. It is a mini operating system for running Web applications. So far, most of the Web applications have been running on the server side and used the browser only for display. Recently, there has been a push towards Rich Internet Applications (RIA) that use your browser's advanced functionalities such as Flash, Javascript etc to deliver desktop application-like complex feature set. Zoho and Google docs are examples of popular Office applications that run in your browser. This trend has just started and is growing.

Hat-tip to Fencing bear at prayer.

Like many other people I've read about the Chrome web browser for Google, and have wondered if I should try it. Is it any faster than other browsers, any simpler, any more efficient?

And this article explains it better than anything else -- the push towards Rich Internet Applications.

But it misses out the most important thing: the web is not ready for Rich Internet Applications because of bandwidth caps. There is already far too much Flash and Javascript stuff around.

I've installed the Noscript add-on to Firefox to block Javascript applications like streaming video, podcasts and the like, because they are such bandwidth hogs, and all this "rich content" costs money to download.

It's a sort of electronic verbosity, like HTML in e-mail. People who never use one word where four will do love to clothe the most trivial statements with fancy fonts in different colours, animated smiley faces and the like, so that one gets the original message, and then the HTML version that is 10 times as long (and I have my mail reader set to only show the plain text anyway, so I never see the fancy stuff).

If the content was really enhanced by all these bells and whistles it might be OK, but most of it is trivial.

So if the main feature of Chrome is that it does more of what I'm already trying to stop Firefox doing, thanks but no thanks.

Until bandwidth caps are removed, the web is not ready for Rich Internet Applications, and therefore not ready for Chrome.

Search engines for genealogy and family history research

Over the last ten years or so Google has become the most popular web search engine — to much so that “to google” has become synonymous with searching the web. It’s become a generic term.

When Jackie Seaman announced her Growden reunion, I thought I’d do a web search for Growden, and started with Google because Firefox puts it so conveniently in the toolbar. Growden (or Growdon) is one of the less common surnames I’m researching, and we have a web page just for Growdon family researchers. But Google didn’t find it — at least not in the first 17 mages of results.

I tried another search engine, Altavista, and our Growdon page came up on the first page of results.

I tried another search engine, Dogpile, which is an aggregator of results from several different search engines, and our Growdon page was also on the first page of results, but further down.

It seems that Google is definitely not the best search engine for genealogical and family history research. Altavista (www.altavista.com) was better by a long way, and its first page of results was far more relevant to genealogy researchers.

The first page of results on Google produced a bunch of generic surname search sites, many of them commercial. This means that they show up on search results for anyone looking for any surname at all. If you try some of them you might find they have no information at all on Growdon (or whatever surname you are looking for), but then invite you to look for other surnames. And quite often, if they do have information, they ask you to pay upfront before you can see it.

Dogpile also came up with quite few of those generic surname sites, but did have more relevant sites on the first page of search results as well.

But Altavista came up with “real” Growdon/Growden sites first — people who were actually interested in Growden family history, and had information or were looking for information, rather than generic surname search sites.

So if you are looking for family history information on the web, don’t just “google” for it — try other search engines as well. You may be pleasantly surprised.

(Originally posted in my family history blog, but copied here as it may be of wider interest).

Blogger working again

Blogger started working again on Sunday afternoon, after having stopped working on Saturday afternoon. I assume that Google fixed the bug, because I didn't make any changes at this end that could either have caused it or fixed it.

By the time it was working again I had already moved my family history blog over to WordPress, where a lot of people migrated about a year ago. That migration was caused when Google introduced a Beta version of Blogger, where lots of things that had previously worked stopped working, and it took 6-12 months before some of them started working again, and it appeared that Google was in no hurry to fix them. So when it stopped working yesterday, I wasn't sure when it would start working again, if ever.

I'll leave this blog where it is for now, and see what happens. But if I start getting any more "403 forbidden" errors, I'll think about moving it again.

Google hacked, or have they gone mad?

Google searches now result in the following message:

We're sorry...

... but your query looks similar to automated requests from a computer virus or spyware application. To protect our users, we can't process your request right now.

We'll restore your access as quickly as possible, so try again soon. In the meantime, if you suspect that your computer or network has been infected, you might want to run a virus checker or spyware remover to make sure that your systems are free of viruses and other spurious software.

If you're continually receiving this error, you may be able to resolve the problem by deleting your Google cookie and revisiting Google. For browser-specific instructions, please consult your browser's online support center.

We apologize for the inconvenience, and hope we'll see you again on Google.

To continue searching, please type the characters you see below:

But having typed the characters, then what?

Nothing happens.

Anyone know a good search engine?

Fraudulent Google searches

Having an idle moment waiting for the kettle to boil I remembered finding a blog with a similar name to mine, and decided to look for it on Google, where I found this:

Notes from underground: Urban legend: government to replace

12 Nov 2007 by laiiwjmi bGovernment/b employees demand more bholidays/b and higher pay. When the Danish bgovernment/b intervened in spring 1998 to end the major private sector industrial b/bLink to Queensland bGovernment/b (www.qld.gov.au) b/b Public ... btyu.mevent.org - http://btyu.mevent.org/

and a few others like it. That is not a blog similar to mine, but it has nicked the title of a post I wrote in my blog (Notes from underground: Urban legend: government to replace Christian public holidays), though the content is nothing like it.

Entering "Notes from underground: Urban legend: government to replace" into Google blog search produces some interesting results -- a long list of bogus blog sites.

Should one report this to Google, as it seems fraudulent, to say the least?