devolute.net

My Wordpress installs have benefitted from the Google Analyticator plug-in for ages now. Partially through the lazyness of keeping my calls to the GA (Google Analytics) javascript up to date. But now there is a much better reason to use it.  They’ve built in an interface that can be embeded on your Wordpress dashboard. Now I don’t have to clunk my way into the GA interface to see my stats.

Google Analyticator puts stats on your Wordpress dashboard

Yes, embaressing stats. But I do get the odd spike every now and again. Honest! The Google Analyticator plug-in for Wordpress requires authentication with Google. This is the 2nd piece of software I’ve used which has taken advantage of the GA API in such a way; the first one being the very pretty Ego for the iPhone, which allows you to keep track of some basic stats across your sites on one convenient page.

Grab Google Analyticator for you blog now. It works with most themes.

Time for some more Google, but a bit less sarcasm. Google recently announced (and put live) their ‘SearchWiki’ feature. Tagline: “Make search your own”. This makes me uncomfortable for three reasons:

Everything Google does makes me nervous.

They are basically the search engine. What else is there? Cuil? Get outta here! Yahoo!? What! About! The! Shouting!? MSN Live search, the search engine of ’soccer moms’ everywhere? Nah, Google are it. Even on a little site like this where I pimp myself out to the odd social network and I have readers coming in from RSS; Google brings in the bulk of traffic. Anything they change effects all webmasters. If it doesn’t, then I don’t think they’re very good webmasters. This is something that could potentially alter current SEO thinking.

Visual clutter.

Now this is being fussy, perhaps the designer in me speaking, but I think a large part of the reason why people use Google over other services is that it just does the job well without much visual clutter. Try looking at the initial Google search page compared with the Yahoo one. It’s a lot tidier. These new buttons next to every search result makes the whole thing a lot busier.

They’ll kill what I love.

Currently you only see the changes that you make using the search wiki but things can change. I find most of the best stuff on the web through services like reddit, Stumbleupon and digg (well, less so digg these days). If google decide they want the user-generated rankings to effect the global search rankings than this could effectively kill off the other guys.

Obviously it’s early days for this feature and I’ll be honest; I personally feel uncomfortable using it. If a search result isn’t in the top #10 then it’s for a reason. I don’t want to change anything. Lets see if in a few months if I’m any less reactionary about it.

The Official Google blog offers a announcement here, with an explanatory video featuring their chirpy as usual engineers.

I know it’s early days. The new Google browser is on Version 0.2 and I’m sure more features will come, more options and less bugs. It’s a browser with potential. It’s pretty fast, it does everything you want (tabs, good javascript support, privacy modes, W3C compliant rendering through webkit) but it’s just a bloody browser. In some JS tests, it’s not even as fast as Firefox.

Unfortunately, it seems like it’s only El Reg who have noticed this.

People are calling Chrome a cloud operating system because it is a “platform for running web apps”. It renders HTML and interprets Javascript, you know, like every fucking browser made since 1995. It’s also got Google Gears built in. Great. I’ll alert Tim Berners-Lee.

They are completely right. The gushing over Chrome by otherwise insightful blogs like Techcrunch about it being a challenger to WIndows is ridiculous. I wish it was, but it’s simply not. Get a grip people!

This collection of web-site nosey-ness is evidence that web devs do have a sense of humour! Well, almost. Nice to see the geeks at top sites like facebook are as frustrated as I am when it comes to hacking the crappy IE box-model into working properly. Makes me feel… like a proper front-end web developer.

I wonder if I can get away with sneaking stuff like this into my clients work, as an aid to my occasional frustration.

There have been rumours about this floating around for a while but it just happened! As soon as Jobs ended today’s WWDC keynote (yes I did follow it live, yes I do need to get out more) a beta release of version 3 was made available, for Windows as well as OS X. I’ve tried it and to be honest, I don’t particularly like it. The interface is too clunky. However; that’s pretty irrelevant. As a developer this is great news. I can test my sites double quick to make sure they work in Safari. It even uses Mac-like font smoothing. The prospect of more developers being able to test their work thoroughly has got to be great news for Mac users. Way to go Apple.

The other good news is that OSX will support ZFS (presumably this will lead to better interaction with linux machines) and they finally got rid of that horrible brushed metal effect. It always reminded me of my primary school serving counters at lunchtime. Ugh. I used to shudder as cheap cutlery slid across the surface. Regardless, I’m thinking of doing that unspeakable, bighting the bullet and buying a Macbook so although I feel a little dirty, all this Mac progression is all good. I just got to make sure I don’t turn into one of those Mac rumour-mill fan-boy types.