Posts Tagged ‘google’
January 17th, 2010
Remember those great offers from web design and development agencies? E-commerce website from $999! Well I believe their time is gone, and once more, Google is taking the lead. Google Checkout has been introduced quite some time ago, but here’s what there’ up to these days – Google Checkout Store Gadget. And this looks really fabulous! You can create your own online store in just a few minutes. Too bad though that the only countries currently supported in Google Checkout are the United States and United Kingdom. Let’s hope those guys add a few more, including Russia of course ;)
Create Your Online Store in Minutes
There’s a sandbox account you can create with the Store Gadget, but you can’t skip the linking to your Checkout account step (hence the Country limitation issue). I believe that the widget functions pretty much like their FriendConnect widgets, which is great, although quite glitchy sometimes ;) Not in terms of processing data of course, but in terms of layout. I couldn’t get a properly-functioning FriendConnect widget to stay in a hidden div and show upon request..
Oh and guess what! There’s no WordPress plugin for this gadget yet, so here’s your chance ;) Although there are other e-commerce plugins with Google Checkout support, but who cares if you have a Store Gadget straight from Google?
December 7th, 2009
A few days ago Frederick Townes, author of the W3 Total Cache for WordPress has released an update to this wonderful plugin, and yes, it now fully supports Amazon S3 and CloudFront as the Content Delivery Network! This is a major one for me as I manually upload most of the static assets to my CloudFront account which may take quite a lot of time. The W3 Total Cache plugin does that for you in seconds! Post attachments, images, javascript, css.. All those could go to CloudFront in just 4 clicks. Frederick also mentioned that the upcoming update will also be surprising, which keeps me wondering.
WordPress: Now with Amazon S3 & CloudFront!
I also tried out the other options for page and database caching. A few tests showed up that memcache is faster than APC, so that’s where I stopped at database caching. Page caching was switched to enhanced, which I believe is a new option. The site performance graph at Google Webmaster Tools shows pretty good performance for Novermber and December (very close to 1.5 seconds) although the overall average is still up at 3.5 seconds, which in terms of Google is slower than 59% of sites. This is probably caused by the force majeures in September and October. Page load time peaked at over 7 seconds there.
One more funny fact about Google’s Site performance and Page Speed tools is the “Minimize DNS lookups” section, which most of the time shows up a single entry:
The domains of the following URLs only serve one resource each. If possible, avoid the extra DNS lookups by serving these resources from existing domains: http://www.google-analytics.com/ga.js
Interesting. Perhaps I should copy that javascript file and serve it from my CDN, I wonder if that will work. Oh and then I’ll be missing all the nifty updates to Google Analytics, like the most recent one called Asynchronous Tracking – very neat by the way!
November 19th, 2009
I received an email this morning from the Alexey Shelestenko (from Google) with a link to some photos from GDD 09 Moscow and this fantastic 2 minute video from the event:
This definitely is one event I’ll never forget. Lars is a superstar ;) Oh and here’s last year’s.
November 16th, 2009
That’s right. I’m giving out Google Wave invitations too! No VIP invites though (like the ones at Bit Rebels) and there’s no need to tweet anything to get them. The rules are simple: I know quite a lot of you readers comment here from time to time and yes, all you have to do is leave a tiny little comment to this post (please include your name and your Twitter account) to get your chance for a Google Wave invitation. Please don’t write your e-mail address or anything in the comment itself, doing it in the e-mail field would be enough for me to know your addresses.
Freebies: Welcome to Google Wave
By the end of this week I’ll look through your comments and send out the invitations. First to friends and people I interact with on Twitter, then to those who often comment on my blog, and if there’s anything left, to the rest. Don’t worry though, the last time I asked if anybody wanted a Google Wave invitation on Twitter I had 2 responses from people I follow, so there’s quite a good chance for everyone.
P.S. Make sure you filled in this Wave application form before asking for invitations, that (I guess) would speed up the whole process.
Update: 6 invitations have been sent out today (Thursday). Hope to see you waving soon! Others will receive theirs tomorrow.
Update: Okay, I sent out the rest of the invitations. Too bad some of you didn’t even read the post, thus, didn’t get their invitations. Anyways, I have a few left so feel free to bug me on Twitter if you need any ;) Good luck and thanks for your participation! Also, for the peeps who were sent an invitation but didn’t get it yet – you don’t generally get the invitation the day it was sent out. There’s a time frame for that, normally around a week, sometimes less, but you’ll get there, don’t worry ;)
November 16th, 2009
Well I guess it’s time to give you a detailed update on the event of the year – Google Developer Day 2009 Moscow (Google I/O, #gdd09ru on Twitter). It was held on November 10th, with over 1,500 visitors and a few guys from Google! Here’s a little video (Chrome Experiments and the Google I/O song with the lyrics) that’s been playing around on the big screens during the conference.
Out of the many topics at GDD 2009 I had the chance to listen to HTML 5, OpenSocial, Speeding up the Web, Google Web Toolkit, Google AppEngine, Google Android and PubSubHubbub. The most interesting was of course OpenSocial by Chris Chabot – Developer Advocate at Google. I also had a little chat with Chris during one of the breaks and he seemed like a very nice guy to me. I found out some interesting stuff about OpenSocial and started writing some code already! Too bad though that Facebook aren’t yet supporting OpenSocial, guess they’re too fond of their own platform and API. Well, that’s Facebook ;)
One more interesting topic was Speeding up the Web, but I wrote about that earlier: Every Millisecond Counts: Page Speed for Firebug.
HTML 5 and PubSubHubbub were just introductory presentations of what’s going on with the web and why real-time matters. Basically all that stuff is available on the net for quite a long time now, though I didn’t quite understand why the RSS Cloud by Dave Winer doesn’t seem to have a future.
The Google Web Toolkit and AppEngine lectures were a bit more techy than the rest. We saw lots of code on the screen which showed some nice methods for testing web applications, the Model-View-Presenter (MVP) design pattern, and the keynote featured a little demonstration about how easy it is to write and deploy Java applications using the Google Web Toolkit and AppEngine plugins in Eclipse.
Other celebrities at Google Develoepr Day were Lars Rasmussen and Stephanie Hannon – the creators of Google Wave from Google Sydney. By the way a friend of mine Alex managed to get a cool photo with Lars, and I managed to get one (not so cool, blame the photographer) with Chris. Here are a few photos from the event:
I’d also like to give a huge shoutout to Alexey Shelestenko from Google Russia. There were way too many people dying to get to the event, but Alexey was the one who made sure I could come. Thank you so much Alexey! And I guess that’s it, waiting for Google Developer Day 2010 ;)
