Bill Rowell

I opened up Chrome tonight and did a Google Search and noticed that the styling of the search results has changed. When I did the same in Firefox 4, I didn’t see the same changes. This leads me to believe one of a handful of things:

1. This is specific to Chrome
2. Their testing the changes on a limited basis

It could be either really, but here’s a screen shot of what I saw:

I kind of like the changes. A few other things I noticed is that the styling for search results and AdWords is almost exactly the same. Nothing really jumps out at you, which I kind of like. It means everything on the page has the same “weight” when a user is looking at results. Thoughts?

I was doing some keyword research for a site the other day and ran into a page from Google based on my searches and looking for SERP results:

There are tools out there that can do this, but we hadn’t finished our signup process for one of the better tools out there. Anyway, it looks like my constant searching (for similar terms probably) and paginating looking for our placement caused Google to notice. Their message:

So apparently Google will get wise to the number of queries you make, the types of queries, and how you use the results. Personally, I have no problem with this. After typing in the Captcha phrase (I hate Captcha by the way), they return you to the next results page.

I was going to Twitter tonight and forgot to type in the second ‘t’ (twiter instead of twitter). Took me to a site that looks almost like Twitter, but with a survey popup instead:

It looks like its a survey site looking to gain access to email addresses. They made the site look legit enough to make a lot of people probably think its really Twitter interested in a user’s input, but it’s not. After you answer 3 simple questions, you’re asked what you’d like to be entered to win (iPad 2, Victoria’s Secret Gift Card, or $1,000 Gift Card). Obviously you’re not going to win anything, but the site owner will certainly take your email address and sell it to make a tidy profit. Users beware.

The “intertubes” was abuzz recently with news that Google was going to add social media to its algorithm, meaning that tweets could be of more importance in the future. But exactly how important? I’m not sure anyone really knows, but a few things I would assume out of the gate:

1. Massive tweeting on your part probably won’t have much effect on any traffic sent your way on Google’s part. I honestly don’t think Google will take the text from a tweet just on face value. I believe they’ll use that in conjunction with other metrics when placing a value on the importance of a tweet.
2. Your followers will probably play an important role in the effect of tweets. Just like how similar web sites linking to your site help with your ranking (based on keywords, linking, etc.), the same will probably be said for your Twitter followers. For instance, if you’re into Ford Mustangs and you promote your Ford Mustang site on Twitter, other Ford Mustang related Twitter accounts will be more valuable to you than a Twitter follower who’s all about Britney Spears. Makes sense.
3. The depth of your tweets will mean the most. What I mean is, how many times does your tweet get re-tweeted? By having a tweet re-tweeted a ton of times basically means whatever you had to say started to really catch on and people thought it was important. More value would be placed on a tweet Google could tell the social network found important.
4. A combination of all of the above. I’m not sure anyone has any solid idea on how Google is going to use Twitter data. My guess is they’ll use a combination of my assumptions above when placing a value on anything it gleams from Twitter.

What’s almost certain is Google appears to be applying more metrics to its algorithm. Whereas domain names, inbound links, domain age, etc. was of utmost importance several years ago, Google is going to look into more metrics when applying your search rankings. In my opinion, this is a good thing. At the end of the day, it puts more relevant topics first based on how people are using the information across the web. Only time will tell what the importance of these changes will be though. What does everyone else think?

A couple years back I joined Commission Junction to test out my affiliate marketing chops. Mostly I was interested in trying to generate a little side income. For a while, I ran a site that I did reviews of music that I enjoyed and tried selling concert tickets through StubHub. I didn’t rake in the money, but I did alright with it. Life basically took over and I didn’t put anymore effort into it. Lately, I’ve decided that I have enough traffic to this site to attempt to generate some income. If you’ve noticed, I’m displaying some Google Ads here and there across the site (hopefully not that annoying to you). So, I went back to CJ to log into my account. For a while, I couldn’t remember my password, so I filled out the forgot password form. This is what I got:

At this point, I figured that they just deleted my account since I hadn’t been an active user for a long time. So I went to their signup form to create a new account with the same email address. This is what I get:

Now a little frustration is setting in. CJ is telling me that when I try to retrieve my password that an account does not exist for my email address. But when setting up a new account, it does. How can that be? At this point, I start trying every password that I use online. Getting lucky, I think I found out which password I had been using a Commission Junction. However, I couldn’t get my account to log in. This is the screen they show me:

I’m baffled at this point. First, why can’t CJ get some consistent messaging going on in their system. Second, why would I try to login again if you just told me that my account was deactivated? How would trying again fix that?

Now it was time to contact their customer support through their help link for logging in. I tried to get a solution from them 3 times, but to no avail. This is the canned response they send me no matter what I type in their help form:

Gaaaaaah! Really CJ? I have an account. Your system keeps telling me it’s not active. Then how can your email system tell me that my account doesn’t exist? Apparently Commission Junction just doesn’t care about small affiliates or to even have a system that actually gives you some useful information.

I suppose I could call them to try and have this resolved, but at this point I’m just not interested. I’ll set up a publisher with another affiliate system like ShareASale.

UPDATE:  I just wanted to update that I wasn’t banned from Commission Junction for violating their terms of use or terms of service. I believe my account was just deactivated for lack of use.

Just like everyone else, I get a lot of junk mail. Some of it I’ve signed up for years ago and some just shows up. I received an email from some company called ATLANTIC-ACM this morning. No idea who these guys are, so I went to unsubscribe from their list. I use Chrome and Firefox 4 most of the time and I saw this when I clicked their unsubscribe link from Chrome:

This is basically what it says:

Really?!?!? In this day in age you’re forcing someone to use a specific web browser? Especially for something as simple as an email unsubscribe form. This is just rediculous. If you’ve built something like this into your site, you should know better.

Today, I took a look at Google Labs’ Page Speed Online app to check the score of one of my sites. I was shocked to find out it was scoring really low at 59/100. Pathetic in my opinion since I consider site speed a huge priority (and so does Google in fact). I had just done a site update earlier in the week, so I was thinking that I had broken something. I checked the Page Speed Plugin for Firefox (part of Firebug), and just like I remembered, we were scoring really high at 94/100. I decided to take a look at the Page Speed for Chrome to see where that plugin would score us. It wasn’t as high as Firefox, but not nearly as low as the Online version; scoring at 81/100.

So my question to Google is this: Why the difference? Aren’t they running the same rules? Which score means more to Google? Between the browsers I would assume the rules being run in Firebug instead of straight through Chrome could cause a slight difference. Also perhaps the rendering engines for the browsers could account for some difference too. If anyone knows the answer for sure and which score I should really believe, I’d love to know!

jQuery is awesome. If you use Javascript on your website, you should use jQuery. If you don’t, you don’t know what you’re missing.

Recently, on a new site I’m about to launch, I was looking for some better ways to use jQuery and ColorBox when estimating shipping charges for customers. Previously, I called out to an internal web service to do some calculations and then do a redirect with the values to display to the user. I was thinking, meh, a redirect? You really need to do that?

So I ripped it all out and started over. I basically decided I could use jQuery and element IDs to do the same thing. Hide some controls, set the html or text values of others where I wanted calculated values to show up. But the kicker was, I could easily do that from my ColorBox modal window, but I wanted it to close after hitting the submit button. Turns out this is stupid simple. From the ColorBox documentation, you can manually close the ColorBox window:

The key to making it work is to find the element that actually opened the ColorBox window. I managed to only get this to work by finding the form that owned the element that opened the window first, then get the element in question, i.e.

var myForm = $("#myForm ");
var myElement= shoppingCartForm.find('#myElement');
if (myElement!= null) {
    myElement.colorbox.close();
}

For some reason, just doing this didn’t work:

$('#myElement').colorbox.close();

That would have been simpler, but I got it to work and that’s all that I really cared about. Anyway, hopefully this will be useful to someone else!

I stumbled upon a little gem today while searching for a few more techniques to improve the performance of my ASP.NET web applications. I use YSlow and Google Page Speed almost daily, and it was great to find this website that combines the both of them called GTmetrix. GTmetrix combines both Google Page Speed and YSlow into an easy to read, tabbed, table of recommendations. Each recommendation, once expanded, offers you a list of tasks that you can complete to improve the performance of your test. What’s more, is it ranks the grouping of recommendations from Low to High so that you know what to get after first. If you’re serious about your web site’s performance, definitely check this one out!

I get a lot of questions regarding issues I have had in the past regarding my Macbook Pro and the infamous swollen Macbook Pro battery issue. Apple won’t always warranty your battery for you, especially if your Macbook is out of warranty or older than a year. The issue is that batteries aren’t meant to last forever and depending on the battery usage and how well the battery is taken care of, they won’t replace it. There are some tricks you can use to keep your battery performance at a high level. In a nutshell, you want to charge the battery to 100%, then unplug your Macbook and let the battery run to 0% without having the Macbook plugged in. Then let it charge while in sleep mode until it is fully charged. Its pretty important to not use your Macbook Pro while its charging during this procedure.

If you are experiencing issues with your Macbook Pro battery though, I suggest you take your laptop and the battery in to your local Apple Store. Don’t bother calling Apple Support, they’ll most likely blow you off. You just want to make your Genius Bar appointment and plead your case. In my experience, I talked to the head Genius at my local Apple Store (in Natick, MA) and he took care of me. He also gave me a receipt because my new battery was under warranty for a year.

In the case that Apple won’t replace your battery, I suggest you take a look at these NewerTech NuPower batteries available at Other World Computing. They generally offer better performance and a longer life expectancy. Hope that helps!