A few days ago, @MelissaAmbrose_ suggested that I made a blog post about GoogleGoogleGoogleGoogle.com! Now when I first looked at the site, I was not impressed at all and was just going to make a quick blog about it to appease @MelissaAmbrose_ and make her happy  However, what first looked like a simple site set up with 4 frames that just simply load Google up in each, was a bit more complex than I anticipated. After a short while of playing with the site I found that it actually had a lot more thought gone into it than just 4 iFrames.

Semi-Dynamic Sizing

I am starting this review on the negatives. My first assumption was that the site was either designed to fit nicely on a 1280×800 display (which would have been awfully designed) or that the frames would dynamically resizes as the size of the window changed (which would have been the best thing). Unfortunately, I soon discovered when resizing the window I discovered that the size of the content stayed the same. This then made me question if it was statically set to look good at a size of 1280×800 or whether there was actually some cleaver JS running in the background. To my relief there was some JS running that would detect the size of the window on the page load and then resize. My main question to the makers of the site would be “Why can you not make an event listener that resizes the iFrames dynamically?”

Loading Sites in Frames

The site is adaptive, it isn’t just limited to having Google. At the top of each frame there are some special controls which you can see in the screen shot on the right.

The purpose of the first 2 icons should be fairly recognisable and obvious as the favicon of Google and Wikipedia. By clicking on these icons it will wither load the Google homepage or the Wikipedia homepage within the frame bellow. The last icon shown is the green arrow! By clicking this icon it will make a dialogue box pop-up requesting a URL to navigate to and this will allow you to go to any site of your choice!

Here is an example of the site with Google, Wikipedia, this blog, and a Google Search for my name loaded in the 4 frames.

Customisability

Another way that the site adapts in though the customisability of the layout! The main control of this is through the Cross that is shown on the screen shot of the frame controls. Clicking this will get rid of that frame and stretch an adjacent frame to fill the space. To see what this might look like and the look of a customised workspace, look at the images below:

Pretty Design

Last but obvious not least is design. Although it is not amazing the coloured border around each iFrame is a nice touch and goes well with the Google them of the website

Conclusion

In conclusion, I would say that this is a cleaver idea and I can see some uses for it but I will stick to the normal Google site and multiple tabs

By the way there are a few more features and if you want to find them, go and have a play at GoogleGoogleGoogleGoogle.com

Popularity: 11% [?]

I just did a random search on Google (can’t remember what for) and discovered a nifty new feature! If you search for the user name of someone on twitter on Google, then Google will recognise this and automatically add a box at the top for a select few of the user’s most recent tweets of that user. Here is a screenshot of when you search for flungo on Google:

As you can see it will only show two updates and these updates may not necessarily be the 2 most recent. After being amazed by just the fact tweet were appearing on twitter, I noticed that there was a link that said, “Pause” and to me this implied that search was live! I tried testing this by making some for some reason (which I am yet to discover – if you know please comment) some of my tweets were omitted even after refreshing and these tweets never appeared on this page; Google must be using some sort of filtering to try and offer the most reliable tweets.

Rather than messily extending down the page (which would be inconvenient for those who don’t wish to use this feature) when the page starts to load more tweets and updates, Google shows them but limits the size of the area, and adds a nice little scroll bar if it exceeds that area. An example of this is bellow when @MOn321 sent me a tweet.

Even though not all tweets are show, you can view more tweets by clicking, “Latest updates for…”. By clicking this you will get a live search page that searches for you query:

This view will display any tweets that contain your query. This view is accessible from any search (even if Google does not automatically show the updates on your main search) by clicking, “Show options…” at the top of the search then selecting “Updates” from the list of search types.

I then decided to search for something that may find a few more results so I did a search for something that has been in the news for quite a while, “Tiger Woods“. Although the Latest Results did not appear at the top of the page it did appear but further down the page. It must use a similar ranking system to when positioning result in accordance to relevance. When I scrolled down, I instantly notice that the update was definitely live with updates coming in every few seconds and that this feature was not just limited Twitter; news sites and other sites that constantly have updates posted at a very fast rate were also being loaded in real time!

To just see the sheer number of tweets that it could build up I left the page searching for “Tiger Woods” for a little while (it ended up being approximately 15 minutes). Google ended up finding so many results that the screenshot is almost 6000 pixels long. For this reason, I am displaying just a thumbnail of the photo on the right however you can click to vie the whole picture

Overall this looks like a very powerful tool and a step in the correct direction for real-time search for one of the world largest search engines!

Popularity: 14% [?]

I finally got my Google Wave Invite today! Just to make you guy jealous, I have decided to blog my experience of receiving a Google Wave Invite!

Well receiving your Google Wave Invite is very much like receiving any other email except the subject of the email is “Your invitation to preview Google Wave” and it it from Google Wave! In my case it looked like this:

If you are even remotely thinking “What did you do next?” then I find that offensive! Is it not obvious and customary to accept an invitation when you receive one! So that is what I did and it could not have been more simple! I clicked the link, typed in my Google password and I was off!  I was logged straight into my Google Wave account.

I then read my 2 new messages:

And that was my first experience of Google Wave! I did have a little play around afterwards and will make some more blogs about Google Wave later! But if you are so jealous and really want an invite, watch this space as I will be running a twitter competition to get 3 of my 8 beautiful invites!

Popularity: 8% [?]

Finally it has happened to me
Right in front of my face
My feelin’s can’t describe it
Finally it has happened to me
Right in front of my face
And I just cannot hide it

Google Wave, the app of my dreams
The one and only true love or at least it seems
With a blue skin and a white background
It’s just the way it looks at me, that gentle lovin’ stare

Finally you come along
The way I feel about you it just can’t be wrong
If you only knew the way I feel about you
I just can’t describe it oh no no
If you couldn’t guess from my really, quite awful parody of Finally by CeCe Peniston, which only had the odd word changed; I finally received my Google WaveGoogle Wave invite! I don’t know if it had anything to do with the constant emails I sent Google or the ranting blog post I made but I am finally a user of Google Wave! I have already accepted and had a little play with the application and will be blogging the Invite Experience soon!

Popularity: 1% [?]

I have been trying for months to get my Google Wave account and am now starting to give up hope! The big hype about Google Wave started on the Thursday 28th May when the product was announced on Day 2 of the Google I/O event. The product was unveiled in the morning keynotes at approximately 9am and at that point the web went crazy over this product. Everyone at the event was twittering and blogging away about Google Wave and the hype began. If you have not seen the keynotes from this day or want to know more about what Google Wave is, I recommend you watch this YouTube video:

You can also find more information on Google Wave from here.

As soon as I had watched all of this video, I started my mission to get a Google Wave account! within an hour I had filled out the following forms with great detail:

• Request an invitation to Google Wave
• Google Wave Developer Sandbox Account Request
• Get Involved Form (Google Wave Federation Protocol)

At this point, I just waited…. And waited…. And waited until I could not take it and made a few stroppy tweets about how I wanted my Google Wave account ASAP! I then got a response from Christine Tsai who I believe works for Google (well she had an @google.com email so that was kind of obvious )

“Brilliant,”, I thought, “finally getting somewhere!”

After exchanging som DMs on Twitter we eventually started emailing and eventually the followign conclusion was made:
Hey Fabrizio,

It doesn’t look like you registered or attended Google I/O. Please note that right now, Wave sandbox accounts were only given to I/O attendees and that’s what I was checking for on Twitter. If you signed up on https://services.google.com/fb/forms/wavesignupfordev/, you’ll be notified when it’s available for you.

Thanks
Christine
I though, “Fair enough,” and just kept waiting!

A couple of months later on Monday the 20th July, I got the following email:
Hi,

You are being sent this mail because you requested access to the Google
Wave Developer Sandbox. If you would still like a Google Wave Developer
Sandbox account, please fill in this linked form:

http://wave.google.com/signups/signup1.html

After filling in this form, you should receive a mail with your account
details within a few days.

Hope to see you on Google Wave soon,

- The Google Wave Team
I was finally close to having my Google Wave account! I eagerly filled out the form and waited a bit longer!

I presumed that Google would be swamped with accounts to set up and that it may take some time but after 6 days I tried to contact someone. Sicne then I have received no replies or any contact from Google and my account was never set up

Hopefully someone at Google finds this blog post and can get me an invite to the real google wave which is now running!

Popularity: -0% [?]

I was at school about 2 weeks back using Firefox (which I installed by bypassing the .exe file restrictions in the Active Directory) and whenever I did a Google search from the search bar, this page came up! It was getting extremely annoying at the time. Every search i had to do that stupid re-captcha thing! I reckon my schools proxy had been black listed but have you ever seen this error before?

Popularity: 1% [?]

This is just a quick little blog post to get me back into my blogging. I just did a test using SunSpider on an (admitedly) not very powerful computer and got some interesting results! Both Firefox and Chrome were tested on the same computer to make it fair and just look how much faster Google Chrome was!

It was overall, 6.22 times faster than Mozilla Firefox! This shows that Google has gone to allot of effort to increase the speed at which JS is handled. For a more in-depth look at my results, here are the links to each:

• Mozilla FirefoxMozilla Firefox
• Google ChromeGoogle Chrome

I will be posting some more tests that I run in the near future to see if I get the same results on different computers and then do a full analysis of my results! Watch this space…

Oh and if you want to get Google Chrome after seeing these results, you can download it here and if you like BETA versions click here!

Popularity: 21% [?]

I know I have been saying that this blog post has been coming for quite some time but it is finally here! This is my first Tutorial on this Blog and it will show how to use filters in Gmail. I thought that I would do it on something basic just to see how to lay it out and just to get used to it!

This tutorial will explain to you how to keep on top of your Gmail account by automatically applying filtering to new and existing mail! By the end of this you will be able to set up filter and automatically perform tasks to your mail like adding Labels, Auto Archiving and marking emails as read!

I hope this tutorial has been helpful and I will be running some feedback polls to get your…. well…. feedback You can also leave a comment bellow with your thoughts.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Over the last few days I have been slowly sorting the login and authentication methods for my site. Yesterday I added the plugin that allows me to control logins from all the external sites which I have now successfully set up and have today finished configuring it all!

You can now login using, Google, Windows Live, Yahoo, Twitter, Facebook and MySpace. I have fully tested all of them for their main purpose which is so you can post comments without registering for an account here, but if you don’t have any of the accounts listed I recommend getting a Google account!

I hope you guys all like this new form of authentication and can all use it to comment back to my posts! If any of you experience a problem or glitch, comment it bellow!

Popularity: 100% [?]

Hello everyone!

Today I have been working very hard on my English homework Blog. I should have been concentrating on the English but to be fair, I have now finished it! Now, back to the point of this blog. I have had a very productive day on the blog and allot of changes which (if you were the one person who looked on the site yesterday…. ehem…. @KathrynSt) you will be able to see.

The change which is probably most visible (simply as it is at the top and also a very important part of the site) is that the navbar at the top of the page now has 5 links (excluding the RSS feed link) which compared to yesterday has 2.

The about me page is still as unedited as yesterday and I don’t think I will get round to editing this until some time next week but the 3 new pages will be done by Monday (I hope).

I have already completed the main pages for the Social Widgets and Support Me sections of the site but still need to work on the sub-pages of these sections. Most of the sub-pages have been set-up but just need filling with the appropriate content. This I hope to be able to do tonight, and if it takes a bit longer than expected I will use tomorrow night as well.

Other changes I have made include changes to the sidebar. I will explain each change in the sidebar, starting from the top.

Although you may not see any change to the Categories section, there has been allot of work done to this section in the back-end. Almost 30 new categories have been made and they will slowly start appearing as I create blog posts that fall into those categories. By the end of tonight you should see 4 appear as I need to categorise some of the uncategorised blogs. Before you have a moan at me tomorrow when there are still some uncategorised blog posts, there should definitely be 4 new categories appearing.

The next change is the new section of the sidebar called, Subscribe! I actually added this section late last night so this is not an addition that I made today but I thought it was still relevant and important to mention it! This new section gives you 3 ways to keep up to date with my blog and what I am up to:

• RSS – Although there is another button in the top right for getting to my feed, there is no harm in having it again (just in case you missed it the first time). You can use this link to find out RSS feed which can be read from many browsers and in any RSS reader of your choice that supports RSS2.0! This RSS feed gets all the new posts and will allow you to read the full story from within your RSS reader of choice. The advantage of RSS is that one RSS reader can gather feeds from all your favorite sites then put them into an easily manageable workspace! This method is also instantly updated the second a new post is made (well…. I suppose processing time for the post would have some knock on affect but it would be close enough to instant for your needs).
• Email – Yesterday I also set up my FeedBurner account and have now linked to it with the Email icon. You can now subscribe to a daily summary of my postings via Email. This is simple to set-up and easy to use and the advantage of using this method is that the updates go straight to your inbox (or another folder if you like to Sort Your Mail using Filters). This is good for people who check their mail once or more times a day and will have time to browse all of my daily posts in succession.
• Twitter – Like the RSS feed, this is already on this page (but you probably haven’t noticed it yet! After reading this, scroll down and spend a bit of time to look at my footer! This form of subscription (more commonly know as following) is also instant – I post a blog item and it is tweeted! My twitter will also contain allot of smaller micro-blogs telling you more about what I am up to, what I am thinking and what I am feeling. If you wanted the best of the both worlds of, Twitter and RSS, you could subscribe to both or subscribe to my Twitter RSS feed

Remember that the thing with the subscription methods is that there is nothing stopping you from using all 3 of them! Go on…. you know you want to.

After that you will then see the calendar (which in case you are wondering, hasn’t changed) followed by the Donate section which has had a very big change! I am still using the chip-in system but I have now designed a custom widget using Sprout Builder! If you do like my site I urge you to please donate! All donations will be appreciated and large donations will get a blog of thanks (with the donor permission, of course).

The last modification made to the sidebar today is a very simple one! I just changed the limit of the amount of ads that can be displayed from 1 to 3! Oh and not forgetting that I have also linked and written the page explaining how to get your ads in that section by Sponsoring This Site!

Just as a friendly reminder, the Support Me page has been started so to find great ways to help keep this site going that could cost you anything from £0/$0/€0 (Alright…. it might cost you a bit of time, but that is it)!

Popularity: -0% [?]