All posts tagged Google.
I just got a call from an automated service (I did not stay on long enough to hear all of it) that said:
“This is an important call for the business owner. This is not Google…”
I figured when they said “This is not Google” they really meant to say “this is a scam to get you listed when you could do it for free” so I hung up. I did have to laugh a bit when I heard “This is not Google”.
I have an assortment of clients – all who prefer to pass documentation back and forth in a number of ways: email, spreadsheets, documents, faxed, etc. Over the last year or so I have been using Google Docs for almost all of my client interaction/checklists/etc. Using Google Docs is great for a number of reasons and if you are not using it yet for your documents – please consider giving it a shot.
Why I use Google Docs (and you should too):
I could go on and on but before you decide to buy the next version of Office, etc – take a look at what Google put together – they did a great job!
A few years ago – Doug pointed me to an interesting service called “Grand Central”. This service was supposed to take care of the issue of several phone number changes. By using Grand Central – you could use one number for life and forward calls from that number to your home, cell phone, or any other phone depending on caller, time of day, etc. This also means – you can have someone call your Grand Central phone number and it could potentially ring all your other lines until you pick up (great for traveling or people who always use the excuse “you should have called my cell phone instead of my home phone, etc”).
We both signed up for accounts – but soon after I ended up not using it because of some reason or another. Almost a year and a half ago – Google bought it and finally – has released it under the name “Google Voice“. I look forward to trying this out because of the added features (voicemail transcription, conference calling, new UI, etc) and increased reliability (and coolness).
*This also takes care of my never remembering what phone number I have registered for my Dominick’s card 
My company is working on one of the largest projects we have ever done and the entire project (a 153 field application form, admin, scoring admin, etc) has to be done in both English and Spanish. This has been a fun project all around. This is the first time I have worked with Ruby on Rails and with localization. Fortunately enough, I found a great tool which I had never used before: Babel Fish Translation. I can input all my form labels and text into the English to Spanish translator and viola! I should mention I started with the Google Translator (still in beta) and did not have the luck I have had with Babel Fish.
Google just announced “My Maps which is a great way to add your personal routes, landmarks, etc on a Google Map. This would be awesome to plot out a trip using placemarks with photos/videos taken at specific places. I am excited to play around with this!
If you own a domain name or maintain a web site you have, at one time or another, wondered who is currently linking your web site. Wonder no more. If you have a Google account, you can log into the Webmaster Tools, add your site and view (and download) a table full of incoming links – both internal and external. Thanks Google!
Nice work Google! Check out the latest cool thing: Google Gadgets. Coming soon to a Jen web site near you? For sure! For now check out these examples:
[tags]Google[/tags]
I just happened to stumble onto something pretty interesting: jux2.com as I was reading about it’s sale on eBay. If you are like me…live to search, search to live (if I do not know, I search for it) you might be interested in trying out jux 2 – a meta search engine that will show you the best results for your query but it also allows you to compare that with Google, Yahoo!, and MSN. SEO fans should find this useful as well. Give it a whirl – it is at least worth a quick look.
[tags]jux2, eBay, Google, Yahoo, SEO[/tags]
Today was one of those “nothing is easy” days. One of my tasks today was to customize my company’s QuickBooks invoice template. As a UI person, I often need to customize pretty much everything I use in some way or another. I have to say, QuickBooks is not very friendly when it comes to making changes to the standard. After I added my letterhead as the background and changed the font/font color, and column widths, all I wanted to do is move the “Bill To” box at the top left over about 50 pixels to line up with my company logo. After doing some research via Google searches, I came up with nothing and have to settle with the “Bill To” box hanging out far too right, in my opinion. If any readers use QuickBooks and have any thoughts, I would greatly appreciate it.
[tags]SDAC Inc., QuickBooks, Google[/tags]
Over the years I have become more paranoid over who sees what on my web sites, and I have learned that one of the most important steps in creating/posting a web site on the web is the robots.txt file that goes with the site and the meta tags for each page. I will not go into how I learned the hard way, but do yourself a favor, check out:
http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/robots.html.
Know that you can control what search engines indexes.
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