Vista - I might be beginning to like it
March 11, 2008
A bold statement I know but when you find something as cool as Snipper you begin to change your mind.
I have always hated print screen and all that it stands for but until now it was the only way to go, until I received a junk email from those bods at PC World.
I found myself reading it against my better judgement, I was on the hunt for a new printer at the time and it’s thanks to PC World that I found Snipper. Good email marketing by them as I will make sure I read the next one for any more juicy tidbits 
What does Snipper do? It snips any segment of your screen and allows you email it or save it for later use. No more full screen grabs, just snip what you need. To find it all you need do is click your Vista start button and type snipping into the search bar.
One little snip for man, one giant leap for Microsoft.
Search Within Search
March 11, 2008
I spotted a strange thing on Google yesterday so hopped over to the official Google blog to research my findings and I can confirm that you can now search within a search!
Open up Google and search ‘NASA’. You will be presented with the listing and underneath nestles a brand new search box!
In reality this is only a shortcut to what you can easily achieve any way making use of the - keyword site:nasa.gov - parameter but for the millions of us who don’t know how to use advanced search correctly, this heralds a step in the right direction.
This only seems to occur for some of the really big sites at present. We serve a number of huge UK sites at the moment but alas it seems that this latest change is US only. If anyone finds a UK site with the added search box, please let me know.
Well done Google! This is (for once) a truly useful addition to the SERPS.
When is Google.co.uk Not Google.co.uk?
March 10, 2008
When it’s Google.com that’s when.
What am I talking about? Well in the UK we have slight Google issue, namely we don’t know which one we should be using. Around 17% of Brits use Google.com when searching for a UK based website. Nothing wrong with that, except the small fact that it doesn’t return the same results as when you search the same phrase in Google.co.uk.
hmmm! A small geo targeting issue methinks and one that Google should get ironed out as soon as possible. It makes life that wee bit harder for us UK based search agencies.
Let me explain.
.com domains are international domains, not US domains (sorry America). The US does have its own domain .US but it’s a bit crummy and not many people like to use, unless its creatively - delicio.us anybody?
That means that many UK companies own .com domains and have them set to target the UK in their Google webmaster console. If we want to search for American websites we should be using Google.us no?
This is confusing for our searchers who are led by brand name. Not only that but browsers likeFirefox come with the search bar configured to Google.com
Come on Google sort this out now! It’s hard enough for our UK businesses to succeed on the search engines without our cousins across the pond muddying the waters with irrelevant results. A simple redirect is all it takes to retain quality and consistent UK search results.
When was the last time you felt like taking your dog to the vet in Michigan as opposed to the vets around the corner? Slackers.
EDIT: As I published this I realised that google.com is now redirecting to google.co.uk when typed directly into the address bar - the problem still remains when you use the IE or Firefox search bar, which most of us do.
A Date With IE8
March 7, 2008
So I spent days and hours slaving over a new site and making sure that it worked in Firefox, IE6, IE7, Safari et al and heard the news that the IE8 beta was available for download. I rushed on over to the Microsoft site with a mixture of excitement (lord knows why? I think I need to get out more) and some amount of dread to download the latest incarnation of the much maligned browser only to find that when I tested my lovingly crafted site on it… well.. let’s just say some colourful expletives were issued forth. The site looked terrible… busting out everywhere, and the funny thing is I knew it was going to happen, but kinda hoped it wouldn’t… you know, just for a change.
Realising countless others would be having the same trouble on this day of days I turned to the all knowing Google for advice, and some simple clicks later I had myself a piece of code which promised to solve my problem. And thankfully for my sanity it did. Simply inserting the following <meta http-equiv=”X-UA-Compatible” content=”IE=7;FF=2;OtherUA=4″ /> into the head of every page made my woes disappear and had my site looking how I intended it to look. Phew, thank you Google and panic over…
Well, not quite as I then went into a frenzy of checking all my other sites to make sure they weren’t also similarly ‘IE8′d’, you heard that expression here first folks… although luckily for me they were all fine, bizarre. So my first experience with IE8 went rather disappointingly exactly how I imagined it would, after which I simply closed it down knowing it will only be used in the future to check my future projects compatibility with it. Sorry Microsoft you lost me to Mozilla Firefox a long time ago, and from what I saw yesterday that’s not going to be changing anytime soon.