Murmurs

Ever wonder about those ads that Google is showing you? Ever wonder what Google knows about you? Have a look at Google Ads Preferences to see what Google thinks your interests are and modify them if you like.

FÁS creates digital media training programme. Currently Dublin only.

Sponsorship for the 2009 web awards are now open.

If you’d like to develop an iPhone app but don’t have the time or staff to do it, take a look at Swebapps - The easy way to build your own app.

Appointed by the Taoiseach, the Innovation Taskforce is requesting submissions by 18 September.

6 simple ways to increase productivity.

Frank from Website Design Cork has published the results of a poll about PDF files in Google Search results.

I signed on to the Microsoft Bizspark programme a number of weeks ago and I’ve been trying out some of the Microsoft applications that I’ve never had access to before without forking out a lot of money.

I’m planning a lot of projects right now so I installed Microsoft Project 2007 to try it out. I have to say, I like it a lot so far. I got a couple of lessons on using MS Project from my brother in law who uses it as part of his own work for a large Engineering company in the UK.  I imagine I’m barely using 2% of its abilities but it’s working out very well for me already in planning the time and costs for a project.

As well as Ms Project I’ve begun using MS Word 2007 too in place of Open Office which I’ve been using for years. Open Office gives problems when using bullet points and when copy & pasting from OO to other applications so I installed MS Word. I can open the odd .docx file that people send me now too.

For emails I use Thunderbird,I’ve used this for years and I’m very happy with it. Recently though I’ve been a little frustrated with its ability to connect to other apps. Several addons are needed to sync Thunderbird with anything.

I use a Thunderbird extension called Lightening to provide an interface to my calendars.

I use Provider for Google Calendar“  to sync Lightning to a Google Calendar, this has been failing recently.

On my Nokia e61i phone I use CalSyncS60 to connect the phone calendar with Google Calendar. CalSyncS60 used to be free but now its proprietary and called Googasync.

MS Outlook provides a calendar facility built in without any addons. It syncs with my phone using the Nokia PC Suite via cable or Bluetooth.  It has an added bonus of syncing the contacts and notes on my phone too. I’m a big note taker.  I’m thinking of getting the cradle for the Nokia e61i since I’ll be syncing more often.

Outlook can also be linked to the projects in MS Project. Emails in my inbox can be drag and dropped into tasks which can then be imported into a project.

There is a Journal section too in Outlook 2007 that can record the time spent on documents which is great at accounting for time but I’m not too familiar with this yet. Maybe it could track time spent on Twitter

I moved my emails from Thunderbird to Outlook over the weekend and I’m planning on using Outlook/Word/Project for a few weeks to see how I get on. I may eventually go back to Thunderbird, I know Thunderbird 3 is on the way promising more facilities.

Moving from Thunderbird 2 to Outlook 2007

I followed a guide to  move from Thunderbird to Outlook. Thunderbird emails are stored in MBOX format. This cannot be imported into Outlook 2007 directly so a couple of steps are needed.

I used ImapSize to convert the MBOX files from Thunder bird to .eml files.

Then Drap and drop those eml files into Outlook Express, recreating any custom folders.

Use Outlook Express to Export to Outlook to Outlook 2007.

For the address book, export the address book from Thunderbird as an ldap file. Import into address book in Outlook Express, Export to Outlook 2007.

I’ve upped my backup routine too. I picked up a Seagate 1 TB external USB drive which is on offer in Eason’s at the moment for only €89 and started backing up my documents, projects, downloads incrementally to the drive each day instead of each month to a 320 GB drive as before.

For backing up the folders I’m using Second Copy. Thank you @lecraic for the recommendation on Twitter.

It’s a great app and easy to set up. It automatically backs up several folders on my hard drive and compressed a couple of them and provides email notifications when complete or if errors occur. I highly recommend it.

So overall, starting this Monday morning, Im a little more organised and connected thanks mainly to the Microsoft software available through the Microsoft Bizspark programme. If you’re an SME, check it out.

Related articles by Zemanta

• MS revives Outlook for Mac (theregister.co.uk)
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DesignFellow have released CodeIgniter quick reference cheat sheet version 2.0.

A blog post on Why PHP frameworks matter.

Test your app in any browser from the web. Very useful service.

17 Awesome Web Developer Cheat Sheets, some great cheat sheets, PHP, Ruby, mySQL and more.

Earlier in the week, I wrote about differences in the referral address from Google and Google ‘Caffeine’, Googles new search engine algorithm. On the Blackdog SEO blog, Paul compares the two search tools and has created an excellent tool to compare the results from Google and Google Caffeine.

Google just recently opened up their next-generation infrastructure for their Google Search. Currently being called ‘Caffeine’, Its faster, more accurate and more comprehensive. You can try it out at http://www2.sandbox.google.com/

I noticed that the referrer string from Google is different in new version; it appeared to pass the position of the search result in the string so I tested it out in a couple of browsers to research it a bit more and see fully what information is passed in the referrer string.

Using Firefox version 3.5.2, Internet Explorer 8.0.6001.18702 and Google Chrome Beta version 3.0.195.6 I performed searches for ‘murrion’ and ‘gordon murray’ on the existing Google search at http://www.google.ie and compared the referral string to the new search at http://www2.sandbox.google.com/

Searching for “murrion” in Firefox

Using Google.ie (Firefox 3.5.2 ) Searching for “murrion” (Position 3)

http://www.google.ie/search?q=murrion&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-GB:official&client=firefox-a

Using Google Caffeine (Firefox 3.5.2 ) Searching for “murrion” (Position 3)

http://www2.sandbox.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&cd=3&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.murrion.ie%2F&ei=w4KBSoqyCoqEMfXEwPwH&rct=j&q=murrion&usg=AFQjCNETdpvRK9baXAConZ5g397IO8c7vA

Searching for “murrion” in Internet Explorer

Using Google.ie (Internet Explorer 8.0.6001) Searching for “murrion” (Position 3)

http://www.google.ie/search?hl=en&q=murrion&meta=&aq=f&oq=&rlz=1W1GGLD_en

Using Google Caffeine (Internet Explorer 8.0.6001) Searching for “murrion” (Position 3)

http://www2.sandbox.google.com/search?hl=en&q=murrion&aq=f&oq=&aqi=g2

Searching for “murrion” in Google Chrome Beta

Using Google.ie (Google Chrome 3.0.195.6 ) Searching for “murrion” (position 2)

http://www.google.ie/search?hl=en&q=murrion&btnG=Google+Search&meta=&aq=f&oq=

Using Google Caffeine (Google Chrome 3.0.195.6) Searching for “murrion” (position 3)

http://www2.sandbox.google.com/search?hl=en&q=murrion&aq=f&oq=&aqi=g10

Searching for “gordon murray” in Firefox

Using Google.ie (Firefox 3.5.2) Searching for “gordon murray” (Position 3)

http://www.google.ie/search?hl=en&q=gordon+murray&btnG=Google+Search&meta=&aq=f&oq=

Using Google Caffeine (Firefox 3.5.2) Searching for “gordon murray” (position 7)

http://www2.sandbox.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&cd=7&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.gordonmurray.com%2F&ei=yoSBSra5NpLkMMyZxPwH&rct=j&q=gordon+murray&usg=AFQjCNFhaAyOWDVyTm76fNTNkIs4GNmnbw

Searching for “gordon murray” in Internet Explorer

Using Google.ie (Internet Explorer 8.0.6001) Searching for “gordon murray” (Position 3)

http://www.google.ie/search?hl=en&q=gordon+murray&meta=&rlz=1W1GGLD_en&aq=f&oq=

Using Google Caffeine (Internet Explorer 8.0.6001) Searching for “gordon murray” (Position 7)

http://www2.sandbox.google.com/search?hl=en&q=gordon+murray&aq=f&oq=&aqi=

Searching for “gordon murray” in Google Chrome Beta

Using Google.ie (Google Chrome 3.0.195.6) Searching for “gordon murray” (position 3)

http://www.google.ie/search?hl=en&q=gordon+murray&btnG=Google+Search&meta=&aq=f&oq=

Using Google Caffeine (Google Chrome 3.0.195.6) Searching for “gordon murray” (position 7)

http://www2.sandbox.google.com/search?hl=en&q=gordon+murray&aq=f&oq=&aqi=g10

Using Google Caffeine with Mozilla Firefox gave the most information passed in the referral string. There are some new parameters I haven’t seen before.

The parameter q= continues to show the search term but there are a couple of new parameters. “cd=” is the main one I was interested in, it appears to show the position of the search result for that search.

The ‘cd=’ parameter shows ‘3’ when searching for ‘murrion’ and ‘7’ when searching for ‘gordon murray’, both are the current positions for those searches in the search results.

The ‘ei’ parameter changed every time I searched.

The ‘usg’ parameter stayed the same if I did multiple searches for the same phrase. It was also the same if I searched on another computer for the same phrase

The referral string searching for ‘murrion’ in Firefox using Google Caffeine

http://www2.sandbox.google.com/

url? (changed from ‘search?’ to ‘url?’)

sa=t (stayed showing ‘t’ all the time)

source=web (new)

ct=res (stayed showing ‘res’ all the time)

cd=3 (appears to be the position of the search result)

url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.murrion.ie%2F (the url I was going to)

ei=w4KBSoqyCoqEMfXEwPwH (Changed every time)

rct=j (stayed showing ‘j’ al l the time)

q=murrion (The search term, same as before)

usg=AFQjCNETdpvRK9baXAConZ5g397IO8c7vA (Stayed the same if I searched for the same term again even on a different computer)

It’ll be good to keep an eye on this to see if the referral string stays this way then Googles updated infrastructure becomes the norm.

If it does, I’ll be able to update my Whats Google Up to wordpress plugin which shows the search terms that a user used to find your blog on Google. I’ll be able to add search result number to it too withut scraping Google.

Nominations for the Realex Payments Irish Web Awards are now open!

100 handy keyboard shortcuts for Windows.

Want to know what the Americans are up to all day? Have a look at this graph of How Different Groups Spend Their Day.

For the 8.0% of visitors to this blog using Googles Chrome browser, you can now get themes for Chrome.

A few weeks ago, Microsoft announced that they would use Word to render the HTML in the next version of Outlook.  The email standards project aren’t too happy about it and started a Fix Outlook campaign.

Lobsterpot Solutions created a Silverlight version of all the people on Twitter who responsed to the Fix outlook campaign.  Check it out and zoom in, see if you can find anyone you know.

Hint : “T”.