Posts Tagged google
X’Buzz?
Posted by Malcolm Micallef in Guide, Technology on February 22, 2010
Google recently announced Google Buzz. So far all the people I am following seem to be confused what Buzz is really about. I shall now attempt to clear the confusion (or increase it).
Google Buzz brings social networking into Gmail and the rest of the Google applications. Whether or not you are into the whole social networking scene (twitter or facebook), Buzz offers a different approach to this scene.
Buzz’s key features are:
- Automatic friend lists (friends are added automatically who you have emailed on Gmail). This caused a lot of controversy since people were finding friends in their friend list which they did not want.
- “Rich fast sharing” combines sources like Picasa and Twitter into a single feed. It also includes a full sized photo browsing utility.
- Public and private Buzzs.
- Inbox integration (instead of emailing you with updates, like facebook does, Buzz features emails that update dynamically with all the Buzz threads).
- “Recommended Buzz” puts friend of friend content into your stream, even if you’re not acquainted. The system learns what you would be interested in overtime through user feedback.
Buzz lets you share photos, video, links to web sites, and other content from all over the web with your friends and your friends of friends.
The video below has been created by Google to better explain the purpose and the features of Buzz.
Wordpress 500 Internal Server Error and GoDaddy
Posted by Malcolm Micallef in Errors, Guide, Technology on February 7, 2010
This weekend I didn’t have much time to write on this blog. One reason is because of parties and the other is the sheer amount of work I had to perform. Apart from electronics failing left, right and centre a site I am working on failed this week for no apparent reason.
The site uses wordpress where I was creating a theme and some custom widgets and applications. I wasn’t working on it when the Internal server error occurred. I immediately went onto Google for the solution, what any experienced trouble-shooter would do. My search immediately lead to a problem between wordpress and my webhost, GoDaddy Shared Windows hosting.
I started by removing all the plug-ins as some people did to fix the problem. This had no effect on the error. I changed the theme name to try force wordpress to use the default theme and Houston we still have a problem. I even resorted to emailing customer support of GoDaddy but they were as helpful as most customer support around the world. Completely useless.
After some thinking and debugging I noticed the web.config which in the subdirectory which I never created. I decided to rename it and presto the site was back up and running like nothing ever happened. Hopefully this little piece of information will find its way onto Google so that if someone has the same problem as I did would be able to notice and fix the problem quicker than I did. Since I wasted a few hours on this problem.
This problem occured on a site I am developing but I was worried that my site would crash too since I was using wordpress too. So it was very important I solved the problem just in case this site decided to bite the dust too. At least now I am more confident that I can fix the site quickly. I don’t want anyone not to be able to read my crazy thoughts for a day.
Most Visited Sites of Malta
Posted by Malcolm Micallef in Funny, General, Internet, Technology, Wierd on February 1, 2010
Today I worked on making my website more accessible to Google. This is known as Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and it is a very popular and profitable service some are capable in offering. It involves making a sitemap for Google to know the pages you have on your site, adding the proper meta tags, etc.
During this process I decided to check out Alexa to see what the most visited websites in the world are. I was pleasantly surprised when I found that I can see the most visited websites by country.
For Alexa to track these sites the user must have some adware installed on their computer. So this won’t be the whole Maltese population but still it’s quite shocking when you see some of the sites that are up there.
Dedicated GPS Units are now useless
Posted by Malcolm Micallef in Gadgets, Smart Phones, Technology on January 30, 2010
Streetview Navigation
Garmin and friends have been critically wounded by the iron mongers Google and Nokia. Recently Google announced that Google Maps on GPS enabled smartphones will provide free navigation. This meant that any smartphone with GPS was capable of directing you anywhere around the world. The only down fall of the Google Maps application was the fact that it needed a constant internet connection to the internet. This had it down falls for some but for most of the planet would be able to use it.
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