Wednesday, August 27, 2008

Are Google to busy creating new things to fix their current things ?

That is the impression that I get.

I am starting to get disillusioned by their systems because each one seems to be buggy and in beta, even those that have been around for some time.

Perhaps they are having growth problems, because there are real issues which I can't seem to get any quality support on with Adwords, iGoogle, Blogger and a whole range of other applications for that matter ....

YouTube is great and seems to be going ahead full steam, but most of what Google touches these days is far from turning to gold.

Monday, August 25, 2008

Google Adwords Login Issues driving me nuts

Trying to set up anything Adwords or Adsense related on Google is like trying to teach a baby to walk.

While managing Google's My Client Center, the amount of times I've dealt with emails not being sent by Google for Adwords invitations is unheard of.

And don't get me started on the whole "This account is already a login to another AdWords account. Please select a different Google Account login to access this account." mobius loop.

This thread at Webmaster World typifies the sorts of Google garbage I have to deal with on a daily basis.

Furthermore, Google's own Adwords Learning Center, at least for me, appears to have completely wrong details on how to link accounts. It says it can do it easily by:

  1. Retrieve your client's AdWords external Customer ID and account password (which establishes your client's permission to link the account to yours).
  2. Log in to your MCC.
  3. Click the Link existing account link above your client accounts table.
  4. Enter your new client's Customer ID and account password into the appropriate fields.
  5. Click Submit.
However in my "My Client Center", there is absolutely no option to enter the account password and when I click submit - nothing happens. No email to the client, no notification in their Adwords account - nothing !

I'm nearly fed up with the then I get support people who don't even know what they are talking about and sent generic mail merged responses. If only they realised that if their systems were usable and they answered their support queries, they might actually get less of them.

No wonder advertisers are moving to Yahoo. Pretty soon I'll be one of them.

Friday, August 22, 2008

Bug Tracking Revisited: The trials and tribulations of "Fogbugz"

I started using Fogbugz, a web based project management system for work about 4 months ago. I'd previously used a hacked version of a PHP and MySQL program called Mantis, which I found to be adequate.

Fogbugz was hyped up as being the simple "be all and end all" solution to project management that would work out of the box, handle enquiries by magic automatically responding to email enquiries and help solve data duplication and a whole bunch of other problems. Certainly the sales pitches on the Fog creek website are pretty slick.

The interface, I was told, was so uber Web 2.0 and friendly that even a baby could use the thing.
In reality I was given a 1-2 hour second hand walkthrough.

The reality is far from easy. It certainly is different. In fact, personally I've found it to be one of the most complex and awkward tools I've ever used. After my walkthrough session I had absolutely no idea how to use the thing and a mountain of questions a mile high.

Well I guess I was always told that it wasn't like the many CRMs with bug tracking added on, and it wasn't a bug tracker trying to be a CRM, but many times you do need both.

I got sold the solution saying that it was going to be something that the programmers would use and it would have all sorts of poweful and useful reports like discrepancies in estimates, overdue cases and the like. But in reality, everything ended up getting pushed through the system, so reluctantly, I had to learn to work its way. And most of the reports turn out to be pretty useless.

I'm just now getting used to circumstances when I should use my own email and its email.

Then there is setting signatures. I was told that it was easy. So rather than ask for help (I'd rather use "user friendliness and initiative), I searched and searched my user settings and all sorts of other things. Nothing. So I did some Googling. By a couple of hours later I'd found that you can use some sort of thing called "Snippets". But further reading only discovered what they could do and not really how to use them. (If only I had a manual). Finally only after stuffing around for literally ages, I discovered that my laptop keyboard doesn't have the default snippet character ... great, so if only someone had told me I could change it from my options, I'd be a step further from smashing something. ...

Fogbugz also uses a whole lot of filters and reports and uses cookies to save queries. Which is fine until you want to do something and then spend whole minutes deactivating filters and trying to work out which filters have been set.

Then there are timesheets. Unless you're one of those people who works using "What am I doing now" style of worker with minimum distractions, the system is clumsy. I constantly find myself entering times for the wrong days, then entering a time only to find that I don't have the case number and guess what, those funky AJAX style floating box consistently sits smack bang on top of that case number and guess what, it won't move, so I have to close the whole thing off, remember the case number and start over.

Then there is the way that the system categorises things and of course being an email based system when you get bounce backs and spam, you have to deal with them too. As a project management tool I have to get used to this whole process of projects and releases and release candidates. But at the same time, its no web based project management tool either ...

So we're also at the point where we're again hacking it (not always progammatically though) just to try to get it to work the way we want. What was supposed to save time has, at least for me, become a huge time waster. And there is more duplication of data then ever.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. I'm not saying that Fogbugz is bad, just to scratch the surface of the slick sales pitch. Maybe I should have read the manual afterall ...

Wednesday, August 20, 2008

First impressions of Firefox 3.0

I've recently run an update of my web browser to Firefox 3.0 and I must say, superficially I can't see too many differences. Some of the interface elements have increased in size. Although I suspect many of the improvements are under the hood in terms of rendering and new standards support. However I have experienced numerous severe crashes, particularly on some sites and incompatibility issues with some rich text editors which has seen me go back to Internet Explorer.

Monday, August 18, 2008

Google Street View, Blogger and Firefox

Several times I've tried to use Google Street View and Blogger by embedding street views into my posts.

On Firefox at least, there seems to be some real problems with this. After doing so, you can no longer edit your post. It currently comes up blank in both "Compose" and "Edit HTML" views.

After upgrading to Firefox 3.0, it seemed to fix the problem.

YouTube goes Google with Insight video analytics and Google Maps integration

Logging into YouTube recently I first became aware of some new features I've had on my personal wishlist for some time.

Probably the most significant is Insight, which provides a Google Analytics type view of who is watching your videos. It has some great statistics including daily view charts, referrals (such as from related videos, YouTube searches or embedding) and even which countries the viewers are from and even some basic demographic information. All this is fantastic and really improves the experience for video uploaders.

The other features I've discovered is that you can now set a date and Google Map location for your videos. While I'm not sure how this benefits the video uploader in terms or exposure or how it will affect the search (I suspect they intend to add a whole range of new end user features around this), it is certainly refreshing and the whole interface now has more of a Web 2.0 feel than ever.

Tuesday, August 5, 2008

Google Street View - Awesome !

Check out the new Google Street view.

http://maps.google.com/help/maps/streetview/

Scary stuff.

Certainly makes touring the world a lot cheaper.
I think it could revolutionise city planning and community consultation.

Big Brother is watching ...

It also opens a minefield of potential problems. Scratch the surface of privacy issues and you'll find a plethora of potential problems. It could make life a whole lot easier for burglars for a start, and not to mention graffiti vandals and a whole range of other nasties ...

Monday, August 4, 2008

Template Monster Alternative - Open Source Web Design

Template Monster is easily the most popular place to get website templates on the web, but I've often tried to find free alternatives because the quality on Template Monster can often be a mixed bag. Some of the templates have terrible HTML with embedded tables with images used for headings, poor CSS and poor source PSD files or restrictive Flash/swf and a dose of general search engine unfriendliness.

So I recently discovered the whole Open Source Web Design movement, the quality and diversity of site templates is increasing all the time.
And here are some of the better sites I've found so far:

http://www.oswd.org
http://www.openwebdesign.org
http://www.opendesigns.org
http://www.oswt.co.uk