Googling Google and Other Google Issues ...

I wonder if Google have noticed that when you type any query with "Google Help Centre" as keywords, it enters a circular abomination of a search.

Google redirects you to "Google Help" search. But when you click one of the links, it simply refreshes the screen with the keywords "Track ASP" (whatever that means) in the Search field.

Google Help is a misnomer, because it is completely not helpful, nor are their support staff, most of which don't have a clue what they are doing.

I have now waited 3 weeks for a reasoned response to the reason why my whole Adwords My Client Center broke down for me:

I've decided to escalate your issue to our technical team, which will perform a thorough investigation to determine the cause of the issue. These investigations can take some time, but I'll contact you to let you know when our specialists have found a resolution.

But after no response for some time, I emailed out of frustration ans here is the response that I received:

First, I would like to inform you that according to your screenshot which shows that there is no password field available and this is exactly the way it is. I apologize for any inconvenience caused due to any mis communication in the help center.

I note that they have since updated their Help Centre documentation on this, but for a while their documentation was completely wrong and they kept sending me incorrect advice. Unfortunately changing it does nothing to help my situation where clients are in limbo and cannot authorize me to manage their accounts.

And Analytics support is just as bad. It confounds me that in order to delete duplicate unused accounts that the delete button is greyed out and that you have to contact support, but then they don't actually tell you how you can contact support and do their best to discourage you. Then when you do manage to contact support through their online form and provide all the necessary information, this trivial issue requires toing and froing of about 10 emails until they understand what you actually want, but still can't manage to do it.

Hopefully Yahoo or someone else realises just how bad Google's service really is. There is a definite market there for any savvy competitor who can provide reasonable support and customer service. Afterall, it is not rocket science. I have no idea why Google decided to make their login systems so complex and convoluted that even they can't get a grip on them ....

Web browsing with Google Crome, Initial review

I've just been playing around with Google's new beta web browser and I thought I'd write a few things first up.

I'm actually using it right now.

At first glance, I think the whole "less is more" approach to user interface design has been probably a bit overdone.

The back, forward and go navigation icons tripped me up a bit initially, and I kept looking for the drop down list to access my recently visited sites. However I'm impressed with the way the recent and most visited sites with screenshots automatically appear when I open a new tab. Chrome really takes tabbed browsing to the next level.

Importing settings from Firefox seems easy on the surface, but even though I closed Firefox as advised, it still didn't recognise that Firefox was actually closed.

There are some interface bits and pieces to get used to. I found myself accidentally adding sites to my favourites. But Chrome is much quicker and easier to sort bookmarks into folders which is a definite plus.

It has taken a bit of time to get used to less right click options. In particular, I find myself looking for "Refresh" and "Find" options, only to find them in the toolbar. The page icon is a bit counter intuitive and a bit of a catch all and working out what is in either this or the Tool/spanner icon is a bit tricky at first.

I like the inbuilt developer tools and History tab is great.

As a web developer, I'm really interested in how it renders sites. But having checked out many of my favourite sites, I can't yet see any obvious rendering differences between Chrome and Firefox, which is another real positive. However I did notice that while Hotmail works, rich text editors on Blogger and many content management systems (CMS) don't. I'm told this is a problem WebKit, the engine that both Safari and Chrome are partly based on. But more on this to come soon.

Overall, Chrome Beta is not a bad first up effort by Google, although I still think Firefox is better and will probably remain my favourite browser ...

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.

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.

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 ...

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.

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.