google – Page 4 – Something Odd!

Oh look! There’s Jupiter!

My wife called me out to the back garden tonight to see the bright object in the sky near the moon. She thought I might know what it was you see. I, uh, didn’t. I thought it might be Mars because of the colour but I knew how to find out! Google Sky Map to the rescue!

I quickly installed the app on my phone, pointed the device at the moon and hey presto! Instant astronomer! Ok, maybe not but it’s still a very cool app. The last time I tried it I found the map was a few degrees off which might have been something to do with the GPS on the original SGS. On the SGS II however it was accurate and a pleasure to use.

Thanks Google!

A really simple way to archive your Tweets

You have a gmail account don’t you? Visit Google Reader now.
Click on the “Add a Subscription” button.
Type in the web address of your Twitter profile. Mine is http://twitter.com/donncha.
Click Add.
There is no #5.

Since Google Reader doesn’t have the 3,200 post limit that Twitter has you can always get access to your old tweets, even when you go over that limit. On the downside, your Twitter account can’t be private and Google will find out yet more about you (but they probably already indexed your Twitter account anyway so no loss there!)

Android Playstation Emulator goes Free!

Fly! Fly away! Be free!

In other news, the Playstation emulator for Android (PSX4Droid) that Google booted off the Android Market is now open source and you can grab source and binaries from here. If you’re impatient get the apk here and install in the usual way on your phone. (via)

Now, how do I load a PS1 CD into my phone?

WP Super Cache and mod_pagespeed

So I finally got a chance to try mod_pagespeed on this server. I particularly wanted to know if it behaved well with WP Super Cache as I’d read reports that it causes problems.

Unfortunately those problems are real but I’ve been told that a new release will be out shortly to address a few bugs so perhaps this will help.

If you’d like to try mod_pagespeed make sure you disable compression in WP Super Cache and clear the cache first. Even though the docs state that the module always generates uncompressed HTML it appears to do the opposite. In fact, it tries to load mod_deflate:

# more pagespeed.load
LoadModule pagespeed_module /usr/lib/apache2/modules/mod_pagespeed.so

# Only attempt to load mod_deflate if it hasn’t been loaded already.
<IfModule !mod_deflate.c>
LoadModule deflate_module /usr/lib/apache2/modules/mod_deflate.so
</IfModule>

When things were working, supercached files were processed by mod_pagespeed correctly, I noticed inline Javascript was modified to remove whitespace and I presume other changes were made too but I already minify things and have static files off on another domain so perhaps the changes made on my pages are less minimal.

The changes made by mod_pagespeed, like minifying inline Javascript, are not cached by WP Super Cache so your server has to make these changes each time a page is served. I know that mod_deflate does not cache the gzipped page content, but zips up the page each time it’s served. Mod_pagespeed does however provide a caching mechanism so there’s a good chance those changes are cached there. I haven’t looked at the code so I don’t know.

I did have problems with dynamic pages. A simple phpinfo() refused to load quite often, and backend requests sometimes became stuck. Load on the server sky rocketed occasionally, usually when the module cache directory was emptied.

For now I’ve turned mod_pagespeed off but that might change as this is a young project and maturing fast! I’ll update this post whenever this happens.

Google for Pacman

So, Pacman turned 30 in the last few days and Google put a Pacman game on it’s front page for the day! If you missed it, you can still play Pacman online.

Apparently it’s written in HTML, Javascript and CSS with Flash only used for sound so it will work almost as well on iPhones and iPads.

The Guardian has a great post on it, as does Dave and many others.

Google does hotel reviews now?

A couple of days ago my wife and I discussed our next holiday and she was quite taken with the idea of going to a particular hotel. I searched for the hotel and when I discovered that Google showed hotel reviews linked right from the search page I had to write about it.
After I had written the post I realised that someone might ring up the hotel and if they were feeling nasty or malicious they might cancel the holiday. Therefore, I’ll use the Radisson SAS in Limerick, an excellent hotel we stayed in a few months ago thanks to SuperValu Breaks.

So, search for the Radisson on Google.

Clicking on the reviews link takes you here:

I can only echo the good reviews. It’s a 4 star hotel, but book through SuperValu and you’ll get a big discount! (with the appropriate book of stamps of course)

Richard knows more about this sort of thing than I and he blogged about it 2 days ago. Looks like a good change for Irish businesses!

BTW, the break away is booked, the hotel is child friendly, we’re looking forward to it already!

PS. Richard has a post on Google’s local search which is definitely worth a read.

Google Chrome on Linux and Mac

Google Chrome, the open source browser that recently made headlines, was unfortunately only released for Windows. Linux and <a href="Mac users were left out in the cold.

It was possibly to get the browser working with Wine, but it wasn’t very stable by all accounts. Thanks to CodeWeavers, they have ported the Chromium browser to Linux and Mac OS X and packaged it ready for download on both systems!

First impressions of the Linux version? For some reason my whole screen goes black while a page is loading or when a new tab is opened. I see this in Vice (The C64 emulator) and any movie player other than mplayer so it’s an issue with my setup, not the browser. The fonts in the url bar suck as well, but I’m sure they can be fixed too. My curiousity is sated. CoveWeavers did a great job, but I’m going back to Firefox. (Via Tom)

So today I am pleased to announce that we have shipped freely available versions of Chromium for both the Mac and Linux. Not only does this give Mac and Linux users a chance to see what all the hype is about, it also lets the world see just how far Wine has come and how powerful it truly can be. In just 11 days, we were able to bring a modern Windows application across to Mac and Linux.

How Google Search Really Works

I’ve always wondered, ‘What really happens behind the scenes at Google when I hit the “Google Search” button?’

(via Scott)

How to successfully spam blogs (and how to fight back)

What you’re about to learn isn’t anything new. It’s not particularly earth shattering either, but a lot of people don’t know it.

NOFOLLOW DOES NOT WORK (properly)

You may have noticed legitimate looking comments on your blog from people with suspect names. Usually the name will be a brand name, service or literally anything that sells. The commenter’s website is obviously related to that business. Why do they bother using special keywords when Google is supposed to not follow those links? Do they know something you don’t? Yup. They know that keywords, even on nofollowed links, matter. I’d provide reference links to SEO blogs explaining this but then they’d know I’m reading and they might shut up.

So, how do you go about spamming blogs? (And how do you defend against those spammers?) Here are two examples:

George, who runs 858graphics obviously makes signs in San Diego. I’m sorry that his store was egged last year, but he’s obviously trying to manipulate Google. Unfortunately, he succeeded. He is #2 in Google for “San Diego Signs”. Strangely enough there are no links to his website.

This second guy isn’t quite so successful, and to think he’s spamming my poor Shih Tzu, Oscar. The spammer’s domain is near the bottom of the first page of a Google search for Shih Tzu Checks. That’s still pretty good considering he doesn’t have any links to that page either.

How did these guys find my blog? The first guy searched for WordPress blog posts with comments. The second looked for a page saying, “leave a reply”, an open invitation to spam if ever there was one!

Out of curiosity I followed the Google search a recent spammer used. On the blogs surrounding my blog in that search I found traces of him everywhere. He left legit looking comments but the link was always full of keywords for his business.

Stuffing keywords in nofollowed links certainly helps rank for keywords.

So, you want to know how to fight back? It’s very simple if you’re using WordPress:

Install my Comment Referrers plugin. That will add a line at the end of the moderation emails with the referrer of the visitor. Some referrers should ring alarm bells!
Install Delink Comment Author. This plugin removes the link the comment author left as their URL. I modified my install so it removes the email too as I moderate comments from new users.
I was planning on coding this next plugin, but I found Lucia’s Link Love first and that saved me the trouble. I modified mine so it doesn’t hyper link the name of a comment author who has left less than a certain number of comments. See this comment as an example. That “Landscape Artist” never came back to my blog again so his “name” isn’t linked to his site.

So, chances are a few more people are going to try this technique now that I’ve blogged about it. I bet many more blog owners will be more vigilant of it now though. It’s your blog. If you don’t want to be pawn to a spammer then fight back!

Edit: Here is my version of Lucia’s Linky Love. Just rename this file to .php and drop into your plugins folder. If you’re not logged in or have a comment cookie in your browser you should see some comment author’s names won’t be linked.

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