Archive

Posts Tagged ‘Google’

Google Analytics Plugins for WordPress

If you have a WordPress blog and use Google Analytics to track its usage, you should consider using one of the following plugins:

Both considerably simplify Google Analytics usage with WordPress. You don’t have to open any WordPress file and physically enter the Analytics code. This is especially important if you change your WordPress theme every once a while – or may be upgrade to a later version of a theme.

I personally prefer the one from Semiologic because it ignores your hits if you are logged in as a author, editor or the admin. Without this feature, I was getting too many false hits on '/?p=XX&preview=true' every time I wrote a new post using Save and Continue Editing feature of WordPress.

So that’s what ig stands for…

I’ve been using the Google Personalized Homepage for quite a while now. I always wondered what the ig in http://www.google.com/ig stood for.

This clears things a bit…

Tags:

Google Talk and choice of Gaim/Pidgin ports

If you use Gaim – er… or should I say Pidgin – to connect to Google Talk, you probably use the usual 5222 port as mentioned in the instructions on configuring Gaim for Google Talk.

If for some reason, your firewall/network does not allow communication on port 5222, give port 443 a try. It worked for me.

Camino: it’s not the Live Bookmarks…

I like Camino, but it is not my default browser on the Mac – Firefox is.

So far, I was under the impression that Firefox like Live Bookmarks – or more so the lack of them in Camino – was the show stopper for me. But recently, I have stopped, although not completely, using Live Bookmarks in Firefox.

I was wondering, what changed? Turns out, I was mostly using Live Bookmarks like a feed reader. Once I started using Google Reader, I no longer felt the need to use Live Bookmarks the way I was using them.

Secondly, I had feed that contained all the websites I visit frequently. I Live Bookmark’d that feed to get access to that list from multiple machines. I’ve started using Google Bookmarks – via the Google Toolbar – to maintain a globally accessible repository of my bookmarks.

So it was not exactly Live Bookmarks that I was missing in Camino. What I was missing was the ability to gain access to my bookmarks that I might have updated at work, or on a different machine etc. Now I am going to find out if there is a way to use Google Bookmarks in Camino – other than over the web of course.

Google Bookmarks

I have been using Google Bookmarks for a while now. Needless to say, I like the Bookmarks button on the Google Toolbar. Although I don’t really care about most of the other functionality in the toolbar. So I got rid of it (via Customize)! With Firefox’s Bookmarks Toolbar not needed anymore, the browser window looks pretty clean!

The cleaner Firefox browser window

I like this for now, may be until Places changes the bookmarks scene. I hope Google finds a way to seamlessly link Google Bookmarks with Places… that would be very useful.

Which reminds me of Browser Sync. I tried it, but quickly gave it up after I came across too many issues using it on different machines running different platforms. Another problem was that, at least at that point, there was no web access to manage Browser Sync data. You could only delete it! Google Bookmarks gives me greater control over the bookmarks database.

And what more, if need be, I can use Google Bookmarks with IE too! Well, for that matter, with any browser with access to http://www.google.com/bookmarks/

Tags: ,