How to delete _old data in Google Calendar • 07 Jan 2011
I use Google Calendar as a vital piece of milonga.be: me and some 20 other editors keep an up-to-date calendar of tango events in Belgium. We’ve been doing that for the last 3 years, so there was a lot of old, no-longer-relevant data in the agenda. The way I use the calendar on the site is that I download all the appointments as a .ICS (iCal/gCal) file and then format/display it with another program. But with all the old data still present, that ICS file had grown to more than 1MB, and this size slowed down the updates (I download...
MIVB en Google Transit • 06 Dec 2007
Wouldn’t this be a great idea: the Brussels public transport not mapped by MIVB‘s horribly unpractical route planner, but by Google’s Transit maps. You just need to get an export of the stops, the routes and the times, and they can be shown on Google Maps just like that. Where should we start looking for the source data? Then create agency.txt, stops.txt, routes.txt, trips.txt, stop_times.txt, calendar.txt and that’s it.
What Google Agenda currently misses • 22 Aug 2007
I am using Google Agenda as the central repository for the milonga.be Belgian tango agenda, which I edit together with half a dozen other tango enthusiasts. While the principle of a central, hosted calendar storage works wonderfully, I (have to) use a modified PHPiCalendar to display different views on the agenda (‘only Brussels’, ‘only workshops’, ‘1 week in advance’, ‘1 month in advance’, …). There are actually a couple of features that I’d like to see in Google Agenda, and what better place to list them but here:
Web tool: visualize on Google Maps • 05 Jul 2007
I have been working a bit on Google Maps visualisations for my milonga.be tango site, to show an overview of all Belgian tango sites. I did it the following way:
Twitter: watch your mouth • 12 Apr 2007
Whether Twitter will turn out to be a conversational revolution or a giant waste of time, I’m still not sure about. Sometimes it feels like instant messaging (chatting *with* someone), sometimes like just changing the subtitle of your MSN/Gtalk (just a shout, no specific destination), sometimes it’s more like talking to yourself. But make no mistake: you are not just talking to yourself!
My own Pagerank inventory • 19 Jan 2007
When I search for Roos Van Acker (in the Google sense of searching), I have 2 sites that show up in the top results: a blog post of mine and the Flickr picture you see at the right. My blog has a Pagerank 6, so that explains why it can score high in searches, but I was sometimes surprised when my Flickr pictures showed up high in Google results; until I noticed that my Flickr stream also had a Pagerank 5. So maybe I had more PR firepower that I suspected. I decided to make an inventory of all sites...
Yahoo should sell Flickr to Google • 21 Nov 2006
Brad Garlinghouse, a Yahoo senior vice president, has written an internal memo (that leaked, obviously) stating that it is about time for Yahoo! to bite the bullet and start reorganising/refocusing.
Import Excel into Google Spreadsheets • 03 Nov 2006
This is the first time I noticed this: an email in my Gmail with Excel attachments offers me the option to view the document in Google Spreadsheets.
Intrusive Google ads on Sourceforge • 01 Sep 2006
Come on, I can understand Sourceforge needs the Adsense revenue, but this is going too far. A huge 450 x 400 blue advertisement is blocking access to most download links on a Sourceforge download page, and there is no way to make it disappear, no [X] button in the top right or a “hide this” link.
Five SEO Excuses • 29 Aug 2006
Russell Jones, CTO of SEO firm Virante, has found an original way of showing off his SEO skills: he created a top 5 of SEO excuses, and made sure they listed #1 to #5 for the Google query “five seo excuses“.
Brussels Tango on Google Calendar • 21 Aug 2006
I’ve started a public Google calendar for tango events (milonga’s, salons) in and around Brussels. My preferred site, milonga.be has gone down, the agenda at tango.be is quite ugly (it uses frames *shiver* ), and Marisa & Oliver’s agenda cannot be exported. So I made my own:
Trackback wizard for Blogger users • 30 Jun 2006
Trackbacks are a good way to alert other bloggers that you citing them on your blog. It also helps to drive traffic to your own site (if your comment was insightful or tempting).
Unfortunately, some blog hosts like Blogger, Skynetblogs do not automatically send a trackback ping to all the blog URLs in your blog post. So how do you send such a trackback from your blogspot.com site to other blogs (provided they support receiving them, obviously)?
Lies, damned lies and Google trends • 16 May 2006
Yesterday I was browsing through my freshly arrived Tufte book “The visual display of quantitative information“. One example of “garbage in, garbage out” that he gives is the London Stock Exchange index (which went way down one year in Dec) and the solar radiation in that same year (which obviously also went down in the winter). Plotting both lines in the same graph gives the impression of correlation (Stock Exchange went down because of lack of sun).
Adsense also looks at search terms • 06 Apr 2006
I had been wondering just how much information Google Adsense uses to select the right contextual ads. Specifically, do they use the referring page also. I just got part of the answer:
Blogger snafu: emergency migration to WordPress • 09 Mar 2006
One of the reasons why I have been posting less the last couple of days, is because I was working on a migration from Blogger to WordPress. I was still working out some DNS stuff (don’t let me get into that, it’s complicated stuff , to do with how Bluehost‘s -my hosting provider- DNS management works).
Google buys Writely • 09 Mar 2006
Google has just confirmed to have bought Upstartle, the creators of Writely (Writely Blog/GoogleBlog via Om Malik). Apart from being good news for the founders of Upstartle, this also indicates Google’s determination to make the fat client history and allow users to do all their business through on-line services.
Recent posts + comments in Blogger • 19 Jan 2006
One of the disadvantages of using Blogger is that by default, you don’t have categories and recent comments on your blog. There is a trick to put recent comments on this Blogger help page. It involves introducing a new <Blogger> ... </Blogger> loop in the blog template. A nice trick, but I don’t like the fact that they only show the comment dates.
Google introduces music search • 15 Dec 2005
When a user enters a music-related search in Google search box, the resulting search returns information about the artist, a few albums and a picture, when available, above the standard search results.
via money.cnn.com
Google experiments with inline revisions • 15 Dec 2005
I don’t recall having seen this before: within the SERP (Search Engine Result Page) of a keyword X, Google puts the top 3 results for a keyword Y.
The exact details:
Google Toppers: pick your title carefully • 24 Nov 2005
Everyone with a bit of SEO (Search Engine Optimalisation) experience knows that the title of your HTML pages is crucial. But just how strong is that tiny part of your HTML? When I noticed I had become #1 for the Google query “media technology belgium” in Google (3 words I put in my blog title), I started investigating a bit further. I was first in a total of 18 million pages (according to the “of about” part in the top right of each Google results page). Could I do better than that? I could -as can be seen lower- but...
Contextual advertising without JavaScript • 26 Oct 2005
A recent article on Jensense: Monetizing from those with javascript disabled made me ponder a bit on the possibilities of contextual advertising *without* JavaScript. This would be primarily for places where you cannot add JavaScript (e.g. in RSS feeds, in blog posts). And I think I have found a solution.
Pareto doesn’t do search • 11 Sep 2005
I’m gonna talk about a post that is 6 months old, I know, but I recently re-read it and wanted to link it to Technorati’s recent traffic troubles.
Joe Kraus from JotSpot (and previously Excite) wrote an excellent article called “The long tail of software. Millions of Markets of Dozens.“. I’ll concentrate on the following segements:
Googlistics: messing with the big “G” • 05 Apr 2005
He probably also first thought it was an April’s Fool joke:
Matt Mullenweg from WordPress was discovered to have used his PageRank 8 site (WordPress is a popular open-source blogging software) for hosting lots of irrelevant content, with the purpose to get high scores in Google rankings and (let a customer of his) make money on Google Adsense.
Google is listening: searching audio • 04 Oct 2004
There are rumours that Google would be rolling out search functionality for audio files. It is true that currently no sound files (.wav, .mp3, .wma, .mov, .ogg, …) files can be found by Google’s “normal search”, except for the odd mis-indexed mp3 file.
Multimedia search is a fascinating topic, let’s talk about audio for a moment:
Peter Forret
I store quite a lot of info in Google Spreadsheets, for the obvious reasons:
