Anyone who cares about website performance comes to the quick realization that ads are a huge slow down. They are also the source of income for many websites. I somewhat casually mentioned back in December that Google was beta testing an async Google Analytics call. I found a bug in the early [...]
Archive for the ‘Google’ Category
Google Conversion Madness
Google’s calculator is starting to bug me because it has some rather odd gaps. I finally decided to dig a little deeper. Take these conversions for example:
2 hogsheads in tierces – Works
1 chain in inches – Works
1 league in furlong – Works
1 MiB in MB – Fail
MiB is likely the most common unit [...]
YouTube HTML5 + Firefox
Google has been a long time supporter of HTML5. They recently launched a HTML5 beta of YouTube however it will only work in Safari and Chrome. The reason for this is not due to the actual markup but the video codec chosen. YouTube is using h.264, the same codec used for YouTube [...]
The Future Of SSL
Google announced the other day that it will now enable HTTPS by default on Gmail. Previously a user had to either manually type in HTTPS or change a setting to default to it, something most people likely never bothered to do. Google says it’s not related but it seems oddly coincidental that this [...]
Google vs. China
Google’s announcement about China is rather stunning in many respects from its candidness to the rather bold decision to potentially leave China over “[t]hese attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered–combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web…”.
Some may remember a few years ago that Yahoo! controversially [...]
Google Nexus One Shaking Things Up?
Google’s Nexus One is now out. Given that they distributed a phone to employees a few weeks ago, this isn’t surprising and we all pretty much knew what was coming for a long time now. Mike Pinkerton (Google Employee, Apple fanboy) has a great and rather candid review of his experience with the [...]
Adventures With document.documentElement.firstChild
Here’s an interesting DOM test-case I ran across inadvertently yesterday.
For the purpose of this post assume the following markup:
< !DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<!– i broke the dom –>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"/>
<title>Testcase</title>
</head>
<body>
<p>Something</p>
</body>
</html>
If I use document.documentElement.firstChild I don’t get consistent behavior. In Firefox and IE I get the <head/> element, which is what I [...]
Who Indexes Tweets
I was curious who is indexing the links that people tweet on Twitter. It’s obvious someone does since links get ‘clicks’ almost immediately after submission. To do this presumably they are tapping into the xmpp firehose.
Lets take a look:
66.xxx.xxx.xxx – - [06/Dec/2009:20:17:43 +0000] “GET /test HTTP/1.1″ 301 20 “-” “Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)”
I [...]
Google DNS Privacy Policy
John Gruber among others note that Google DNS service is not tied to Google Accounts. That’s not just wording in their privacy statement, it’s technically impossible for them to do otherwise, at least with reasonable accuracy.
Your computer is associated with a Google account via a cookie given to you when you login. Cookies [...]
Google Goes HTML5
I just noticed that Google is now serving it’s homepage with an HTML5 doctype:
< !doctype html>
I suspect this might have changed when they launched that new fade effect. I also noticed they are doing so when using the new YouTube “Feather” beta. This shouldn’t be too surprising considering their involvement in the HTML5 [...]
