With Facebook’s recent update and changes to their privacy settings, it seems that keeping in control of what information is shared with your friends is becoming more difficult. Perhaps you don’t want to tell all your friends about every single group you join? Perhaps you don’t want everyone to know about an event you are attending? Do you want everyone to see whenever you are tagged in an embarrassing photograph?
Well now is your chance to regain some control with this excellent video which goes over the new privacy settings in Facebook – and where to find them. Enjoy.
So… you want to insert some tracking code into the body of your Wordpress blog / website page to track conversions? Simple, surely?
Think again!
The first option that I tried was using the custom fields on the page to insert the code. Unfortunately though, this inserts the code into the header of the page – not the body where it needs to be – so that’s not going to work for us.
If you Google the subject, the top result is this post by Ozone Marketing. This looks promising as it is based on a Wordpress plugin and these are generally good for the not-so-technical amongst us in terms of adding functionality to the mighty Wordpress. However, having tried this I have got to admit that it did not actually work for me. The reason is that the solution was based on a Google Website Optimizer Plugin for Wordpress and this plugin has now been updated which renders this approach unworkable. I might be wrong about that and if I am I would love to hear!
Next up is this post from the Google Adwords Forum. Unfortunately the best that they could come up with was somebody suggesting checking the plugins available for Wordpress – surely somebody must have written one… Well – sorry – they haven’t!
The last post of note is this one from ‘Internet Megaphone’. I would say this is a very well researched and written post by somebody who obviously knows what they’re talking about. The problem with this is really that it involved downloading and editing PHP pages and, frankly, this scares me.
So.. what we really need (and urgently) is a Wordpress plugin specifically dedicated to this one issue – that is, adding AdWords tracking code to one specific page of a Wordpress blog. If anybody knows of one I would love to hear about it. If, as I suspect, there isn’t one, then coders – I suggest you get cracking!
A very recent announcement on the official Google blog entitled ‘A New Approach to China’ seems to suggest that Google have now lost their patience with the Chinese government’s human rights abuses. Of course the post does not say this directly but, if one reads between the lines, the message is clear.
What the blog post does say explicitly is that the company was “no longer willing to continue censoring our results” on their Chinese search engine Google.cn. The company seems to have taken particular issue with the fact that “we have evidence to suggest that a primary goal of the attackers was accessing the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists.”
LS Digital Media applauds Google for taking the moral high ground, for putting principles before profit. Okay, Google aren’t perfect but at least they are trying to do good and there are a very many companies, organisations and governments that could take a leaf out of their book. Well done the Big G!
This is a great new feature in the latest upgrade to Wordpress – version 2.9. It’s here – you can now edit images directly from within Wordpress.
The functionality is basic for the time being but it does allow you to scale, crop and rotate images within the CMS.
Personally, I am sure that even this simple amount of functionality is going to save quite some time. Rather than needing to edit images in an external editor such as Photoshop and then upload them again to the media library – none of this will be necessary any longer. And that’s great!
A debate was held earlier this week at the IAB with the very intention of coming up with a definitive answer to the question “Are apps more important than mobile sites?” The article on the IAB website can be found here.
Well, to summarise the findings… At the start of the debate 58% disagreed with the motion and by the end of the debate that figure had risen to 87%. However I do think that the wording made this an inherently pointless debate as the findings were, quite obviously, that you should have both.
A much more interesting debate would have been “which of the two channels is more important?” That way you would have had to choose one or the other, and my money would have been on apps quite frankly. I would be interested to see what the panel thought of this.
Some of the statistics are staggering. Jon Mew, head of mobile at the IAB, introduced the proceedings by outlining some key statistics to highlight the popularity of iPhone apps in particular. Mew pointed out that there are now 115,000 iPhone apps for sale in the Apple app store and 2.4bn have been downloaded, meaning that more people have downloaded an app than own a TV. And, citing figures from acrossair, they demonstrated that the iPhone is the fastest growing technology product ever!
Walshaw Lodge is a unique country retreat set in the absolutely stunning countryside of the Pennine Moors in West Yorkshire. It is the perfect venue for large gatherings of family and friends, or for residential courses and workshops. It is also an original and inspiring setting for business meetings and corporate events.
My major gripe with Skype since I’ve been using SnowLeopard is that the video call functionality has simply refused to work. That’s quite a major gripe since my Mac Book has got a great built in camera just waiting to be used.
I have been trying to work out what was going on for a few days. Well, now I have found the solution on the Skype for Mac blog. It turns out that all is now well as Skype have sorted this and several other issues that I didn’t even realise existed with their latest hotfix. Skype 2.8 hotfix 1 for Mac can be downloaded here.
Today Google have added a new Sports Calendars function to Google Calendar. This is a very easy way to stay on top of your favourite team(s) fixtures throughout the season. Sports covered include football, or as they call it “soccer”. Rugby is the other UK focused sport covered. North American sports include (Amercian) football, baseball, basketball and (ice) hockey.
I know that from my experience it has been valuable but rather time consuming to go through the entire Fulham FC fixture list and manually add the individual matches by hand. Now, within a matter of clicks, every single match for the rest of the season (home and away) has been added to my calendar instantly. Happy days.
To add more calendars to your Google calendar, simply click on Settings, then Calendars, then click on the link that says “Browse Interesting Calendars”. From here you can drill down to Soccer > England > EPL (English Premier League) and choose your team. They also cover the championship and other football leagues.
How many times do you click on an email link when browsing a website, only to find that your computer starts trying to open the dreaded Microsoft Outlook, when all you really wanted to use is your Google Apps account?
Well, google apps help is at hand and fortunately it’s rather simple. There are only 2 steps. First, open your Google Apps mail page. Then paste the following code into the address bar. Make sure you change where it says “yourdomain.com” to your real address – i.e. your domain name.
And that’s it! For more information and for instructions on how to do the same using Gmail, see the original Lifehacker article here.
Marissa Mayer, Google’s VP Search Products & User Experience, recently took questions in the most recent edition of Digg Dialogg. Topics covered by Mayer include the upcoming launch of Google Wave (Google Wave), how Google feels about Microsoft Bing and Wolfram Alpha, and the biggest threats to Google’s survival (”complacency”, says Mayer). Interesting viewing…
A debate was held earlier this week at the IAB with the very intention of coming up with a definitive answer to the question “Are apps more important than mobile sites?” The 
My major gripe with Skype since I’ve been using SnowLeopard is that the video call functionality has simply refused to work. That’s quite a major gripe since my Mac Book has got a great built in camera just waiting to be used.
Today Google have added a new Sports Calendars function to Google Calendar. This is a very easy way to stay on top of your favourite team(s) fixtures throughout the season. Sports covered include football, or as they call it “soccer”. Rugby is the other UK focused sport covered. North American sports include (Amercian) football, baseball, basketball and (ice) hockey.
How many times do you click on an email link when browsing a website, only to find that your computer starts trying to open the dreaded Microsoft Outlook, when all you really wanted to use is your Google Apps account?