I thought it was strange when I noticed that the search result position of a customer’s site, Eureka Financial, varies depending on whether the customer was logged in or not to their Google account. It should be noted the customer is running Adwords campaigns for their site.

But it gets even stranger – can you believe that what browser you’re using affects the result position?

Here are the variations I’ve seen so far on searches for the phrase “financial training uk”:

• customer logged in, result position #2
• customer not logged in, result position #40
• me logged in (different Google acct), Safari: #37
• me logged in (different Google acct), Firefox: #40

When you’re using a Safari browser, Google adds a client param to the url, ie, client=safari, however for firefox the param is not added.

Go figure.

The Readability bookmarklet is by far the most useful bookmarklet I’ve used. A must try for anyone who spends an inordinate amount of time reading stuff on the web

I wish I hadn’t waited so long to install the ClickToFlash plugin, it totally improves the web experience. The idea is simple, all flash animations are paralyzed by default To view flash, including videos like youtube, etc, you have to click to play. A lot healthier for the laptop, no more CPU running at 100% nor mindless distractions when you’re trying to absorb valuable content.

Are you using Wordpress for your blog?  Who isn’t

But a fairly simple sounding task like tracking conversions for Adwords campaigns actually requires a bit of work.  Here is the system I found works best, you can get it up and running in only a few minutes.

The goal is to be able to track when contact enquiries result from a paid campaign.  I’m using this systems at http://seagullsystems.com.

• the contact form plugin you need is cForms, version 1.5 or later (scroll down past the pluses, big banner on left hand side)
• install the plugin, you will probably need to create the file abspath.php manually
• configure a basic contact form, for example name it “my_form”
• insert the form in your relevant page by pasting the html comment <!–cforms name=”my_form”–>
• in the cformII options panel select Form Settings
• make 2 settings:
  • disable the Ajax mode in the first section
  • in the Core Form Admin / Email Options section, tick Enable alternative success page (redirect) and enter a Thanks page URL you previously created inWordpress
• in your Thanks page paste your conversion javascript code provided by Adwords

And that’s it!  Any probs please mention in the comments.

In this video we see Hitler castigating his core dev team for failing to to be true to Agile methodologies and cutting corners on their testing.

Some interesting slides from Mack Collier

Or maybe just Google Apps – either way they are so frequent these days I’m regretting having moved over.  C’mon guys, I never expected this level of outages from the great Google!

Gmail outages

“Detailed technical info” … wtf?

This comic perfectly captures that elusive but all-important question: what are the universal hallmarks of good quality code.