Full Speed

Google Reader Favicon Disappearing

I have been having problems with Google Reader’s favicon disappearing from my bookmarks bar lately. And since I use the Smart Bookmarks Bar extension in Firefox, this icon is essential when it comes to knowing which bookmark is which.

Back when I was using Firefox 2, this wasn’t such a big deal. I would just manually edit bookmarks.html and insert a base64-encoded data: URI that contained the favicon image. I did this twice and was quite satisfied with the result.

But now, I have upgraded to the beta of Firefox 3. It is so much better that I just can’t bring myself to use FF2 any longer. And with the upgrade, the bookmarks are now stored in a SQLite database. Sure, I could update the data in this database file, but I didn’t want to be constantly editing favicons just to get the desired result.

A bit of googling turned up a thread on the Google Reader Troubleshooting group covering this exact topic. Following the suggestions in that thread, I bookmarked the following URL, and my favicon now appears every time:

http://www.google.com/reader/view/#

It even seems to work with the https variation of the URL:

https://www.google.com/reader/view/#

The troubleshooting thread lists a few links that should work. Apparently, you can build your own as well. For example, the following URL appears to have a working favicon. It links directly to my “finance” label.

https://www.google.com/reader/view/user/-/label/finance#

It’s disappointing that you can’t simply bookmark reader.google.com or www.google.com/reader and get a favicon to show up in Firefox, but until somebody fixes things, this will do.

Django meets Google Code

I recently discovered loads of Django code on Google Code. This tab sweep is meant to lower the memory footprint of Firefox on my laptop while serving as an excellent reference for those seeking prepackaged Django code.

• django-voting
• django-contact-form
• django-registration
• django-tagging
• django-template-utils
• typogrify
• django-openid
• reviewboard (also here)
• django-object-level-caching

GMail Macros

Late last year, Mihai Parparita, a member of Google’s Reader team, release a GreaseMonkey script called GMail Macros. Lately, Mihai has been, understandably, a bit busy. So others have picked up the slack. New features have been added. We even have a “GMail Power Users” discussion group on Google Groups.

I have been using Mihai’s script ever since the day he released it. It makes GMail a whole lot more friendly to someone who doesn’t like to reach over to grab the mouse all that often. I stumbled upon all of the new activity around the script last week when some changes were made to GMail that broke the script. It was great to see that the script’s tiny community had come together to not only fix the script but to also add in some really neat features.

There are a few versions of the script up in the files section of the Google Group. The version that I’m currently using is the one that Brent created/modified. I have tweaked my personal copy, mainly changing the appearance of the popup windows a tiny bit. But anyhow, I’m posting a link to my version here. It’s not significantly different from Brent’s script, but I like it.

Another Way To Talk To Google

Google launched a pinging service for their blog search today. Much like Ping-o-matic, the service allows bloggers to inform the world of new content. This is the first time, however, that we have been able to directly alert Google that a site has been updated. It will be interesting to see how this is used by the SEO crowd.

More Efficient Computing

There are several hard technical problems surrounding power efficiency of computers, but we’ve found one that is actually not particularly challenging and could have a huge impact on the energy used by home computers and low-end servers: increasing power supply efficiency. All computers, including personal computers and servers, have power supplies to convert the alternating current (AC) from the outlet to the direct current (DC) needed by the machine. Typical power supplies waste 30-45% of their input power, and relatively simple modifications can bring this waste down to 10%. […] We believe that the development of a new open standard is necessary to achieve very high efficiencies at low costs, so we have begun discussions with Intel and other vendors that we hope might lead to significantly more efficient power supplies.

Google Blog

Another Google Reader Error Message

Lately it seems that Google’s Reader is full of surprises in its error screens. It’s amazing that in my months of daily use, I have not seen these errors before. Here’s the latest find:

Electrons and Leptons, Meters and Liters

Google Reader is down at the moment, and because I enjoy the various web outage screens, here’s Reader’s.

Google Pushing Talk on GMail

In the wake of some bold predictions by Robert X. Cringely, Google Talk advertisements were spotted on GMail today in a rather prominent location:

Could this be the start of the big VoIP push by the big Internet players? This should be fun to watch.

Google Updates

A little tidbit for the SEO community slipped out on Matt Cutts’ blog yesterday:

“Just to give you a heads-up, I think a new set of backlinks (and possibly PageRank) will probably be visible relatively soon; Iâm guessing within the next few days.”

Matt Cutts

Even though he goes on to say that this will result in a bit of flux afterwards, I certainly hope that the Google results will be consistent after this is over. I have two laptops on the table in front of me right now. When I enter certain searches that I have been monitoring on Google, I see completely different results from the two machines. On one machine, I see that my site has some 40,000 pages in Google’s index. On the other machine, there are around 15 pages. This is not good. Hopefully they will fix this soon.