Google Groups #Fail

If you are familiar with jQuery and follow their news, you would have heard that they switched from Google Groups to Zoho to host their forums / discussions. John Resig gives a number of points on the failures of Google Groups in his blog post and I can see why.

Since I joined several groups that I found of interest at some point, I had to some Google Groups cleanup. I removed several of the projects that I was no longer interested in and found a new preference “Do not allow group managers to directly add me to their groups” which was defaulted to being unchecked. I am not certain of this but my understanding is that it allows a group manager of any group I am a member of, to create a new group and add me to it.

It almost seems spamalicious to add that setting and defaulting it to “Yes, please allow Group managers to invite me to new groups that can spam me and pass my information to them”. When I cleaned up my groups, I thought I found a few groups unfamiliar and I am still not sure if it was just Group Managers who added me or if I accidentally joined the discussion forums at some point.

Check your settings and leave feedback on whether you also have the same settings.

PS. I also added the open-source Vanilla Forums v2.0 from GitHub and it looks very tidy and Web 2.0 unlike most of the solutions out there. You can see it at http://eapen.in/forum/

Yahoo #Fail

Trying to visit Yahoo News earlier this week – gave me a 404 error for a minute or so and redirected me to their homepage with the circled Google advertisement as the most prominent result. This is a great pick of sponsored keywords by Google to send Yahoo! users over to Google.

WaveSecure {Review}

After reading about WaveSecure via LifeHacker, I installed it but only got to try it out today and I am IMPRESSED.

Here is a brief overview of WaveSecure’s features:

• Backup SMS
• Backup Contacts
• Backup Call Logs
• Backup Media (selectively)
• Track Location
• Remote Lock/unlock/wipe
• Needless to say – Restore functionality

There are a lot of apps out there that will backup the SMS, Contacts, Cal Logs for the Android but its nice to have a single application that does this and more. What blew me away with this application is the “Track Location” and “Remote Lock” feature.

WaveSecure Track Location Feature

When you choose to “Track Location” via the website, it sends out a text message (encrypted/gobbledygook text) or MMS that seems to activate the WaveSecure application and if GPS is enabled uses that and if not uses the Wireless Tower Triangulation method to determine your location. I tried this and without the GPS enabled it found my exact location and without the GPS also it was pretty close. So, if you ever misplace your phone, you just need to visit this site and you will probably remember where you left it (in your car or at the gym). The technology that uses the SMS information is what impressed me the most!!! Now, I just wish the GPS had a 1 foot accuracy range so I could find my phone the next time it is hidden under a magazine or under some clothes so I can find it within my house instead of having to dial 5 times and hoping I can hear the phone vibrate or ring in one of the rooms.

Finally, the remote wipe allows you to wipe all your secure data of your phone (if you work for the CIA or if you are Tiger Woods and don’t want Elin to see any of the text messages/call logs when you forget your phone at home). You can easily restore the data after you recover your phone. The site also offers the option to lock your phone remotely which instructs the person who found the phone to call 911 to return the phone or if you know the secret PIN you can unlock it yourself.

It also has a “Lock & Alarm” feature which makes your phone wail (annoyingly!) and will embarrass any thief who hoped to get away with your phone. It also displays your emergency contact phone numbers (which it asks you for when you install the program) so you can call them and return the phone sooner. The next time my phone is on silent or vibrate and I cannot find it within my house, I plan on using the “wail” feature to locate it. You can also unlock the phone through the website as well.

So, if you have an Android powered device, I highly recommend WaveSecure and SlideScreen.

To www or not to www

As you can see, if you visit my website with www.eapen.in, you will be redirected to eapen.in (with a search-engine friendly 301 redirect, of course) and I really wish all websites would adopt this method instead of using the “www” since it makes more sense as it is the root domain. One of biggest annoyances is when the slow one finger typists (dad? mom?) have to type the “www” in a URL and punch in “w w w g [backspace] . g o o g l e . c o m ” instead of just typing “g o o g l e . c o m”.

The “www prefix” is just the old convention and is totally unnecessary. This saves 4 characters and for a message that includes links, this can save quite a bit of space. Twitter and other services that encourage smaller character limits, this is quite beneficial rather than having to employ a URL-shortening service. Even more useful is when users email links and when the email client hard-wraps the message at 72 characters, it often breaks the links. There is still a good chance that the link will break if your original URL had more than 76 characters. A lot of websites & webmasters do not know about canonical URLs and how search engines view a website as having duplicate content when a URL is accessible via the “www” and the “non-www” counterpart. (i.e. A search engine like Google sees http://mysite.com/buy-product1.html and http://www.mysite.com/buy-product1.html as 2 different sites with duplicate content unless you have canonical URLs entered).

As with all rules, there are always exceptions and I wouldn’t recommend this for large websites that need load balancing which are served up as www.website.com and www2.website.com although most of the bigger companies (like Google, Amazon) employ round-robin DNS to handle such traffic with just one domain and routing the requests to different servers/IPs.

One of the advantages of having the “www” is that in emails and URLs in SMSes is that it automatically hyperlinks the URL rather than using “http://” and in those cases, it actually saves a few characters. Either way, my preference for URLs now is without “www”.

tl;dr
Prefer not to use “www” in URLs Prefer to use “www” in URLs (see below)

UPDATE (12/16/2010): I just posted an update to this and now I believe it is better to use “www” in URLs

CSS Frameworks

I have been interested in CSS frameworks recently and have played with 960.gs and BluePrint. Both are great and now I found the winner – a combination of the two and more – BlueTrip and I am using this for a lot of my projects including an earlier mockup of my site. I highly recommend it as a starting point for web developers/designers.

Bluetrip CSS Framework

For those who are not familiar with the CSS frameworks, check out the link above and fascinate yourself with a lot of the groundwork already done for you. Another great feature of BluePrint is that it combines all the CSS files into a single file (unlike some of the other frameworks which have several files in an effort to keep the file size smaller) which will definitely help cut down the number of requests from the browser.