Michael Gibbs » Page 11

Author: Michael Gibbs

I'm a technologist at heart, assisting companies best utilize the Internet to market themselves and sell their products and services online. This includes organizations as large as Google and as small as one or two individuals.
At Over The Top and Exhibit A Communications, I've programmed solutions for Google as well as at least one other company that was later acquired by Google.

I've been CTO of an Internet SaaS company and spent my time pretty evenly between guiding the future technical strategy of the company, architecting software solutions for my dev teams, designing and running a data center to service our clients world-wide as well as being a technical evangalist/sales engineer to our media clients large and small.

I've also been Chief Photographer of the Daily Sun/Post newspaper back when it was a 5-day a week daily newspaper.

I also spent a great many years as a beach lifeguard for the City of San Clemente as well as Jr. Lifeguard instructor and then as it's program coordinator.
Bragging rights
Private Pilot with Instrument rating and proud husband of soon to be 25 years (and counting).

Using Google Forms? Get Notified Of Submissions!

Google Spreadsheet Form If your Google Sites or custom website is using Google Forms for data collection, you’re probably quite familiar with going to the spreadsheet to collect information submitted by your site visitors. However, many times you want to know RIGHT AWAY that a customer is reaching out to you because they are a hot lead that you’ll want to contact immediately.

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Google Sites to include Templates features

Google Sites, a member of the Google Apps family as well as a stand-alone feature, has added site template to the feature list of this great product. Now, instead of the relatively lame themes you now have complete site templates that include not only the overall theme of the site but also suggested content, structure and gadgets that take full advantage of the platform.

Now don’t get me wrong, the themes were nice for personal sites in a GeoCities/FrontPage kind of way but there is so much you can do with Templates. Admittedly, many of the initial templates that are available are still a little "blocky", there are a number that one would be hard pressed to tell weren’t custom sites if it weren’t for the

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Creating Or Using a Google Account

Have you lately been asked to log into your Google account to access a calendar, site, Google Analytics, Google Adword, Google webmaster tools or other Google service but didn’t know how or what your Google Account was?

Well, this is simple if you have an email address that ends in @gmail.com as your email address is the key to your account. To utilize any of the other services available from Google including iGoogle, Web History, Google Checkout or Google Docs you would just sign in using your email address and the associated password.

However, it is more likely that confusion is caused when someone (a consultant or web geek or friend) sends you an email saying "I’ve set you up with access to Google Analytics for your site. Go ahead and use your Google Account with an email address of yourname@domainname.com" and you have no idea what they are talking about.

imageOne of the quickest and easiest ways to do this is to go to https://www.google.com/accounts/Login and clicking on "Create an account now" link at lower right.

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Backup Your Google Apps Data

One of the concerns we hear from people is "How do we backup our data when it lives in the cloud?" Well, if you are using Google Apps, or even just plain old Google Docs, the option is there to do this.

The first thing you’ll need to do is to select all of your documents. Because Google uses an "infiinite scrolling" technique to display your documents, you may need to select "All Items" in the left menu and then scroll all the way to the bottom of your list of items; ensuring that Google has loaded all the documents on the screen. Then you can pull down checkbox selector and choose "Select all visible". This will put a checkbox next to each item on the list.

Select All Items screenshot

Next you’ll either right click on the listed items and select "Export" or pull down the "More Actions" menu item and select "Export".

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How NOT to Offers Support Videos

imageI was signing up for a new YouTube account to support a forthcoming video/blog project (we’ll have announcements about it soon) when I stumbled on the following page in Google’s YouTube support pages:

I was interested in learning more about desired video formats and, in particular HD video formats. So, I clicked on the video at right labelled “How to make HD videos for YouTube” only to be greeted by the following message in the video:

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Moving From One Google Apps Account To Another

I’ve had a number of customers who’ve moved from one Google Apps account to another recently and thought I’d write down the steps on how to do this for use by others in the same situation. This seems to happen regularly with startups who change their business model (along with their domain name) mid-stream.

Some people just might add the new domain name to their existing Google Apps account but this means they can’t send AS the new domain unless they set up “Send Mail As” and set the new account as their default, but more importantly, the other elements of their Google Apps suite (like docs, calendar, etc) will be in the old domain.

imageSo, once you have accounts in both domains you will go into your OLD account and set up forwarding. This is done by  going into the “Settings” section of your imagewebsite  and  selecting the “Forwarding and POP/IMAP” tab.

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