Michael Gibbs » Page 8

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).

Twitter Plugin for Windows Live Writer Updated for OAUTH

Twitter Notify, a great plugin for Windows Live Writer, is working with Twitter again thanks to updated version!Ever since the oauth-calypse back in August, I’ve been really missing my this plugin for Windows Live Writer. WLW is, in my mind, the best way to manage and compose your blog posts regardless of the platform you are working on (WordPress, BlogEngine.Net, SubText, etc) however the Microsoft-built plugin that I relied upon on every post, called Twitter Notify, stopped working abruptly when Twitter dropped support for basic authentication.

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Managing Transition From Google Apps Accounts to Google Accounts

There has always been a challenge associated with differentiating between Google Apps Accounts and Google Accounts. One of the big challenges is that Google doesn’t recognize Google Apps Accounts as Google Accounts for most of their services. Back in May, Google announced plans to change all that.

In the fall of 2010, Google is planning on moving all existing Google Apps accounts (all editions too, not just Premium and Educational versions) over to this new system that will allow users to sign in for the majority of Google services using their Google Apps account. Of course, since this will be accessing the directory information for your Google Apps account, your domain administrator will be able to choose which Google Services people can use their Google Apps login to access.

Previously, the plan was to launch this with a select grouping of applications but the most recent update to the Google Apps Admin Help page about the Google Apps Account Changes indicates

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How To Extend ASPDNSF Product Name Field

On of the nice features of AspDotNetStorefront is that it supports multiple languages right out of the box. It does this by storing the multiple locale phrases as XML fragments inside the particular field. So, in the case of a product name, this means stuffing each of the multi-lingual product names into the Name field in the Product table. It also needs to be properly defined in this field with the XML code so a sample, multiple language name field could contain something similar to the following:

<ml>
    <locale name=”de-DE”>CMS-6R4</locale>
    <locale name=”en-US”>CMS-6R4</locale>
    <locale name=”fr-FR”>CMS-6R4</locale>
    <locale name=”ja-JP”>CMS-6R4</locale>
</ml>

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Delay in Google Indexing of Google Sites?

Been in touch with a couple of friends that have converted over to Google Sites from their old websites and we’ve added them to Google Webmaster Tools (so we can generate a sitemap) and submitted that sitemap back to Google Webmaster Tools.

In the past this has always been a pretty quick route to get sites indexed (or in these cases re-indexed) by Google. That being said, it appears that Google is dragging their heels. Both Advantage Insurance Group and Lake Forest Acupuncture both have been having Google download and read the sitemaps for the last two weeks and (as recently again as yesterday) and they still stand at 0% found in the Google Index.

Anyone else heard of such behavior recently? Any thoughts on what is going on that is slowing down the indexing of the sitemaps?

AspDotNetStorefront Acquired by Vortx

image Wow, just when you think certainly areas of your life are pretty stable… Vortx, a leading integrator of AspDotNetStorefront software in Ashland, OR,  announced yesterday that they had acquired the Ohio-based ecommerce company.

One interesting tidbit that can be found on the press release is that they are planning a marketplace of plug-ins. Hopefully this will be more along the lines of the Android app and Google Apps marketplaces than the iPhone app marketplace, if you get my drift.

Not surprisingly, AspDotnetStorefront website has no press release up about this acquisition.

More details to follow as it is released.

How to Receive Email from Google Forms

Setting Notification Rules in Google Spreadsheet so you get emailed when form is submitted.

The forms built into Google Docs are handy devices. We’ve talked before about how easy it is to create a form and have the resultant data stored in a Google Docs spreadsheet for later use but many people are looking for more immediate gratification.

It is a little buried, but Google does make it fairy easy to do this Anyone who has access to view the spreadsheet behind the form can go the Tools menu and select Notification Rules.

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