Category: Tech

Categories
Software Web

Why I don’t use Gmail Priority Inbox

priority inbox

This week Gmail has been rooling out a new feature called Priority Inbox.
After turning it on for 24 hours, I ended up turning it off. Why? Because I believe it clutters my inbox more than it helps.

Priority Inbox sections

The sections in wish Gmail divides Priority Inbox don’t seem to make a lot of sense.
For me:
Important and Unread = Unread
Starred = Read
Everything Else = Spam/Garbage

What is Everything Else!?

The one section I really dont like and also the one that you cannot remove (all others you can change or remove) is Everything Else.

All the emails that go to the Everything Else section can only be of 2 types:
-Spam and should be on the spam folder
-Important and should be out of this section

If I receive an email it must be important for me or else is spam/garbage.

Read Unread

All I need in my inbox are my unread messages so I can read them or the ones that I already read and need to come back.

All other messages should go to the archive, spam or trash. Isn’t that simpler than having some blue bars and emails changing place?

I simply love, adore and absolutely need Gmail

I don’t like this feature but Gmail is the only email client I can imagine myself using today. I love it, it’s my only suggestion to anyone in need of an email account and whenever my computer is on gmail is running on my browser.

BTW – making the Mark read, unread, starred, unstarred options go to a combox, not that smart also. Prettier but annoying.

Categories
Dev

Analysis of long tail keywords for SEO with Google Analytics

After the recent Mayday update to Google SERP I decided to have a look into how much was the long tail keywords influenced by this.

Long tail keywords are normally keywords with 3 or more words. To track it down I used the following regular expression: [^\s\+]+(\s|\+)+[^\s\+]+(\s|\+)+[^\s\+]+

Steps inside Google Analytics. Traffic Sources->Search Engines->Google->Non paid

On the filter keyword [containing] I input the regular expression: [^\s\+]+(\s|\+)+[^\s\+]+(\s|\+)+[^\s\+]+

After I just tracked down the last 3 month number of visits with and without filtering the long tail and calculated the % value of the longtail.

long tail keywords/total organic = % of the value for the long tail

5 minutes and I realised that mayday update did *not* influence my sites long tail keywords.

Hope that helps and if someone knows of a simpler or more effective way to do this I would love to know.

Categories
Web

Google Chrome View Source

IMHO view source from Google Chrome acts really odd.

When you click view source a new tab opens and the page is loaded all over again.

Maybe there is a very valid reason for this. But I cant find one. To me this can even be problem.

Examples:

  • If you pass values via POST you cant get the results as Chrome does not re-POST it just issues a new request using GET and a new session. (I found a couple “Notice: Undefined variable” on some of my code, but this was my problem as I wasnt doing proper verifications) But anyway you never get the POST values and see the source for your page.
  • If you have a counter or random dinamic content you will never get to see exactly what you get on the rendered html you have on the initial tab.

A work around is to use “inspect element” but its not the same. Its great for some things but its not the same.

If someone finds a valid reason for this “view source” behaviour I would love to know.

Categories
Dev Web

User Experience Professionals

I just order two tickets to http://www.ux-lx.com/

I am really happy that this kind of events happen in Portugal as it gives us (Portuguese developers) a chance to learn and share experiences and knowledge.

UPDATE: minutes after I emailed about this I received a friendly response and the issue bellow was solved. Great job.

I am not one to normally nag and complain about stuff, but for a user experience professionals conference this menu issue made me laugh:

Anyway, and as I started complaining having http://www.ux-lx.com/index.html and http://www.ux-lx.com/ both working is not a very good thing for SEO.

P.S. – Sorry about this guys at http://www.ideias-imagens.com/ but just couldnt resist.

Categories
Android

htc magic flash perfect spl – android

androidThis christmas I offered myself an htc magic from Portuguese provider TMN.

This came with a “perfect” SPL 1.33.0014.

After a few hours searching I ended up using the goldcard method to flash it up.

I followed http://vivekgolecha.blogspot.com/2009/08/as-promised-i-said-i-would-come-up-with.html but with some changes.

I 1. no need to download the fastboot as it comes by default with the new sdk

II 1. I used a sandisk 1gb without a problem.

II 12. i quick formated the sd card to fat32 on my computer on this step (not sure if it was needed)

II 13. choose the “removable disk” from the bottom option and NOT the top eg:”Untitled Disk (F:)” – I almost gave up here. So simple and was my main problem.

III 1. Used “ROM v2.53.707.2 (Engineerings SPL v1.33.2010)” as you cannot downgrade spl for me this was the only option

III 29. My sdcard was causing some media error. I took it out and without it no problem. I ended up formating it using the phone and it re-started working fine.

And thats all you need to change spl.

After that I followed this tutorial http://forum.pplware.com/showthread.php?tid=4043&page=1 (Portuguese) my recovery page looked and gave me some diferent options, but it was common sense.

Its working fine. Faster and without any errors or bugs. so far 🙂