Webmaster Central gets a new look

Sorry I haven't updated anything recently, but I got food poisoning from guuhh... I can barly type out the name without feeling queezy.. Needless to say I'll probably never eat at Mc Donalds ever again.


ANYWHO... back to our story.

A few days ago I posted how you could get googlebot to crawl your webpage more often.

Well just yesterday Google announce that they've updated their "Webmasters" home page and have added a few helpful tools for webmasters

Tools like:

Google Analytics which is a free tool for helping you see the traffic on your site.

This tool is really awesome it even goes as far as to tell you how many times a specific link on your page has been clicked.

Google Custom Search Engine (CSE) Which will enable you to create a custom google search page for your site.

and lastely Gadgets

hundreds of gadgets you can add to your site to make it seem like it has more content than it really does. Like all that stuff on the right hand side-->

Which makes it seem like this site has more content than it really does lol.

Source: Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Webmaster Central gets a new look

Google Reader adds new search bar and other tweaks

Finally no greasemonkey script needed!
After much criticism for being a SEARCH engine, Google Reader finally steps up and adds a search bar to their lovely RSS reader.

Search through all your past subscriptions post easily to find whatever it is you might need to remember. It even searchs through shared items.

Other tweaks include hiding the side pane if you don’t want to see all the subscriptions and reader now goes up to 1000 unread rather than just 100

Source: Official Google Reader Blog: "We found it!"

Google GDrive coming soon?

AMAZING find over at Blogoscope by Tony Ruscoe

Here’s the skinny. Basically he’s found a service that still is ether meant for internal use only, or is unavailable to the public so far.

What is it? GDrive.

Applications that turn Gmail into a Shared Drive on your computer has been around for ages, and specuation that Google was in the works of creating a service like this is also old news.

Where is it? GDrive evidence can be found as part of Google Apps which has a number of services.

Tony has found solid proof that a GDrive service does in fact exist whether it’s in beta testing for public use or not is the question.

Visit his site for screen shots and a DETAILED run down on how he found it.

Source: Google Blogoscope

iGoogle: New Custom Google layouts

Just yesterday Blogoscope announced that they’ve spotted new, Custom Google Layouts.

If you are using custom Google and don’t know/remember where to change the layout at just head over to the “tab” you want to edit and click the down arrow then select settings and you’ll see all the new layout style you can choose from.

(The old version I believe only had 3 options, single column, double or 3 columns. Now you can even select the width of the columns)

This new feature has helped my iGoogle page become a heck of a lot easier to read.

Source: Google Blogoscoped

How to: control googlebot's crawl rate

Alot of Webmasters may not know this, but you can control how often your site gets search. You may want to change this rate depending on how often you update. Also there are some other factors you might want to consider.

Perquisites

• Have a working website with access to the index page or ftp to the root of the host
• a Google account.

First step:
Navigate over to http://google.com/webmasters/tools and log in


Second step:
Add your site to your account



Third step:
Verify your account by adding a meta tag to your index page, or uploading a .html to the root of your web host




Once you're all verified which literally takes seconds you'll have access to a few different tools






The Crawl rate link is the one we're going to go over soo



Final step:
Change the rate.


Tada! Have fun, hopefully this is useful to those out there that feel Googlebot never comes around




(actual results from using webmaster tools)

*note
Be sure you have enough bandwidth to take Google crawling your site multiple times a week. Bare in mind that Google downloads from your site and if you have large files can eat up a lot of bw

Google creates mapplet to other mapplets

Google has created a mapplet to other mapplets. A mapplet is a saved map on Google maps with specific pin points to areas of choice. For example the one lets you see all the nearby gas prices










Once you add the google made mapplet then you'll be able to browse for other useful ones like these


Mapplet for browsing other user-created Mapples can be found here

Source: google-latlong.blogspot.com

Embedding Multiple Google Calendars

Google Calandar lets you embed multiple calendars in your blog/website while giving you more control over the look and feel of the calendar itself for, example you can now do "week" view.



Source: googlesystem.blogspot.com

Google Earth Adds Easter Egg in 4.2 release

Google Earth has added a neat little flight simulator in their latest version of Google Earth version 4.2.

You can choose from 2 different style aircrafts

How to use this Feature:

Make sure you have Google Earth 4.2. Open
the application, click on the globe and then press Ctrl+Alt+A. You should see
this dialog that lets you choose one of the two aircrafts (F16 "Viper" and SR22)
and an airport.

Here is a list of keyboard shortcuts on how to fly: here

Is this the begining of the end for Microsoft? Hardly people are blowing it way up. It's a neat little trick though.

Source: googlesystem.blogspot.com

Download Flash Videos from any site

No addons, no special FireFox extension just go to http://www.keepvid.com/ and past the URL in their box his go and it'll ask where you want to save the .FLV flash video to.




Simply select the appropriate drop down and paste the URL from that site and DOWNLOAD!


FYI:
They have links below the .FLV download box for a FLV to WMV,AVI convertor. That link directs you to a pay converter. There are tons of free online converters and http://mediacoder.sourceforge.net/download.htm seems to be the best one

Here is a really good 5minute tutorial which shows you how to use mediacoder and shows you how to play FLV files if you need help with that.



Keepvid.com Currently supported sites:
Google
Youtube
Break.com
iFilm
Putfile
Angry Alien
ArtistDirect
Blastro
Blennus
Blip.tv
Bofunk
Bolt
Castpost
Current TV
Dailymotion
DevilDucky
FindVideos
Free Video Blog
Grinvi
grouper
Hiphopdeal
LuluTV
Metacafe
Midis.biz
Music.com
MusicVideoCodes.info
Myspace
MySpace Video Code
Newgrounds
PcPlanets
Pixparty
REVVER
sharkle
StreetFire
That Video Site
The One Network
VideoCodes4U
VideoCodesWorld
VideoCodeZone
vidiLife
VIDNET.com
Vimeo
vSocial
Web62.com
ZippyVideos

WTF Google Moon?

http://moon.google.com/











Apparently the guys over at Google made a little Google moon site (Yes I realize this is an old site) with images provided to them by NASA. This has always been an interesting subject to me. I'm still not quite sure who to believe so I turn to you bloggers out there for insight.



What's funny to me is that even if you zoom in I still don't see a flag. Yeah I know "Gio the flag is way too small to be seen from earth" Sure but why hasn't some telescope from space picked it up, at the very least to debunk all the conspiracy theorists.

What do you guys think? These guys seem pretty convinced it happened.