Add your church site search to your Chrome home page

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One of the most talked about features of Google Chrome is the rather innovative home page.  It shows your nine most often viewed sites, along with some goodies along the sidebar.  The sidebar can include quick-search boxes for sites you often search.  As often as I’m searching our church site, I thought it’d be great to have it listed there but I couldn’t make it show up.  After a bit of tweaking, I got it to work.  Here’s what I did.

First, it’ll help if you have a true on-site search of some kind. From what I can tell, there’s no way to add search boxes if you use the Google custom search on your site.  If you find a way around that, let us know.

As for our site, it only took a couple of very small changes:

  • The search needs to produce a GET request, not a POST request.  The difference is that a GET request will put your search term in the URL, which is critical to make this work.
  • You may need to change your search string variable. I noticed that most sites use “s=whatever” when you search, so I changed ours to that to help Chrome easily figure out what we were doing.
  • That’s it!
As for getting it onto the sidebar, here is the two-step process that tends to work.  Try it with our church site if you want.
  1. Perform a search on the site, just like you normally would.
  2. After that Google should recognize that it’s a search and give you a new shortcut.  Start typing the URL of the site in the address bar at the top (“M-T-B-E-T…”).
  3. After a few letters, a small bit of text should appear on the side that says “Press [tab] to search mtbethel.org”.  Go ahead and press [tab] and search for something.
  4. Done!
You should now have a quick-search box for our site on your Chrome start page.  There’s no way to manually remove it, but it will go away by itself after a while.  There seems to be a limit of three search boxes on your page, so if you have three already you may need to repeat step #3 (the [tab] search) a few times to encourage Chrome to replace one of the other ones.
That’s it!  Chome even uses your favicon to dress it up, and they look very nice.  If you have any questions or problems, please let us know in the comments below.

How will “Chrome” affect your church site?

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As you may have heard, Google is releasing a new browser tomorrow called Chrome.  Based on what’s been revealed so far, it should be excellent

, though we won’t know for sure until we get our hands on it.  If nothing else, it’s expected to be very fast and very stable, which are the two main jobs of any decent browser.

But what about us webmasters?  Will we have to start worrying about another browser when building our sites?  Not really.  The great news about Chrome is that it’s built on top of Webkit, which also powers Opera (and a few others).  This means that the basic rendering engine is one that you’ve probably already checked your site against, so it’s nothing new.

Keep an eye on my SEO site

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tomorrow to see when Chrome is available for download.  If you have a Windows machine, it’ll certainly be worth trying, even if it doesn’t live up to the hype.

Update: It’s available!  You can download Chrome here.

Google Suggest finally coming to the main Google homepage

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It’s been in Google Labs for a couple years, but Google Suggest is finally coming to the main search box on Google.com.

Google Suggest shows an on-the-fly drop-down of possible search results as you’re typing.  The advantages of this, as presented by Google, are:

  • Help formulate queries. Start typing what you want to find, and it’ll offer suggestions on how to finish your query.
  • Reduce typos. The results that pop up are already spell corrected, with the same logic as they use in the “Did you mean?” feature.
  • Save keystrokes. You don’t need to type the whole query.  Start typing until your desired query appears, then just choose the proper option to finish it.

You probably won’t see this on your Google homepage yet, but it’ll be rolling out to all users sometime this week.

Turn on full-time SSL in your Gmail account

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A few weeks ago, Google introduced a new feature that allows you to set your Gmail account to always use SSL, not just when you’re logging in.

Like most folks, I didn’t think much of it.  However, a new vulnerability has been discovered that can hijack your account if you’re not using full-time SSL.

While this situation is making Gmail look bad, Google is really looking pretty good.  This specific hack is Gmail-only, but a similar hack could be built for Yahoo mail, Hotmail, etc.  The big difference is that Gmail offers full-time SSL, while the others don’t.

To turn this feature on in Gmail, simply go to [settings], then choose “Always use https” at the bottom of the page (be sure to  [Save Changes]).  It’s quite simple.

The tool to execute this hack will be released in two weeks

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, though others may be working on it already.  I’d suggest you make that small change to your Gmail settings right now.

AdSense for Feeds now open to all!

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It’s been a few months since they first announced it, but AdSense for Feeds is now available to all AdSense/FeedBurner users.

You should notice a new entry on your main AdSense page for “AdSense for Feeds”.  To get started, you need to ask Google to manually tie your AdSense and FeedBurner accounts together.  To do that, send an e-mail to [email protected] and give them your Feedburner account name and the Google Account e-mail address that you use to sign into AdSense.  I was bummed when I heard that it was a manual process, but they turned mine around in about 45 minutes.  I’ve just added the ads to a few feeds of mine, so we’ll see how it goes.

The Google Operating System blog has more details (and screenshots) on how to get started.

I’ll post back with my results in a few days.

AdSense ads finally coming to FeedBurner

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I’ve been waiting for this for a while, but FeedBurner publishers will soon be able to insert AdSense ads in their feeds

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.  I’d love to insert some insightful commentary here, but there’s not much else to say.  If you don’t know what AdSense or FeedBurner are, then I don’t know why you’re on an SEO blog. 🙂

It’ll be interesting to see how well it works.  I have a couple of very large feeds (not this site – ha!), so I’m anxious to give it a shot.  They’ll be rolling it out to a small group of publishers next week, and the rest of us “soon”.  Once I’m able to try it, I’ll be sure to post my findings.

Jing is awesome!

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How have I not seen this before? A friend showed me Jing a few days ago, and I’m in love with it. It’s a software program for Windows or Mac that makes it very easy to capture screenshots or video clips and share them.

I had seen Skitch a few weeks ago, and thought it looked awesome. The problem with it is that it’s Mac-only. A Windows version is “coming soon”, but not here yet. In addition, Skitch only does image capture, while Jing does both images and videos.

To explain how easy Jing is, I’m going to do the following:

  • Pull up ESPN
  • Grab a screenshot
  • Add some arrows pointing to interesting items
  • Annotate it a bit
  • Post a link to the final, uploaded image
  • Time the whole process.

Here we go…

Done! 32 seconds.

https://www.mickmel.com/jing/2008-05-20_2230.png

It’s great! For another brief example, here’s a quick video I just made so you can see how those look:

https://www.mickmel.com/jing/2008-05-20_2246.swf

You’ll probably find quite a few uses for this. I even grabbed the Jing logo at the top of this post by grabbing it from their site using their own software. Give it a shot and let me know what you think.

AdSense and Feedburner getting closer to launch?

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As reported by Darren Rowse

, it appears that AdSense ads will be finding their way into Feedburner feeds pretty soon.

There is a feed (Inhabitat) that is showing some ads. They’re being served as image maps, as opposed to JavaScript, which hopefully will help them work with a wider variety of feed readers. I’ve not had much luck with Feedburner FAN (feed advertising network), and not many people had much luck with the older “AdSense for RSS” system either. Hopefully this new format will perform well.

Animoto now exports directly to YouTube

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Animoto, the very cool video mixing service, has announced that you can now export a video directly to YouTube!

Animoto, for those that don’t know, allows you to create a killer video in about five minutes. You upload a batch of your pictures, choose a song (or upload your own), and tell it to go. It analyzes your song and pictures and creates a video with them. The pictures move in time to the music, and it’s got some cool effects.

If you haven’t tried it before, give it a shot. If you already use them, go dig out your old videos and put them on YouTube! Here is one that we did for our church a while back:

Should you use the webmaster tools provided by Google, Yahoo and Microsoft?

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Logos for all three toolsSearch Engine Journal posed the question “Should You Use Google Webmaster Tools?” and got some pretty good reponses. I think when talking about this, you need to consider the three big ones: Google Webmaster Tools

, Yahoo Site Explorer and Live.com Webmaster Central.

Some of the questions posted by SEJ (paraphrased):

  • Is listing your sitemap in your robots.txt enough?
  • If you own multiple sites, should you set up separate Google accounts?
  • Do these services give too much insight to the companies providing them?
  • Or are they the best things ever?

Overall, the responses were very positive. A few people were neutral, but almost no one was negative.

Taking Google as an example, I look at it like this: They already know everything about my sites. I use AdSense and I use Analytics, so every detail is at their disposal. I figure it can’t hurt to make sure they have an up-to-date sitemap for each of my sites, which can only help to get content in their index more quickly.

As a general rule, I create a sitemap and add it to all three services for every new site I create.

What do you think?