RSS feed for InstantSpot site Aaron Lynch

Cool Gmail Feature: Different email addresses for one account

Thu, 12 Jul 2007 15:33:56 GMT

So, I was talking to Conrad yesterday about gmail, and his email address has a "." in it, name DOT othername @gmail.com. And I told him that Google would ignore the "." in his name if he wanted to drop it for some reason.

This was new information to him, but then he told me that you could append a "+something" after your account name, and it would still get delivered to the correct address. New to me!

Example:

my.name@gmail.com
myname@gmail.com
myname+Spam@gmail.com

Mail sent to any of those three email addresses will be delivered to the same account. Now, where this gets cool is that you can set up filters in gmail to handle your incoming emails based off of different email TO's.

What other stuff is hiding in Gmail that I don't know about?

Recent Google slowness: Gmail, Adsense, Analytics, etc

Fri, 05 Jan 2007 14:35:46 GMT

The network here at work is not exactly stellar, so I'm not sure what to attribute this to...but Google has been sllllooooooooww in the last couple days.

Gmail and Adsense often time out. The Analytics and Adsense scripts on our sites are, to me, noticeably effecting the render time.

I did a quick search to see if there was anything out there, but didn't come up with any good recent info.

Is there something going on or is it just this sweet sweet network here at work?

Where to place your Google Ads

Thu, 21 Dec 2006 13:35:29 GMT

Ad placement on web sites is an slippery slope. We have tried to keep the ads really unobtrusive on the InstantSpot member sites, but still try to figure out a way to (hopefully) make it worth our time.

We originally were going to go for the one text block in the right column, but we just were not seeing the performance we need (dismal click through ratios). Thanks to the comments from one of our members on one of my related blog posts , we started running a small link block below the content.

Believe it or not, we saw an immediate increase in clicks. Now, it still isn't time to pack up and leave the day job, but it does seem a lot more plausible that with a ton of users it could generate some ad revenue.

Moral of the story:

Pay attention to your ad placement. Check out Google's heat map for some ideas.

(You will notice, the "hottest" section on the map is the one that the InstantSpot user gets to claim for him/her self.)

Google Co-op search engines

Tue, 24 Oct 2006 20:03:30 GMT

First off, credit goes to Ray for blogging about Google's new co-op search engine offering.

For those who didn't read about it yet, Google is offering what they call "Google Co-op"

Google Co-op is a platform that enables you to customize the web search experience for users of both Google and your own website.

This seemed like a cool way to let Google know a little bit more about our InstantSpot sites, so I created a co-op in order to start adding our InstantSpot network sites.

InstantSpot also sports its own search functionality, both network wide, and per site. But, a little more Google never hurt anyone.

InstantSpot Google Co-op

NOTE: I have only just started adding 'Spots to it, so if you don't see yours in there don't feel left out. I will get it in there when I have more time. Thanks, AJ

Robots and main page accessibility

Tue, 15 Nov 2005 06:00:00 GMT

On my quest towards e-stardom (aka a relevant and content-rich website), I realized that the navigation towards my older "news items" was somewhat lacking. My solution for this problem was to create a side bar menu that would contain all of the news item titles in descending date order (aka newest first).

A day or two after this change, I began to notice a positive side-effect to including all of these titles as links on the main page...The robots (spiders) were crawling all through my site! I'm not 100% sure, but I can't imagine how this increased indexing would hurt my chances of being returned in some search results.

In a possibly related subject, a Google search for 'Aaron Lynch' now returns this page in the top 10 search results (#6 as of this entry) and an MSN search returns www.AaronJLynch.com as #3!

Does anybody want my autograph?

UPDATE 1/25/06: Either Google has changed my ranking somehow, or my switch to BlogCFC has harmed my accessibility somehow. I now turn up on like page 5 or something terrible. Back to the drawing board!