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Google Chrome Built-in PDF Viewer Incompatibility with IFRAME and a Workaround

Saturday, December 11th, 2010

With the recent automatic upgrade of Google Chrome to version 8, Google made their built in PDF viewer the default viewer *.  I.e. there is now no need to separately download Adobe Reader or Adobe Flash Player to browse the web with Google Chrome.

Generally, I like this addition to Google Chrome; however, it caused some work for us.  Our web based bingo card generator, print-bingo.com, is highly dependent on PDF’s.  That’s the sole reason why our bingo cards are dead-easy to print out by the hundreds.  Unfortunately, Chrome’s built-in PDF renderer does not display PDFs that are in an IFRAME tag properly.

For the last few days, this is what users of print-bingo.com would see after generating 5 pages of bingo cards on print-bingo.com:

 

Broken PDF rendering in an IFRAME in Google Chrome 8 - screenshot from print-bingo.com

Broken PDF rendering in an IFRAME in Google Chrome 8 - screenshot from print-bingo.com

Chrome tries to scale the parent page to fit everything in… and it fails badly.

We were not able to get things working 100% the way we would like, but we have a workable situation now.

The basic steps that we had to take:

  • Change from IFRAME to OBJECT tag.  For whatever reason, this fixes the zooming issue.  And it was quite simple.  In our case, there wasn’t much difference between the two HTML tags.
  • Unfortunately, we can’t find a way to get Chrome to print the contents of the object tag without printing the rest of the page (though, perhaps using CSS  might work).
  • Instead, we added some bold warning text that gives Chrome users instructions to use the manual download links. We use a little function to identify Chrome users – the two key lines of code are: 
    $u_agent = $_SERVER[‘HTTP_USER_AGENT’]; 
    if(preg_match(‘/Chrome/i’,$u_agent)) { $ub = “Chrome”; }

So, we ended up with a workaround.  We sincerely hope that Google will add the missing interface elements that will make things just work, but until then, we are doing some other site improvements as we prepare to bump up the price of Premium Access to $12 in 2011.

* If you want to go back to using Adobe Reader in Google Chrome, you can turn off the  built-in viewer by going to the special address about:plugins and change Chrome PDF Viewer to Disable.  Of course, website owners should not depend on end-users to do this just to visit your site!

 

 

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Posted in annoying, bingo cards, Google, html, print-bingo.com, printing, programming, web development | 1 Comment »

Canada.com Email is Shutting Down… it’s a good time to move to a vanity domain.

Tuesday, November 30th, 2010

I was mildly surprised when a relative mentioned to me that her free Canada.com email address was being shut down.  She’s had that email address for years – though, I know she hasn’t been using it for day-to-day email for most of that time.

For those individuals who are actively using their Canada.com email addresses still, here are a few suggestions from us at Perceptus:

  • Do NOT move to the email provided by your internet service provider.  Choose one of the major webmail providers such as Hotmail.com, Gmail.com or Yahoo.com – these services are all well run, and more importantly, they will probably be around for a long, long time.  Of these three, I recommend Google’s Gmail.com service.  I’ve written about this in a previous post: Picking an Email Address – Don’t use a Free Account from your ISP.
  • This is a great excuse to move to a vanity domain.  It’s cheap.  You can buy the rights to a .com domain for <$10 per year and have Google host the email for you.  If you have a few family members or friends, you can share a domain.  We use Google’s Apps for Domains  for all email to perceptus.ca – it’s excellent.
  • You do not have to lose your saved Canada.com email.  Read their own migration instructions here.  You can move your email to Google’s Gmail service easily.  These instructions can be adapted for all other major web email providers, and also, to download your email using POP3 to your own computer to software like Outlook or Thunderbird.
  • Remember to update all of your 3rd party logins.  eBay, PayPal.com, Amazon, everything.  You will not have an easy time getting access to your accounts once canada.com webmail goes offline.
  • Do this ASAP.  Canada.com really did a disservice to their users by providing such a small amount of notice.

I wonder if the email being shut down is related to the recent change in ownership of the site’s publisher, Postmedia Network Inc.  Seriously, couldn’t they find a way to make a buck on this by partnering with a 3rd party webmail provider and sharing ad revenue, rather than shutting it down?

Comments are encouraged.

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Posted in annoying, business, canadian, email, excuse, Google, opportunity, support | 7 Comments »

Does Google Apps for Domains work in China?

Tuesday, October 26th, 2010

Today I got a call from someone whom I helped setup with Google Apps for domains.  Primarily, he’s using Google to handle his email – it’s pretty much the exact same system that powers GMail, but under your own domain name.  We use it too for perceptus.ca email.  It’s awesome.  You can use the excellent webmail interface,  and IMAP for full desktop and mobile email applications.  Plus,  it’s free if you don’t need very many user logins.

If you have a vanity domain for yourself, get Google to host your email.  You won’t find anything better, especially for $0.

Anyway, my client is in China, behind the world’s biggest firewall.  And he can’t access his email.  His web requests get  forwarded to weird places. Ironically, he sounded rather pleased, since he’s actually on vacation, but it did raise some good questions.

Does Google Apps for Domains email actually work in China?  I don’t know, it might be a weird forwarding bug.  I’m not there now, so I can’t experiment with it.  If someone reads this and can confirm success or failure with Google Apps for Domains, that would be excellent.  Unfortunately, this is some info that I can’t seem to find on the Internet.

As an aside, in  trying to figure this out, I stumbled on  Google’s Transparency Report.  It’s a fun way to see if Google services are blocked in different countries at any given time.

I wonder if any of Perceptus’ websites are blocked in China?

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Posted in China, email, Google | 2 Comments »

Is it a good thing when you don’t notice that your AdWords campaign was turned off?

Thursday, September 16th, 2010

We’ve run campaigns for print-bingo.com on Google AdWords from day 1.  Actually, we ran ads before the site was even on the print-bingo.com domain.  So, it’s been years.

We learned this week that Google has quality checks to make sure that AdWords customers are running legitimate websites.  I.e. they don’t want to sell advertising to scammers, malware installers, virus tricksters, and whatever Google deems to be low quality sites.  As with all things Google, these are highly automated processes. This quality score concept  makes sense –  I would be less likely to click on ads if there was a chance that the landing page was virus laden.

Apparently,  after our large edits to print-bingo.com in  August, we tripped the quality scanner and our AdWords campaigns  were turned off.  We sent a support request in to Google and a few days later, after a manual review, our ads are now running again.  Yay!  More advertising expenses.  :)

The strangest thing is that we didn’t even notice for two weeks.  We’re happy to say that sales are up so much year over year, that we just didn’t notice.  It did seem weird that we weren’t getting many (in retrospect, zero) referrals from Google AdWords that lead to conversions, but that happens some days, so it didn’t shout problem.

What’s the point of this post?  Well, actually, I think we’re bragging about our increased sales.  But on a practical note, make sure you watch your campaigns – I couldn’t find a way to get email notifications, but it might be buried in the interface somewhere.  You can always watch your logs.  Anyway, the point is, even if things are going well, it’s possible that they could still go better.

Technical notes: If you want to see when you’ve been visited by the quality bot?  Check your web access logs for the user agent AdsBot-Google.

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Posted in advertising, bingo cards, Google, print-bingo.com | No Comments »

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