Archive for the ‘web development’ Category

How to Transfer Ownership/Management of a Google Plus (Google+) Page

Sunday, January 12th, 2014

Here’s a hint for every group and business: I highly recommend having a Google+ Page for your organization – even us at Perceptus will be setting one up sooner or later. Why? Because, I highly suspect that having a Google+ Page will influence your Google search ranking.

I recently helped test the transferring of ownership and management of a Google Plus Page – mostly as a favour to someone I know who needs to make one for her club Toastmasters of Today (Vancouver). If you are creating a Google+ Page for your business or club, it is possible to transfer the ownership of a Google Plus page and to have multiple managers, which is useful for when those pesky personnel changes come up!

Here’s the gist of how ownership and management of a Google+ Page is handled:

  • The first person to create the Google Plus Page automatically becomes the owner.
  • There is only 1 owner of a Google+ Page, but the owner can add multiple managers.
  • There are 2 types of managers: managers and communications managers. The owner and managers have different permissions.
  • The owner can transfer ownership to a manager – BUT that manager must have been a manager for at least 2 weeks (I assume this is to prevent theft of control of a page by giving managers a few days to discover and remove false new manager additions). Then the initial owner automatically gets demoted to a manager. This means that if your organization is preparing for a pesky personnel change, make sure to plan the Google+ Page ownership change at least 2 weeks in advance! :)

 

On another Google+ topic, what search term are you supposed to use to search for a Google+ Page? “Google+”? “Google Plus”? I’ve randomly used both terms throughout this post. How ironic that Google picked a name that’s so confusing to search. Ugh. Never mind the fact that “+” is frequently used in that silly thing called math?

sIFR (and Flash) is dead. Long live sIFR (and Flash)!

Wednesday, March 6th, 2013

It’s hard to believe, but only a few years ago I eagerly looked for excuses to use Adobe Flash to make a website just a bit more interactive or fluid. Now, I have started the process of purging Flash from every site that we operate, and manage for clients. What changed?

iOS.

It’s truly astounding how much web browsing is done on iPhones and iPads where Flash does not exist (Flash is also on the outs in the Android world). One of our clients has the majority of their web traffic driven by their weekly email newsletter – and I’ve seen the numbers, a very large fraction of people read their email on their phones and tablets. Today, it is critical that your website does not depend on Flash. It’s also a good idea to slowly remove Flash from non-critical parts of your website too.

Which leads to today’s subject. On many of Perceptus’ websites we use sIFR, Scalable Inman Flash Replacement, which 5 or 8 years ago, was a great way to use nicer fonts on your website for headers. sIFR uses Flash. For some reason the most recent Google Chrome web browser broke some, but not all, of the sIFR headlines on print-bingo.com, our popular bingo card generator. It might be related to a missing  attribute or something relatively minor. But, rather than debug it, it was time to move to Javascript based fonts. On print-bingo.com, we’re now using Google Web Fonts.

Bye bye sIFR. You were a good thing for your day.

Bye Bye MyPhotoPrinter.net

Friday, April 22nd, 2011

About a week ago, we were approached by someone who wanted to buy the domain and content of our website, MyPhotoPrinter.net.

We decided to sell it, though, not without some sentimentality. MyPhotoPrinter.net  was one of our first websites.  It was the first, and currently the only, content site that we have created for our own operations.

Unfortunately, over the years, we weren’t able to invest enough time  in the site, and it fell into an unmaintained mode. That wasn’t a very good situation.  We never talked about the site much, in fact, this is probably the first and only mention of the site on this blog.

We wish the new owners of the site the best of luck.  We’ll be sure to visit once in a while.

 

You can search Print-Bingo.com!

Monday, February 14th, 2011

The other day we added a Google Custom Search box to the top right of print-bingo.com, our awesome web based bingo card generator.  We’ll probably tidy up the setup if we discover that it is used frequently enough.  The nice thing for our setup is that we configured this Google Custom Search Engine to search the three sites that have print-bingo.com content, the site itself, our corporate blog (the site you are reading right now), and our support forum.

This is actually our second run-in with Google Custom Search.  Late last year we played around with this technology when we created KittenSearch.net, the cutest search engine in the world.  We still haven’t decided if we’ll keep KittenSearch.net around or not.  We learned a few things, and that was the primary goal.

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!