Published on December 18th, 2011 by Jeremy Chatfield

I was upgrading a web application that I’m working on to use Rails 3.1.3 and Ruby 1.9.3p0 on Mac OS X Lion (10.7.2) with XCode 4.1 and rvm 1.9.2 and found some great resources but that missed a couple of key points. I loved “Read This Before Installing Rails 3.1.3” – near perfect. It even [...]

Published on October 14th, 2011 by Jeremy Chatfield

Is threatening a user community that have been active supporters, the smartest thing for Google to do? In late 2008, I set up AdWordsHelpExperts.com (AWHE) with a group of other Top Contributors to the AdWords Help Forum. It is referenced by Google, in the Google sponsored and managed AdWords Help Forum, as a resource. I’ve [...]

Published on October 1st, 2011 by Jeremy Chatfield

Tuesday, a client sends me an email asking if they should take advantage of an offer to buy a page on a directory on which they can create links. It’s accompanied by the email soliciting business, which includes a story about how a couple of businesses benefited, and the prices for pages at different tiers [...]

Published on July 11th, 2011 by Jeremy Chatfield

[Update 2011/11/05: Google has now made Google Apps and Google Plus interoperate. If you have problems, try signing out of Apps and Plus and clearing your cookies. I've still got a problem with how this was done - no email notification that it was fixed, and I didn't see anything in the Apps management console [...]

Published on July 7th, 2011 by Jeremy Chatfield

With the upcoming merger of the Microsoft and Yahoo search networks in the UK, we’ve been looking at optimisation techniques on the adCenter network. Wayyyy back in the dawn of time (well, a year or two after AdWords started) we were doing work on optimising ROI, when we spotted an intrinsic economic problem – a [...]

Published on July 7th, 2011 by Jeremy Chatfield

I’m going, someday, to write about a web site or business that I like… I promise. In the meantime, here’s another nutty bit of Microsoft activity. In September, the Bing and Yahoo search network will merge in the UK. While you can now do some activity on those networks and generate some business, because neither [...]

Published on July 5th, 2011 by Jeremy Chatfield

Google *really* don’t get how confusing they’ve made user identity. I’m required to have a new Google Account for every AdWords Account I open. Admittedly most of our work on AdWords has been fixing existing accounts rather than starting new ones, but I’ve still personally started tens of accounts. That means that I have tens [...]

Published on June 23rd, 2011 by Jeremy Chatfield

An unexpectedly popular tool on the old Merjis company site, was a form that helped search engine marketeers see Google Search results as if they were in another country. Type in your search, select the language and country, and you are sent to the Google Search Results for that query, in that country. Google have [...]

Published on June 3rd, 2011 by Jeremy Chatfield

Google’s new “plus one” button for web sites is an interesting development and potentially a game changer – if done well. I’ve seen a few commentators calling this an attempt by Google to go the Social Media route. And it is, at first blush, out of the Social Media canon. Facebook and Twitter both have [...]

Published on May 22nd, 2011 by Jeremy Chatfield

I said that I’d be testing whether I had substantially reduced blog spamming on this blog’s articles, by changing the string that announced where to leave a comment or response to an article. The first thing to check is whether this blog, post-Caffeine and post-Panda, is still substantially where it used to be in search [...]