Simone Carletti's Blog » google

Google changes the maximum number of users for Google Apps

Simone Carletti — Fri, 29 Apr 2011 07:31:13 +0000

I just received an email from Google about upcoming changes to the maximum number of users for Google Apps. When Google Apps was released, Google allowed all accounts to create up to 500 users. The limit was changed in 2009 for free accounts and reduced to 50 users.

Today, Google is changing this limit again to 10 users. Here’s the content of the email.

Hello,

We recently announced upcoming changes to the maximum number of users for Google Apps. We want to let you know that, as a current customer, the changes will not affect you.

As of May 10, any organization that signs up for a new account will be required to use the paid Google Apps for Business product in order to create more than 10 users. We honor our commitment to all existing customers and will allow you to add more than 10 users to your account for DOMAIN at no additional charge, based on the limit in place when you joined us.

Sincerely,

The Google Apps Team

Starting from 10 May 2011, the new maximum number of users for a Google Apps for free account will be set to 10.

Google Site performance tool says Google is not serving Gzipped resources

Simone Carletti — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 09:53:46 +0000

Google just launched the Site Performance tool, an experimental feature in Webmaster Tools that shows you information about the speed of your site and suggestions for making it faster.

It’s likely 2010 will be “the year of site speed” and this feature can become a really important information point. However, I just noticed a really weird behavior.

Look at the following screenshot.

Google Site Performance suggestions for simonecarletti.com

Enable Ggzip compression

WTF?!? All the assets are linked from Google and Google does gzip compression. Why Google is saying Google is not Gzipping?

Headers don’t lie.

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Last-Modified: Mon, 08 Jun 2009 20:49:31 GMT
Content-Type: application/x-javascript; charset=UTF-8
Expires: Fri, 03 Dec 2010 07:13:27 GMT
Date: Thu, 03 Dec 2009 07:13:27 GMT
Vary: Accept-Encoding
Content-Encoding: gzip
X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff
X-XSS-Protection: 0
X-Frame-Options: SAMEORIGIN
Cache-Control: public, max-age=31536000
Age: 4066
Content-Length: 45879
Server: GFE/2.0

200 OK

Combine external JavaScript

Hey Google, that would be great but I can’t combine these libraries. *You* should combine them since you are serving the content and considering you are motivating webmasters to use your service.

Minimize DNS Lookup

Sorry, it’s not my fault again.

Combine external CSS

Yeah, I would be happy to do so but one style is for print media and the other is for the screen. I know, I could embed the media type directly in the CSS definition, but also you could understand they are here for different purposes.

In conclusion, 3 of 4 Google suggestions depends Google itself. Has anyone here noticed a similar behavior?

Google Chrome OS User Agent

Simone Carletti — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 17:35:04 +0000

Wondering how to detect Google Chrome OS in your server logs? Here’s how the Google Chrome OS user agent.

1	79.8.208.125 - - [20/Nov/2009:23:21:31 +0000] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 2900 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; CrOS i686 9.10.0; en-US) AppleWebKit/532.5 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/4.0.253.0 Safari/532.5"

I logged the user agent browsing my website with a Google Chrome developer preview. And here’s the Google Chrome Browser user agent on my Mac OS X.

1	79.8.208.125 - - [20/Nov/2009:23:24:45 +0000] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 2900 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_5_8; en-US) AppleWebKit/532.5 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/4.0.249.0 Safari/532.5"

As you can see, the browser token is the same because both Google Chrome OS and my Mac are running the same browser version. Google Chrome OS identifies itself with the CrOS i686 9.10.0 token, as you can see in the first user agent.

I’m wondering how long it takes before analytics software will start tracking Google OS users.

How to run Google Chrome OS on Mac OS X with VMWare Fusion

Simone Carletti — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 22:44:17 +0000

As soon I finished watching the Google Chrome OS announcement video the first question that came to my mind was: Will it work on my Mac? Is it possible to run a Google Chrome OS preview using a virtualization software such as VMWare Fusion or Parallels Desktop?

The answer is yes. Google Chrome OS actually works inside a virtual machine.

If you are running VMWare or Virtual box, setting up a Google Chrome OS instance is really straightforward. Thanks to the guys at gdgt, you can download a Google Chrome OS image ready to be used with VMWare or VirtualBox. Also, Paul Miller from Engadget published an awesome screencast with a step-by-step tutorial to run Chrome OS as a virtual machine.

Here’s a screenshot of my Google Chrome OS virtual machine.

Google Chrome OS on Mac OS X using VMWare Fusion

Google SERP full of “This site may harm your computer” warnings

Simone Carletti — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 15:24:13 +0000

Since a few minutes Google SERP pages have become completely unusable. Any result is flagged with the This site may harm your computer warning message, it doesn’t matter which query are you searching for.

Here’s a screenshot.

Funny enough, Google also flagged itself as potentially harmful.

I suppose the problem to be caused by a really weird bug. Changing browser or logging out from your Google Account doesn’t matter, thus I guess this bug should affect a really wide range of users.

Update: A thread is available at the Google Blogoscoped forum, #googmayharm can be used to track conversation on Twitter.

Creating a blog sitemap with Movable Type

Simone Carletti — Thu, 20 Oct 2005 09:00:29 +0000

December 30th, 2008. This post was published long time ago on the Italian version of my blog then moved here after the English blog has been opened. Please note that the following post can contain outdated information and (probably) multiple typos.

This tutorial targets Movable Type 3.2. Although the template should work on later versions, you are strongly encouraged to update it according to the specific Movable Type tag syntax provided by your current version.

Movable Type provides an excellent template engine that can be easily tweaked to create a XML Sitemap.

Basically, you just need to create a new index template and ask Movable Type to rebuild it each time your blog is updated.

The Sitemaps Protocol enables you to inform search engine crawlers about URLs on your websites that are available for crawling and helps search engines to find all your pages.

To create a new template enter the Movable Type administration panel.

Blog Dashboard > Templates > Indexes and press Create New Index Template to add a new template to your blog configuration.

Choose an easy to understand Template Name — for example Sitemaps — and an easy to remember file name — for example sitemap.xml.

Configure Movable Type to rebuild the template automatically when rebuilding index templates and fill the Template Body textarea with the following code

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<$MTBlogURL encode_xml="1"$>
1.0
daily

http://www.simonecarletti.com/blog/index.xml
1.0
daily

http://www.simonecarletti.com/blog/atom.xml
1.0
daily

<$MTEntryPermalink encode_xml="1"$>
<$MTEntryModifiedDate utc="1" format="%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%SZ"$>

<$MTCategoryArchiveLink$>

<$MTArchiveLink$>

Please note that bold styled strings must be replaced with your own settings.

Save the new template and… your new sitemap file is ready.

That’s all! Now login into your Google Account, go to the Sitemaps admin panel and submit your sitemap to Google.

Before closing this article, let’s have a look at the template source code.

First of all, according to Google Sitemap Specifications, you need to declare the XML file and schema.

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Now you are ready to start your URL list.

Add your blog main URL using <$MTBlogURL encode_xml="1"$> template tag. Set the higher priority value and (if required) the update frequency.

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<$MTBlogURL encode_xml="1"$>
1.0
daily

Then list the Atom and RSS feeds

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http://www.simonecarletti.com/blog/index.xml
1.0
daily

http://www.simonecarletti.com/blog/atom.xml
1.0
daily

and all entries.

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<$MTEntryPermalink encode_xml="1"$>
<$MTEntryModifiedDate utc="1" format="%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%SZ"$>

Finally, complete the recipe with all category indexes

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<$MTCategoryArchiveLink$>

and monthly archives, if they are enabled.

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<$MTArchiveLink$>

The original tutorial was posted by Nial Kennedy. The code published above is an updated version based on the original post.