Category Archives: Web

Missing Things in Google Chrome (from a Developer Standpoint)

So I’ve been testing Google Chrome yesterday. The first thing you’ll notice is that it’s indeed fast. I’ve visited the same pages I usually visit with Firefox and it loaded much quickly.

What’s good is that each tab runs as its own process, so if there’s something wrong with one tab, it won’t affect the other ones and crash the whole thing.

Now, I’ve noticed a few things missing from Google Chrome that will not allow it to be the web developer’s favorite web browser:

– No extensions: Ouch! Extensions aren’t available right now but according to Matt Cutts, they will be soon.

– No “Open File” : I’ve tried to open an HTML page located on my computer to see how it renders with Chrome, but couldn’t find this option. Or maybe I missed something?

– No support for RSS: Chrome doesn’t seem to have a built-in RSS reader nor a shortcut to subscribe to a site’s RSS feed like on Firefox, the usual orange icon located in the toolbar.

How To Get Full Access To WSJ.com For Free (Wall Street Journal)

Most of the articles on the Wall Street Journal website are only available to paying subscribers. Rupert Murdoch said that he may make the site free but there’s already a way to view all articles on WSJ.com for free.

The Wall Street Journal website has a mobile friendly version, for subscribers who want to access to view financial while on the go. Now here’s the nice part: the mobile version of WSJ.com offers access to the full version of articles that are only available to paying subscribers on the PC website.

That means that anyone can view all articles published on WSJ.com for free just by visiting the mobile site!

For example, if you visit WSJ.com and want to read this article, you’ll only get an excerpt, only paying subscribers can view it in its entirety.

However, the mobile version will allow you to view the entire article, without having to be a subscriber, as you can see here.

The mobile version of WSJ.com is available at this adress: http://mobile2.wsj.com/device/index.php. You can visit the mobile site from your desktop computer, or by typing www.wsj.com from your mobile, you’ll be automatically redirected to the mobile version.

So now anyone can view the best financial news for free! Enjoy 😉

AOL Shuts Down Research Department

According to Greg Linden, AOL Research has been shutdown after the massive search data leak and the user privacy concern that it presented.

After only a month of existence, the AOL Research website has been closed.

The site had a nice list of publications and was aimed to allow researchers to share their ideas with others and help people understand search engines better. Too bad it didn’t last long…

How Bloggers are Influencing Society

Instead of sharing your ideas at your local pub with a few buddies, it has become pretty easy to share your ideas with thousands, or millions of people thanks to blogs, but also forums and all kinds of websites.
According to Technorati, they are now more than 35 millions of blogs, who are most of the time targetting small audiences but also some that are read by thousands or millions of people.

China Daily today published an article called “Study: Bloggers punch way above their wieght” in which they comment a recent research from Jupiter Research.

From the article:

Its study suggests that although “active” web users make up only a small proportion of Europe’s online population, they are increasingly dominating public conversations and creating business trends.

More than half of the Internet users on the continent are passive and do not contribute to the web at all, while a further 23 per cent only respond when prompted. But the remainder who do engage with the net through messageboards, websites and blogs are helping change national conversations, say researchers.

From, this research and this article, we understand that bloggers and web users are becoming really influential and are often the subject of “public conversations” and “are creating business trends”.

“Bloggers and blog-readers are ‘influentials’ the minority that pays attention to events outside of political and news cycles. They also tend on average to be better off, better educated and, more importantly, employed.”

The article notes that thanks to search engines like Google, everyone can easily spread his ideas online.

Companies like McDonald’s, lock manufacturer Kryptonite and computer firm Dell have all fallen foul of Internet buzz in recent years. Because search engines like Google can allow grassroots campaigns to become highly visible, industry insiders agree decisions can be shaped by a small number of activists.

Internet Explorer: Microsoft admits the “Mess Up”

“We messed up”. That’s what Dean Hachamovitch, Microsoft Internet Explorer general manager said yesterday at the Mix06 conference in Vegas, while talking about the delay they took in releasing the new version of IE. Indeed, the latest version of IE was released in 2001, and nothing new has been released since, until IE 7.

According to this article from The Seattle Times, Microsoft promised to “refresh its browser technology more often in the future”. If you look at his main competitor, Mozilla, it’s true that they update their browser very often and are fixing all the bugs on a constant basis.

Bill Gates knows that they cannot lag anymore, and have to provide browsers capable of handling new kinds of pages without any problem…
“You can expect to see us moving very very rapidly there because we see great opportunities there” he said.

Performancing releases Free Web Analytics Service for Blogs

Performancing , the famous site dedicated to the bloggers’ community, has just released a free Web Analytics Service for bloggers. It’s called Performancing Metrics. I’ve already installed it for SEO Principle and it has a pretty neat configuration. The metrics allow you to get plenty of information about your visitors, but also about the search engines they used to find you, and much more.
It’s a pretty neat service that they provide here. For example, you’re able to see which posts from your blog people have read, you can have a comments summary, you can see your visitors’ languages, and you can also have adsense information.

And the great news is that everything is free! I guess I don’t have to wait for Google Analytics anymore… Congratulations to the Performancing team! They already have 500 blogs which subscribed to the service. If you don’t have a Performancing account yet, you can sign up now.

Are you Web 2.0 or not?

These days, it seems that people are talking about Web 2.0 more than ever. Many sites that I visit everyday just changed their design recently to look more Web 2.0, and the number of new web applications is booming.

There are just too many things going on that it can be hard for someone to know what Web 2.0 really is… I am myself sometimes confused and wondering where’s the limit between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0.

It’s true that some people seem to consider Web 2.0 as the use of the AJAX language only or to community sites such as Digg, Del.icio.us, Flickr etc. There are actually more elements that define the new Web and some people are trying to help people understand this new era.

Dion Hinchcliffe tries to give a definition of Web 2.0 and seems to be complaining about the confusion amongst people when it comes to define what Web 2.0 is. He wrote an article yesterday called: You know you’re Web 2.0 when… , a very interesting and comprehensive piece of paper where he tries to help people see if they’re Web 2.0 or not.

Here’s his Web 2.0 checklist:

  • You can easily comment on, or preferably, actually change the content that you find on a Web site.
  • You can label your information with tags and use them to find that information again.
  • Your Web page doesn’t reload even once as you get a whole lotta work done.
  • You are actively aware of other users’ recent activity on a site.
  • It’s possible for you to easily share with others the information you’re contributing on the Web site.
  • You can syndicate your information on a Web site elsewhere on the Internet through a feed like RSS or Atom.
  • You can pick and choose the pieces of a Web site that you like and then add that functionality to your own site.
  • There are easy ways to find out what content is the most popular or interesting at the moment.
  • You heard about a new Web site because a friend enthusiastically recommended it to you out of the blue.
  • There happens to be a mind boggling amount information and a lot of people on a site, yet it seems easy to find what you want and communicate with others.
  • Everything you ever added to a given Web site can be removed easily at your whim.
  • The Web site actively encourages you to share and reuse its information and its services with others. And it even provides a license to do so.

That’s a very comprehensive list. That doesn’t mean that every site should respect all these elements, but this is a good list to understand if you are close to Web 2.0 or not… Hmmm, I think my blog misses a few web 2.0 things: should I add tags or links to social bookmarking sites? 🙂

A good “new” blogs list

Todd, over at Stuntdubl has published a good list of his favorite “newer” blogs. I recognized a lot of sites on his list but he also included sites that I’ve never heard about before but that seem very interesting. A good example is Fiftyfoureleven, a beautiful web dev resources site and blog. The author seems very knowledgeable and his posts are quite unique. Another good blog is Rogerd’s notebook, who is one of WebMasterWorld’s administrators, his last post about copywriting and marketing is very interesting.

Thanks Todd for sharing this personal list with us!