Google have released a URL shortner at http://goo.gl/ – following in the foot-steps of sites like http://bit.ly/ and http://pig.ly/. However, Google’s URL Shortner is only for use within Google Toolbar and FeedBurner.

More news in the press release here : Google Blog

Facebook – somewhat of an arch rival of Google – have been rolling out a URL shortner for a short while on their mobile system. Any link in the m.facebook.com stream is auto-shortened using using fb.me. For example – fb.me/chickenland would take you to my page on Facebook.

The subject of HTML emails usually ends up in a 2 hour long discussion about all the hacks and work arounds that need to be put into place to get it working in the series of test mail clients and online “clients” that you’re supporting.

That list of course could be tiny, or very extensive.

Whilst trying to find out why Hotmail wanted to fill my email with lots of margins breaking the layout, I Googled to find an answer and came across http://www.viget.com/inspire/hotmail-image-problems-in-html-emails/

From here, I visited the Email Standards Project which gives a good overview of mail clients and their current ability to ignore all the code you’ve been slaving over.

And I’ll leave you with a Flickr group depicting the hatred of GoogleMail’s current rendering:

http://www.flickr.com/groups/project-gmail-grimace/pool/

I mentioned yesterday that Google Chrome Extensions are in the here and now as opposed to a distant figure on the horizon.

You’ll need to go grab the beta of Chrome from http://www.google.com/landing/chrome/beta/ as it’s not in the release version yet, but once you do, you can play to your heart’s content.

I have a feeling that innovation may be a little few and far between since Firefox has been out for so long, there is such a base of extensions there. It reminds me slightly of a conversation Gina Trapani and Matt Cutts were having on Twitter regarding the lack of truely original apps on Android. Almost everything has already been covered by Apple’s iPhone.

Chrome may also struggle as Android’s market-place has with getting the volume of content on the site in the first place as adoption by programmers may take some time.

However, I’m sure that won’t put developers or users off using Google Chrome extensions- as its still (for the time being) lightning quick. There are already some great extensions to get started, like:

Speed Tracer
https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/ognampngfcbddbfemdapefohjiobgbdl

Chromed Bird
https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/encaiiljifbdbjlphpgpiimidegddhic

Google Wave Notifier
https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/aphncaagnlabkeipnbbicmcahnamibgb

I recently uttered the words “If Chrome supported the web developer tool bar, I’d switch from Firefox”.

Suppose it’s only a matter of time :)

https://chrome.google.com/extensions

It won’t have escaped note that Google are updating their PageRank algorithm soon to take into account the speed of the web server that supplies the information.

This throws up many questions like whos going to define how quick “quick” is? – what happens if Google indexes your site which is on a shared host when another site is taking a pounding? Alot of Google’s recent announcements have all involved “speed” as a central issue, and as such, Google have released a series of tools over at http://code.google.com/speed/page-speed/

Anyone wanting to know more about the algorithm hanges can check out http://www.blogstorm.co.uk/page-load-speed-may-be-in-google-2010-algorithm/

I think we can all expect this to become a big selling point for server providers – such as UKFast who already make great play of the fact in their documentation. Remember though, this isn’t an official announcement of intention as such – they ould still implement this in a different way if they wanted to.

I assume we’ll all hve to go back to text heavy sites with ascii art now.

Noticed an article over at Smarterware – http://smarterware.org/3898/namebench-benchmarks-dns-services – which introduces “NameBench” – a service for determining whether your DNS is services are quicker or slower than alternatives.

Great thing is, this is from YOUR machine and location – not just usage statistics and speed improvements you SHOULD see by switching.

The words Google and DNS in the same sentence fill me with both excitement and apprehension.

For those that don’t know, we all rely on DNS (Domain Name Servers) to translate domain names (like www.google.com) into an IP address (66.102.9.99) – which allows your machine to correctly identify the machine on the internet somewhere that holds the site you’re looking for.

Google, being the massive company they are, with fingers in many pies have just stuck their hand into the DNS pie. Their DNS even have catchy, memorable IP addresses themelves – 8.8.8.8 & 8.8.4.4.

Many ISPs who provide DNS services to their subscribers use them to intercept mistyped URLs and supply a page of ads – something Google could easily integrate with AdWords. It also means that – should they want to – Google ould gather more and more data on the usage habits of anyone using their DNS.

Could this be the next step in taking over the world without anyone realising?

What is Pub Sub Hubbub? Well, apart from being a badly named service, it is basically a hub that sits between a server (publisher) and it’s feed users (subscribers). The server talks to Pub Sub Hubbub when content is updated and the Pub Sub Hubbub server then pushes content to individual subscribers dependent on their preferences.

This is innovative in that it actually pushes the content across the web rather than users constantly polling the service. This means that the publisher can save an awful lot of bandwidth and subscribers can receive the updates practically instantaneously.

You can find out more on the project by workers at Google (working outside of Google) here: http://code.google.com/p/pubsubhubbub/

If you’re using Feedburner to manage your RSS feed subscribers (and lets face it why wouldn’t you be? – note to self….), then you can enable Pub Sub Hubbub support. Click on the feed you want to enable, and under the publishing options, look for “ping shot”, and activate the service.

I mentioned this over at webdeveloper.com a while ago, and it’s still an issue that I’m running in to.

Apache error_logs are showing quite a lot of “file does not exist” errors for pages using rewrites. For example, you could visit “http://www.mydomain.co.uk/product/103697.html” and the error log would show “http://www.mydomain.co.uk/product” with the file does not exist error.

Fine (I thought) as the referrer is the page, it must be that there is a broken link.

No such luck – no broken links on the page, and seemingly nothing wrong. In fact, while I’m looking at the specific site that I noticed the issue on first, it appears that I’m not affecting the error_logs at all. None of my browsing is causing errors.

So, I switched to the access_logs and started looking for times & dates of the errors. Turns out, all users were using IE8.

Cutting a long story short, I figured out – by looking at the number of errors that would appear on each page request – that the issue had something to do with Javascript includes on the page.

All the javascript pages were referenced in the header include file as relative i.e <script type=”text/javascript” src=”js/monkey.js”></script> There has never been an issue with this – until now – and specifically with IE8.

I do seem to remember something about the new rendering engine in IE8 parsing the page several times to pull in content I don’t see how a browser rather than an specific action could be causing an Apache error.

To fix the issue, making the javascript files “more” relative cured the problem. Altering the source to “/js/monkey.js” fixed the issue.

To be honest, it’s got me stumped. Can anyone shed any light on this?