6 Great Uses For Google Alerts

Google Alerts is a great system that sends you an email you whenever a new page containing a word or phrase you have chosen to follow enters their search index.

You can create up to 1000 alerts on as many words and phrases as you like. You can also determine how often each alert is sent: “as it happens”, once a day or once a week.

And finally you can also filter the source of the content to specific part of the web:

• News
• Blogs
• Web
• Videos
• Groups
• Comprehensive (i.e. all of the above)

I usually choose comprehensive and then adjust the settings if there’s just too much information coming in.

Here are a few suggestions as to how Google Alerts can help you keep on top of things.

1. Simple reputation management

The most common use has to be for monitoring what people are saying about you, your clients or your competitors.

I have an alert set up on several client company names and receive a once a week alert on this. It helps me to see where on the web these clients are mentioned and measure the effectiveness of publicity campaigns.

2. Measuring search optimisation effectiveness

If you set up an alert on the title of an article you have written, an “as it happens” alert will let you see how long it takes for it to enter into the Google index.

For most of my blog articles, this is usually in about one hour whereas on certain other web sites, it can take a week. Alerts also let you see where else on the web your articles are mentioned (or stolen, see 6)

3. Monitoring the launch of new products

For my sins as a web designer I’m interested in tracking developments in the latest versions of web browsers. Google alerts keeps me up to date with new releases of all the major browsers and lets me track the opinions of commentators on the same subject.

4. Trend spotting

If you have a hunch that something is going to be big or want to follow the development of a story, Google Alerts can help you with this as well. Over time you’ll start to notice the volume of alerts on particular subjects rise and fall and you may also be able to determine what caused a story to snowball.

5. Alerting you when hard to find items become available

If you’re looking for an out of print book or a classic pair of trainers, Google Alerts does the business, but patience is the name of the game.

6. Content theft

My bug bear. It’s a sad fact that as soon as you post something on the web, someone nicks it and publishes it as their own in order to have content on their web site so they can keep visitors coming and generate advertising revenue.

How much you can do about that is debatable, but it’s at least helpful to have an idea of who is doing it.

So How Do I Create A Google Alert?

Creating a Google alert is really easy.

Just go to www.google.com/alerts

If you don’t already have a Google account, you’ll need to set one up. If you do have one and you’re already signed in, just enter the word or phrase you want to track, set the frequency of the alert and set the comprehensiveness of the filter.

Use quotes for exact phrases to avoid being deluged with emails. e.g. to monitor the term “Liz Hurley” enter it in quotes rather than as Liz Hurley without the quotes.

That’s all there is to it. You’ll soon start to receive updates on any new content that Google finds.

Managing Google Alerts

To add more alerts, edit or remove existing alerts, just go back to www.google.com/alerts

But there’s an even easier way to manage your alerts than that. At the end of each email alert that you receive, there is a link with the option to delete the alert, change the settings for that alert or set up another alert.

If you’re using Google Alerts I’d be interested in hearing about the ways in which you use the service.

Filed under: How To Manage A Website, Information Management, Search Engine Optimisation , alerts, google, news, notifications, reputation management

AIR For JavaScript Developers Pocket Guide Released Free Of Charge

Yesterday’s post looked at how Ext JS were using AIR for their library documentation. Today, it’s back to documentation about AIR.

Adobe and O’Reilly have released the AIR For JavaScript Developers Pocket Guide

It’s free and 204 pages of great material useful for all levels of developers. If you know nothing about AIR, it’ll get you started, but the final chapter, Adobe Air Mini Cookbook is the one that will probably appeal to developers that have a handle on AIR and want to jump straight in to working with databases, figure out how to deploy AIR applications or work with file uploads etc.

Grab it now. It’ll get you a long way down the road to taking all your existing web developer skills and adding desktop applications to your skillset.

Filed under: Adobe Air, Support Articles , Adobe Air, air documentation, air pdf

Adobe AIR Used For Documentation

I was wondering how long it would be before someone did this.

Ext JS have released the documentation for the latest version (Ext JS 2.1) of their JavaScript library as an Adobe AIR download.

This makes a lot of sense and illustrates some of the great strengths of AIR.

All of the Ext JS documentation is already available online, created using HTML and the Ext JS library, so packaging this up an an AIR application wouldn’t have taken much effort. People tend to like working with documents offline so it adds a new advantage for Ext JS over other libraries. But unlike other more traditional means of distributing documentation, this is automatically updateable.

The other key advantage is that the documentation very closely replicates the documentation on Ext JS’s web site so you can happily choose whichever way is most convenient to you at any given time.

Filed under: Adobe Air, Information Management , adobe, air, documentation, extJS 2.1

Browser Caching Tip

Here’s a quick tip for web developers. If you’ve made changes to your CSS or JavaScript but you’re not seeing the results that you expected and you’re sure that your code is correct, try forcing a page refresh.

You don’t have to empty the browser cache, just use the following key combinations:

IE : Ctrl F5

Safari : Ctrl + r

Firefox, Mozilla et al: Ctrl + Shift + r

Opera : Ctrl F5 or Ctrl + r

Apple users replace Ctrl with Cmd.

Filed under: Support Articles, Web Browsers , browser shortcuts

RegExr, An AIR Regular Expression Builder – Free Fridays #14

What could be better on a Friday afternoon that an dose of regular expressions. Anything I hear you cry. Well of course you’re right, but once you’ve mastered them, regular expressions can save you a lot of time and add power functionality to your applications.

Learn Regular Expressions By Experimenting

RegExr is an excellent tool not only for building and checking regular expressions, but also for learning RegEx because it comes a built in supply of standard RegEx.

The application is divided into 3 main areas as seen in the screenshot below.

1. contains the input field for your RegEx, the switches and flags that you can apply and an area containing text where you can see the effects of your RegEx. You can add what ever text you like to the text area so you can build and test your RegEx using relevant text.

2. contains information a breakdown of the information about your regular experssion, this is useful as RegEx are extremely difficult to read and this area parses the RegEx into it’s individual components.

3. this section is the most useful for beginners to this tricky area of programming. This section contains the store of prebuilt RegEx as well as a short explanation of what each one does. YOu can study these and use them as the basis for your own RegEx.

The application was built in Flex by the Canadian Flash developer Grant Skinner and runs on Air so it’ll work on Windows, Mac and Linux. You can download it from gskinner.com/RegExr/desktop

Filed under: Adobe Air, Free Fridays, Free Software , adobe, air, Free Software, grant skinner, regex, regexr, regular expressions

Updating Adobe AIR Applications

One of the great things about developing Adobe AIR applications is that they install very easily and when you need to update them, the AIR runtime handles most of the heavy lifting for you via the Updater API. Also, if the application requires an newer version of the runtime, it will download and install that as well.

Part of the update process is that you the developer have to specify a version number for the update. It’s mandatory, but can take any form you like. The version number is a string variable so you can use and combination of numbers and letters but I’d suggest using the same numbering convention as Ubuntu.

Ubuntu Version Numbering

The linux operating system, Ubuntu uses a simple and fool proof numbering system that increments nicely as a number and also provides some meaningful information.

So how does it work?

At the moment, the current release of Ubuntu is 7.10. that’s because it was released in October (10th month) of 2007, hence the 7. So the pattern is [ YearNumber.MonthNumber ].

Next week, when the new version of Ubuntu is released, it will have the version number 8.04 (April 2008).

But what if you need to update the application several times per month? Just add the day on the end as well like so [ YearNumber.MonthNumberDayNumber ]

So today (17 April 2008) would have the version number 8.0417

Need to release several times per day! Just add the hour in 24 hour notation and so on.

The nice thing about this convention is that you can convert it from a string to numeric type and the newest version will always have the highest number.

Filed under: Adobe Air , adobe, Adobe Air, air, api, ubuntu 8.04, updater, updater api