Google Application Engine: Outage

Seems the Google App Engine suffered an outage the other day:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-9971025-7.html

I guess this proves it, they are also human and prone to error.

Okay Okay…

Okay so I am taking a cheap shot but one cannot resist to point out problems with a competitor when most people I meet casually talk of Google as “perfect” or “g-d like”. Every software product at some point sooner or later will have an issue, this cannot be avoided and once again today I am forced to come back to the concept of an Image problem. People simply like Google better most of the time without justifiable facts, its really sad to me.

At the end of the day though I wish Google engineers well and hope they keep all their software running smoothly, its all in good fun. Besides, we will beat them through better products anyway!

Q&A: Virtual Dedicated Server and Blogger Visitor Tracking

Today a former colleague of mine emailed me with a few questions. To answer them I have decided to put together this blog post as I believe the answers might help others as well.

Virtual Dedicated Server

His first question focused on my mention of Virtual Dedicated Server. To summarize I have recently leased a VDS from GoDaddy.com. While this is higher in price then simply using shared hosting it does give me a lot more control and options of what I use the server for.

To manage the VDS I simply Remote Desktop into it using the standard windows client and manage the machine as if it was a real dedicated server. Prices starts at around $42.00/month and more information can be found by clicking here.

I setup my VDS with .NET 3.5 runtime and configured three websites I am prototyping so far without issue. This is a great option with maximum flexibility but minimum support from the hosting provider.

Blogger Visitor Tracking

His second question focused on how I track visitors to my blog. The answer here depends on the statistic we are talking about:

Daily Visitors. For tracking visitors to the various blog entries I use Google Analytics. To use this service you simply register with Analytics for free with your Google account and they provide you with a small amount of HTML to embed into your site. Once the HTML is embedded they starting tracking visitors and provide updates every 24 hours. You can even setup email's daily or weekly in PDF (and other formats) of your statistics which is very convenient.

The instructions for inserting Google Analytics HTML into blogger is well documented and can be found on sites like andywibbles.

RSS. Additionally I track how many people subscribe to my RSS feeds by using FeedBurner. Feedburner is a great free service (recently purchased by Google) that allows you to replace your standard Blogger RSS feeds with a special URL that then tracks statistics. The full instructions can be found here on the FeedBurner FAQ for Blogger.

Closing

I hope these answers are helpful to my colleague and anyone else who stumbles upon this post. If anyone has any additional questions please don't hesitate to contact me directly.

Google Custom Search Engine (aka CSE)

Custom Search

Google and Microsoft search engines now offer a neat feature that allows you to setup a custom search engine that is limited to a specific set of sites. Here are the links to both options:

Google Custom Search

Live Search: Macros (Why is this so hard to find in Live.com Maybe its just me...)

Google Custom Search & This Blog

Today I decided to add this search feature to my blog (as can be seen implement at on the top-right of this page). I have used CSE before and was quickly up and running. For configuration I added only my site to the "Included sites" list and configured the search engine to "Search only included sites" mode.

While this configuration worked and only returned my site in the  results it did do something I HATE about searching blogs, the front page was returned as a result item.

Why Do I hate this? Because typically the front page is a moving target. All posts have their own pages, but the front page changes each time someone posts, while the individual links stay fairly static. This is very frustrating especially when Googling for something only to find that the link it should be on does not have it, as other content has pushed it down but Google has not caught up. I can also think of good reasons why this is not something Google can easily fix, but it bothers me nonetheless.

Personally id love to turn off "front page searching for blogs" in some sort of setting, but no such setting exists yet :(.

Giving this problem some thought I came up with a work-around for my own blogs search engine. Here is a screenshot of the "Sites" tab in my CSE:

In the example above I have added the root URL of my blog as an excluded site, while leaving the same URL on the included sites list. This does exactly what I expected, it returns only the actual individual post pages ignoring the front page.

While few could benefit from such a configuration I do believe this technology in general is excellent and the flexibility in CSE is fairly impressive. Check it out for yourself!