Sometimes you might want to do a little on the fly DOM editing using your favourite Javascript library – jQuery.

To do this you might need to include jQuery on the page, you can do this by pasting these lines into your console in Chrome or Firebug in Firefox.

And there you have it, the full power of jQuery at your fingertips

We are big fans of Google Apps and have built a large portion of our business processes around the system. For this reason we have absolutely no problem recommending the service to our clients and have assisted numerous clients with a migration to the system.

The first benefit you will get is your emails migrated over and a much better email service. You have the option of using normal IMAP access so you can continue to use your preferred desktop application however we suspect that you will start to use the web interface as it is really quite powerful with some unique features that you can not access on a normal desktop client.

Along with this you have great support of mobile devices, especially if you opt for Android with powerful and free native apps meaning that you can have all the access to your emails that could possibly wish for.

Along with the really excellent email functionality you also have powerful online documents giving you the basic office application functionality along with really powerful collaboration features allowing multiple people to be working on the same document simultaneously from geographically separate locations. This can be great when putting together proposals, specifications etc.

Now called Google Drive, the documents system has grown from managing purely office documents into a fully featured online file store that can be used to store and share all kinds of files across your organisation and with third parties.

Finally the calendar functionality is great. If you have never used Google Calendar then I suspect the first things you will notice is the abilty to easily drag and drop appointments around when reorganising your schedule. The ability to quickly create appointments using natural language such as “call steve at 11am” is really nice. A full barrage of reminders can be set up if you wish including on screen, SMS and emails meaning you should never miss an appointment again.

All in all we think Google Apps is great and would love to help you move your organisation across to the system. If you would like to discuss this in more detail please do get in touch today.

Edmonds Commerce are a Google Apps Reseller.

If you are using Firefox browser on Linux Mint you might have notice that the default search engine is not Google but DuckDuckGo.

DuckDuckGo are presenting themselves as the biggest threat to Google search engine bringing as the main advantage more privacy than what Google currently offer.

If you are happy with it than you are fine but if you feel like me that DuckDuckGo might have some interesting features, it does not bring the same result or way of using internet than Google search engine then you might want to come back to Google then please follow the below step by step procedure:

Type about:config in the location bar and press Enter

Type keyword.URL in filter

Change the keyword.URL value to:

http://www.google.co.uk/search?ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&sourceid=navclient&gfns=1&q=

Hope that help.

In a move that will hurt a lot of small businesses and especially startups, Google have withdrawn their free Google Apps for Domains which has been slowly reducing in number of users from 50, to 10 to now 0 (almost).

They are keeping the existing accounts open so if you have Google Apps already, don’t panic yet, your data is still there.

For one-man-band startups apparently there is the option of creating a single-user apps account still apparently, according to Greg D’Alesandre of Google.

If you are struggling trying to get PHPMailer working with Google Apps then perhaps this is the solution for you.

I went to the PHPMailer site and found my way to a SourceForge download. After a lot of debugging and wrestling with this I just could not get it to work. In the end I looked at other projects that I knew were using PHPMailer for their mail and that were working with Google Apps or Gmail and found that their version was drastically more up to date than the one I downloaded from SourceForge.

In a nutshell – the version I had was never going to work.

A quick update later and I have PHPMailer working with Google Apps.

For reference the version here seems to be the up to date.

Here is some example code that IS working with Google Apps

<pre>
    <?php
    $to = 'info@edmondscommerce.co.uk';
    $message = 'testing swift mailer';

    require("class.phpmailer.php");

    $mail = new PHPMailer();

    $mail->IsSMTP();
    $mail->SMTPAuth = true;
    $mail->SMTPSecure = 'tls';
    $mail->Host = 'smtp.gmail.com';
    $mail->Port = 587;

    $mail->Username = 'your@email.com';
    $mail->Password = 'yourpasswordwhatever';

    $mail->From = $to;
    $mail->FromName = 'test';
    $mail->Subject = 'test';
    $mail->WordWrap = 50; // set word wrap

    $mail->Body = eregi_replace("[\]", '', $message);

    $mail->IsHTML(true); // send as HTML
//To
    $mail->AddAddress($to);
    $mail->SMTPDebug = true;

    $mail->CharSet = 'us-ascii';
    $mail->Encoding = $mail->Charset != 'us-ascii' ? '8bit' : '7bit';

    if (!$mail->Send()) {
        echo "Message could not be sent. <p>";
        echo "Mailer Error: " . $mail->ErrorInfo;
        exit;
    }
    echo "Message has been sent";

So now that everyone uses Google Shopping, Google are making life difficult for the merchants and they all have to jump through hoops.

The current push from Google is enforcing some things that are very difficult for small companies to conform with :-

* EAN Numbers – This is the BIG one, Google are making EAN Numbers required – for some retailers, they just don’t exist, and for a lot of older or cheaper shopping cart systems, they don’t have anywhere to enter them.
* Google Category – This is a fairly obvious one, they are attempting to enable shoppers to browse products and find a motherboard for instance with a 1156 socket rather than a CPU that fits an 1156 socket. The answer is to add an extra field to a site’s category system to map site categories to Google categories, or to restructure your products into google’s categorisations.
* Product Images – Google are making this mandatory as well, which most people are getting round by using stock or illustration-only images.
* Availability – This one actually helps retailers, putting orderable products that are out of stock in front of customers, and is a small change to most scripts exporting to Google

The above changes are being phased in now but should your feed suddenly stop working, how big is the impact on your business? Whilst some of the changes are little tweaks, such as the availability flag, others require fairly substantial changes in the back-end of many cart systems. We are getting many aggrieved businesses contacting us asking for fast turnaround on their Google products feed as they are loosing money all the time that Google are rejecting their products.

What normally (given past changes) has been little tweaks for feeds to be compatible has lately become hours and hours of work both on developers and store-owners. Are you ready to jump through the latest burning hoop Google is holding out for you?

Looks like Google have finally rolled out Google Voice to the rest of the world.

A nice alternative to skype, the rates look fairly reasonable though not as cheap as Skype – in fact the only place it seems to beat skype is on calling the US.

Just saw this story on the BBC site:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8488751.stm

The Magento site has recently switched from serving search results internally to using Google to provide the results. Whilst the Google results pages are a lot faster, we now miss the opportunity to search specific areas of the Magento site.

In particular, its now a bit of a pain to track down a suitable module in Magento Connect. To make things a bit easier I have knocked together a simple Magento Connect Search tool.

I could easily extend this tool to provide searching of other areas of the Magento site if you wish. Just drop a quick comment against this blog post and I will do it.

Google’s latest incarnation, dubbed caffeine is set to improve further the quality of Google search results. The focus seems to be on more real time search, fresher content being boosted to the top of the rankings. So just when Microsoft thought they were giving Google a run for their money with Bing, Google take the game another leap forward. It does look like Google will continue to enjoy their near monopoly on search for the forseeable future.

For the average webmaster though its looking like an active fresh content creation programme is going to become an ever more important part of the overall SEO package. At Edmonds Commerce we have been working on setting up an outsourced fresh content service for our clients and will be rolling something out in full in the near future.

We recently launched our outsourced link building service and fully intend to put together a collection of SEO services that can be outsourced as individual services or all together as a bulk package.

Fresh, original and regularly posted relevant content will become an SEO essential for any serious web site.