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Google Gears working on Ubuntu 8.04 now – almost

Holger — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 22:02:42 +0000

Google Gears now works on my Ubuntu 8.04 installation, at least almost. For Google Docs the little green symbol appeared after I had installed Google Gears for Linux. Then I headed to Google Reader, but there the symbol for offline support did not show up.
I do not know, what is going wrong, but my Google Reader just does not support Google Gears, somehow. I will keep on trying, but at least Google Docs work. That is one step ahead.
UPDATE: Seems like currently I am blogging too fast! I just added a new feed to Google Reader, and the little pop-up for activating Google Gears for this website appeared. It seems to work perfect.

Impact of Wordpress theme on search engine results

Holger — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 21:06:53 +0000

A few days ago I have switched the theme of this blog from freicurv to WP-Polaroid and since then the visits on my blog (not very many visitors anyway) went down to zero yesterday.

I hope this switch to a new theme did not impact my search engine results that much and it is just a temporary issue. Especially for the Icybox 4220 I had quite good positions.

UPDATE I: Of course the theme has an impact on the visits, at least if you have the google analytics code hard coded into your theme... I guess the problem was, that I did not have the Google Analytics tracking code on the page anymore. We will see what tomorrow brings.

UPDATE II: The installation of the Wordpress Plugin for Google Analytics didn't help either. There is something wrong with that WP-Polaroid theme when it comes to web analytics. None of the tools that I was testing was working anymore, so I switched back to freicurv for now. It's too late to figure out what is wrong with the theme.

Bidirectional syncronization between Google Calendar and Mozilla Thunderbird

Holger — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 20:28:57 +0000

It took quite some while, but final it is there: the bidirectional synchronization between Google Calendar and Mozilla Thunderbird. I know, synchronization should be bidirectional by default, but lately the word synchronization was used with different meanings. However, I do not care anymore - it finally works!

I have tried it my own. WITH offline support!!! So, you can update your Google Calendar via Thunderbird and everything you change in Google Calendar will also show up in Thunderbird and can be displayed off-line (you have to choose "Work offline" from the "file" menu though). You can also make changes to Thunderbird and it will show up in Google Calendar after a while.

This made my day. I was waiting for this so long.

The respective links:

It might have some bugs still, but so far it worked fine for me.

Finally Google Gears works on Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn)

Holger — Thu, 22 Nov 2007 21:02:44 +0000

While adding a new feed to Google Reader a little window open and tells me that Google Gears would like to use this application. I accepted and suddenly the little green symbol for activating the offline modus in Google Reader appeared!

It seems to work. I did not change anything. OK, today there was one update for Linux, but I do not think it was do to this update of Gnome utils. But who knows. It is just weird because I can not understand, why suddenly the "thingy" works.

But on the other hand: Who cares? Google Gears finally works!

Google Gears, Firefox and Ubuntu 7.04

Holger — Sun, 04 Nov 2007 12:06:15 +0000

Due to a comment by Jon on my last article on Google Gears, "Google Gears still not working for me on Ubuntu", I gave this tool an other try on my FSC Amilo si1520 with Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn).

It seems to work for Jon with Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon). He mentioned, that he had installed libc6 and libstdc++5. I have checked and both files were installed already on my system. So these were not the problem. My next try was to deactivate all other Firefox add-ons. This was not a major success, as Google Gears still does not work. But at least now a pop-up opens, when I click on "Extras" -> "Google Gears Settings".

Unfortunately I still can not change the settings. When I go to "Extras" -> "Add-ons" I can see "Google Gears" as a add-on, but the "Settings"-option is greyed-out.

Additionally the "Offline"-option in Google Reader does not show up in my account any more. This makes it quite difficult to use Google Gears for me at the moment. I don't know. It was there a few days ago.

I guess the guys in Mountain View do not really like me, so I thought I migh just give up for now.

Maybe once I have figured out my problem with my external hard drive (I think I will write a post about this too), I can make a back up of my data and then upgrade to Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon), where Google Gears seems to work. At least for Jon.

[UPDATE|22.11.07] Google Gears works now on my notebook! Read the story "Finally Google Gears works on Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn)" to know more.

Google Gears still not working for me on Ubuntu

Holger — Sun, 21 Oct 2007 10:17:34 +0000

Due to a comment of Sudhandshu on my article "Google Gears does not work with Firefox on Ubuntu 7.04" I thought I might give it an other try. I installed Google Gears again. However, I do not see the option in Google Reader to download the content to my computer. I can also not access the "Google Gears Settings" in Firefox.

My suspicion is that it has something to do with "glibc 2.3.5 or higher" and "libstdc++" which are required. In Synaptic on Ubuntu I can not find the glibc, it only offers me a glibc-doc. The libstdc++2.10-glibc2.2 is installed.

Maybe this is the reason why it does not work with my Firefox?

[UPDATE|22.11.07] Google Gears works now on my notebook! Read the story "Finally Google Gears works on Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn)" to know more.

Google penalty because of excluding the bot temporary by robots.txt?

Holger — Sun, 21 Oct 2007 09:59:53 +0000

One of my websites was mistakenly excluded from crawling by a wrong entry in the robots.txt. When I noticed the drop in visits it was already too late. The search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc.) had removed the website already from their index.

I have changed the robots.txt immediately, but until now the website is not back in the index. I have checked in Googles Webmaster Tools and everything seems to be OK. I know it can take a while until you show up in the index, but from my experience it never takes that long.

Therefore I was wondering whether Google might have some penalty for websites which did not allow their bot to access the website. Maybe that it takes simply far longer until it can be reincluded? Did someone make the same experience? Any answers?

Google Gears does not work with Firefox on Ubuntu 7.04

Holger — Sun, 15 Jul 2007 21:41:05 +0000

I was trying to get Google Gears working on my computer. Not that I would really need it, but I like the idea to be able to read my feeds offline. That comes really handy when you are travelling and you do not have any internet connection. You could easily get up to date by reading through the latest posts on your favourite blogs and news sites.

However, when I click on the link Google is offering ("Offline New!") in the upper right corner of Google Reader it opens a window, gives me the opportunity to install the plug-in. The plug-in installs, but after restarting Firefox the "Offline" links still shows up and I can not download the feeds to my computer.

Is anyone running Google Gears with Firefox and Ubuntu 7.04? Any idea how to fix the problem?

[UPDATE|22.11.07] Google Gears works now on my notebook! Read the story "Finally Google Gears works on Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn)" to know more.