Working with gettext as your translation engine your project? In need of a rough translation of your application for a mockup/preview/…?

Paul Dixon offeres a free service that automatically translates a gettext PO file with Google Translate. I personally use gettext a lot because of its speed and ease of use (with poEdit) and this will certainly be of use.

Of course the results should not be used in a production application.

Another project: last week I finalized a Google Maps integration with an overview of my client’s members and the status of their membership.

VSK (or the Vlaamse Scholieren Koepel) manage their member schools through a web interface and because they had addresses of each school, it was a logical step to show them on a Google Maps overview:

While the result will definitely come in handy for them, implementation is not spectacularly difficult. The fact that the hosting was fixed on PHP 4.x caused a bit more “fun” though!

This can save some time searching: to center a map on a set of markers (like with the county selection above) your must first center it on a set of fixed coordinates.

When you use FireFox, you might notice that the Google search results show a different URL once you click on a link.

Google has been experimenting/implementing/… this for quite some time now but apparently not in all countries/browsers/users/… simultaneously?

It is caused by some JavaScript script that re-routes the link through Google in order for them to be able to track clicks. Although I can imagine some people make a fuss about this, personally I do not care as long as the results are good.

But this becomes annoying once you right-click a link to copy it (e.g. in an e-mail): I want to send the original URL and it sounds a bit strange to track other people clicking on my search result (for some good reason it probably makes sense to Google though).

You can easily avoid this (at least in FireFox) with a Greasemonkey script. Scripts have been available for some time, but I made a simple one with jQuery that does the trick for me.

Download or install jQuery Google click tracking removal script.

The upgrade to the new FireFox 3.5 causes the nice Live Pagerank plugin by Martin of raketforskning to be deactivated.

Although his URL means “rocket science”, his site seems to be down so I wouldn’t expect an updated version too soon.

Luckily a nice guy named Daniel Olivares has created a new version which runs on FireFox 3.5.

If you own one or more sites the little number that appears in the FireFox status bar is an addiction. The Google Toolbar offers the same, but of course you don’t want the whole package and that’s why this add-on is so popular.

Edit: at the time of writing this new version worked, but it seems like it no longer does. Neither does the one downloadable on the official plugins site (although some users report it does, e.g. with firefox 3.7).

After getting rid of my Windows Live address, I started to move my domain e-mail to Google Apps (GMail).

Before I moved to Google, my domain e-mail (strictlyphp.com/strictlyphp.be) was handled by my hosting company and I also maintained the e-mail address my ISP provided and the GMail account I checked once in a while.

This has certainly wasted many hours in the past.

Google Apps to the rescue: you create an account, add your domains, point your MX records to Google “et voila”. After everything is set up, you can access your e-mail just like a regular GMail account. This means that you can set up POP3 or IMAP access from within your preferred e-mail client and you can set up your account to fetch messages from external accounts (the ISP account and the regular GMail account I already had in my case).

I had only one difficulty actually: the choice between POP3 and IMAP. I first picked IMAP but I soon realised this was not the optimal choice if you process many messages and maintain many folders. Because it is a synchronization protocol, it is not optimal for offline usage and is of course slower than an offline storage (which is the case for POP3). POP3 on the other hand is not ideal for multiple clients or multiple locations, but you at least don’t need to be connected to search your mailbox.

Because I fetch mail from my laptop, desktop and mobile, the Google Apps mailbox is configured to keep a copy of each message which is unnecessary and can become rather large. There seems to be no solution though: a setup with the setting “leave a copy on server” while fetching e-mail doesn’t work with Google.

Like you may have noticed, you can also not merge your existing regular GMail account with Google Apps and I wouldn’t recommend deleting it either, since the Apps accounts aren’t fully compatible with all Google services which you currently access with your GMail account.

If you doubt about Google Apps in terms of e-mail, maybe the other applications can convince you: Calendar, Mobile, Contacts,… Possible downtime may be the only drawback, but the Premium account (50 USD per year per user) with a 99.9% uptime guarantee provides an answer.

When you want to use Google Reader in offline mode so you can catch up with posts when you are not connected (yes, that happens!) you may not be able to follow the instructions stated in the Help (Dutch).

Google tells you to simply click the synchronize icon at the top right, next to “Settings” but no icon appears after you’ve installed Google Gears. Switching you preferred language to English instead of, in my case, Dutch solves that.

Since it acts the same across browsers I assume it’s a small bug for all languages except English?

Edit: Google Reader’s offline mode seems to be buggy since December last year.

In case you didn’t already read about this on one of the Google blogs: Virgin and Google (amongst others) sponsor a one-person rowing trip around the South Pole.

Olly Hicks, the one that will row the dedicated boat from Tasmania to Tasmania (with a few months over-wintering in Argentina or the Sandwich Islands, depending on his progress), will face the harshest weather on earth in the Southern ocean.

The trip is as much tied to Google services as possible: a Blogger blog, Picasa image gallery, Google Maps route tracking,… And of course: a dedicated YouTube channel. The initial video gives a nice impression at how Olly will live for the next 18 to 22 months.

It will sure be a lonely trip!
(unless you ask him a question, that is)

Like half the world probably did today, I also installed Google’s new browser.

They promised it to be fast but in comparison to FireFox 3 (and of course Internet Explorer 7) it seems lightning fast. I don’t know what causes this but I guess it is also reinforced by how quick all menu’s and tabs pop up. In the end, they can only control part of how fast a page loads.

It’s astonishing though how good sites still look. After using it for a few hours I haven’t found any deviations in site layouts between FireFox and Chrome. If you made the same comparison between FireFox and a new Internet Explorer most developers started to cry.

One remark though: as I already said, I need a dual-display in which I maximize windows and Chrome for some reason can only be maximize across both screens.
Edit: some Facebook JavaScript also does not seem to work. I guess this won’t be an urgent one ;-).

Almost perfect.

Although, as a developer, I can’t be extremely thrilled with a new kid on the block, in the end I must admit it looks like it will make many people’s web experience more fun. And since their zero pagerank site now is on top of their own search engine results (above much higher ranked sites) I guess it’s market share will steadily grow in the next weeks.