Julie Kurpiewski

After several weeks of using Safari on my MacBook, I started to miss my Google Chrome…sniff sniff…I wanted my integrated URL and search bar!

I was hesitant to add Chrome because the MacBook worked so well with all it’s little Apple products…it was seamless.

I downloaded it, set it as my default browser and used it for about a day before switching back to Safari.

Chrome for Mac is still in beta and it’s pretty obvious. There were many features that just didn’t work…the most painful being my weather.com radar…just would not work! Ya I’m a weather-checking-dork.

So until Google works out the kinks in Chrome for Mac, it’s Safari as my default.

Several weeks ago, I received this e-mail from Google about our Google Products search listings…

Hello,

In order to create the best experience for our users, Google verifies all product listings that are submitted to the Google Merchant Center. For example, we make sure that listings contain all required attributes, such as ‘price’ and ‘link.’ We also crawl these links to ensure that the pages you’ve specified exist and represent the correct products. When attempting to access some of the links that you provided, we found that a robots.txt file is preventing us from crawling them.

In order to resolve this, please update your robots.txt file to allow us to crawl your product pages by February 28, 2010. After this date, we will suspend any listings that we’re not able to crawl.

The below scenarios are the most common reasons why we may be unable to crawl your links:

1. You’re submitting tracking URLs which you do not want indexed. To resolve this issue, you may include the ‘rel=canonical’ tag in the pages you submit. Please visit http://googlemerchantblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/make-your-results-look-better-on.html for additional details. Please also note that in addition to including the ‘rel=canonical’ tag, you’ll also need to update your robots.txt file (see point 2).

2. All of the content you’re submitting has been roboted. Please be sure that the user-agent ‘Googlebot’ is not being blocked from crawling your website or product pages. To ensure the ‘Googlebot’ is not being blocked, please add the following two lines of text to the end of your robots.txt file:

User-agent: Googlebot

Disallow:

For more information on robots.txt files, please visit http://www.robotstxt.org. If you have any questions, please contact your webmaster directly.

3. Some of the items you’re submitting no longer exist and are redirecting to a roboted error page. Please remove any unavailable content from your feed and then resubmit it. Additionally, please be sure to update and submit your data feed as often as your items’ information changes — up to once per day.

After you’ve made the changes, please upload your items again. If you’re using the scheduling feature to submit your feed, we recommend that you upload the corrected feed manually before your next scheduled upload. Additionally, please note that your feed is automatically re-evaluated and therefore there’s no need to contact us confirming the resubmission of your items. If you have any questions, please visit our Help Center at http://www.google.com/support/merchants to find answers to frequently asked questions.

Sincerely,

The Google Team

Hmm not cool. It is very important to me to be able to track my traffic from Google Products…without being able to track it I wouldn’t have known about it’s crazy growth.

It looked like we had two options. The first was to remove Disallow: /*? from our robots.txt. The second option was to remove the tracking code from the feed. I felt like editing our robots.txt would open the flood gates…I don’t want the search engines to crawl my URLs with tracking codes or URLs with sorting and/or filtering options.

So I asked our IT guy to remove the tracking code from the feed…I figured Google Analytics would just treat it as a referral. Not the case…looking at the stats from this past weekend, it appears Google is treating traffic from Google Products as organic Google traffic.

I don’t understand why Google can’t separate the two, especially because both are THEIR products.

I have until the end of the month to troubleshoot the issue…unfortunately it looks like my only option is to edit the robots.txt.

I figured out what my problem is with all these Mac-compatible offline blogging programs I’ve been trialing… I am used to Windows Live Writer which is a WYSIWYG editor (what you see is what you get…think Adobe Dreamweaver)…it’s easy. I was trying to compare software such as MarsEdit to Windows Live Writer which apparently is like comparing birds and fish…they aren’t supposed to be the same.

I’m not a dummy…I can definitely figure out MarsEdit, especially since I have a basic working knowledge of HTML. Ya, there’s a bit of a learning curve but being able to create posts with HTML might actually pay off in the future.

So now that I’m looking at it from a different direction, I’m sure I’ll be a whiz in no time.

I mentioned last week I was looking for a blog editor to use with my new Mac. In that post, I said I was planning to try both Ecto and MarsEdit. Well I’ve tried both and I’m less than impressed. I’ve also tried Blogo and MacJournal…I’ve spent the least amount of time with MacJournal (to be fair).

I may be missing something big but I’m struggling to find a setting where I can easily adjust my margins with pictures and videos. Some of the editors put this gigantic space at the top of the post…some just put the pictures where ever… I’m clearly overlooking a setting but I’m starting to get frustrated. I can’t believe I’m saying this but I wish my Windows Live Writer worked on a Mac…

And rest assured, once I find out how to work one of these puppies, I will write a post including a tutorial with the basics i.e. how to post a video.

In addition to this blog, I also have a blog that revolves around my horse Grayson. The blog is less than a month old but when I was writing the title tags for the About Grayson page, I thought I’d have some fun

bahahaha!

Mashable wrote an article yesterday about Twitter’s growth stalling…I was actually just thinking about this. I thought “Wow, I haven’t heard a lot about Twitter recently…people must be getting bored with it”

I’m on Twitter and I’ve tried to become all savvy with it because I’m an internet marketing specialist and that’s what we do, right?

Wrong. I’ve decided I like Facebook way more than Twitter. So there. I don’t use Facebook to look at business fan pages, I use Facebook to keep up with my awesome college roommate who has her own farm and tack shop (sense the jealously?) and I use it to keep tabs on my little bro who’s a sophomore at Ohio University.

Twitter is just too darn noisy for me and I think other people are starting to come to this realization as well; you have to be glued to Twitter or else you miss the conversation.

Don’t get me wrong, if you want to procrastinate, Twitter is your place. I could get lost for hours while lurking on other people’s (that I don’t even know) profiles.

Maybe Twitter should’ve monetized in 2008 when they grew 752%.

And boy I hope TV and radio personalities learn it’s Twitter, not Tweeter.

Hmmm…my theme looks to be doing some odd things. I better look into that.

Update: Looks like my theme is unhappy when I end with a picture instead of text.

I loooove Flickr. I’ve been a member for almost three years and a pro member for almost two. But I have a dilemma.

I take tons of pictures. I usually take the pictures off my camera and immediately upload them to Flickr. I organized my pictures on both my computer and Flickr by creating a set or album for the month the pictures were taken. Once I have three or four months of pictures on my computer, I burn them to a disc so I have a hard copy. I’ve been doing this for years, at least four years, but I’ve only gone back to the discs a handful of times and that’s because I wanted to look at pictures that weren’t on Flickr.

But for some reason, I really dislike burning the pictures onto a disc. I’d like to completely do away with this step. So can I trust Flickr to keep my pictures safe and not lose them? I’m leaning toward that and I might be willing to take the chance.

Update:

I received my AdWords Qualified Individual logo yesterday.

Yes, I named my computer.

I think we will be best of friends in no time.

I have made it clear that I am a Windows Live Writer fan. I refuse to use the WordPress interface…it makes me feel claustrophobic and it just frustrates me.

When I bought my Mac I forget to consider not being able to use WLW! yikes! I know I need a blogging editor because of the sheer amount of blogging I do in a week.

So the search begins. I’ve heard great things about Ecto but I just found out you have to pay a fee. I heard MarsEdit is slightly better than Ecto but you’ll pay a little more (a whole $10). I have no problem paying a reasonable fee. So should I go with Ecto or MarsEdit? Or is their some sort of offline blogging software I haven’t considered?

Ecto and MarsEdit both offer free trials so I might give them a spin and then decide from there.