Merging All Official Google Blogs

New Video: What is the Analytics API?

Jeff Gillis — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 06:09:00 -0700

I spent a day in Irvine, California interviewing some of the software engineers who built the Google Analytics API, starting with Jacob Matthews, the tech lead behind the API. If you haven't read any of our API documentation yet but you have been wondering what the Google Analytics API is all about, we put together a couple of videos where we hear about the API from the people who built it. Here is the first one where we keep it high level and ask Jacob, "What is the Google Analytics API?"

Enjoy!

Posted by Nick Mihailovski, The Google Analytics API Team

New Analytics API Features including Event Tracking!

Alden DeSoto — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 07:14:00 -0700

We are excited to be releasing new features -- features that have been prioritized based on feedback from you.

Event Tracking

Get Excited! Event Tracking, our number-one feature request, is available through the API. You can use event tracking to measure the number of user interactions with a website. For example, you can track:

the total number of times a white paper is downloaded
the length of time it takes to load a video
the number of validation errors users get when filling out a form

If you already have an integration with Google Analytics, Event Tracking is even more exciting. To illustrate, let's look at Sprout. Sprout's integration with Google Analytics helps customers track user interaction within their Sprout content. However, users currently must log into the Sprout interface to see billing and account management data, and then also log into Google Analytics to see how their own sprouts are performing. Now that event tracking is available through the API, companies like Sprout can pull the interaction metrics tracked by Google Analytics events and present them directly in clients' performance dashboards--effectively leveraging Google Analytics as a platform to power their analysis reports.

Ready to try out Event Tracking yourself? Check out the event tracking API docs, or fire up the Query Explorer tool.

Navigational data

The Google Analytics web interface provides a navigation report. Analysts use it to infer which links visitors click on, from one particular page to the next. Now that this data is available through the API, you can create new visualizations, such as custom site overlays, to see which links get the most clicks.

Increased filter length

The length of filter expressions has been increased to 128 characters. This enables developers to perform more complex queries with fewer requests to the API, saving bandwidth and quota.

There is a detailed list of all these changes in our public change log. We hope you find these features useful to your development and look forward to your comments and continued feedback. If you haven't done so already, please join our public Google group and let us know how you've been using the API.

Posted by Nick Mihailovski, Google Analytics Team

Back To Basics: Save Clicks, Save Time

Jeff Gillis — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 08:24:00 -0700

Did you know that you can save clicks and jump directly to a deep-level report from your dashboard? Let's say that you want to see which cities in California you get traffic from. Ordinarily, you'd need to click Visitors, then Map Overlay in the report navigation. Then, you'd need to click United States, then California. But, you can save 3 of these 4 clicks by simply adding this report to your dashboard.

Try it now. Go to one of your favorite reports that requires several clicks to access. Once you've arrived at the report you want --and at the level you want it -- click Add to Dashboard. (The Add to Dashboard button is at the top of your report on the left, next to the Export and Email buttons.)

You'll now see the report on your dashboard. The next time you log in to your Analytics account, you'll be able to see the top cities from California on your dashboard and jump right to the report with a single click.

Posted by Alden DeSoto, Google Analytics Team

New Video: Steps to Using the Analytics API

Jeff Gillis — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 04:58:00 -0700

Last week, in our Google Analytics API video series, Jacob Matthews discussed What is the Google Analytics API? In this new video, Jacobs goes deeper and describes the three steps developers need to take to retrieve data from Google Analytics: Authentication, Account Query, and Profile/Report Query.

Feeling inspired? Play with our interactive javascript examples to see the API in action.

Posted by Nick Mihailovski, Google Analytics API Team

Fall In Love With Motion Charts

Jeff Gillis — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 07:33:00 -0700

Have you used Motion Charts yet? If not, it's a little like playing an instrument. It takes a little practice, but once you get the hang of it, it's the best thing you ever did - fun and informative and you'll want to do it daily. Create them and watch them reveal patterns you weren't aware of in your keyword activity or some other area that is important to your site.

We've written a few posts on Motion Charts and made a video, and now we wanted to refer you to a great article called How To Use Google Analytics Motion Charts To Maximize Results, on Searchengineland.com, written by one of our Authorized Consultants, Daniel Waisberg from easynet search marketing in Israel.

Daniel discusses both how to use Motion Charts and also what metrics to designate as which elements of the chart to best use the feature for optimizing your online marketing. In his example, Daniel chooses to have conversion values as the size and color of the bubbles so you can easily spot them for optimization opportunities. For instance, for an e-commerce site and a motion chart showing keywords with the y-axis as visits and the x-axis as bounce rate, Daniel says:

Ecommerce conversion rate (color of bubble) shows the conversion rate for a keyword. This is important since you might have high converting keywords that are not receiving enough traffic. Look for red-small bubbles located close to the x-axis—these keywords should get priority optimization treatment. Tip: focus on these and related keywords on your PPC campaigns.

Revenue (size of bubble) shows the amount of money this keyword is driving to your website. Look for big-blue bubbles—this is a signal that a keyword brings lots of money but could bring even more if it converted better. Tip: optimize the pages related to these keywords to improve conversion.

Daniel also goes into detail about how to share motion charts with others. If you're ready to try Motion Charts today, his article is your next step. Then, for more inspiration, here are a few more examples of using them.

Posted by Jeff Gillis, Google Analytics Team

Back to Basics: What's in a profile setting?

Parkie — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 09:33:00 -0700

A little known link in your Analytics account is the key to unlocking extra ecommerce functionality in your Google Analytics account. In this post, we'll show you how clicking the 'Edit' link in your Main Website Profile Information box can open doors for your AdWords and ecommerce tracking purposes.

Once you click 'Edit' (highlighted in red above), you'll see a screen with editable fields like the image pictured below. The numbered list corresponds to the number next to each field so that you can learn how to set up a profile and enable the right features for your tracking purposes.

Enter an easily identifiable profile name.
Fill in the web property URL that you are tracking for this profile.
Enter the default page to which your server defaults to when no page on the domain is specified. This information allows Google Analytics to combine requests to www.yourdomain.com and www.yourdomain.com/index.html, which are in fact the same page. If Default page isn't specified, these would be reported as two separate pages.
If your account is linked to an AdWords account, your time zone country and time zone will default to the ones specified in your AdWords account. If your accounts are not linked, you'll see pull-down menus that display options for you to select for #4 and #5.
Same as #4.
If your site uses unique session IDs or other query parameters in your URLs that you are not interested in seeing in your reports, you can easily exclude these parameters by entering them into this field.
Enter the currency you want to see in your reports.
If you have linked an AdWords account, import your cost data so that you can get AdWords information pumped into your Google Analytics account. Once your cost data is imported, the information will appear in the Clicks tab of your AdWords report. Learn how to import your cost data.
If you're tracking e-commerce on your website, you must enable it to be reflected in your reports in this section. If you would like to set up e-commerce for your site, please read this Help Center article.
If you have a search engine on your site, you may want to enable this feature. Site Search contains reports about the visitors using the 'search' functionality on your website. Google Analytics Site Search reports deliver many useful pieces of information - for example, they can help you analyze how people use the search functionality on your site, and report its conversion metrics. Learn how to enable Site Search.

Posted by Christina Park, Google Analytics Team

Advanced: Structure Your Account With Roll Up Reporting And More

Jeff Gillis — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 04:58:00 -0700

Guest post by the team at E-Nor, a Google Analytics Authorized Consultant

For the analytics ninjas out there, you know that data accuracy is probably one of the most challenging aspects of analytics across all solutions and platforms, and you learn to apply best practices and establish processes to improve data collection and reporting.

But for the rest of us, how do we help marketers, business owners, and webmasters have confidence in their data? Analytics is all about clarity. It should help you see actionable statistics clearly and quickly. However, when you have a website structure with multiple domains and subdomains - which is often the case - sometimes things can get jumbled.

For instance, you are a CMO or a Director of Marketing at the enterprise and you are responsible for the performance and ROI of a large number of web proprieties. You look at your analytics reports and you can't find your ecommerce data from site A, site B is referring traffic to itself (definitely not a good thing!), and conversion data from your marketing campaign microsite is no where to be found.

This image sums up the feeling.

No need to panic. This post aims to offer an approach to help you plan your Google Analytics accounts setup in a structured fashion to help with clarity. I hope that by following the approach and the technical steps, you will be able to collect and manage all your data, make more sense of it, and most importantly, ensure what you are reporting on, trending, dashboarding and analyzing is based on accurate data.

There are two distinct sections of this post:

The Strategy (non-technical)
The How (technical)

The Strategy

There are many ways to structure your Google Analytics profiles when you have multiple domains and subdomains. But in this post I will limit myself to the one that I like the most and I believe is the least confusing.

Before I go into details of the solution, and for simplification, let us assume we are dealing with a project that has the following requirements:
A business with 3 domains (www.a.com, www.b.com, and www.c.com)

1 domain (a.com) links to a 3rd party shopping cart (www.mystore.com)

2 domains (a.com and b.com) have multiple sub-domains

Here is a graphical representation of the structure:

Measurement Requirements

Track each domain and sub-domain separately (e.g. www.a.com, news.a.com, and blog.b.com)

Track the rollup/overall traffic for all domains and sub-domains

Track full e-commerce transactions

Solution

Create a Google Analytics account for each domain (www.a.com, www.b.com, and www.c.com)

Customize the tracking code to link the multiple sub-domains with their main domains

Link the third party shopping cart with the main domain and install Google Analytics tracking code in all shopping pages

Create a rollup Google Analytics account and add its code to all domains and sub-domains

Graphical example of a well-planned Analytics Account Structure:

Now on to the technical stuff. If you don't enjoy javascript and regular expressions, you may stop here and ask your webmaster or technical analyst to read further :-)

The How:

I will try to illustrate the technical implementation in 10 simple steps:

1- Create a unique Google Analytics account for each domain www.a.com, www.b.com, and www.c.com and then use the account number UA-AAAAAAAA-1 in the code in step 3 and use the accounts UA-BBBBBBBB-1 for www.b.com and UA-CCCCCCCC-1 for www.c.com in the code in step 8.

2- Create a Google Analytics account for the a rollup account that will oversee all domains and sub-domains (use the GA account number UA-XXXXXXXX-1 in the code used in step 3 and 8)

3- Add the following Google Analytics tracking code to the main site (www.a.com) and its sub-domains (blog.a.com, news.a.com, images.a.com, and media.a.com)

About the following code: We have a regular pageTracker object to track activity on each particular subdomain and a rollupTracker to track activity across all subdomains and the third party checkout site. (Click here to learn more about the customizations we made to the standard Google Analytics tracking code)

4- Enable E-Commerce Reporting

Analytics Settings > Profile Settings > Edit Profile Information

5- Add the following code* to all shopping cart pages on the store site (www.mystore.com)

*Make sure to add this code to the top of the pages.

6- Add the e-commerce tracking code to the confirmation page after the GATC.

Read more about "How to track e-commerce transactions?"

7- Change the links to the store site (www.mystore.com) on the main site (www.a.com) to use _link as following:

If the current link looks like:

Change it to:

8- Repeat step number 3 for domains www.b.com and www.c.com after updating the Google Analytics account number UA-AAAAAAAA-1 and the setDomainName value.

To view the entire code for www.b.com and its sub-domains (click here)

To view the entire code for www.c.com (click here)

9- Create a profile for each sub-domain (only if needed)

In order to track a sub-domain (ex. blog.b.com) in its own profile, follow the following three steps:

a- Create a filter that include only traffic from Hostname=blog.b.com

b- Create a profile and name it "Blog"

c- Apply the sub-domain filter to the new profile

10- As you might have noticed from the codes that we added so far to all pages, we added an extra Google Analytics account to track all pageviews across domains and sub-domains to one Google Analytics account. We call this account “rollup account”.

var rollupTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-XXXXXXXX-1");
rollupTracker._trackPageview();

Since in the rollup account, we will track pages from different sites and many of these pages might share the same naming convention, I suggest that you create an advanced filter that adds the hostname to the page name to differentiate between pages with same URI.

Once you apply the filter, the upcoming data will appear as following:

Note, in the example above if we didn’t apply the “Add Hostnames” filter, all home.aspx pages will appear as one page with 2685 pageviews.

If you have been with us so far, you are now ready to conduct your analysis based on clean and much more accurate data :)

To review each domain by itself and for deep-dive analysis, use the domain profiles

To get an overview and to see how the business is doing across all sites, use the “Rollup Account”

Google Analytics - Accounts and Profiles

Account Rollup in Google Analytics

Google Analytics for the Enterprise

Posted by Allaedin Ezzeidin, Analytics Specialist @ E-Nor, a Google Analytics Authorized Consultant

Overview Of The Google Analytics Platform And API

Jeff Gillis — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 14:20:00 -0700

In the previous two videos from the API team, tech lead Jacob Matthews discussed What Is the Google Analytics API and Steps To Using the Google Analytics API.

In our third video, we turn to Ruth Doane, another Tech Lead, to take a step back and look under the hood of Google Analytics itself. Did you ever wonder how data is collected and organized in Google Analytics? See what happens to traffic data after it is sent to Google Analytics and learn how it gets processed and stored, and then ends up in the Web Interface and Custom Reporting.

And best of all, learn how the API works with your data, and how it puts you are in the driver seat. Enjoy!

Posted by Nick Mihailovski, The Google Analytics API Team

Analytics training coming to NYC, Chicago, Berkeley, Seattle, Phoenix, and Charlotte!

Jeff Gillis — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 02:15:00 -0700

Do you learn best by clear examples? Do you get the feeling you could be doing so much more with Google Analytics, but are not quite sure how? Do you want to take your skills to the next level? Or are you starting from scratch? Whatever your goal or skill level, there's a day-long Google Analytics Seminars For Success that is right for you - and is coming to a US city near you.

Our instructors have years of experience implementing some of the most sophisticated Google Analytics implementations to date and working with customers of every skill level. They are touring the country with S4s (Seminars For Success) spreading that knowledge to the public. They are all Google Analytics Authorized Consultants and are listed in parentheses below next to the city name.

Former students tell us all the time they never realized how much there was to learn and how they wished they had taken the class sooner.

We’re happy to announce a new round of cities hosting the seminars through the end of the year—sign up today!

New York, NY (EpikOne)
Oct 8: Analytics Intro/Marketer Training
Oct 9: Analytics Advanced & Implementation Training

Chicago, IL (WebShare)
Oct 28: Analytics Intro/Marketer Training
Oct 29: Analytics Advanced & Implementation Training
Oct 30: Website Optimizer & Landing Page Testing

Berkeley, CA (WebShare)
Nov 4: Analytics Intro/Marketer Training
Nov 5: Analytics Advanced & Implementation Training
Nov 6: Website Optimizer & Landing Page Testing

Seattle, WA (WebShare)
Nov 18: Analytics Intro/Marketer Training
Nov 19: Analytics Advanced & Implementation Training
Nov 20: Website Optimizer & Landing Page Testing

Phoenix, AZ (WebShare)
Dec 9: Analytics Intro/Marketer Training
Dec 10: Analytics Advanced & Implementation Training
Dec 11: Website Optimizer & Landing Page Testing

Charlotte, NC (ROI Revolution)
Dec 9: Analytics Intro/Marketer Training
Dec 10: Analytics Advanced & Implementation Training

Posted by Jeff Gillis, Google Analytics Team and Corey Koberg, WebShare, a Google Analytics Authorized Consultant

Appraising Your Investment in Enterprise Web Analytics

Jeff Gillis — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 04:54:00 -0700

Earlier this year, we asked Forrester Research to help us understand the key trends in enterprise web analytics. The commissioned study conducted by Forrester, "Appraising Your Investment in Enterprise Web Analytics" provides rich insights into what large companies want from an enterprise solution and how they are thinking about their web analytics decisions.

First, let's provide some context for what was considered an "enterprise." The study looked at companies with at least $500 million in annual revenue. Of the 198 companies that met this criteria, almost half (45%) have annual revenues in excess of $5 billion. Three quarters of the companies have over 5,000 employees.

One of the study's findings that we find interesting is around the role of people and web analytics technology. As companies re-evaluate their investments in web analytics, the study explains that:

"Enterprise companies must ask themselves if they are paying too much for capabilities that they simply do not need. In some cases, gaining fewer seldom-used capabilities is a worthwhile tradeoff if funds can be reallocated to hire more resources necessary for analysis."

Companies are recognizing that analysts drive insights, not the analytics tool itself. According to the study, "sixty percent of decision-makers agree that investments in web analytics people are more valuable than investments in web analytics technology." This is in-line with Avinash Kaushik's 10/90 rule for web analytics success: invest 10% of your analytics budget on the actual technology and 90% of your budget in the people who deliver actionable insight, whether in-house analysts, agencies, or vendor partners. It's the people that matter.

Below are other key findings from the Forrester report's Executive Summary:

• Free web analytics takes residence within the enterprise. A staggering 53% of enterprises surveyed currently use a free technology solution as their primary web analytics tool, and 71% use free tools in some capacity. This places use of fee-based solutions in the minority, with only 33% of survey respondents paying for web analytics technologies (12% use homegrown solutions, and 2% use some other option). In addition, it dispels the belief that free solutions are only being used in small organizations or somehow diminished in their capacity to provide value to the enterprise.

• The merits of free analytics products are compelling. Among respondents currently paying for their primary web analytics tools, 66% would consider displacing them with a free alternative. While the primary driver for this consideration is cost, 60% of enterprises are more likely to consider a free tool now because of recent improvements in free solutions. Additionally, 52% are enticed by free tools because they allow enterprises to invest more in the people necessary to drive insight rather than the technology used to collect and analyze data.

• Balancing costs and benefits requires introspection. We found that 52% of practitioners employing both free and fee-based solutions fail to effectively use more than half of the capabilities offered by their tools. This realization is cause for a needs assessment to determine if fee-based web analytics technologies are justified or simply excessive. For many, spending on web analytics technologies could be better allocated toward program development and acquisition of expertise.

• Reliability and ease of use are characteristics that enterprises crave. For 71% of enterprises surveyed, web analytics data plays a significant role in driving decisions. So it comes as no surprise that users place a premium on data assurance, with 45% citing reliable data collection as the most important vendor selection criteria. This was followed by 40% who listed an easy-to-use interface and product pricing as the second equally most important vendor selection consideration.

• Organizations are approaching a point of inflection. Nearly two-thirds of enterprises would abandon their current web analytics provider given the right circumstances. While 74% of large enterprises agreed that web analytics is a technology that they cannot do without, many indicated that alternative tools would suffice. These metrics indicate that organizations are receptive to change and justifiably seek solutions best suited to meet their needs.

If you'd like to learn more, download the full report. We'd love to hear your thoughts. Post a comment and tell us what you think!

Posted by Dai Pham, Google Analytics Team

Batter up! eMetrics DC, October 19-23

Jeff Gillis — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 07:27:00 -0700

Come to the nation's capital and join us again this year at the eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit in Washington, D.C. from October 19-23.

Ah, The Fall Classic. If you're stateside*, you may be aware that the baseball playoffs are in full swing. Full swing.

Bear with us here. Are you familiar with the expression, "Right in your wheelhouse"? In baseball, a wheelhouse is a hitter's powerzone. It's the part of a batter's swinging range in which they will make the best contact with the ball. It's the sweetspot. If a pitch is right in your wheelhouse it's basically that pitch that makes your eyes widen in anticipation. The ball is coming right where you want it, in the spot where you'll have the best chance of hitting it out of the park. Grip it and rip it.

Some hitters like a pitch inside and low, some like it level center right over the plate. Each hitter has a wheelhouse, and a pitcher should figure out where that is and keep the ball away from it. Our buddy Justin Cutroni, lifelong Red Sox fan and web analytics practitioner extraordinaire, knows a thing or two about this.

The term "wheelhouse" itself actually comes from even further back than baseball. A wheelhouse on a ship is where the captain commands the ship, also known as the bridge.

But, the phrase can also be used generally to refer to something that is in your area of expertise. For instance, "Analyzing website traffic is right in Justin Cutroni's wheelhouse." This is our usage.

Here's another one: "The eMetrics conference is right in Google Analytics' wheelhouse." You probably saw that coming, but it's true. We love this conference because it brings together a bunch of analysts, marketers, vendors, thoughtleaders and general wild cards who are agitating over the methods and tools that help them focus their organizations towards the best data-driven practices. Wire to wire, it's a good week of learning, arguing, networking and information sharing. We'll be there, and hope you will too!

Here's a discount code for 20% off a 1 and/or 3-day pass when you register for eMetrics:
SPONSORDC09

In addition to our booth, here's some Google Analytics and Website Optimizer related things going on at the conference, including some breakout sessions we'll be hosting in conference room Beech. (We'll also have details about the following at our booth.)

Monday, October 19:
9am - 4:30pm Google Analytics Workshop in conference room Chestnut
This will be excellent and enriching. You'll be exposed to Google Analytics from soup to nuts in a small, hands on, high energy, classroom setting where you can get personal attention. You'll learn set up for your particular site, best practices, newest features and be exposed to other related products such as Google Website Optimizer. You need to register for this separately.
Instructor: Caleb Whitmore from Analytics Pros

Tuesday, Oct 20:
10:30-11am: Google Website Optimizer 101 in conference room Beech
Get acquainted with Google Website Optimizer and learn about a/b and multivariate testing on your site. "Conversion rate lift" will become part of your regular vocabulary.

2:30-3pm: Google Analytics main presentation in Plaza B&C
You'll hear some good stuff from our team, presented by the best speaker we know. We've been working hard to be ready for eMetrics and this should be a fun half hour. :)

3pm-3:30pm Deep dive! in conference room Beech
Google Analytics enterprise-level feature deep dive breakout session led by Phil Mui, senior Product Manager of Google Analytics. You'll love this. Phil has the style of the best professor/mentor/wizard you had at MIT. :-)

Wednesday, Oct 21
10:30-11am: Google Website Optimizer Techie Session in conference room Beech
Website Optimizer Engineers from the team will cover advanced topics and techniques to help you take it to the next level.

3:00 - 3:20: Meet the Google Analytics and Website Optimizer Partner Network in Conference Room Beech
Some of our authorized consultants will be attending the conference and will intro themselves and tell you what they can do for you, from simple support or training, to helping you get the right implementation, to basic or advanced analysis, either on a project basis or ongoing. In addition to analytics and website testing, they do SEM, SEO, e-commerce, design, branding and more. Feel free to ask them questions to get details about engaging one of them. There are over 100 worldwide, so chances are there's one near you.

The conference is less than two weeks away. We hope you register and we see you there!

*If you're not stateside, think Cricket. Don't worry, we'll be talking World Cup next year.
Posted by Jeff Gillis, Google Analytics Team

Rapid Fire Web Analytics Q and A with Avinash and Nick

Jeff Gillis — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 06:40:00 -0700

Recently we started an initiative to ask you to share your most burning questions via Google Moderator (link: Google Analytics Google Moderator site).

This week, Avinash and I sat down to do a rapid fire Q&A to answer your questions. Rather than do a dry text Q&A version, we chose to do a video, and we think you'll find it educational and entertaining.

In this episode we discuss:

How is bounce rate calculated
Effect of search bots on data collection
Finding a benchmarking category for sites that don't fit into any particular benchmark category
What is the best way to identify landing pages with high bounce rate
How to find new keywords to improve content performance
Effects of private browsing and incognito mode on data collection

Here are links to resources we discussed in the video:

Compare landing page performance by bounce rate report screen shot
Google Insights for Search
Google Search Based Keyword Tool

If you found this helpful, we'd love to hear your comments. If you have a question you would like us to answer, please submit a question or vote for your favorite question in our public Google Moderator site. We will answer your latest questions in a couple of weeks with yet another entertaining video.

Please add your thoughts about the Q&A via comments below. Thanks!

Posted by Nick Mihailovski, Google Analytics Team

2 Upcoming Events: Chicago and Melbourne

Jeff Gillis — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 22:31:00 -0700

Every now and then, we like to shout out events that our Google Analytics Authorized Consultants are doing for the community.

Seminar For Success In Melbourne
Two weeks ago we mentioned some upcoming Seminars For Success which are all day seminars on Google Analytics. Here's one more Seminar For Success in Melbourne, Australia this Thursday and Friday, October 22 and 23, hosted by Mangold Sengers, a Google Analytics and Website Optimizer Authorized Consultant.

Thursday will be a Google Analytics Introduction and User Training, and Friday will be an Advanced Technical Implementation session. You'll learn how to use Google Analytics and also get some indispensable techniques for analyzing and optimizing your marketing and traffic. Take a look at the agenda to learn which one would be right for you.

User Conference in Chicago
On November 4th, Authorized Consultant Stratigent is holding their 2009 Google Analytics User Conference with many members of the Google Analytics Product and Engineering teams in attendance to meet you and hear about how you're using the product and what you'd like to see.

Join fellow Google Analytics users for a full day packed with tips from industry insiders, discussions on the latest innovations, customer panel conversations featuring organizations making the most out of Google Analytics. And,

Stratigent will discuss some of the applications that you can’t live without and, of course, networking with other members of the Google Analytics community will be a huge part of the day. Some of the highlights from the day's agenda include:

Improving ROI and Conversion with Google Analytics: Presented by Phil Mui, Ph.D., Senior Product Manager at Google.
Enterprise Insights: Understand what sets world-class analytics programs apart

Customer Discussion Panel: Listen to everyday Google Analytics users discuss their struggles and triumphs

Applications You Can't Live Without Competition: Discover these useful add-ons that make your life easier

Google Analytics - Guide to Success: Hear tricks of the trade from seasoned professionals

Register by 10/11/09, you’ll receive an extra 10% off. Click Here to Register Now. Also, Google Analytics has provided a limited number of Google Analytics Individual Qualification (IQ) exam vouchers, which allows individuals to demonstrate proficiency in Google Analytics (a $50 value).

Posted by Eva Woo, Google Analytics Team

Google Analytics Now More Powerful, Flexible And Intelligent

Jeff Gillis — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 04:00:00 -0700

Today, we're announcing a new set of Google Analytics features which builds on last year's enterprise-class feature launch. Some add more power to existing capabilities. Others provide new flexibility to further customize and adapt Google Analytics according to the needs of your enterprise. Finally, we'll introduce Analytics Intelligence. Resist the temptation to skip ahead. We wouldn't want you to miss anything. :-)

Powerful.

Power-users have asked us to add even more data manipulation and analysis features to Google Analytics. We've been listening, and are adding the latest power features to expand Google Analytics enterprise-class capabilities.

Engagement Goals..and more of them! Two new goal types allow you to measure user engagement and branding success on your site. The new goal types allow you to set thresholds for Time on Site and Pages per Visit. Furthermore, you can now define up to 20 goals per profile. Watch this short video on goals to learn more.

Expanded Mobile Reporting: Google Analytics now tracks mobile websites and mobile apps so you can better measure your mobile marketing efforts. If you're optimizing content for mobile users and have created a mobile website, Google Analytics can track traffic to your mobile website from all web-enabled devices, whether or not the device runs JavaScript. This is made possible by adding a server side code snippet to your mobile website which will become available to all accounts in the coming weeks (download snippet instructions). We will be supporting PHP, Perl, JSP and ASPX sites in this release. Of course, you can still track visits to your regular website coming from high-end, Javascript enabled phones.

iPhone and Android mobile application developers can now also track how users engage with apps, just as with tracking engagement on a website. What's more, for apps on Android devices, usage can be tied back to ad campaigns: from ad to marketplace to download to engagement. Check out the SDKs and technical documentation on mobile apps tracking to get started. And coming soon, you'll be able to see breakout data on mobile devices and carriers in the new Mobile reports in the Visitors section!

Advanced Analysis Features: Advanced Table Filtering feature is being added to the arsenal of power tools you can use to perform advanced data analysis. Earlier this year we announced Pivoting and Secondary Dimensions. Using Secondary Dimensions, you could, for example, see revenue metrics for city + keyword combinations. So, you could see how much revenue your site received from visitors in Boston who searched for "bean bag". You could then "pivot" by source and see revenue by search engine for each of these city+keyword combinations. Here's a quick tutorial video.

Now we're adding Advanced Table Filtering. This allows you to filter the rows in a table based on different metric conditions. Watch the following video to see an example of how you could filter thousands of keywords to identify just the keywords with a bounce rate less than 30% and that referred at least 25 visits.

Together, these three power features let you perform in-depth, on the fly analysis without having to export your data to spreadsheet tools.

Unique Visitor Metric: Now when you create a Custom Report, you can select Unique Visitors as a metric against any dimensions in Google Analytics. This allows marketers to see how many actual visitors (unique cookies) make up any user-defined segment.

Flexible.

Every enterprise has unique web analytics tracking and reporting needs. Today, we're enhancing two of the tools that organizations use to adapt and customize Google Analytics. We're adding multiple custom variables to the tracking API and making it easy to share Custom Reports and Advanced Segments.

Multiple Custom Variables: Custom Variables provide you the power and flexibility to customize Google Analytics and collect the unique site usage data most important to your business. If you've used the _setVar() function, the concept of custom variables will be familiar, but we've taken it a step further: you can now define and track visitors according to visitor attributes (e.g. member vs. non-member), session attributes (e.g. logged-in or not), and by page-level attributes (e.g. viewed Sports section). Use custom variables to classify any number of interactions and behaviors on your site. This powerful customization capability makes Google Analytics even more flexible and able to meet the needs of the most demanding enterprises. Multiple custom variables will become available to all accounts in the coming weeks but you can start learning more about them now.

Sharing Segments and Custom Report Templates: You may have recently noticed in your accounts the ability to administer and share Custom Reports and Advanced Segments, features we announced earlier this year. Have a Custom Report you created just for the Sales Team? Simply share the URL link for that report to anyone who has an Analytics account and a pre-formatted Sales report template will automatically be imported. You can also now select which profiles you want to share or hide your Advanced Segments and Custom Reports with.

Intelligent.

Now, for the new feature you've been waiting for! Wouldn't it be great if Google Analytics could tell you what to pay attention to? Beginning today, it can.

Analytics Intelligence: We're launching the initial phase of an algorithmic driven Intelligence engine to Google Analytics. Analytics Intelligence will provide automatic alerts of significant changes in the data patterns of your site metrics and dimensions over daily, weekly and monthly periods. For instance, Intelligence could call out a 300% surge in visits from YouTube referrals last Tuesday or let you know bounce rates of visitors from Virginia dropped by 70% two weeks ago. Instead of you having to monitor reports and comb through data, Analytics Intelligence alerts you to the most significant information to pay attention to, saving you time and surfacing traffic insights that could affect your business. Now, you can spend your time actually taking action, instead of trying to figure out what needs to be done.

Custom Alerts make it possible for you to tell Google Analytics what to watch for. You can set daily, weekly, and monthly triggers on different dimensions & metrics, and be notified by email or right in the user interface when the changes actually occur.

Watch this video on Analytics Intelligence and then look for the feature to appear in your account in the coming weeks!

That's the summary. We're excited to share more details about each of these features, so stay tuned! We'll discuss each feature in turn over the next few days.

Posted by Dai Pham, Google Analytics Team

P.S. We're not the only ones with exciting news today! Google Website Optimizer also announced some big features - over time charts and a Website Optimizer API! Check out the Google Website Optimizer blog to learn more.

Google Analytics IQ: Proof of Qualification Now Available!

Alden DeSoto — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 09:09:00 -0700

Since we launched the Google Analytics Individual Qualification (IQ) program, many of you have asked for a way to prove to others that you have passed the Google Analytics IQ test and are therefore Google Analytics qualified. We're pleased to announce that you are now able to create and publish a link to your official test record. You can publish this link on your website or share it with others however you wish. When someone clicks on your link, they'll be taken to a page that looks like this:

Your test record can also display your test score and a contact email address if you wish to share this information. You can even create multiple test records -- for example, one that includes your contact email address and one that doesn't -- to share with different people.

Here's how to set it up. Go to the Google Testing Center and sign in to your account (using the same email to log in that you used when you took the test). Once you've signed in, click the Manage Your Test Records link (highlighted in yellow on the screenshot below).
You'll then see this screen (below). Click the Add link (highlighted in yellow).
On the next screen, you select the information that you want included in the test record. The Description can be any name you want; you'll be the only one who sees this name.
Save the record. You'll now see a test record. Click the record (shown in yellow, below) to get the link.

You'll now be able to share your test record by copying and pasting your link.
We encourage you to share and publish links to your test record, but please remember that you may not create logos or graphics (or reuse any logos that you find online) to promote your Google Analytics qualification. The link to your test record is your official proof of qualification.

Posted by Alden DeSoto, Google Analytics Team

New Feature Spotlight: Engagement Goals, Goal Sets and 20 Goals Per Profile

Jeff Gillis — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 04:39:00 -0700

Last week, we announced a bundle of new enterprise-class features in Google Analytics. Over the next few weeks, we'll do posts which go into depth on each new feature. Here is the first, which goes into detail on the expanded and improved goals in Google Analytics (related video). It's very clearly and insightfully written by our friends at WebShare, a Google Analytics Authorized Consultant, with links to related help center articles.

You can probably think of more than four things you'd like your visitors to be doing when they visit your website. Until last week, Google Analytics had limited the number of configurable goals per profile to just four. Sure, you can create 50 profiles and thus track up to 200 goals, but having to switch back and forth in your reports can be a bit cumbersome. Well, here's some very welcome news: comprehensive site performance measurement just got easier. A newly released feature in Google Analytics now lets you create up to 20 conversion goals per profile, including new Engagement goals.

What is it?

Each profile now can be configured with up to four “Goal Sets”, each capable of housing five individual goals. In your Traffic Sources reports, each goal set appears as its own tab (see screenshot below) and the goals associated with the set are listed out in plain text, just as before, to show you how your visitors are accomplishing the objectives of your site. (Click any image to enlarge it.)

In the screenshot above, you can see that Goal Set 1 is comprised of five individual goals. Look in the white boxes under "Goal Set 1" and you'll see "Goal 1: Newsletter Signup", "Goal 2: Contact Us Page", "Goal 3: New User Registration", "Goal 4: Webinar Signup" and "Goal 5: Catalog Request". Goal Sets 2, 3, 4 contain various other goals, and a simple click on the tab puts the numbers you need right at your fingertips.

When viewing your Goal reports, you'll now see up to 20 individual goals in the “Select Goal:” dropdown list, so you can quickly and efficiently look at trend data, funnel visualizations and more:

Setting Up Your Goals

Goal configuration has a new look which follows the goal set organization. For each goal set, you can add up to five individual goals (the remaining number of goals in each set are conveniently noted for you). To add a new goal, just click on the “Add goal” link for the goal set you wish to add a goal to.

With all of these new goals to configure, it's a good practice to use your goal sets to group your goals strategically. For example, you might use Goal Set 1 to track a set of e-commerce related goals such as Successful Purchase, Added Item to Shopping Cart, Deleted Item from Shopping Cart, and things of that nature. For your next set, you might want to track interaction goals such as Newsletter Signup, Followed us on Twitter, Logged In, etc... The sky's the limit, but make sure to consider how you'll want to use your reports when configuring your new goals.

New Goal Types - Engagement Goals

Another change you'll notice is the addition of two new goal types called Engagement goals: Time on Site and Pages/Visit. Previously goals could only be counted when a particular page URL was visited, but Engagement goals will allow a conversion to be recorded when a visitor reaches a certain threshold of involvement with your site. For instance, do you have an ad-serving site and want to record a conversion when a visitor has seen 10 pages? Now you can. Or, are you serving up audio/video or longer content pieces and want get an idea of how long people are listening, viewing or reading? A Time on Site goal can help.

Time on Site allows you to specify a greater than or less than value of time spent on your site as one of your goals. The following goal would fire once a visit passes five minutes in length:

Pages/Visit allows you to set a greater than, equal to or less than value to a pages-per-visit value. The following goal would fire upon the 6th pageview of the visit:

As always, if you'd like a monetary value to be assigned to any of your goals and used in cost and revenue calculations, just enter the amount in the "Goal Value" field.

Note: funnels do not apply for Engagement type goals. Speaking of funnels...

Goal Funnels

One more change to the goal creation page is the goal funnel creation step. The setup is collapsed by default (as it is optional), but if your URL Destination goals follow a path and you'd like to see how users are entering, following and abandoning that path, this is something that you can take advantage of. To create a funnel, just click on the “+ Yes, create a funnel for this goal” link and start entering the URL path to your goal, adding up to 10 steps.

Happy Goaling!

With this new addition to Google Analytics, opportunities to understand and then cater to your visitors abound. So the question is, how will you take advantage of this for your site?

Posted by WebShare, A Google Analytics Authorized Consultant

Google Analytics API on App Engine Treemap Visualization

Jeff Gillis — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 06:25:00 -0700

It's Friday, time for some fun! Advanced API analytics fun :)

Here is a captivating way to look at your Google Analytics data in a Treemap visualization. You can visualize your own data with our live demo. (Note: IE currently not supported for visualization part.)

click to enlarge

And, here is a video explaining how to look at the Treemap visualization and how to use it.

The goal of this example was to teach people how to use the Google Analytics API on App Engine in Java, as well as to demonstrate how to use both OAuth and AuthSub along with the App Engine's various services. The code looked great, but the output was a boring HTML table. So we used some open source tools to transform the table into a pretty tree map visualization, which is also useful in noticing interesting metrics.

All the code has been open sourced on Google Project hosting. Also, here's an article describing how this application works making it easy for developers to use this example as a starting point for new data visualizations and other Google Data projects.

For the data retrieval part, we used the App Engine Java SDK and the Google Analytics Data Export API Java Client Library to retrieve data from Google Analytics. The example code implements both unsigned AuthSub and registered OAuth authorization methods allowing developers to get up and running quickly in their dev environment and later switch to a secure authorization method in production environments. The application also uses the Model-View-Controller pattern, making it flexible and allowing developers to extend the code for new applications (e.g. adding support for other Google Data APIs).

And lastly, for the visualization part, we used the open-sourced Protovis SVG Visualization Library to create the Treemap. This JavaScript library is maintained by the Stanford Visualization Group and excels at creating brand new visualizations from a data set (in this case a boring HTML table). To handle all of the interactions, including rollover, tooltips and slider controls, we used JQuery. Here is the JavaScript source for the visualization part of the sample.

Enjoy!

Posted by Nick Mihailovski, Google Analytics API Team

p.s. If you have created any cool new visualizations using the Google Analytics Data Export API,email us so we can highlight them as well.

New Feature Spotlight: Google Analytics for Mobile Apps

Jeff Gillis — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 02:15:00 -0800

Last week, we introduced expanded mobile reporting features in Google Analytics. To help developers, this launch includes features that make it easy to see how people are using specific parts of their iPhone and Android applications. The same Google Analytics reports that provide insights into website traffic and engagement are now available for mobile apps.

As with websites, there are two basic categories of user interaction you can track: pageviews and events. Since mobile apps don't contain HTML pages, developers simply determine when their apps should trigger pageview requests. Google Analytics then aggregates this data in the Content reports to display the number of visits, session length and bounce rates. The data gives insight into how your users interacted with the app.

Developers can also track visitor actions that don't correspond directly to pageviews using Event Tracking. These user actions can include views of embedded videos, button clicks, downloads and more. App developers can then use this data to understand which features are most popular and inform decisions about which features should be promoted or prioritized for further development.

Redfin, an online brokerage for buying and selling homes, recently tested Google Analytics on their mobile application. Watch this video to learn more about their experience:

To get started using Google Analytics to understand and optimize how people use your iPhone or Android mobile app, check out the SDK and technical documentation.

Posted by Meredith Papp, Google Mobile Ads Team

Rapid Fire Web Analytics Q and A with Avinash and Nick - Episode #2

Alden DeSoto — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 07:21:00 -0800

This is our second video in our recent initiative to ask you to share your most burning questions via Google Moderator (link: Google Analytics Google Moderator site).

This week, Avinash brings his cast (leaving only one good analysis ninja arm) and we sit down to do a rapid fire Q&A to answer your questions.

In this episode we discuss:

Strategies for non-bounced non-converted visitors (Macro vs. Micro conversion)
Ways to report total number of keywords over time
Benefits to tracking transactions as conversion goals
Tracking unique visitors to specific web pages
Path analysis for keyword reports -- why it's bad and what to do instead
How Google Analytics can be used on affiliate sites
How site owners can exclude themselves from being tracked by Google Analytics
How to properly track sites that reside on different domains but use a shopping cart on a different, common, site (cross domain tracking)

Here are links to the resources discussed in the video:

Measuring Macro and Micro conversions
Create custom reports with Google Analytics API Excel Plugins
Absolute unique visitor tracking can be found under Metrics -> Site Usage -> Unique Visitors when creating a new custom report. Once created, you can apply any advanced segment (such as traffic from Google) to get the unduplicated number of visitors that came from Google.
Simple way to track exit clicks in Google Analytics
Excluding tracking certain visitors (like site owners and administers) by IP address
Configuring Google Analytics to track 3rd Party Shopping Carts
Cross domain tracking _getLinkerURL(), _link method reference

Please add your thoughts about the Q&A via comments below. Thanks!

Posted by Nick Mihailovski, Google Analytics Team

New Free Google Analytics API Dashboard Application

Alden DeSoto — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 04:38:00 -0800

If you manage many Google Analytics profiles, it can be difficult to stay on top of all your top line metrics across accounts -until now. Trakkboard is a free, easy to use desktop application that allows analysts to create dashboards that pull data across different Google Analytics logins and different Google Analytics profiles to display top level metrics all within the same view.

This application was built using the Google Analytics API by our friends in Germany, Trakken GmbH and is available in English, German and Spanish. Once downloaded, you can add multiple Google Accounts, select Google Analytics Accounts and profiles, then choose from any of the pre-canned report widgets. The report widget will then appear on the dashboard. This process can be repeated with other Google Analytics Accounts, Profiles, and Widgets - and your customized dashboard is ready to use.

What's really nice is each report widget can be configured to automatically fetch new data from the API at a regular interval, for example, every hour. This dramatically reduces the time it takes to see top level metrics across all your accounts.

Some of the other available features include:

15 different report widgets available
Top/flop keywords widget (movers & shakers)
Drag-drop and resize report widgets
Update all widgets at the same time
Update individual widgets at set intervals
Use tabs for more dashboards
Resize report widgets
Notes widgets for comments
Add up to two Google Account Email addresses
FAQ Center available in English, Spanish, German

We continue to be impressed by the new solutions developers are bringing to market by leveraging the Google Analytics Platform. If you have developed a useful new tool or integration on top of Google Analytics, drop us an email at analytics-api@google.com. If it's innovative and useful we'll highlight it to our readers on this blog.

Posted by Nick Mihailovski, Google Analytics API Team

New Feature Spotlight: Advanced Filters

Jeff Gillis — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 05:27:00 -0800

Here is another in-depth look at one of our recently announced new features: Advanced Filters (or Advanced Table Filters), written by the excellent team at LunaMetrics, a Google Analytics Authorized Consultant.

For the daily user, Advanced Filters may be the most useful new feature of the bundle of new features, in terms of streamlining your actual process once you access a report and are actively doing analysis. They are found at the bottom of the table in any report. As a habitual poweruser, I've been clamoring for it for years, and it has made my process so much simpler. It's the equivalent of replacing a screwdriver with a powerdrill.

You no longer need to export your data to slice and dice it to see your desired subsets. Now, you can set a filter while looking at a certain report to get the information you want, without having to exit and create a filter or advanced segment. Within seconds, you can whittle down a massive data table to look at a subset that is important to you.

One example already given in this tutorial video is to show just the keywords that have a low bounce rate (less than 30%) and that referred at least 25 visits. Right away, you've found high value and high traffic keywords. We're using this feature almost every time we look at a data table in a report. It makes you feel much more command over your data.

Here are three more interesting uses of the new Advanced Table Filtering:

Looking for specific non-branded keywords
Sometimes, it helps to see keywords that contain a certain word or phrase, but exclude the brand name. Taking a company called DeLallo Italian Foods, for example. If I wanted to see all the keywords that contain the word Italian food but exclude the brand name DeLallo, I could easily use the advanced filters for this. Previously, I would have done this using regular expressions in the filter:
Filter Keyword: containing ^(?=.*italian food)(?!.*(delallo)).*
No more! Now, we don't need to do this! Now, it is so easy with the advanced filters. Just filter for Keyword containing Italian food and excluding DeLallo.
And presto! Your report is updated. And, at any time, you can edit this filter to further refine it, or delete it altogether.

Landing Pages, Sorted by Bounce Rate

Has this ever happened to you - you're looking at your Top Landing Pages report, and you sort by bounce rate, only to have a bunch of pages with 1 entrance clogging the top of the report? With advanced filters, you can filter out those pages with a low number of entrances to get a better look at which landing pages with significant traffic have a high bounce rate. All you have to do is filter by Entrances greater than 50 (or whatever threshhold floats your bounce-rate-boat).

Top Content, Sorted by $ Index

Another similar use for sites with e-commerce or a goal value enabled is when you're looking at the Top Content report, sorted by $ Index. What you're trying to find are the pages that have the highest value - those that are viewed during a visit that results in a conversion. Again, it's common to get a lot of pages at the top that have a low number of pageviews.

First, it helps to filter out those pages that have a low number of pageviews. But once you do that, you'll likely see the pages with the highest $ Index are pages of your shopping cart or checkout process. We can filter out these pages with the advanced filters too - just add a new condition below your first filter that excludes pages that contain the word cart (or checkout, etc.) in the URL.

These three examples give you a taste of Advanced Table Filtering for your analytics, but they just scratch the surface. Once you explore your own analytics, I’m sure you’ll find many more uses of this flexible and powerful new feature. You'll really notice it's use when you find you're happily lingering for 5 extra minutes, using this new interface feature to easily gain insights and ask questions that would've taken you an hour before and possibly a data export. Pure wizardry. :)

Posted by Jim Gianoglio, LunaMetrics, A Google Analytics Authorized Consultant

New Feature Spotlight: Analytics Intelligence

Alden DeSoto — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 01:43:00 -0800

How would you like to have 24-hour a day access to a dedicated assistant who is focused exclusively on your site's analytics? Your assistant would be so diligent and detailed that they wouldn't miss a thing. Sound too good to be true? We're giving you one. Say "Hello" to Analytics Intelligence.

Your new hardworking assistant, Analytics Intelligence, can't replace you or a professional analyst. But, it can find key information for you and your professional analysts -- so that your team can focus on making strategic decisions, instead of sifting through an endless sea of data.

Analytics Intelligence constantly monitors your website's traffic. Anytime something significant happens, it adds an automatic alert in your Intelligence reports. If your bounce rate suddenly jumps on one of your referrals, Analytics Intelligence creates an alert. Of course, it's up to you to go find out that the bounce rate jumped because someone inadvertently changed the landing page. But you might not have noticed that there was a problem that needed fixing if your trusty assistant hadn't alerted you.

Behind Analytics Intelligence is a sophisticated algorithmic intelligence engine that detects any anomalies in your traffic patterns. That means it's smart enough to know the difference between a change that's actually part of a larger trend versus a change that you might need to look into. But, from a user perspective, Analytics Intelligence couldn't be simpler.

Navigate to the Intelligence reports and you'll see three reports -- Daily Alerts, Weekly Alerts, Monthly Alerts. Daily Alerts contains all the alerts that are based on daily data. Weekly Alerts contains alerts based on weekly data. Monthly Alerts contains, you guessed it, alerts based on monthly data.

When you look at your alerts, you'll notice that your trusty assistant has already gone through your historical data and posted alerts. This highlights a key feature of Analytics Intelligence: you don't have to do anything -- alerts automatically get posted to your account.

The best way to come up to speed on Analytics Intelligence is to take a look at the alerts that are being created for your data. You can learn everything you need to know about how to interpret your alerts in this 2-minute video.

You can also instruct your assistant to be on the lookout for specific things that you want to monitor. Let's say you are running a billboard campaign in New York's Times Square. You want to be proactively informed regarding how the campaign is impacting traffic from New York. To do this, go the Manage Intelligence Alerts page,

and set up a custom alert (see the example, below).

You might even want to set up a second alert that checks for decreasing New York traffic, so you can see if the campaign is starting to wind down.

You'll then receive a custom alert, posted in your Daily Alerts, whenever one of these things happens. You can be notified by email as well, so you'll know what's going on even if you're not checking your reports.

If you're ever unsure about how to set up an alert, try starting with one of the templates on the Manage Intelligence Alerts page. Just click Copy, and then modify and rename the alert to fit your needs.

As with automatic alerts, the best way to learn about custom alerts is to try them out on your own data. You can also refer to the articles on Analytics Intelligence in the Google Analytics Help Center.

Sign in to your account to try it out. It's time to meet your new assistant!

Posted by Alden DeSoto, Google Analytics Team

An Integration With Feedburner

Jeff Gillis — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 08:51:00 -0800

The FeedBurner team has just announced an integration with Google Analytics. We know what many of you are saying. "About time!" We'll take it.

If you are using both Google Analytics and FeedBurner, you will automatically see campaign attribution for item clicks tracked by your AdSense For Feeds or your Google FeedBurner account. To read more and get details, please see the blog post here and take a look at the below image:

It works in the same way as URL tagging. You can see how many people click through to your site from the content sent by you in your feeds. FeedBurner is now automatically inserting Google Analytics tracking codes into the URLs of your items, or content. For instance, if you publish a blog and a subscriber reads it and then clicks through to your site, you will see that the source of that visit is Feedburner. And as you can see, it gives even more granular information, such as the type of feed reading software or email.

Taking a step back. What is a feed? From the help article, feeds "are a way for websites large and small to distribute their content well beyond just visitors using browsers. Feeds permit subscription to regular updates, delivered automatically via a web portal, news reader, or in some cases good old email. Feeds also make it possible for site content to be packaged into "widgets," "gadgets," mobile devices, and other bite-sized technologies that make it possible to display blogs, podcasts, and major news/sports/weather/whatever headlines just about anywhere." The most popular types of feed formats are RSS and Atom feeds.

If you're publishing content like this blog, then feeds are probably half the story. Feed subscribers are a very important audience to be aware of. If people are really interested in what you have to say, they'll subscribe to your feed or RSS so they can be automatically updated every time you publish new content. They don't want to miss it, and don't want to have to keep visiting your page to check if you've published new content. FeedBurner is the way you can measure how many people are using your feed and who they are. It's could be called Google Analytics for feeds :-) Or Google Analytics could be called web...analytics...burner?

Anyway, FeedBurner shows you not only how many subscribers your feed has, but also metrics like geography and reach, with a breakdown by each piece of content (or "item") you publish. It also tells whether they clicked on a link in that content or went to the actual piece of content on your site. You can also see where the subscriber is reading your feed; whether in email or some kind of feed reader, such as Google Reader.

Another thing to be aware of is AdSense For Feeds, which allows you to monetize your feeds by placing AdSense ads in them.

This integration is the first step towards using these two very similar tools together. You still need to log in to FeedBurner to actually see how many subscribers you have and the rich detail around your feed usage FeedBurner provides.

Posted by Jeff Gillis, Google Analytics Team

Depth and Discovery: Powering Visualizations with the Google Analytics API

Jeff Gillis — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 01:00:00 -0800

We're always really excited to see what developers are building with Google Analytics. Here's an amazing visualization using the API from our friends at Juice Analytics. Now, this is what we're talking about when we say this stuff is "Off the charts!" (The API team t-shirt slogan). :-)

At Juice, we work with web analytics APIs large and small, from Google, comScore and Omniture. The Google Analytics API is our favorite. It powers the world's best, most widely deployed analytics site. And it powers Juice products like Concentrate (innovative search analytics) and Vasco de Gapi (a tool for exploring the Google Analytics API).

We were approached by the Google Analytics API team to explore new ways of looking at data with the API, and we were excited by the possibilities. We've been working on our own visualization framework, JuiceKit, that integrates the power of the Flare Visualization Library with Adobe Flex.

The result is Analytics Visualizations, two visualizations powered by the Google Analytics API that are free to use. You just need a Google account with access to Google Analytics data to explore your own data. Here are the details about the visualizations, called Referrer Flow and Keyword Tree.
Referrer Flow
Curious about what sites are linking to you and what content is benefitting the most? The Referrer Flow visualization answers those question and shows how results change over time. It's a stream of daily treemaps showing pageviews and bounce rates for various groupings of your website's pages. You can group by combinations of page title, referrer and url. Here is a brief video introduction:

Clicking on the treemap will filter all the data by the page, referrer or url that you clicked on. Click again to clear your filter.

Keyword Tree

A list of top keywords isn't enough to really understand how people are searching and finding your site. The Keyword Tree visualization displays the most frequently used search keywords and how they are used together. Here's a video overview:

You'll see a frequently used search term at the center and the words and phrases that are most often used in combination with that word. Pick a different starting word by typing into the box in the upper right or selecting from the top word across the bottom of the screen. The words are sized by their frequency of use and colored by bounce rate (or % new visitors or average time on site). Roll over a word to see details about that combination of connected words.

Depth and Discovery

In designing these visualizations we focused on the question: how can we let users uncover the unexpected? That means designing targeted visualizations focused on limited well-defined issues. The Referrer Flow monomaniacally focuses on a single question "What pages are people viewing on your site and where are they coming from?" The Keyword Tree is laser-focused on word ordering and what that means for keyword performance.

The Google Analytics reporting tool is a great general-purpose reporting solution. It gives the advanced users everything they need to answer specific questions. However, its generality means it has limited ability to focus on two issues; depth and discovery.

The Google Analytics API is Google's solution to this problem. It's an opportunity both for businesses like ours that can create new ways of analyzing data, and for large sites that can use the API for integration, custom analytics, and more.

Thanks, Juice! We continue to be impressed by the new solutions developers are bringing to market by leveraging the Google Analytics Platform. If you have developed a useful new tool or integration on top of Google Analytics, drop us an email at analytics-api@google.com. If it's innovative and useful we'll highlight it to our readers on this blog.

Posted by Nick Mihailovski, Google Analytics API Team

Episode # 3 - Rapid Fire Web Analytics Q and A with Avinash and Nick

Nick — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 05:35:00 -0800

This is the third video in our recent Rapid Fire series where you share your most burning questions via the Google Analytics Google Moderator site and we answer them!

Generally we want to focus on your questions about key metrics and analysis techniques, but this week we get a little technical.

In this episode we discuss:

How to group referrals from common sources
How to setup Google Analytics to track multiple web sites and view all the aggregate data in one profile
Strategies to track websites that support different languages
The value of using Google Analytics on You Tube partner channels
Troubleshooting discrepancies in Google Analytics Data
Best practices for implementing E-commerce tracking for E-commerce sites
Simplifying customizing the date range in GA
How to track segments of users who interact with internal referrals/cross sell campaigns
Tracking Social Media campaigns

Here are links to resources we discussed in the video:

If you found this helpful, we'd love to hear your comments.

If you have a question you would like us to answer, please submit a question or vote for your favorite question in our public Google Moderator site. Avinash and I will answer your latest questions in a couple of weeks with yet another entertaining video.

Please add your thoughts about the Q&A via comments below. Thanks!

Posted by Nick Mihailovski, Google Analytics Team

Partner Profile: Lijit

Rick Klau — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 02:52:00 -0700

Periodically, we profile a Blogger partner that can add functionality to your blog. This week we'd like to spotlight Lijit, a company building "search powered web applications for publishers" (that's you!). Lijit has made adding its "wijit" as easy as could be—just fill in your blog's URL and complete the sign-up wizard, you'll be good to go.

What does Lijit give you? For starters, Lijit provides a nice search tool for your site that will not only search your blog, but search the blogs of your friends, and all of the related sites (Flickr, YouTube, Picasa, del.icio.us bookmarks, etc.) that you and your friends use regularly.

Where Lijit shines is in the stats they gather for you: what are people searching for when they come to your blog? Once they arrive, what do they then look for? Where are they coming from? How has search traffic changed over time?

Best of all, Lijit lets you expose this info via a customizable "wijit" so that your visitors can see where other visitors are coming from and what they are looking for. To see this in action, take a look at Dark UFO's Lost Spoilers site, a Blogger blog focused on unraveling the mysteries surrounding the TV show Lost. The Lost Spoilers wijit shows not only the most recent searches that have brought visitors to the Lost Spoilers site:

It also shows a map of their visitors:

And finally it shows a list of the most recent visitors, their locations, and if they used a search to visit the site, the search term they used:

Interested? Give Lijit a try - just visit their site and you'll have it on your blog in just a few minutes!

Contribute Gadgets to Blogger

Siobhan Quinn — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 07:38:00 -0700

(cross posted from Blogger In Draft)

Calling all Developers! We've just launched several extensions to the Gadget API that will enable developers to build more relevant and engaging gadgets for Blogger.

As you may already know, every Blogger blog is a gadget container. What's more, every blog is an OpenSocial gadget container powered by Friend Connect. This means that as a gadget developer you can leverage social APIs to build engaging tools for bloggers and their audience.

In addition to leveraging social data, gadgets can now access a blog's post and comment feed via new JSON APIs. For example, with this data you could easily build a map gadget that maps the geo-location of posts, or a "Most Commented On" gadget that ranks posts by the number of comments they've received.

Need to be inspired? Recently we asked our users what gadgets they most wanted to see in Blogger. Hundreds responded and here's their wish list.

When you build a gadget for Blogger, it becomes available to millions of active bloggers. Just submit your gadget to us, and within minutes it will surface in the Blogger gadget directory where users can easily browse, configure, and add your gadget to their blog's sidebar.

So now that you know Blogger is a great distribution platform for your gadget, what are you waiting for? Get started building Gadgets for Blogger now.

Important Note: The APIs and documentation are new, so there may be bugs. Let us know by posting to the Blogger Developer Group if you run into problems developing your gadget.

Tweet Your Blog

brett — Sun, 02 Aug 2009 18:42:00 -0700

Tweeting your new blog posts is a great way to engage your readers, and something that many on the team have taken advantage of for our own blogs. An easy way to do this is through Twitterfeed, which automatically updates Twitter with each new blog post. Here's how to set it up:

Head on over to the Twitterfeed site, click Sign In with OpenID and type in your Blogger blog's URL. Once you've registered you'll then be taken to the New Feed page where you can start linking blog feeds to your Twitter account.

First click the Connect your feed to Twitter Account button, which will prompt you to enter your Twitter login credentials to authorize Twitterfeed's access. You will get a nice little confirmation once you've successfully linked up your Twitter Account.

Next just enter a name for your feed, as well as your blog's Feed URL into the form. If you want to customize your feed's settings you can modify frequency, add prefixes, and even create keyword filters. Otherwise you're all set—click the Create Feed button and your Twitterfeed is enabled.

You can always come back later to the Twitterfeed site and modify your feed settings, as well as look at click-through metrics for existing feeds.

Blogger is turning 10

Rick Klau — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 08:37:00 -0700

A few months ago we mentioned that Blogger was turning 10 years old later this year. That day is almost upon us — just six days away in fact — and we've been hard at work trying to think about what we could give you to celebrate.

Wait, what? What we could give you? That's right. This is our birthday — but we're celebrating your contributions over the years. Over the past decade, millions of people around the world have made Blogger what it is today: a vibrant community of real people telling their stories. When we asked you to tell us your Blogger story, you responded: you connected with far away family, shared your art, grew up, demonstrated your expertise in an emerging area of research, overcome childhood adversity, met authors and poets you admire, coped with an illness, became a parent, learned a new culture, struggled with your parents' divorce, placed digital messages in virtual bottles, helped people fix their cell phones, wrote a novel. You even made the inaugural blogging team at school, and while there you're working on your PhD on consumer trends towards blogs. There are millions of such stories — and they grow by the day.

As we turn ten, we wanted to give you some presents to commemorate this milestone and thank you for letting us be part of your story. Over the next several weeks we will be releasing a number of new features on Blogger. Some presents are because you asked for them this spring. Other presents are because they meant a lot to us. And some are because our friends (both inside and outside of Google) wanted to chip in and give you something. In short, it's a lot like a real birthday: you won't necessarily want or need every present that you get, but keep in mind: it's the thought that counts!

We're excited to share this milestone with you. Stay tuned, the next several weeks will be a lot of fun!

Blogger Joins the Hubbub

John — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 16:11:00 -0700

When you publish a public blog post, you want to share it with the world—immediately! Blogger helps by feeding your posts to subscribers all over the web. Unfortunately, while we really want things to be as speedy as possible, sometimes it can take a while for the bits to travel through the intertubes.

We're happy to announce that Blogger has rolled out support for the PubSubHubbub protocol, which turns feeds into real-time streams. What does this mean to you? As feed readers adopt PubSubHubbub, your posts will surface immediately for their users. For example, Google Reader has started rolling out support for PubSubHubbub; when it's complete, your Blogger posts will surface in Google Reader as soon as you publish them. FriendFeed, Livedoor Reader (a feed reader popular in Japan), and FavIt already support PubSubHubbub—which means that their readers are already benefiting from this new feature.

Best of all, your blog is already broadcasting updates—you don't need to do anything to enable it.

Some more details: All blog post feeds now contain a "hub" element, and will ping Google's hub on every post update. If you're a developer writing code to monitor feeds and want to get updates efficiently in near real-time, you just need to detect the hub link and subscribe to the hub server. Then, sit back and let the hub push updates to you. To learn more about PubSubHubbub and start adding code to your project, see the PubSubHubbub site.

Thanks to Brad Fitzpatrick and Brett Slatkin who worked on a 20% project with the Blogger team to add this support over the past few weeks. We encourage any developer who wants to get a near real-time flow of updates from Blogger to use PubSubHubbub for their application—it's simple, efficient, and lightning fast. If you have questions, you can find answers in our developer support forum, or you can reach us on Twitter: @blogger.

This is one of many features announced as part of Blogger's 10th birthday. Happy Birthday!

Sending Blogger some Birthday Cheer

Rick Klau — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 08:05:00 -0700

by Brian Shih, Google Reader Team

If you use Google Reader to keep track of all the interesting Blogger blogs you're following, you might have run across something you really wanted to share on your blog. With Reader's new Send To feature, we've made it easier than ever to do this. Just head over to Reader's settings page and enable Blogger from the list of services:

Now, when you want to send a post to Blogger, simply click the "Send to" button and choose Blogger. If you're into keyboard shortcuts, "shift-t" will do the same. We'll send you over to Blogger with everything you need to write about the post. And that's it! We hope this makes it easier for you to blog about things you read in Reader - if you have feedback, please head over to our help group, Twitter, or Get Satisfaction.

This is one of many features announced as part of Blogger's 10th birthday. Happy Birthday!

Partly cloudy, chance of labels

Wiktor Gworek — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 03:25:00 -0700

by Wiktor Gworek, Software Engineer, Blogger (Krakow, Poland)

In April, we announced that we wanted to hear from you about your wish list for features in Blogger. Many of you said that the label gadget should be more flexible. Today we are rolling out two enhancements to the label gadget.

Label Cloud

Previously, the label gadget showed a list of labels—and by far the most requested enhancement was to present the labels as a "cloud" instead of as a bulleted list. That's now supported in the gadget directly:

Once enabled, the more popular labels appear in a bigger font than the less popular labels:

Selected Labels

If you've been on Blogger for a while, you might have more labels than you know what to do with. Don't want to show all of your labels in the widget? No problem: go to the label gadget settings and choose "Selected labels." You will be able to select a subset of labels to be displayed in the widget:

We hope you like it!

This is one of many features announced as part of Blogger's 10th birthday. Happy Birthday!

Let the Music Play

Rick Klau — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 02:23:00 -0700

Earlier this year, a number of our users complained about their experience on the receiving end of a DMCA complaint. Much commentary at the time focused on claims that we were removing blog posts at the behest of music labels, that we were not notifying users, and that we weren't providing users with any recourse if they were linking to the music with permission. Though we noted at the time that we hadn't changed anything and were still following our documented policy, we realized that there was room for improvement. Over the next several months, we talked with the Electronic Frontier Foundation and ChillingEffects.org, and reached out to a number of users to find out what they'd like to see in our policy moving forward. We're happy to make those changes our latest birthday present for our users.

First, a quick review: the DMCA is a U.S. law that says that a copyright holder (a music label, for example) can notify services like Blogger if they see cases where their content is being used without permission. Once we're notified by the music label and we believe the claim to be valid, we are then obligated to remove the content—otherwise we could be found liable for its continued use. Up until today, when we received a DMCA complaint, we would send an e-mail to the owner of the blog, forward a copy of the complaint (usually a fax) to ChillingEffects.org (more about Chilling Effects here), and delete the post.

There were several problems: first, some of our bloggers hadn't updated their e-mail addresses in years (Blogger's been around a while!). Second, ChillingEffects.org needed to review the faxes we sent to ensure that they weren't inadvertently publishing personal info, sometimes causing lengthy delays in the publication of the complaint. This meant that the blogger couldn't see the substance of the complaint—often for months. Finally, the post was gone! Posts that contained dozens, even hundreds, of links were removed from the Internet because of one link, and often the blogger didn't know the link wasn't acceptable.

Starting today, we've changed how we handle these situations:

DMCA Complaints are handled via a web form. This form makes data intake easier, and makes it possible for us to share information with ChillingEffects.org without passing along personally identifiable information. It also allows us to notify affected bloggers more efficiently, as we provide information on not only the blog post in question but also the actual link(s) at issue.
Complaints are sent to ChillingEffects.org automatically. ChillingEffects.org will have a copy of the complaint soon after Blogger receives it, making it possible for the blogger to find the complaint by searching for their blog's URL at ChillingEffects.org.
Blogger notifies affected users through their dashboard as well as by e-mail. While we hope all of our users keep their e-mail addresses current so we can notify them in case there's anything important (hint, hint), we also went further by putting a big status message at the top of their dashboard to let them know about the DMCA complaint.
Blog posts are reset to draft status and are not deleted. Now that users have the info they need to know specifically what the complaint was about, they can edit their post (found in their blog's dashboard status message, as well as by searching for posts in "draft" status) to remove the offending content and republish the post.

We realize this birthday present isn't for everyone—we'd hope most of you never receive a complaint. But music bloggers are a large segment of our users—and we know that for those who've received one or more DMCA complaints in the past, this may have been a frustrating experience. Please take care to remove the offending content once notified of the complaint—once you do, you can republish the original post so your audience will continue to have access to the other content contained in the post.

This was a cross-team collaboration between our legal, policy and engineering groups, and on behalf of everyone who helped make this change possible: happy birthday!

Rick Klau, Blogger Product Manager
Alice Wu, Google Legal Department
Steven Chen, Google Policy Team
Saurav Shah, Blogger Engineering Team

This is one of many features announced as part of Blogger's 10th birthday. Happy Birthday!

Share from Nav Bar

Talin — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 07:27:00 -0700

by Talin, Software Engineer, Blogger (Mountain View, CA)

It's fitting that our newest birthday present was announced first on Twitter. Starting yesterday, the Blogger Navbar includes a new button: "Share."

When your readers are on your blog's home page, they can click "Share" to post the blog's URL to Twitter, Facebook, or Google Reader. If they navigate directly to an individual blog post, clicking "Share" in the navbar also lets them share the post by email.

We've already seen some nice adoption of this new feature and hope this helps you build out your audience and share your story with the world. Here's a fun hack: each URL that gets shared has a specific parameter appended (?spref=nn, where fb=Facebook, tw=Twitter, and gr=Google Reader). If you're using Google Analytics to measure traffic on your blog, you can search for those strings to see how much traffic you're getting from each source.

On the other hand, if you're interested in seeing which blogs people are sharing, head on over to Twitter search and you can watch as people share blogs and posts that they like. Don't forget to follow us on Twitter while you're there!

This is one of many features announced as part of Blogger's 10th birthday. Happy Birthday!

There's an app for that!

brett — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 03:34:00 -0700

We're very happy to announce today that Blogger now has a home on the iPhone. The team behind BlogPress (a popular app already available in the iPhone App Store) decided to build a free version of BlogPress just for Blogger users to celebrate Blogger's 10th birthday. BlogPress Lite packs many of the great Blogger features you have come to know into a simple yet powerful mobile application for blogging on the go.

Rich-text WYSIWYG editing, image uploads, labels, configurable settings, and auto-save are among the many features that are part of BlogPress Lite, as well as a handful of other optimizations for the iPhone experience. Landscape editing mode is supported and will feel very familiar for iPhone users, and blog posts are automatically saved when you have an incoming call—you won't have to ever worry about losing a post.

We're grateful to the team at InfoThinker for adding to the birthday "party." The app has been submitted to the App Store and should be available shortly. (We'll update this post when we see it.)

This is one of many features announced as part of Blogger's 10th birthday. Happy Birthday!

Earn Charity Donations on Blogger with SocialVibe

Rick Klau — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 03:35:00 -0700

Guest Post
by Joe Marchese, SocialVibe CEO

In honor of Blogger's 10th anniversary, we are excited to announce that you can now use your blogs to create positive, measurable social change. By adding the SocialVibe gadget to your blog, you'll be turning brand dollars into real charitable donations for the cause of your choice. The World Wildlife Foundation, Nature Conservancy, DonorsChoose, Invisible Children, and Charity:Water are just a few of the great charities you can support on Blogger.

Once you install the SocialVibe sidebar gadget on your blog, money will be earned for charities every time readers engage with the gadget (e.g. rating a Showtime video clip). You can switch your cause and sponsor as often as you like, and receive regular updates from your charity about goal progress and impact. Thus far, SocialVibe has been able to raise over $500,000 for charities, and we know the Blogger community will be able to significantly increase this amount. In fact, we are setting a goal for the community to raise $50,000 before the end of the year (and remember, you don't raise money by taking money out of your pocket—or your audience's—but rather by getting your readers to engage with your SocialVibe gadget).

Adding the gadget is easy. Here's the low-down on how you can use your blog to make a big impact:

Step 1 - Add the Gadget

From your Blogger dashboard, click the Layout tab. Then, click the Add a Gadget link and click on "Featured", then select SocialVibe. (If you don't see it in the Featured gallery, follow this link, or click "Add your own". In the textbox, add the URL http://www.socialvibe.com/s/blogger/gadget.)

Step 2 - Configure Gadget
Here's the fun part. Choose the cause you want to support from the drop-down list. If you want to customize the size and title, you can do that here as well, and you'll see a preview of your gadget underneath. When you're satisfied, click Save.

Congratulations, your gadget has now been added to your blog! Your readers can help you earn for your cause by engaging with your gadget, and will even have the chance to leave you comments and add a SocialVibe gadget to their own blog.

The yellow overlay you see on your gadget is only viewable by you, the blog owner. Click on the link in the overlay to create a SocialVibe.com account and earn even more charity donations by adding it to other networks such as Facebook, MySpace or WordPress.

With SocialVibe, the Blogger community can pool our individual influences to create positive change in the world. Never before has making a positive social impact online been this easy.

This is one of many features announced as part of Blogger's 10th birthday. Happy Birthday!

You Might As Well Jump!

Sean — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 05:20:00 -0700

by Sean McCullough, Software Engineer, Blogger

It's time to announce another Blogger Birthday feature! Many users have been asking for an easy way to implement "Read more" links on their blog's index page. In fact, for years bloggers have been implementing "Read more" jump breaks themselves by manually editing their HTML --- a process that was complicated and error prone.

Today we are excited to announce our latest birthday present: Jump Breaks.

With Jump Breaks you can show just a snippet of your post on your blog's index page. Blogger will insert a "Read more" link to the full post page where your readers can keep reading.

There are a couple of ways to insert a "Read more" jump to your posts. If you use the new post editor (available on Blogger in Draft, or by enabling it via the Settings tab), you'll notice the "Insert jump break" icon in the editor's toolbar. Click this icon and the "jump break" will be inserted into your blog post at your cursor's position.

If you don't use the new post editor, you can still insert a jump break in Edit HTML mode by adding <!-- more --> where you want to position the jump break.

Want to change the "Read more" text to something more your style? No problem. You can edit the "Read more" text by clicking Layout and then Edit the Blog Posts widget.

One more note, the Jump Break feature does not change how your post appears in your feed. You can configure post feed options by going to Settings | Basic | Site Feed, and editing Allow Blog Feeds.

Update: Users that have customized their Blog Posts widget or otherwise have highly customized templates: You may need to edit your HTML to enable Jump Breaks. First, back up your template, then follow the instructions at the bottom of this help article.

This is one of many features announced as part of Blogger's 10th birthday. Happy Birthday!

It's a date!

Rick Klau — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 01:30:00 -0700

by Ross Peter Nelson, Software Engineer, Google Calendar

Do you have an event you'd like to invite your readers to? Thanks to Blogger Gadgets, this is now a piece of cake. Click the Customize link in the toolbar, and go to the Layout tab. There, you'll see the Add a Gadget link. The Event Gadget is currently one of the featured gadgets, or you can add it directly by clicking "add your own" and entering the URL http://www.google.com/ig/ modules/calendar/socialevent/ bloggerevent.xml. You'll then be taken to a configuration page that lets you enter information about your event. Once you click Save, it will be visible on your blog for everyone to see.

The gadget allows your readers to indicate whether they are going to attend the event, and lets them see which of their FriendConnect friends will be there too. In addition, anyone with a Google Calendar account can simply click a link to have that event added to their Google Calendar.

You can add multiple events to your blog as long as you give each one a different title or ID, and we'll keep track of who's attending which one.

This is one of many features announced as part of Blogger's 10th birthday. Happy Birthday!

Widgetbox: Make a Widget From Your Blog

Rick Klau — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 08:20:00 -0700

Guest Post by Will Price, CEO of Widgetbox

In honor of Blogger’s 10 birthday, all of us at Widgetbox are excited to announce a partnership with Blogger that allows you to quickly and easily turn your blog into a widget. Whether you want to add your blog’s headlines to your main website, let your fans showcase your content to their audience, or you want a widget that helps make your content more discoverable across the web, Widgetbox-powered widgets will help you get the most visibility for your content, while eliminating the need for any manual updating or management.

For example, the Blogger Buzz widget below was made in seconds and includes posts, images, and Blogger Buzz branding:

Key Benefits?

The easiest way to build a widget from your blog
Colorful, interactive, and engaging
Easy to add to Blogger and sites across the web
As you update your blog, the widget automatically updates with the latest posts, headlines, and images
Helps you reach new readers and drive traffic back to your blog

How Do You Build Your Widget?

Building a widget with Widgetbox is simple, easy, and fun. Simply:

Enter your blog feed
Design your widget’s look and feel
Publish the widget
Add it to your site and watch it spread across the web
Access statistics on unique views, widget installs, and other blogs and domains that have installed your widget

Tens of thousands of Blogger users have already made a widget from their blog on Widgetbox. Take your blog feed, make it into a widget, and share it with everyone. It’s that easy!

This is one of many features announced as part of Blogger's 10th birthday. Happy Birthday!

Turn Your Blog into a Book with Blog2Print

Rick Klau — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 04:37:00 -0700

Guest Post by Caroline Vanderlip, SharedBook CEO

To continue Blogger's 10th anniversary celebration, I’m delighted to announce that Blog2Print has now partnered with Blogger. Blog2Print lets you publish some or all of your posts and photos as a professionally-printed, full-color book. Since 2007, thousands of Blogger users have become Blog2Print fans, using our easy and quick service to save and share all their favorite writings with friends and family or to keep a hard-copy version of their work. You can make books by season, by year, by event or even by theme, and you can choose from soft cover or hard cover versions of your book.

Your book from Blog2Print.com can include selected comments from your posts, and you can also add your own additional photos and new comments as you edit your book to make a unique edition for posterity.

Blog2Print is easy to use – just enter your blog URL, select the date range for the posts you’d like to include, and choose a cover from among the nine choices. You can add an optional dedication, and then click to produce your book. A table of contents will be generated automatically, and in a few seconds you’ll see a preview of exactly what your finished book will look like.

Best of all, Blog2Print books start at only $14.95 for a soft cover book. The base price includes 20 pages, but you can add as many pages as you like – just 35 cents each.

This is one of many features announced as part of Blogger's 10th birthday. Happy Birthday!

Show your face!

Lu Chen — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 08:11:00 -0700

by Lu Chen, Blogger Summer Intern (Philadelphia, PA)

Last October we launched a comments feature that let you embed comments and the commenting form below your blog posts.

Today we have extended embedded comments to display profile images next to the comments that your visitors write. Though profile images have been available with the other commenting options, we are happy to bring them to embedded comments as part of the Blogger Birthday feature series.

We've also made it much easier to upload a profile photo when you leave a comment on a Blogger blog. From the comment preview, click "Add photo" to upload a photo to your Blogger profile. The next time you comment on a Blogger blog, your profile photo will be displayed next to your comment.

To enable or disable profile images in your blog's comments, go to Settings | Comments.

Cheers to photo-filled comments!

This is one of many features announced as part of Blogger's 10th birthday. Happy Birthday!

Bloggers wanted!

Rick Klau — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 07:28:00 -0700

Have opinions about Blogger? If so, we'd like to meet you. We are looking for participants willing to document their blogging practices over a few weeks and answer some interview questions. This will help us better understand your needs and keep improving Blogger.

Interested? Sign up here.

Thanks!

Post to Blogger with Google Sidewiki

brett — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 08:43:00 -0700

Last week, Google Sidewiki launched to the world as an entirely new way to share information across the web. This new Google Toolbar feature allows you to contribute your own insight to any webpage, as well as read information shared by others right in your browser's sidebar.

Google Sidewiki uses a special relevancy algorithm to display the most helpful entries first, and also has built-in technology to display your entries on other sites which contain the same snippet of text. For a more in-depth look at how it all works, as well as a full overview of all the features that Google Sidewiki has to offer, the team put together a very helpful page which you can check out here.

One feature in particular did catch our attention here on the Blogger team, and that is the ability to post your Google Sidewiki entires directly to your blog. You can watch a quick video tutorial of how it all works below:

So if you haven't already, download the Google Toolbar and give Sidewiki a try. As you come up with new ideas, submit them on the Sidewiki product ideas page!

Keeping Your Blog Secure

brett — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 05:32:00 -0700

While October is to many a month of candy and costumes, it also happens to be National Cyber Security Awareness Month in the U.S. In that spirit, we thought we'd take a minute to look at a few different things you can do to make sure both your content and account are secure on Blogger.

Third Party Code

Adding site counters, templates, and other third-party code to your blog can be a great way to add some flare to your content, but can also leave your blog vulnerable to malicious activity if you aren't familiar with its source.

Over the years we've seen a number of third party scripts disguise themselves as helpful add-ons, when in fact they are performing a malicious operation behind the scenes. For example, a site counter widget may indeed be providing your blog with helpful tracking data, but at the same time may also be discreetly sending that information to advertisers for the purpose of collecting the online habits of your readers. A blog template you downloaded from a third party site might include pop-up ads or links to dangerous sites that install malware on visitor's computers.

The good news though is that most of the add-ons you will run across are perfectly legitimate. To protect yourself from the small minority of add-ons that are nefarious, we've put together a few tips to keep in mind when adding third party code to your blog:

Take a moment to review the code and look for anything that seems out of place. For example, if you are adding a weather gadget to your blog and notice in the code that there are links pointing to unrelated sites, take that as a red flag and keep searching for another weather gadget. There is no reason that a weather gadget should include a snippet like <a href="http://completelyfreemoney.com">Make Money Online!</a>

Before saving new template code, always preview first. Malicious template designers may sometimes include pop-ups or other unexpected ads in the template code, which will usually be revealed with a quick preview. If anything unexpected shows up in the preview, go ahead and discard the new code by clicking Clear Edits.

Backup your template! Whenever making significant changes to your blog's template, it's always a good idea to backup your content beforehand just in case you need to reverse changes.

You can easily do this from the Layout | Edit HTML tab by clicking the Download Full Template link and saving the .XML file to your hard drive. You'll then be able to revert back to this downloaded version by clicking the Upload button, also right under the Layout | Edit HTML tab.

Look first to 'trusted' code repositories for a new template or widget. There are probably thousands of places across the web where you can find widget and template code, but it may be helpful to first check out some of the more widely known and trusted sources.

For templates, we've actually done a bit of scouting work already and collected a handful of great resources laid out in this Buzz post from earlier in the year. That collection comes from a number of well-established designers, and should provide plenty of secure template options to dig though.

For widgets and other scripts, there are a handful of places worth your time. Mashable's 50 Great Widgets for Your Blog is a very nice compilation that covers a broad range of categories. Widgetbox is another great portal to countless widget creations, all organized into easily browseable categories. Finally, Blogger's own Gadget Directory has hundreds of gadgets to look through. Simply click the Add a Gadget link under the Layout | Page Elements tab to access them all.

Permissions

Finally we thought it's worth touching on another security area which has proven problematic for some bloggers in the past, and that is your blog's Permissions settings.

Almost every day our support team receives reports from users who've been locked out of their own blog, the result of giving admin privileges to an unfamiliar blogger. Remember, you can always add more authors to your blog, but only extend admin privileges if you absolutely trust the person.

For more information about National Cyber Security Awareness Month, please check the StaySafeOnline.org page as well as the security series on the Official Google blog.

Blog Action Day 2009

brett — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 03:54:00 -0700

Guest post by Robin Beck, Blog Action Day

This is Robin Beck here from Blog Action Day central, and I want to thank Rick and the Blogger team for helping support Blog Action Day 2009.

For those of you who don’t know, Blog Action Day is an annual event held every October 15th where bloggers across the world unite to write about a single issue on a single day. We like to think of it as one big blogfest for good, and our goal is to spark conversation on an issue of importance across the web.

This year’s topic is climate change, and we’ve thus far had more than 4,000 bloggers from 123 countries register, including many of the world’s largest blogs.

Our aim is to make Blog Action Day 2009 the largest social change event on the web as a demonstration of global concern about the climate crisis. To achieve this, we want to invite the entire Blogger community to get involved and commit to writing a single post about climate change on your blog on October 15th.

You can register your blog here.

In addition to joining thousands of other bloggers, you’ll also be supporting the work of the dozens of leading nonprofits who are also participating – including Oxfam, 350.org, The Nature Conservancy, Greenpeace, The United Nations Foundation, and more than forty organizations affiliated with the TckTckTck campaign.

You can learn more about the issue of climate change and see sample topics you might write about at www.blogactionday.org. There you can also find additional ways to get involved by taking action with leading nonprofits and posting a snazzy widget to your blog.

Thanks so much for your support – we hope to have you all as part of the event!

The Next Chapter

brett — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 06:08:00 -0700

As we close the chapter on the first ten years over here on Blogger, the team couldn't be more excited about the possibilities that lie ahead over the next ten. And while we've got some great things planned already, we know that the ideas and passion of the Blogger community will inspire us further. So in that spirit, we're going to once again ask for some help writing out the next chapter of Blogger. Only this time, we mean it quite literally :-)

We'd like you to take a second to think about where Blogger is today, and then where you'd like to see it in the future. What are some words that come to mind? How would you describe it?

Specifically, we're looking for six adjectives—three to describe the present, and three to describe hopes for the future. And when you've come up with them, please take a second to let us know what you are thinking. Once we've heard what everyone has to say, we'll follow-up here to share the results.

Once again, we really do appreciate your words!

New Transparent Navbar Styles

Talin — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 08:40:00 -0700

by Talin, Software Engineer, Blogger

As a blog author, you've probably spent more than a little time getting exactly the right "look" for your blog. A blog is an outlet for creative expression, and how your blog looks says as much about you as what is written on it. And we at Blogger are committed to giving you the tools to make a great-looking blog.

The Blog*Spot navigation bar ("navbar") is one area where we realized that there was some room for improvement. Our four traditional color scheme choices — Blue, Black, Tan, and Silver — are somewhat limited, especially if your blog's background color is lime green or hot pink.

That's why we have added two new color schemes — "Transparent Light" and "Transparent Dark." These new color schemes take advantage of the ability of modern browsers to render transparency (a technique known to web designers as "alpha blending"). This allows the navbar background to blend together with your blog's background color and pattern. The "Transparent Light" color scheme has a semi-transparent white background, producing subtle pastel colors, while the background of "Transparent Dark" is a semi-transparent black that produces a shaded look.

In addition, we've simplified and slimmed down the look of all the navbars, so that they will be more likely to harmonize with the aesthetics of your blog.

To enable the Transparent Light or the Transparent Dark navbar, go to Layout | Page Elements, then click Edit next to the navbar widget:

We had a lot of fun adding this feature and hope you like it too. Try it out!

Improving Our Communication of Blogger Service Interruptions

Eddie — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 12:12:00 -0800

By Eddie Kessler, Blogger Engineering Manager

After a recent service interruption, we started talking about how we could improve our communications about these (hopefully infrequent) issues. Going forward, in the case of significant service interruptions, we plan to publish a post mortem on the Blogger Status blog within 3 business days to provide details about what went wrong and what we're doing to help prevent similar problems in the future.

During any outage, we try to keep the Blogger Status blog updated once we know about an issue. Of course sometimes — as was the case on Saturday — affected users who cannot reach Blogger cannot reach the Status blog either. In such cases, we will try to post updates on the Blogger account on Twitter to keep users apprised of what we know and when we expect a resolution.

We don't like it when our users experience problems like what we saw on Saturday, but we hope the combination of transparency around these issues and our commitment to learn from our mistakes will help assure you that we're doing everything we can to keep Blogger a robust and reliable service for you. As always, thank you for using Blogger.

Blogger in Your Own Words

brett — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 08:40:00 -0800

Last week we asked you for a few words to describe both the Blogger of the present and the Blogger you'd like to see in the future. You responded overwhelmingly, and now as promised we'd like to share the unedited results with you:

Blogger Today

(click for large version)

Blogger in the Future

(click for large version)

Thanks to everyone who pitched in their two cents; we're very excited to take your words and start writing the next chapter of Blogger.

(And of course thanks to Wordle for the awesome word clouds!)

Coming up Next...

Helen Kang — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 01:33:00 -0800

by Helen Kang, Software Engineer, Blogger

Some of you must have wondered what the Next Blog link on the NavBar does, and clicked on the link once or twice. Next Blog used to take you to a random blog, written by a random blogger. Your fellow blogger could have been writing her blog in a language that you don't know how to read. Or you might be someone who likes to read about food and restaurants in Germany, but your randomly chosen next blog could have been focused on sports, and written in Tagalog.

We've made the Next Blog link more useful, by taking you to a blog that you might like. The new and improved Next Blog link will now take you to a blog with similar content, in a language that you understand. If you are reading a Spanish blog about food, the Next Blog link will likely take you to another blog about food. In Spanish!

You might discover a cool blogger who has hobbies similar to yours, has similar taste in electronic gadgets, likes sports that you're into, or has similar curiosities and interests. We will finish rolling out the new and improved Next Blog link over the next week and hope that you will enjoy discovering blogs that are likely to interest you.

This has been a fun, collaborative effort on the Blogger team and we've enjoyed the support we received from other Google teams. We really hope you enjoy the new, more relevant Next Blog as much as we do.

Creating a User-Contributed Map: Look, Ma - No server side scripts!

Pamela Fox — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 02:52:00 -0800

Posted by Keir Clarke, Virtual Tourism Blog Author and Google Maps Mania Blog Contributor

Pamela Fox wrote a wonderful tutorial in November called Creating a User-Contributed Map with PHP and Google Spreadsheets. However if you are like me, the thought of having to tackle server-side scripting sends you running for the hills. Fortunately, the recent release of forms for Google Spreadsheets means it is now possible (with just a tiny bit of hacking and wizardry) to create a user contributed map without any server-side scripting and with the added bonus of Google hosting the data for you.

The first step is to create a form for Google Spreadsheets at this page.

The information that we need in order to add a contributor to our map is their name, latitude, and longitude. Of course, if you want more information on your map, you can always add more fields to the form later.
- The first question we will ask is ‘What is your name?’. Type this into the ‘Question Title’ box. The default question type is ‘text’ - leave this as it is. After you have completed the ‘Question Title’ press ‘save’.
- Now add the second question by clicking ‘+ Add a question’ and this time type ‘Latitude’ in the Question Title box. Again leave the question type as 'text' and press ‘save’ again.
- Add one more question with ‘Longitude’ as the ‘Question Title’.
The second step (and the only one that requires some coding) is to hack the generated spreadsheet form so that instead of having to type in a latitude and longitude manually, our users can just click on a map to show where they live. To do this, we create a map and then assign an event listener for the map 'click' event that writes the values of the clicked coordinate into the form input fields. The code that accomplishes that is shown below:
```
var map = new GMap2(document.getElementById("map_canvas"));
map.setCenter(new GLatLng(37.4419, -122.1419), 13);
map.addControl(new GSmallMapControl());
map.addControl(new GMapTypeControl()); GEvent.addListener(map, 'click', function(overlay, latlng) { var LatLngStr = "Lat = " + latlng.lat() + ", Long = " + latlng.lng(); map.openInfoWindow(latlng, LatLngStr); document.getElementById("latbox").value = latlng.lat(); document.getElementById("lonbox").value = latlng.lng();
});
```
The full HTML for the form and map is here. This page extracts the latitude and longitude when a user clicks on the map and automatically fills in the input boxes for latitude and longitude in the spreadsheet form, and also lets the user fill in their name. The important things to remember about modifying the generated spreadsheet form is that the form field names remain the same (e.g. the name for the latitude input is 'single:2'), and that the form action remains the same (e.g. 'http://spreadsheets.google.com/formResponse?key=pHxwMuyQhRdSwN9QcKaqWVA').

Now that you understand how the simple map-based form works, feel free to hack it further. Here's an example using the same form that integrates the GClientGeocoder to let users type in an address and then stores the resulting coordinate in hidden input fields.
Once you've successfully modified the form, all you need to do is use the Spreadsheet Map wizard to create your user-contributed map.

The wizard will do all the work of creating your map and generating the code, and give you something like the map embedded below. You could also try out generating KML from the spreadsheet with the techniques from the Spreadsheets Mapper tool.
Check out the example output of the spreadsheets map wizard.

Mash your way to a better world

Mano Marks — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 14:21:00 -0800

Posted by Mano Marks, Geo APIs Team Our friends up at NetSquared recently opened a mashup challenge to engage developers in helping nonprofits realize some of their web ideas. The concept is pretty simple. First, nonprofits post ideas on data they have and what they'd like to be able do do with it on the web. Then, product managers and developers peruse projects and sign up to help produce specs and bring them to life over the course of the next month. Nonprofits with the coolest mashup at the end are eligible for grants totaling $100k at this year's NetSquared conference in May. This year there's extra emphasis on openness, from standards and data to software and ideas. If your mashup can itself be mashed up, all the better. Mix and match APIs from different sources as you see fit - the only goal is to meet a need that a nonprofit has expressed. We like this idea a lot, and we want to help it - and potential volunteers like you - succeed. On March 7, we'll be hosting a hackathon at the Googleplex in Mountain View, California, for participants, where you'll be able to talk shop with API experts from Google. We'll also be inviting gurus from other API providers in the area to join us so you get all the help you need. If you sign up to work on a project you'll hear more from NetSquared about this event and others like it. Go check out some of the projects, think about how you might be able to apply your design skills and API wizardry to help these groups out, sign up, and mash away!

Google Maps Without the Scripting

Tom Manshreck — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 02:50:00 -0800

Posted by Tom Manshreck, Maps API Team

If you're a regular reader of this blog, you probably already use the Google Maps API and love it as much as we do! But you may find it not useful for certain cases: the Google Maps API requires JavaScript, can take a while to load over slow connections, and requires some overhead to maintain a dynamic website.

The Google Static Maps API provides a simpler way to add maps to your website. Rather than use JavaScript, the Google Static Maps API creates map images on the fly via simple requests to the Static Maps service with HTTP requests. No JavaScript, no overhead. Just create a special URL as the src attribute within an <img> tag and let the Static Maps service create your image.

To see how easy the Static Maps API is to use, note the image below:

This image was created using the following simple <img> tag:

<img src="http://maps.google.com/staticmap?center=47.238336,8.827171&zoom=12&size=512x512&key=MAPS_API_KEY">

(Note that you will need to replace the key parameter above with your own Maps API key. You can obtain a free key at http://code.google.com/apis/maps/signup.html)

When this blog post was displayed in your browser, the URL in the <img> tag was sent to the Static Maps service, which constructed an image based on the parameters passed in that URL. Voila! You can create maps up to 512 x 512 pixels, and at any zoom level or location on the face of the earth that Google Maps supports. You can even place markers on your map images! This Static Maps Wizard lets you play around with some of the options.

The Static Maps API is especially useful for pages in which you want a map to load quickly. You can even replace the generated Static Map with a JavaScript Maps API map after the page loads, allowing a seamless transition from a quick-loading map to a fully dynamic implementation.

Because the map generated by the Static Maps API is an image, you can also send it to your friends as an email attachment (especially handy for planning your next party!) or display it on any cell phone browser, whether or not it supports JavaScript.

Full documentation on constructing maps with the Static Maps API is available at:

http://code.google.com/apis/maps/documentation/staticmaps/index.html

As always, please post questions in the Maps API forum.

Introducing the Maps API Demo Gallery

Pamela Fox — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 14:00:00 -0800

Posted by Pamela Fox, Google Maps API Team

Why re-invent the wheel when you can copy and paste our wheel instead?

In the Google Maps API group and in my Inbox, developers often ask me questions such as "How do I draw a circle on the map?" or "How do I create groups of toggle-able markers?" Most of those questions are answered in the usage of little demo applications that I or one of our great external developers have put together. Previously, you have had to hunt through multiple places -- blog posts, developer sites, and group posts -- to find links to those demos. Well, start saving your hunting skills for the inevitable apocalypse. Our new Maps API Demo Gallery aggregates these demos togther, displaying a gallery of 40+ mini-applications with thumbnails, descriptions, and easy-to-read source code. Check out a standalone embedded version of this gallery below, and contact me if you'd like some of your own demos included in it.

Orbitz Mobile Traffic Maps: A Static Maps Story

Pamela Fox — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 09:24:00 -0700

Posted by Joe Monahan, Maps API Developer

It is my pleasure to be asked by Pamela to write another guest blog post; this time to discuss my experiences in using the new Static Maps API to enhance our Orbitz TLC Traveler Update mobile airport traffic page. I am pleased to report that although the API is in its early stages, it provides enough functionality to easily convey valuable geo-based information (e.g. the top 10 severe traffic incidents surrounding an airport) for our mobile users.

So why are static maps so important to mobile? Well, mobile development is kind of the old Wild West of the internet. Different phones use different browsers: some are common browsers like Opera, while others are proprietary ones written by the device manufacturer. This means you cannot count on universal support for Javascript and Ajax, and therefore there is no way to use the Google Maps Javascript API for people on cell phones and PDAs.

Ok, enough of the history lesson, click on the screenshot below to take a look at the Static Maps API in action.

Originally when starting work on this feature, I of course wanted to use things like clickable markers, custom icons, and so on. But the thing to remember about mobile users is that they are on the go and have limited time to look at your map. Therefore it is best to keep the information as simple and bare bones as possible, as to limit the amount of time needed to interpret what they are seeing.

Instead of custom icons, we used colors to contrast traffic markers from the central airport marker. We found the blue icon drew enough attention that it was the central focal, when surrounded by red icons (our traffic incidents). Additionally, the red color was enough to associate markers on our mobile version of severe traffic incidents with those found on our web site that uses a custom red triangle icon. Also by using labeled markers for the traffic incidents, and no label for the airport, we were able to further create a simple interpretation of traffic markers versus the airport maker. Finally, since most users are used to the alphabet markers signifying a list of similar points on things like maps.google.com, it was enough to help us associate the list of traffic incidents on the map with their specific traffic details located below the map.

There were only two big concerns we found when creating this mobile map: icon size and lack of numbered icons. Since most mobile devices are phone-based, screen size (and thus map size) tends to be limited. As you can see in the example above, there are several times where the icons overlap and make the map look cluttered. If a smaller version of the icons were available, it could reduce the number of overlapping markers and make clear the position of the traffic incidents. Another issue with the icons is that the use of alphabet letters as labels has an inherent limitation, in that you can only place 26 different icons on one map. Because our non-mobile version of the traffic page can list over a hundred distinct incidents, we use numbers there to label those icons. If numbered icons were available for static maps, we could display additional traffic incidents on the mobile map.

As always, the Google Maps API team and I welcome comments and questions on this article, the mobile feature mentioned, and the Static Maps API. Please leave feedback in the Maps API forum.

Disclaimer: These views are mine and not the views of OWW or (subsidiary). I am not a spokesperson for OWW or (subsidiary) and neither OWW nor (subsidiary) endorse any material, content and/or links or assume any liability for any of my actions.

Put down your language learning books, we've got transliterated tiles in the API!

Pamela Fox — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 07:30:00 -0700

Posted by Pamela Fox, Maps API Team

Due to the usage of non-latin characters in languages like Russian, and our decision to label countries and cities in their native tongue, I've always found browsing foreign countries in Google Maps to be quite the educational experience. How else would I have discovered that other languages have such pretty swirly letters? Unfortunately, it's also quite a frustrating experience when you're actually trying to find some place in those countries ("Tokyo! SHOW ME TOKYO!! aRrrgghghH!"). Well, thankfully the Google Maps team has now made it easier to have both an educational and satisfying experience with the recent introduction of transliterated tiles for Russia, Greece, Japan, and Thailand.

For users with a browser setting for the native languages of those countries, they'll continue seeing the tiles with just the labels in that language. But for everyone else, they'll see tiles with both the labels in the native character set and in the latin character set below it. You can trust the language setting to get that effect in the Maps API, or if you'd like, you can force a particular output in both the Javascript and Static Maps API by appending the"hl" parameter to the script src or image src with the desired language value. Experiment with the various language/country combinations in the example below to see this in action in both the Static and Javascript APIs:

Link to example of transliterated tiles in the API

MarkerTracker 1.0: "Which way did he go, George?"

Pamela Fox — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 09:25:00 -0700

Posted by Dan Rummel, Maps API Developer

Hi everyone, my name is Dan Rummel and I've been hacking Google Maps out of the San Francisco area for a couple years now. Recently I have been working hard on a start-up with a couple of college buddies: Seero.com (Putting live video on the map). In our UI, we want people to interact and explore using maps as much as possible, something we like to call GeoSurfing. However, sometimes after dragging and zooming a few times, one can quickly get lost in the middle of nowhere and unable to get back to the original viewport. So at the Google Javascript Hackathon, I started working on MarkerTracker, which is kind of like radar for 'important' markers. It's a simple and customizable tool that utilizes GPolyline to display directional indicators for markers that are out of view. Check out this simple example:

And to prove that the MarkerTracker can be used for something more advanced -- and to wish everyone a happy St. Patrick's Day -- here's a leprechaun chasing game:

A big thanks to Pamela Fox and all the developers who have contributed to the Google Maps Open Source utility library, it is a fantastic resource. Of course if you want to learn more about MarkerTracker check out the class reference and more examples. As always, please report any issues you find in the developer forum.

MapIconMaker 1.0: The Easy Way to Make Your Markers Meaningful

Pamela Fox — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 11:00:00 -0700

Posted by Pamela Fox, Maps API Team

In the talk I gave last fall about Maps Mashups Usability, I mentioned that one way to make your map more informative at first glance is to use the color and size of a marker to indicate categorical or density information. Previously, that would mean using an image editing program or server-side image generation script to create all the various marker icons needed. Now, with the introduction of MapIconMaker v1.0 into the open-source utility library, all that's needed is a Javascript include and a bit of code. For example, the simple demo shows how the following line of code creates a GIcon that's 64 by 64 pixels and has a green fill.

var newIcon = MapIconMaker.createMarkerIcon({width: 64, height: 64, primaryColor: "#00ff00"});

Behind the scenes, that line of code constructs the URLs for the various GIcon properties by using a special output of the Chart API to generate marker icon images. But don't worry about that - just use our nifty MarkerIconOptions wizard to preview various settings, and then copy the generated code into your own mashup.

We loved the dynamic icons so much that we couldn't wait to start using them - so some of you might have already seen them in use for Google's Decision 2008 mapplet/map (screenshot below). At the zoomed out view, the map contains dynamically sized and colored markers for each state. The color represents the candidate that got the most votes, and the size represents the relative number of votes that candidate received. When you zoom into the state, the map then contains markers for each voting precinct representing the same data. It's a great way to quickly understand the population density and voting habits of a region.

We hope you enjoy MapIconMaker as much as we do. Please look through the reference and examples, and let us know if you have any questions in the forum.

Street View in the API (or, How I Spent My Summer "Vacation")

Pamela Fox — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 03:57:00 -0700

Posted by James McGill, Maps API Team

For the past three months I have had the great pleasure of working as an intern with the Google Maps API team in Sydney. Unfortunately my time is now up and I must head back to the mundane life of a undergraduate scholar, but before I do I'm ecstatic to announce that my intern project is FINALLY complete: Street View is now in the Google Maps API!

Many of you will already have seen Street View as part of maps.google.com. If you haven't, click this link to give it a go. Street View allows users to view 3D panoramas of various locations around the world and to navigate around neighborhoods as if they were (almost) really there.

We've worked hard to ensure that Street View in the API gives developers the power and control they need to embed this functionality in their own websites in whatever way they wish. The API allows you to embed one or multiple panoramas in any location on a site and move, remove, hide and unhide them as necessary. Panoramas can also be easily integrated with the rest of the Google Maps API to allow synchronization between the map and the panorama viewer. The blue tile layer overlays which show where Street View data is available can be added to your own maps using the GStreetviewOverlay class. The following example mimics the Google Maps functionality with the tile layer and rotating Street View icon:

Link to Streetview Layer example

By far the coolest feature (in my opinion) is the ability to control the embedded viewer using Javascript functions on the GStreetviewPanorama object. The panTo function changes the current point of view by performing a smooth animation between the current and target view. An example of this is the app below which does a 360 degree pan around the current location (for all you people too lazy to use your mouse):

Link to Lazy Streetview Example

There's a whole lot more functionality available in the API than I could ever cover in one blog post, so check out the documentation, reference, demos, and start experimenting! Once you're done, post a link to your experiment in the forum. We'll check them out, post the most fun and practical demos in a blog post and our demo gallery, and send the authors some nifty Google schwag.

Before I sign off, I'd like to thank the entire Google Maps team for their help in getting this project complete. I had a fantastic time interning with Google and learnt a phenomenal amount.

Cheers,
(former) Intern: James McGill

We're Going to Google I/O!

Mano Marks — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 08:44:00 -0700

Posted by Mano Marks, Geo APIs Team

I'm getting excited about Google I/O May 28th & 29th in San Francisco. The reason I'm excited is that many of you will be there too, and it will be a great chance to meet. Google I/O is like the Google Developer Day we had last year, which in turn was based on Google Geo Developer Day, which we had two years ago. This year, there will be a whole track on Maps & Geo, including KML, Maps, and Mapplets. There will, of course, be other tracks, AJAX, APIs & Tools, Social, and Mobile. Both Pamela and I will be there, along with all the Google Geo stars.

The event won’t be limited to just Google APIs and developer tools. There is a lot of knowledge about web development in general at Google, and we’d like to share that expertise so that all applications on the web get better. And of course, we're focusing a lot on Open Source tools, like the new libkml (more about that in a later post).

Over the two days of Google I/O, Google engineers and other leading software developers will share their knowledge in breakout sessions, hands-on Code Labs, and Q&A Fireside Chats. That's your chance to sit down with Google engineers and ask all the questions you've ever wanted to, as well as meet each other.

Visit the Google I/O website to learn more and register. Space is limited, so be sure to make plans to attend now.

And after Google I/O, we'll be doing other developer days all over the world, so if you can't make it to SF, hopefully you can make it to one closer to you.

Text images without (much) coding

Mano Marks — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 13:48:00 -0700

Posted by Mano Marks, Google Geo APIs Team

Valery Hronusov has created a cool visual interface for his Text to Image service. This service allows you to easily create a text image, control its color, add shadow effects, and then place it on directly a map. It outputs to KML, Maps API JavaScript code, or just a plain URL to an image. This is really useful to creating, for instance, road labels or text based ScreenOverlays. All you have to do is copy the output into your own code. The interface is pretty simple:

Here's a sample of the KML output:

<GroundOverlay> ... <Icon> <href>http://text2image.ning.com/TextToImage.php?text=San+Francisco%2C+here+we+come%21&LabelType=2&FontSize=24&casing=asis&alignment=1&font=arial&fontStyle=bold&LabelLocation=topleft&dX=11&dY=0&FontColor=00ff00f9&ShadowColor=00000000&depth=3&effect=0&LabelHeight=35&LabelWidth=438&IconHeight=18&IconName=http://maps.google.com/mapfiles/kml/shapes/shaded_dot.png</href> </Icon>

Here's a sample of the JavaScript code it creates:

var pointCenter = new GLatLng(37.775196,-122.419204);
var map = new GMap2(document.getElementById("map"));
map.setCenter(pointCenter, 10); var pointSW = new GLatLng(37.741743,-122.470044);
var pointNE = new GLatLng(37.786659,-122.272387); var groundOverlay = new GGroundOverlay( "http://text2image.ning.com/TextToImage.php?text=San+Francisco%2C+here+we+come%21&LabelType=2&FontSize=24&casing=asis&alignment=1&font=arial&fontStyle=bold&LabelLocation=topleft&dX=11&dY=0&FontColor=00ff00f9&ShadowColor=00000000&depth=3&effect=0&LabelHeight=35&LabelWidth=438&IconHeight=18&IconName=http://maps.google.com/mapfiles/kml/shapes/shaded_dot.png", new GLatLngBounds(pointSW, pointNE)); map.addOverlay(groundOverlay);

And here's what it looks like:

KML is now an open standard

Mano Marks — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 06:32:00 -0700

Posted by Mano Marks, Geo APIs Team

The Google Geo APIs are all about building powerful tools to share geo information with the world. We've been really interested in seeing the way that KML has been used all across the web to express geographic content, and today we're very excited to announce that the Open Geospatial Consortium has announced its acceptance of KML 2.2 as an official OGC Standard. That means that KML is not just a Google Earth standard, it's not even just a Google standard. It is now an official standard for presenting geographic data. Read more about this great news on the LatLong blog.

Our first Google Geo Developer series is over...but the YouTubes will last a lifetime!

Pamela Fox — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 03:36:00 -0700

Posted by Pamela Fox, Maps API Team

Two months ago, we announced the start of the Google Geo Developer series on this blog. The point of the series was to bring together local geo developers for intimate talks/discussions around Maps/KML topics, and then let all developers watch the events on YouTube. It was a bit of an experiment - would we find enough topics for talks every week? Would anyone watch the videos? Well, I'm happy to say it was a successful experiment. Besides having 6 great talks and more than 20,000 YouTube video views, we also met a bunch of local developers working on geo projects (thanks for always showing up, you guys), and even met some folks from far away through the mailing list. Hopefully we'll get to hold another of these series in the falls, so subscribe to the mailing list if you want to find out about future events.

Here's a roundup of the talks that went down, with links to videos. Click "More info" on the YouTube description and you'll often find a link to slides/materials.

Quick & Dirty KML Creation: With Mano Marks, Pamela Fox, and Christiaan Adams
A demonstration of creating KML visually in Google Earth & Google Maps, and using Spreadsheet Mapper 2.0
Creating Custom Maps: With John Coryat
A comparison of various ways of overlaying data in the Maps API and an in-depth explanation of creating tile layers and custom map types
GigaPan In-Depth: With Randy Sargent & Ted Morse
A demo of the GigaPan panorama-browsing website and KML files, plus a technical explanation of PhotoOverlay
Dynamic KML: With Mano Marks & Brian Hamlin
An exploration of using dynamic queries from KML, using the NetworkLink, httpQuery, and viewFormat elements, plus a demo of a PostGIS-generated NetworkLink
Mars, Moon, and Sky Map Types: With Noel Gorelick
A talk introducing the non-Earth Maps API map types, plus cool demos of other types of projections used with planetary imagery
Mapping the Votes: With Michael Geary
A whirlwind tour of what it took to create the Elections 2008 Map/Mapplet/Gadget, including SHPfile conversion, Javascript optimization, centroid calculations, Twitter updates collection, Mapplet API tricks, and more.
Google API Talks - Android, KML, Google Maps, Gadgets
A series of 5-minute talks by various developers and Googlers given before Geary's presentation, including an intro to Gadgets/Mapplets.

Streetview in the Wild: A Flourishing Species

Pamela Fox — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 10:58:00 -0700

Posted by Pamela Fox, Maps API Team

Several weeks ago, we announced the official release of Street View in the Maps API and invited developers to post examples of their Street View mashups. We crossed our fingers and hoped that we'd made the classes flexible and functional enough for developers to work with, and soon enough the examples started flowing in.

Here are some of my favorites:

	DualMaps: For a given location, displays the Street View, Birds Eye View, and Google aerial map view simultaneously and lets you embed or share the result
	Povo: A local reviews site specially for Boston. Displays street view in a lightbox for each location, and has made a Street View tour especially for the recent Boston Marathon.
	StreetView Adventure Game: In the spirit of the classic interactive fiction games like Zork, this demo lets you play a short game that begins with chasing a guy trying to climb out a window in San Francisco.

Also check out VegasVision, Ong Map V2 (Alpha), VPike, FlyRig, Street View Gadget, LotView, Street View SF Tour, RealBird, Glotter and a Street View Tour Gadget. And if you loved Trulia's implementation (announced on Google LatLong last week), check out this demo that shows how to angle a street view panorama towards the side of the street that a building is on. (It involves math, but don't worry, we've done it for you.)

Thanks to all you developers for sharing your work with us, and as always, please post your examples or questions in the forum.

Google Developer Days: Meet the Google Geo Engineers

Mano Marks — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 15:48:00 -0700

Posted by Mano Marks, Google Geo APIs Team

Google Developer Days 2008, a set of one-day developer events, are back and will take place in locations around the world. We've designed these events for developers with strong coding backgrounds, so that we can discuss our APIs, developer tools and applications.

We'll host Google Developer Days in these locations:

Yokohama, Japan (June 10)
Beijing, China (June 12)
Taipei, Taiwan (June 14)
Sydney, Australia (June 18)
Mexico City, Mexico (June 23)
Sao Paulo, Brazil (June 27)
London, UK (Sept 16)
Paris, France (Sept 18)
Munich, Germany (Sept 23)
Madrid, Spain (Sept 25)
Milan, Italy (Oct 21)
Prague, Czech (Oct 23)
Moscow, Russia (Oct 28)

If you're based in the US, we encourage you to come to Google I/O, on May 28-29 in San Francisco.

At Google Developer Day, our Maps and KML engineers will share their inside knowledge on our developer tools and APIs, including the Google Maps API and KML. In many locations we'll do deep dives into code and conduct hands-on codelabs. If you come to Yokohama and Mexico City, say hi to me and Pamela Fox.

We've posted detailed information for our early dates and will be adding more information for other locations soon. If you're a developer, we encourage you to sign-up for a Google Developer Day at a nearby location. I hope to see you there.

Static Maps Have Never Looked This Good!

Pamela Fox — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 08:09:00 -0700

Posted by Pamela Fox, Maps API Team

Do you ever find yourself using our Static Maps API, wishing you could cover your maps with markers of all sorts of colors, sizes, and letters, or that you could draw lines all over the map? Well, today is your lucky day. Check out these new features in the Static Maps API (and the kind of output you can get from it!) below:

More marker options: You can now specify 4 different sizes (from normal to tiny), and 8 different colors (and for half of the sizes, you can specify a letter as well).
Paths: You can specify a path of up to 50 points, along with color, weight, and alpha.
Image formats: You can specify PNG, JPG, or GIF output.
Transliterated tiles: You can explicitly specify a language, if you'd like transliterated tiles (for Greece or Japan, for example).

Feel free to play around with the options in the updated Static Map Wizard or read through the documentation. As usual, please post questions or comments in the forum. We'd love to see how developers are using this API and its newest features.

Shout it from the Rooftops!

Pamela Fox — Thu, 01 May 2008 02:04:00 -0700

Posted by Jeff Martin, Maps API Team

Today, we're happy to introduce rooftop geocoding in the Google Maps API. This new service delivers pinpoint results for more than 50 million US addresses. The accuracy gains are impressive — and useful. Now, users can distinguish between locations on one side of the street versus the other and can identify specific addresses even in densely built environments.

Check it out for yourself below, starting with the geocode for the Google "house":

Link to Geocode Example

Armageddon Pills and KML in Google Earth

Mano Marks — Wed, 07 May 2008 10:47:00 -0700

Guest post by Matt Brown, concept3D

I’m Matt Brown, a kml developer and designer at concept3D in Boulder, Colorado.

Google Earth has provided a new group of developers with the opportunity to build virtual ‘geowebsites’ specific to vertical markets. Armageddon Pills, a travel book by John Higham, combines this power of Google Earth and a printed book to illustrate the tale of one family’s journey around the globe in 52 weeks.

After creating numerous kml files, he asked us (concept3d) to create a browser look and feel while in Google Earth. We attempted to simplify the Google Earth experience for a broader audience, focusing on its on-screen and balloon navigation systems.

When opening the file, you will find a main menu, or in this case the table of contents, of on-screen buttons. This menu is broken down into chapter groupings that contain sub-menus of icons related to the book. This allows the reader to find ‘where they are’ in the book, and gives them the ability to ‘read’ the kml from start to finish. Each balloon along the traveled path offers an interesting snippet and sometimes a photo or video associated with their locations. Navigation arrows were added to each balloon to allow the information to be chronologically documented and experienced by the end user, and a “home” button to get back to the main menu. Additionally, there are “menu” placemarks scattered around the globe that will help you find the main menu if you are lost in space.

We rely on feature anchors for navigating between balloons and a very high altitude (12680000 meters) to create the effect of a menu. You can download our full KML here.

A big thanks to Mano Marks for his insight and for taking interest in this project. If you have any questions or comments, please email me at matt.brown@concept3d.com.

Upcoming Events

Pamela Fox — Fri, 09 May 2008 06:49:00 -0700

Posted by Pamela Fox, Google Geo APIs Team

There's four big Geo events in the San Francisco Bay Area this month, and Mano and I will be at all of them. Here's the details:

Where2.0: May 12-14th

Sharing Your Content on the Google Maps API

In this session, you'll roll up your sleeves and learn about publishing and sharing using the Maps API. Then we’ll hear from Google partners about what constitutes “great” content and how they expose it.

Searching the Geoweb: Exposing Your Geo Data to Search Engines

Have you been wondering how to drive traffic to that cool maps mashup you created recently? We’ll show you how to get your maps mashup crawled and indexed, and how best to optimize your content for user discovery via search using KML.

WhereCamp: May 17-18th

No sessions planned! This is an unconference - that means the participants do the session planning on the spot. So if there's a Maps API or KML topic you want to talk about, come on by and propose it! (And stay for the slumber party, there'll be lots of hacking and coffee). And, it'll be at the Googleplex! And it's free!

Web 2.0 Mapping and Social Networks Group: May 20th

Communities + Google Maps: Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger

Pamela Fox will talk about the various ways of using Google Maps & the Maps API to create user-contributed maps, covering the spectrum from no-coding solutions to full custom databases and code, and showing examples of sites successfully using each technique.

Google I/O: May 28-29th

There's lots of Geo sessions at Google I/O, here's just 3:

Harnessing StreetView, Static Maps, and other New Additions to the Google Maps API:

Ben Appleton will review some of the recent additions to the Maps API including how to use Static Maps for fast page loads and printable maps, and how to incorporate Street View imagery in your app.

Hosting Your Geo Data, an Overview of Design Options:

Mano Marks will discuss the various options for hosting your Geo data, including Google App Engine, and explain how to choose the right data model for your project.

The World's Information in Context:

Michael T. Jones will discuss new product directions and key trends of importance to geo developers.

Be sure to visit the Google I/O website to see the complete list of sessions and to register. For those coming from out of town, we've arranged discounted room rates at nearby hotels. Read the details on the website to take advantage of the discount, but move fast because the hotel discount ends May 13th.

We're looking forward to seeing you at some of these events soon.

Introducing the Google Maps API for Flash

Mickey Kataria, Google Sydney — Tue, 13 May 2008 22:40:00 -0700

Posted by Mike Jones, Maps API Team

Here at Google, we receive a lot of feature requests - and it feels great every time we fulfill one of them. The ability to utilize the power of Google Maps from Flash is one of those requests that has been popping up on blog posts and other forums since the beginning of time (or more accurately, the beginning of the Javascript Maps API). Over the past few hours, I've had the enjoyment of finally seeing this particular feature request - a Maps API for Flash - come to fruition. Tiredness will grab me soon, no doubt. If you're one of the first readers of this post, rest assured that I'm unlikely to still be awake: long hours have been worked; pre-launch nerves have jangled. Now it's time to let our baby loose into the world and see how the developer community will embrace it.

So, what do I like about the API for Flash? Smoothness and speed are a big part of it. We've designed it so that Flash graphics can be used for each tile layer, marker and info window - opening up possibilities like dynamic shading, shadowing, animation, and video. When the user zooms the map, magnification changes happen smoothly and place names fade in. After the user drags a marker, it gently bounces to a halt. Generally, Flash allows for much greater embellishment, and, well... "flashiness." I get excited just thinking about the creative ways developers might take advantage of having a Flash API for Google Maps.

What was one of our main design decisions for this project? We knew that version 1 of any software project is not perfect, so we opted to split the interface and implementation. As a result, you can build against the current version of the API, and as we add enhancements and tweaks, your website benefits automatically from each update. When you wish to take advantage of new API functions, only then do you need to download the latest API and rebuild.

What does it look like? We've played with it, thrown our ideas in, and also worked with outside companies to see how they use the API. It's been a pleasure to see some of the demos that have come back. Here's one from AFComponents that shows some of the possibilities:

When I first joined Google in Sydney, I got to hear about the experience of the Maps team when they first watched the traffic and the buzz build for the launch of Google Maps. Well, now I'm ready to experience that with this new API. Do send us feedback, we're looking forward to it.

What remains? Over to you.

Love My Maps? Use its Line and Shape Editing in your API Apps!

Pamela Fox — Fri, 16 May 2008 09:30:00 -0700

Posted by Keith Golden, My Maps team

When we launched the map editing tools in Google Maps, the reaction of developers was "This is cool, but how can I use it on my own site?" As someone who was originally drawn to Google in part because of the Maps API and the great developer community around it, I committed to making the My Maps tools useful for developers on their own sites.

Today, I'm pleased to announce that our user interface functionality for editable polylines and polygons is now part of the Maps API.

Say, for example, that you have a GPolygon you want users to be able to edit. Simply call GPolygon.enableEditing() and the poly will have draggable edit control vertices when the user mouses over it. To later make it non-editable, call GPolygon.disableEditing().

We've also exposed additional events for GPolygon and GPolyline so that you can easily mimic the MyMaps behavior (in mashups or Mapplets) by calling enableEditing on "mouseover" and disableEditing on "mouseout". To find out when the user makes an edit, listen for the "lineupdated" event. And if you want users to be able to draw a new GPolyline completely from scratch, just use enableDrawing as shown below:

var polyline = new GPolyline([]);
map.addOverlay(polyline);
polyline.enableDrawing();

Every click on the map will add a new vertex to the polyline until the user double-clicks or clicks again on the last vertex. You can also call enableDrawing to lets users append vertices to either end of an existing polyline. And just because everyone likes pretty colors, we exposed methods to let you change the style of a polyline or polygon: setStrokeStyle and setFillStyle. Have fun, and let us know what you think in the forum.

View example in its own window.

libkml Marches On!

Mano Marks — Mon, 19 May 2008 10:04:00 -0700

Posted by Mano Marks, Geo APIs Team

Google has released version 0.2 of libkml, an open source library for serializing and deserializing KML files. libkml now uses a memory management scheme based on "smart pointers", and has deprecated the use of SCons. On Linux and Mac OS X it now use the traditional automake, and on Windows Microsoft Visual Studio. The "smart pointer" scheme presently restricts support for some alternate language bindings, so libkml 0.2 can only be called from C++, Java, and Python. Version 0.1 also supported PHP, Perl, and Ruby, and is still available in the subversion repository if you're interested. We plan on restoring the those bindings as soon as we can.

Check out the User Guide, and particularly the future development list.

Here's an example of what the code looks like:

// createkml.cc
// This program uses the KmlFactory to create a Point Placemark and
// prints the resultant KML on standard output. #include 
#include 
#include "kml/dom.h" // libkml types are in the kmldom namespace
using kmldom::CoordinatesPtr;
using kmldom::KmlPtr;
using kmldom::KmlFactory;
using kmldom::PlacemarkPtr;
using kmldom::PointPtr; int main() { // Get the factory singleton to create KML elements. KmlFactory* factory = KmlFactory::GetFactory(); // Create . CoordinatesPtr coordinates = factory->CreateCoordinates(); // Create -122.0816695,37.42052549 coordinates->add_point2(-122.0816695,37.42052549); // Create  and give it . PointPtr point = factory->CreatePoint(); point->set_coordinates(coordinates); // Create  and give it a  and the . PlacemarkPtr placemark = factory->CreatePlacemark(); placemark->set_name("Cool Statue"); placemark->set_geometry(point); // Create  and give it . KmlPtr kml = factory->CreateKml(); kml->set_feature(placemark); // Serialize to XML std::string xml = kmldom::SerializePretty(kml); // Print to stdout std::cout << xml;
}

The engineers who worked on it put a lot of thought into making it fast and light weight. However, it is an alpha release. We really would love to have comments and feedback on it, both in the KML Developer Support forum and in the libkml issue tracker.

geo search 2.0: Data In, Data Out

Pamela Fox — Thu, 22 May 2008 03:05:00 -0700

Posted by Pamela Fox, Maps API Team

Last week during the geo madness of Where2.0 and WhereCamp, we announced two enhancements in geo search to make it both easier for developers to get their data into our geo search index and easier for developers to get data back out of the index:

Geo Sitemaps: Sitemaps are a protocol that bots use to index content from websites. Last year, we announced the ability to include KML/GeoRSS files in regular sitemaps just like a normal web resource. This year, we announce a special extension for sitemaps that adds geo-specific tags and makes it easier for us to index. To get your geo content indexed as fast as possible, just submit the sitemap to Google Webmaster Central. For more information on creating a KML file to include in a sitemap, read this article in the KML documentation. An example geo sitemap listing a KML and a GeoRSS file is shown below:

<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9" xmlns:geo="http://www.google.com/geo/schemas/sitemap/1.0">
<url> <loc>http://www.example.com/download?format=kml</loc> <geo:geo> <geo:format>kml</geo:format> </geo:geo>
</url>
<url> <loc>http://www.example.com/download?format=georss</loc> <geo:geo> <geo:format>georss</geo:format> </geo:geo>
</url>
</urlset>

Geo search in the API: The Local Search API has traditionally been used to return business listings and address geocodes. As of last week, it can now be used to retrieve any of the content we have in our geo index. There are a couple different ways to do this, depending on how you use the API. If you're using the LocalSearchControl, here's some sample code (and live example) that will return blended results:

var options = { listingTypes : GlocalSearch.TYPE_BLENDED_RESULTS
}
map.addControl(new google.maps.LocalSearch(options));

var ls = new GlocalSearch();
ls.setRestriction(GSearch.RESTRICT_TYPE, GlocalSearch.TYPE_KMLONLY_RESULTS);

live example

service.url = 'http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/services/search/local';
service.request.q = "site: platial.com" + " " + address.text;
service.request.mrt = "kmlonly";
service.addEventListener(ResultEvent.RESULT, onServerResponse);
service.send();

There are (atleast) two really cool consequences of this news: 1) you'll be able to enable users of your mashups to instantly find international results where previously none existed, and to be able to find results for non-standard searches (e.g. "dog parks"), and 2) by indexing your content, waiting a few weeks, and then using the local search with a "site:yourdomain.com" appended to the query, you get to leverage the power of google search on your own content with barely any code of your own.

So what are you waiting for? Give us your geo sitemap, use our API calls, and let us know what you think in the Maps API, KML, or AJAX API forums.

App Engine, Local Search, & Maps: Making Static Maps... Interactive?

Ben Lisbakken — Wed, 28 May 2008 03:50:00 -0700

Posted by Ben Lisbakken, AJAX APIs Team

JavaScript and Flash are great for putting Google Maps on your website, but sometimes they just won't do. For mobile browsers or users with dial-up connections, simpler is better. So I wrote an open source non-JavaScript version of Google Maps which is designed to show how easy it is to write an application on App Engine that makes use of two new APIs from Google: The Static Maps API and the Local Search API's REST interface. It doesn't have advanced features like street view and public transportation, but it gives you a searchable map that you can zoom in/out on as well as save locations. It also automatically saves your last map view so that every time you go back to the site it will show you what you were last looking at. Check out the source code.

It uses App Engine to store saved points, the AJAX LocalSearch REST API for search functionality, and the Static Maps API to display maps. App Engine is easy to learn and the data store is useful for this kind of application. The REST API for LocalSearch is also very simple. For more information on it, go here.

To use the Static Maps API, you just need to create a URL with the proper parameters for your desired map view. Keep in mind that you need to set the zoom level (unless you are specifying multiple points — then it's calculated for you). In the vast majority of cases, this is completely fine. In my case, though, I needed to know what the zoom level was, so that I could give the user the option to zoom in/out. That meant coming up with calculations of the zoom both for the multiple points and single point case, and that was the trickiest part of the app.

If you use the AJAX Local Search and it returns one result then there will be a viewport object returned with it. This viewport contains the Northeast and Southwest latitude/longitude bounds that are optimal for displaying this point. However, Static Maps only accept zoom levels and center points. Here's the Python to generate that information:

viewport = json['responseData']['viewport']
mercator_projection = MercatorProjection(18) # Checkout the MercatorProjection class
southwest = [float(viewport['sw']['lat']),float(viewport['sw']['lng'])]
northeast = [float(viewport['ne']['lat']),float(viewport['ne']['lng'])]
bounds = [southwest, northeast]
zoom_level = mercator_projection.CalculateBoundsZoomLevel(bounds, MAP_SIZE)

At this point you will have everything you need to construct the map: the center point (the Local Search point), zoom level, marker point.

Then there's the case where you have multiple points returned by the AJAX Local Search. Since we will have a collection of latitudes and longitude points that we want to display we can just find the min/maxes, do some rounding, and voilà you get a bounding box. With a bounding box and a calculated center point, you can repeat the same steps as before.

mercator_projection = MercatorProjection(18)
bounds = CalcBoundsFromPoints(lats, lngs)
center_point = CalcCenterFromBounds(bounds)
zoom_level = mercator_projection.CalculateBoundsZoomLevel(bounds, MAP_SIZE)

From line 121 to about 285 you'll find all the necessary functions for the situations described above. Try using this code to create your own interactive version of Static Maps, and let us know in the forum if you have questions or just want to show off your nifty app.

Neo Geo Blog

Michael Weiss-Malik — Wed, 28 May 2008 10:20:00 -0700

Posted by Michael Weiss-Malik, KML Product Manager

I have good news and bad news. Let's start with the bad.

The bad: After 2 years, 6 months, and 14 days of dedicated developer community service, the Official Google Maps API Blog is being retired. That's right... the blog you're reading right now, right here, is no more, starting today. No more news will be posted here.

The good: All is not lost! A new blog is taking this blog's place: The Google Geo Developers Blog. Hop on over there to see the first post and get the full story on the change.

So if you're reading this post in an RSS reader, be sure to subscribe to the new blog's feed. And if you're reading this post right on blogger itself, be sure to update your bookmark. Because there will still be plenty of continued Maps API news... you just won't be able to catch it here.

See you all over at the new blog!

Blog Editor: Moderating Comments

Patrick Copeland — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 13:08:00 -0700

by Patrick Copeland

You might not know this but when we started this blog back in January 2007 we were the first at Google to allow readers to comment openly on our posts. We take pride in our goal to participate in the testing community.

This openness is sometimes abused. Lately the volume of comment spam has been on the raise. We have to spend a lot of time playing "whack-a-mole" cleaning it up. It's annoying to our readers and clutters the legitimate discussion.

We've taken the step to moderate comments starting today and will delete spam before you see it. Comments that are clearly spam or are purely promotional in nature will be filtered. The only down side is that comments will have a slight latency getting posted. We will continue to encourage debate and won't censor conflicting or alternative ideas.

Thanks for understanding. And keep up the rich discussion.

The Plague of Boredom

James Whittaker — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 05:16:00 -0700

By James A. Whittaker

"Testing is boring." Don’t pretend for a moment that you’ve never heard a developer, designer or other non tester express that sentiment and take a moment to search your own soul for the truth. Even the most bigoted tester would have to admit to contracting the boredom plague at some point. The day-in, day-out execution of tests and the filing of bug reports simply doesn't hold the interest of most technical people who are drawn to computing for its creative and challenging reputation. Even if you find yourself immune to the boredom, you have to admit there are many monotonous and uncreative aspects of testing.

It doesn’t begin that way though. Early in a tester’s career, the thrill of the bug hunt can keep a tester going for many months. It can be as intoxicating as playing a video game and trying to find some elusive prize. And lots of progress in terms of skill is made in those early years with testers going from novice to pretty good in no time flat. Who can argue with a career that offers such learning, advancement and intellectually interesting problems?

But as the achievement curve levels out, the task of testing can get very repetitive and that quickly turns to monotony. I think, promotion concerns aside, this is why many testers switch to development after a few years. The challenge and creativity gets eclipsed by the monotony.

I think bored testers are missing something. I submit that it is only the tactical aspects of software testing that become boring over time and many turn to automation to cure this. Automation as a potion against the tedium of executing test cases and filing bugs reports is one thing, but automation is no replacement for the strategic aspects of the testing process and it is in this strategy that we find salvation from this plague. The act of test case design, deciding what should and shouldn’t be tested and in what proportion, is not something automation is good at and yet it is an interesting and intellectually challenging task. Neither is the strategic problem of monitoring tests and determining when to stop. These are hard and interesting strategic problems that will banish the plague of boredom. Testers can succumb to the plague of boredom or they can shift their focus from mostly tactical to a nice mix of tactical work and strategic thinking.

Make sure that in your rush to perform the small tactical testing tasks you aren't dropping the strategic aspects of your work because therein are the interesting technical challenges and high level thinking that will hold your interest and keep this plague at bay.

Blog Stats

Patrick Copeland — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 06:42:00 -0700

by Patrick Copeland

We get questions once in a while about our readership. Here's a brief summary of the last 30 days...

Page view count: 34,140
Time on each page: 2:52
Most popular day to read: Tuesday's.
Most traffic (top 5 in order): US, India, UK, Germany, Canada
Number of countries with readers: 131

The Plague of Homelessness

James Whittaker — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 03:38:00 -0700

By James A. Whittaker

There are two communities who regularly find bugs, the testers who are paid to find them and the users who stumble upon them quite by accident. Clearly the users aren’t doing so on purpose, but through the normal course of using the software to get work (or entertainment, socializing and so forth) done failures do occur. Often it is the magic combination of an application interacting with real user data on a real user’s computing environment that causes software to fail. Isn’t it obvious then that testers should endeavor to create such data and environmental conditions in the test lab in order to find these bugs before the software ships?

Actually, the test community has been diligently making an attempt to do just that for decades. I call this bringing the user into the test lab, either in body or in spirit. My own PhD dissertation was on the topic of statistical usage testing and I was nowhere near the first person to think of the idea as my multi-page bibliography will attest. But there is a natural limit to the success of such efforts. Testers simply cannot be users or simulate their actions in a realistic enough way to find all the important bugs. Unless you actually live in the software you will miss important issues.

It’s like homeownership. It doesn’t matter how well the house is built. It doesn’t matter how diligent the builder and the subcontractors are during the construction process. The house can be thoroughly inspected during every phase of construction by the contractor, the homeowner and the state building inspector. There are just some problems that will only be found once the house is occupied for some period of time. It needs to be used, dined in, slept in, showered in, cooked in, partied in, relaxed in and all the other things homeowners do in their houses. It’s not until the teenager takes an hour long shower while the sprinklers are running that the septic system is found deficient. It’s not until a car is parked in the garage overnight that we find out the rebar was left out of the concrete slab. The builder won't and often can't do these things.

And time matters as well. It takes a few months of blowing light bulbs at the rate of one every other week to discover the glitch in the wiring and a year has to pass before the nail heads begin protruding from the drywall. These are issues for the homeowner, not the builder. These are the software equivalents of memory leaks and data corruption, time is a necessary element in finding such problems.

These are some number of bugs that simply cannot be found until the house is lived in and software is no different. It needs to be in the hands of real users doing real work with real data in real environments. Those bugs are as inaccessible to testers as nail pops and missing rebar are to home builders.

Testers are homeless. We can do what we can do and nothing more. It’s good to understand our limitations and plan for the inevitable “punch lists” from our users. Pretending that once an application is released the project is over is simply wrong headed. There is a warranty period that we are overlooking and that period is still part of the testing phase.

Update! GTAC Keynote Speakers: Niklaus Wirth and Alberto di Meglio

Patrick Copeland — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 09:22:00 -0700

by Juergen Allgayer, Conference Chair

We are thrilled to announce that Niklaus Wirth and Alberto di Meglio are this years keynote speakers at the 4th Google Test Automation Conference (GTAC).

Niklaus Wirth
Prof. Niklaus Wirth, is the designer of several programing languages and operating systems, including Pascal and Oberon. He received many awards including the Turing award, is author of many books and articles such as "Program Development by Stepwise Refinement" and "Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs". Prof. Niklaus Wirth served as professor at Stanford, University of Zurich, and ETH Zurich.

Alberto di Meglio
In 2003, Dr. Alberto di Meglio was appointed by CERN as Software Integration Manager in the Middleware Reengineering Activity of the first Enabling Grids for E-science (EGEE) project. At the end of the EGEE project, thanks to the very successful results obtained with the integration and testing tools and procedures developed for the grid middleware developed by EGEE, Alberto set up Infrastructure for Testing, Integration and Configuration of Software, an international infrastructure co-funded by EC FP7 (European Commission: CORDIS - Seventh Framework Programme) for building and testing software on the grid, of which he is currently Project Director.

Reminder: Call for proposals
If you would like to give a talk at GTAC please remember to submit your proposal until August 1 at the latest. Please visit http://www.gtac.biz/call-for-proposals for details.

The Plague of Blindness

James Whittaker — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 07:30:00 -0700

By James A. Whittaker

And now for the last plague in this series. I hope you enjoyed them (the posts ...not the plagues!)

Imagine playing a video game blindfolded or even with the heads up display turned off. You cannot monitor your character's health, your targeting system is gone. There is no look ahead radar and no advance warning of any kind. In gaming, the inability to access information about the campaign world is debilitating and a good way to get your character killed.

There are many aspects of testing software that fall into this invisible spectrum. Software itself is invisible. We see it only through the UI with much of what is happening doing so under the covers and out of our line of sight. It’s not like building a car in which you can clearly see missing pieces and many engineers can look at a car and get the exact same view of it. There is no arguing whether the car has a bumper installed, it is in plain sight for everyone involved to see. Not so with software which exists as magnetic fluctuations on storage media. It’s not a helpful visual.

Software testing is much like game playing while blindfolded. We can't see bugs; we can't see coverage; we can't see code changes. This information, so valuable to us as testers, is hidden in useless static reports. If someone outfitted us with an actual blindfold, we might not even notice.

This blindness concerning our product and its behavior creates some very real problems for the software tester. Which parts of the software have enjoyed the most unit testing? Which parts have changed from one build to the next? Which parts have existing bugs posted against them? What part of the software does a specific test case cover? Which parts have been tested thoroughly and which parts have received no attention whatsoever?

Our folk remedy for the blindness plague has always been to measure code coverage, API/method coverage or UI coverage. We pick the things we can see the best and measure them, but do they really tell us anything? We’ve been doing it this way for years not because it is insightful, but simply because it is all our blindness will allow us to do. We’re interacting with our application under test a great deal, but we must rely on other, less concrete senses for any feedback about our effort.

Software testers could learn a lot from the world of gaming. Turn on your heads up display and see the information you've been blind to. There's power in information.

Call for Attendance: Google Test Automation Conference (GTAC) 2009

Patrick Copeland — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 10:11:00 -0700

by Juergen Allgayer, Conference Chair

Testing for the Web is the theme of the 4th Google Test Automation Conference (GTAC), to be held in Zurich, October 21-22.

We are happy to announce that we are now accepting applications for attendance. The success of the conference depends on active participation of the attendees. Because the available spaces for the conference are limited, we ask each person to apply for attendance. Since we aim for a balanced audience of seasoned practitioners, students and academics, we ask the applicants to provide a brief background statement.

How to apply
Please visit http://www.gtac.biz/call-for- attendance to apply for a attendance.

Deadline
Please submit your application until August 28, 2009 at the latest.

Registration Fees
There are no registration fees. We will send out detailed registration instructions to each invited applicant. We will provide breakfast and lunch. There will be a reception on the evening of October 21.

Cancellation
If you applied but can no longer attend the conference please notify us
immediately by sending an email to gtac-2009-cfa@google.com so
someone from the waiting list can get the opportunity instead.

Further information
General website: http://www.gtac.biz/
Call for proposals: http://www.gtac.biz/call-for- proposals
Call for attendance: http://www.gtac.biz/call-for- attendance
Accommodations: http://www.gtac.biz/ accomodations

How to think about OO

Misko — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 04:58:00 -0700

by Miško Hevery

Everyone seems to think that they are writing OO after all they are using OO languages such as Java, Python or Ruby. But if you exam the code it is often procedural in nature.

Static Methods

Static methods are procedural in nature and they have no place in OO world. I can already hear the screams, so let me explain why, but first we need to agree that global variables and state is evil. If you agree with previous statement than for a static method to do something interesting it needs to have some arguments, otherwise it will always return a constant. Call to a staticMethod() must always return the same thing, if there is no global state. (Time and random, has global state, so that does not count and object instantiation may have different instance but the object graph will be wired the same way.)

This means that for a static method to do something interesting it needs to have arguments. But in that case I will argue that the method simply belongs on one of its arguments. Example: Math.abs(-3) should really be -3.abs(). Now that does not imply that -3 needs to be object, only that the compiler needs to do the magic on my behalf, which BTW, Ruby got right. If you have multiple arguments you should choose the argument with which method interacts the most.

But most justifications for static methods argue that they are "utility methods". Let's say that you want to have toCamelCase() method to convert string "my_workspace" to "myWorkspace". Most developers will solve this as StringUtil.toCamelCase("my_workspace"). But, again, I am going to argue that the method simply belongs to the String class and should be "my_workspace".toCamelCase(). But we can't extend the String class in Java, so we are stuck, but in many other OO languages you can add methods to existing classes.

In the end I am sometimes (handful of times per year) forced to write static methods due to limitation of the language. But that is a rare event since static methods are death to testability. What I do find, is that in most projects static methods are rampant.

Instance Methods

So you got rid of all of your static methods but your codes still is procedural. OO says that code and data live together. So when one looks at code one can judge how OO it is without understanding what the code does, simply by looking at the relationship of data and code.

class Database {
 // some fields declared here
 boolean isDirty(Cache cache, Object obj) {
 for (Object cachedObj : cache.getObjects) {
 if (cachedObj.equals(obj))
 return false;
 }
 return true;
 }
}

The problem here is the method may as well be static! It is in the wrong place, and you can tell this because it does not interact with any of the data in the Database, instead it interacts with the data in cache which it fetches by calling the getObjects() method. My guess is that this method belongs to one of its arguments most likely Cache. If you move it to Cache you well notice that the Cache will no longer need the getObjects() method since the for loop can access the internal state of the Cache directly. Hey, we simplified the code (moved one method, deleted one method) and we have made Demeter happy.

The funny thing about the getter methods is that it usually means that the code where the data is processed is outside of the class which has the data. In other words the code and data are not together.

class Authenticator {
 Ldap ldap;
 Cookie login(User user) {
 if (user.isSuperUser()) {
 if ( ldap.auth(user.getUser(),
 user.getPassword()) )
 return new Cookie(user.getActingAsUser());
 } else (user.isAgent) {
 return new Cookie(user.getActingAsUser());
 } else {
 if ( ldap.auth(user.getUser(),
 user.getPassword()) )
 return new Cookie(user.getUser());
 }
 return null;
 }
}

Now I don't know if this code is well written or not, but I do know that the login() method has a very high affinity to user. It interacts with the user a lot more than it interacts with its own state. Except it does not interact with user, it uses it as a dumb storage for data. Again, code lives with data is being violated. I believe that the method should be on the object with which it interacts the most, in this case on User. So lets have a look:

class User {
 String user;
 String password;
 boolean isAgent;
 boolean isSuperUser;
 String actingAsUser;

 Cookie login(Ldap ldap) {
 if (isSuperUser) {
 if ( ldap.auth(user, password) )
 return new Cookie(actingAsUser);
 } else (user.isAgent) {
 return new Cookie(actingAsUser);
 } else {
 if ( ldap.auth(user, password) )
 return new Cookie(user);
 }
 return null;
 }
}

Ok we are making progress, notice how the need for all of the getters has disappeared, (and in this simplified example the need for the Authenticator class disappears) but there is still something wrong. The ifs branch on internal state of the object. My guess is that this code-base is riddled with if (user.isSuperUser()). The issue is that if you add a new flag you have to remember to change all of the ifs which are dispersed all over the code-base. Whenever I see If or switch on a flag I can almost always know that polymorphism is in order.

class User {
 String user;
 String password;

 Cookie login(Ldap ldap) {
 if ( ldap.auth(user, password) )
 return new Cookie(user);
 return null;
 }
}

class SuperUser extends User {
 String actingAsUser;

 Cookie login(Ldap ldap) {
 if ( ldap.auth(user, password) )
 return new Cookie(actingAsUser);
 return null;
 }
}

class AgentUser extends User {
 String actingAsUser;

 Cookie login(Ldap ldap) {
 return new Cookie(actingAsUser);
 }
}

Now that we took advantage of polymorphism, each different kind of user knows how to log in and we can easily add new kind of user type to the system. Also notice how the user no longer has all of the flag fields which were controlling the ifs to give the user different behavior. The ifs and flags have disappeared.

Now this begs the question: should the User know about the Ldap? There are actually two questions in there. 1) should User have a field reference to Ldap? and 2) should User have compile time dependency on Ldap?

Should User have a field reference to Ldap? The answer is no, because you may want to serialize the user to database but you don't want to serialize the Ldap. See here.

Should User have compile time dependency on Ldap? This is more complicated, but in general the answer depends on weather or not you are planning on reusing the User on a different project, since compile time dependencies are transitive in strongly typed languages. My experience is that everyone always writes code that one day they will reuse it, but that day never comes, and when it does, usually the code is entangled in other ways anyway, so code reuse after the fact just does not happen. (developing a library is different since code reuse is an explicit goal.) My point is that a lot of people pay the price of "what if" but never get any benefit out of it. Therefore don't worry abut it and make the User depend on Ldap.

TotT: Testing GWT without GwtTestCase

Christopher Semturs — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 17:53:00 -0700

Because GWT (Google Web Toolkit) is new and exciting it's easy to forget the lessons on clean GUI code structure that have been accumulated over nearly thirty years.

GwtTestCase is good for testing UI-specific code in JavaScript. If you find yourself using GwtTestCase for testing non-ui client-side logic you may not have a clear View/Presenter separation. Separating the View and the Presenter allows for more modular, more easily tested code with shorter test times. Model View Presenter was introduced in another episode back in February. Here's how to apply it to a GWT app.

Defining terms:

Server – a completely standard backend with no dependency on GWT.

Model – the data model. May be shared between the client and server side, or if appropriate you might have a different model for the client side. It has no dependency on GWT.

View – the display. Classes in the view wrap GWT widgets, hiding them from the rest of your code. They contain no logic, no state, and are easy to mock.

Presenter – all the client side logic and state; it talks to the server and tells the view what to do. It uses RPC mechanisms from GWT but no widgets.

The Presenter, which contains all the interesting client-side code is fully testable in Java!

public void testRefreshPersonListButtonWasClicked() {
IMocksControl easyMockContext = EasyMock.createControl()
mockServer = easyMockContext.createMock(Server.class);
mockView = easyMockContext.createMock(View.class);
List franz = Lists.newArrayList(new Person("Franz", "Mayer"));
mockServer.getPersonList(AsyncCallbackSuccessMatcher<list<person>>reportSuccess(franz)));
mockView.clearPersonList());
mockView.addPerson(“Franz”, “Mayer”);
easyMockContext.replay();
presenter.refreshPersonListButtonClicked();
easyMockContext.verify();
}

Testing failure cases is now as easy as changing expectations. By swapping in the following expectations, the above test goes from testing success to testing that after two server failures, we show an error message.

mockServer.getPersonList(AsyncCallbackFailureMatcher<list<person>>reportFailure(failedExpn))
expectLastCall().times(2); // Ensure the presenter tries twice

mockView.showErrorMessage(“Sorry, please try again later”));

You'll still need an end-to-end test. But all your logic can be tested in small and fast tests.

The Source Code for the Matchers is open-sourced and can be downloaded here: AsyncCallbackSuccessMatcher.java - AsyncCallbackFailureMatcher.java.

Consider using Test Driven Development (TDD) to develop the presenter. It tends to result in higher test coverage, faster and more relevant tests, as well as a better code structure.

This week's episode by David Morgan, Christopher Semturs and Nicolas Wettstein based in Zürich, Switzerland – having a real Mountain View

Toilet-friendly version

AsyncCallbackSuccessMatcher.java

AsyncCallbackFailureMatcher.java.

The 7th Plague?

James Whittaker — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 02:25:00 -0700

By James A. Whittaker

Yes, I only posted 6 plagues. Congratulations for catching this purposeful omission! You wouldn't trust a developer who argues "this doesn't need to be tested" or "that function works like so" and you shouldn't trust me when I say there are 7 plagues. In the world of testing all assumptions must be scrutinized and it doesn't work until someone, namely a tester, verifies that it does!

Clearly this is an alert and education readership. But why assume even this statement is true? How about another test? Anyone feel like contributing the 7th plague?

I've actually received a few via email already and I have an idea of my own 7th. So email them to me at docjamesw@gmail.com and I'll post a few of the best, with attribution, on this blog. Maybe I can even scare up some Google SWAG or a copy of my latest book to the best one.

First come, first published.

Super Fast JS Testing

Misko — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 04:20:00 -0700

by Shyam Seshadri

Before I jump into how exactly you can perform super fast and easy JS testing, let me give you some background on the problem.

Javascript is a finicky language (Some people even hesitate to call it a language). And it can easily grow and become a horrible and complicated beast, incapable of being tamed once let loose. And testing it is a nightmare. Once you have decided on a framework (of which there are a dime a dozen), you then have to set it up to run just right. You need to set it up to actually run your tests. Then you have to figure out how to run it in a continuous integration environment. Maybe even run it in headless mode. And everyone solves it in their own ways.

But the biggest problem I have with most of these frameworks is that executing the tests usually requires a context switch. By that, I mean to run a JSUnit test, you end up usually having to open the browser, browse to a particular url or html page which then runs the test. Then you have to look at the results there, and then come back to your editor to either proceed further or fix your tests. Works, but really slows down development.

In java, all it takes is to click the run button in your IDE to run your tests. You get instant feedback, a green / red bar and details on which tests passed and failed and at what line. No context switch, you can get it to run at every save, and proceed on your merry way. Till now, this was not possible with Javascript.

But now, we have JS Test Driver. My colleagues Jeremie and Misko ended up running into some of the issues I outlined above, and decided that going along with the flow was simply unacceptable. So they created a JS Testing framework which solves these very things. You can capture any browser on any machine, and when you tell it to run tests, it will go ahead and execute them on all these browsers and return you the results in your client. And its blazing fast. I am talking milliseconds to run 100 odd tests. And you can tell it to rerun your tests at each save. All within the comforts of your IDE. And over the last three weeks, I have been working on the eclipse plugin for JS Test Driver, and its now at the point where its in a decent working condition.

The plugin in action

The plugin allows you to, from within Eclipse, start the JS Test Driver server, capture some browsers, and then run your tests. You get pretty icons telling you what browsers were captured, the state of the server, the state of the tests. It allows you to filter and show only failures, rerun your last launch configuration, even setup the paths to your browsers so you can launch it all from the safety of eclipse. And as you can see, its super fast. Some 100 odd tests in less than 10 ms. If thats not fast, I don’t know what is.

For more details on JS Test Driver, visit its Google Code website and see how you can use it in your next project and even integrate it into a continuous integration. Misko talks a little bit more about the motivations behind writing it on his Yet Another JS Testing Framework post. To try out the plugin for yourselves, go add the following update site to eclipse:

http://js-test-driver.googlecode.com/svn/update/

For all you IntelliJ fanatics, there is something similar in the works.

Update! Speakers & Talks for GTAC

Patrick Copeland — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 06:35:00 -0700

We are thrilled to announce the speakers and talks for the 4th Google Test Automation Conference (GTAC). Competition was fierce: we received over 100 submissions and have an acceptance rate of lower than 10%.

Testing Applications on Mobile Devices (Doron Reuveni, uTest)
JsTestDriver (Jeremie Lenfang-Engelmann, Misko Hevery, Google)
Fighting Layout Bugs (Michael Tamm, optivo GmbH)
Even better than the real thing - Lessons learned from testing GWT applications (Nicolas Wettstein, Google)
Selenium: to 2.0 and Beyond! (Simon Stewart, Google)
Automating Performance Test Data Collection and Reporting (David Burns, David Henderson, smartFOCUS DIGITAL)
Achieving Web Test Automation with a Mixed-Skills Team (Mark Micallef, BBC Future Media and Technology)
Score One for Quality! (Joshua Williams and Ross Smith, Microsoft)
Automatic workarounds for web applications (Antonio Carzaniga, Alessandra Gorla, Nicolò Perino, Mauro Pezzè, University of Lugano )
Precondition Satisfaction by Smart Object Selection in Random Testing (Yi Wei, Serge Gebhardt, ETH Zurich)

For further information on the conference please visit its wepage at http://www.gtac.biz.