Tag: google

AMP Accelerated Mobile Pages for MVC ASP.Net

Google has a new mobile standard for html that strays from the recent common knowledge involving responsive web pages which show the same html for both mobile and desktop traffic, but which reformats itself to the width of the browser Instead, Accelerated Mobile Pages ( or AMP ) actualy adds a lot of resrictions and some new tags and other goodies with the intention of making the mobile experience much faster. This has been the common compliant I’ve had with the mobile web- even with a powerful smartphone on a fast connection, the web experience is often very slow and just bad. I’m not even sure why some pages are so terrible when they even seem to be built to support mobile, but they just are. This must be the resaoning behind the new AMP standard. 

AMP has recently been in the news because google has indicated that sites supporting AMP will soon receive a bit of an SEO boost. So now, many webmasters who depend on search engine traffic are scrambling to deploy AMP-enabled versions of their sites to take advantage of this slight…advantage. 

Since most of my web projects run on ASP.Net MVC, I’m looking to implement AMP using some boilerplate template code. I’ve checked Nuget and haven’t found anything in there yet. Maybe we’ll have to develop this and add it to the nuget repository. 

Have any of you built or found something to help accelerate developing and/or deploying AMP using .Net MVC? Comment below to discuss further. 

igoogle shutting down

I’ve used igoogle every day since shortly after it came out in 2007. According to this article, google has decided to shut down the service. This really makes no sense, as igoogle fulfills a simple but needed service, specifically letting a user build a “control panel” of content and apps. I don’t see where the new-and-improved google+ fulfills this need, so why is igoogle getting the axe? The article mentions a lot of pushback from google users who wish to continue using the igoogle service, so maybe they’ll see the error and keep it… but it doesn’t look promising. 

So, who is going to step up and offer a replacement? igoogle uses an xml-based plugin “api”, so in theory all the existing plugins could be ported to a third party portal-style application. Heck, if I didn’t already have a billion projects in play, I’d probably take this on. 

Google Black Bar

Google apparently decided to change the menu bar across the top of the page to black. I don’t really care, but I will admit it looks really out of place. Apparently a lot of others agree- and some really have strangely strong opinions about it, which can’t be a healthy sign… but anyway.

So who wants to build a firefox plugin to revert this menu back and make all these weirdos happy again?

Oh and why am I writing about something this dumb? Im just curious if I can rank for the phrase Google Black Bar. And that’s why I just said it again right there 😉

 

Google Microphone in Chrome spooks me out

Loaded Chrome browser earlier and was greeted with a little microphone icon in google’s search box. Click it, and sure enough, you can talk to google and it will recognize what you say and do a search for it.

Cool stuff, but what is spooky about this is- the browser never asked me if I wanted to allow the app to use my mic. So, technically, google could turn on my microphone and listen to me any time it wants? What are the security parameters around this thing?

Click Mic icon. Say “Google, are you listening to me?”