Keyboard Face » Google

Calendar Sync with the IPhone for Google Apps for Domains

Tom — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 06:22:16 +0000

Google just released a new feature – iPhone sync for Google Calendar! That was the first thing I tried to do when I got my iPhone. I ended up using a workaround through NeuvaSync.com. It worked perfectly and thus I was a little hesitant to try the official version out. The little banner at the top of my Google Calendar homepage, finally got to me though:

I had to try it out.

I went through all of the steps, but it the instructions didn’t work! It appeared that it worked perfectly for regular google calendar owners, but when you used Google Apps for Domains it didn’t work.

It took several hours of searching to finally figure out what was going on. The Mobile Sync wasn’t enabled in my Google Apps account. But also, I didn’t even have the ability to enable it! Here are the steps that I had to take to get Calendar Sync working for my Google Apps for Domains account:

1. Go to Domain Settings at the top:

2. All the way at the bottom, make sure that your control panel has Next Generation selected.

3. Now, go over to Service Settings on the top right. You’ll now have a “Mobile” option. This wasn’t there for me until I selected “Next Generation” in the control panel section.

4. Enable the Sync and you’re off. The original instructions link should now work perfectly!
http://www.google.com/mobile/apple/sync.html

Gmail Signature Float Update

Tom — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 00:57:47 +0000

One of the annoying things about using Gmail (or Google for Hosted Domains) for business email is the way it handles your signatures.

Gmail has always taken and put your signature at very bottom of the email below the conversation, assuming that is where you’ll be writing your reply. I tend to like to reply at the top of the email, so I end up copy/pasting my signature each time. Quite a pain.

Then came Firefox and a Greasemonkey script that does the copy/paste for you. This worked great and all was well.

… Then GMail came out with a newer version of their interface and this broke the Greasemonkey script. Back to square one.

It’s been about almost a year now and the script hasn’t been updated.

But – at last! GMail came out with a feature that does it for you! It’s in GMail Labs, and it does exactly what this Greasemonkey script did, but now it’s part of GMail itself – so it works in any browser.

Yay! The little things that make my day

The NOODP Meta Tag

Tom — Sat, 15 Jul 2006 21:51:02 +0000

Matt Cutts just wrote a post recently on Google adopting NOODP meta tag. It specifies that the SERPs (search result pages) shouldn’t use the description from your Open Directory Project listing (ODP for short, located at dmoz.org). MSN already supports this feature.

Having a listing in the ODP helps tremendously in getting traffic to your site from the directory itself as well as increased traffic from the search engines. If you have a high quality site, I suggest you submit it for approval.

This tag is great though. I hadn’t thought of it, but – what if the editor writes a description of your site that you don’t like? What if your description is several years old? Without this tag and feature, you’d have to be content with the search engines describing your site using the data from the ODP.

Good feature.

Related Posts:

Are You Down With ODP Descriptions

Google Supports Meta NOODP Tag