One of the joys of testing with IE8 is the added google time that I get to spend hunting down bugs and solutions. If you find something mesbehaving in Redmond's browser, then the Internet knows about it and has a fix somewhere.

If you use Google Analytics to measure traffic and activity on your website, once you start customizing the tracker code, use the asynchronous tracker, or do more complicated tracking it can be hard to verify that your changes have worked.  The asynchronous tracker won't necessarily emit any js errors and you can't always waitio see any effect in the analytics dashboard.  

 Google's approach to speeding up the web, explained by Kimsall below, is in stark contrast to Microsoft's approach to trying to dominate the web 12 years ago. Google's approach can cut  pageload times about in half, and can really help large and complicated sites that make a lot of requests.

If you use Google Analytics, Asynchronous Tracking is now available.  This is a faster way for pages to send data to the mother ship, and was announced at the end of last year.  The GA module for Drupal is working on supporting the new tag, in fact a patch is available if you want to run on the absolute bleeding edge.

Google can now render labels hierarchically.  I've been using a naming convention to get labels to sort the way I want, but this will further declutter my labels list.  You have to go to the Google Labs tab in settings to enable it for your account.

Will we see more organizations outsourcing email services? Having run my own personal mail server for a few years, I'd be quite wary of purchasing and operating your own mail servers. Yes, if you own your mail servers, you can make them as secure and redudant as you want if price is no limit. But there's always a budget, and it will always not be enough to provide the uptime, redundancy, and backups that someone like Google, Yahoo, or Microsoft can provide.

Cuil is a new search engine on the block, trying to displace Google from the top of the search heap.  They  say their index is larger than Google's, as if size is THAT important, and was launched by former Google employees.

Saw today that Google Maps now has a Traffic layer, which color codes congestion around 30 major cities, Washington DC included.  If you zoom in close enough, you'll also now see markers for Metro stations.  HT: Tags: Google, Internet

Debian AMD64 Setup

Google Calendar has launched if you want to check it out. There is also an overview of the features available. Will this be a compelling calendaring solution? After looking it over and checking out the website, I think it might be for me. I've setup DAV on apache before so that I can have a portable read/write calendar available online but it hasn't become critical for me.