Internet Blu

Fighting Developer Burnout

John Callaway — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 18:34:00 -0500

Recently, a colleague and I were having a philosophical debate regarding developer burnout. He pointed me towards an article (What causes developer burnout) that he had found that same morning. This got me to thinking about my own experiences and times of professional frustration.

What follows are a few tips that may help fight developer burnout.

Avoid blame. Don't get stuck finger pointing and searching for a source of your frustration. The reality is that it doesn't matter. Instead, focus on finding solutions.

Work with those whom you feel frustration towards. It's been my experience that the team is more productive when everyone works together instead of against one another. Befriend those that frustrate you and ask how you might help them. This act will go a long way. In return they may even remove some of the unnecesary obstacles in your way.

What tips do you have to share?

Why Testing Your Pay Per Click (PPC) Ad Text is Like Dating

John Callaway — Mon, 04 May 2009 08:33:00 -0500

The following is a guest post from good friend and SEO and PPC expert, Amberly Stitzel.

by Amberly Stitzel

When it comes to dating it seems like everyone is trying to find "The One." It appears we are trying to meet the same goal with Pay Per Click (PPC) ad copy. We all want to find the one ad text that can generate the highest Click Through Rate (CTR) thus getting more qualified users in the door for a lower Cost Per Click (CPC).

Just like dating you start with a pool of, hopefully, qualified applicants. In PPC you also start with a pool of qualified ad texts; I recommend at least three and probably no more than five just to keep results from getting diluted.

You don't want to send your ad texts out into the search space without properly preparing them for competition, just as you wouldn't go out on a date in your pajamas after your just rolled out of bed in the morning. We all try to put our best foot forward on a date by wearing something nice, fixing our hair and smelling good so why wouldn't you do the same for your ad texts? Using great calls to action and accurately explaining what you expect the user to do when they arrive at your site after clicking on the ad is similar to getting "gussied up" before a date. It is a bit more difficult, however, because pay per click ads have only so many characters to put their best foot forward whereas dates can go all out, wearing whatever, wherever. Nonetheless, make sure you put as many selling points as you can in your ads and don't try to write ads just for the clicks because the ultimate goal is the conversion once they get there.

With PPC ad texts the system then optimizes to show the best performer most often. And with dating, lets be honest, you wouldn’t keep seeing someone if you weren't that interested in them. So in both scenarios we are optimizing for the best performers. So what happens after you deem a winning ad text or date? With ad texts you would then take your lowest performers out of the mix and replace with new ad texts to test against your control (the winning ad). With dating I presume you would continue seeing the winning date until they do something to turn you off or until someone better comes along (a new control). In either scenario you have the best performer 100% of the time until that no longer works for your goals in mind. The main thing to keep in mind is to not be complacent with your ad copy or it could be costing you clicks and ultimately, sales.

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Amberly Stitzel is the Interactive Marketing Manager for LeapFrog Interactive. She has been in the search engine marketing industry for over three years and is certified inGoogle AdWords, MSN AdCenter and the Yahoo Ambassador Program.
astitzel@leapfroginteractive.com

What Good is a CMS if You Can't Add Pages?

John Callaway — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 16:00:00 -0500

Recently I've been working with a local not for profit organization. Early on in my meetings with them it was discussed that they needed a new website. I offered my services and suggestions through numerous emails and lunch meetings. At then end of that initial run I had suggested a new website using one of a number of Content Management Systems (CMS) available on the market. The organization members at that last meeting thanked me and stated that they had someone volunteer to design, code, and host a solution for them. "Great," I thought, "less work for me to do."

It was in my next coorespondance with this group that made me a little nervous about their choice. It turned out that the volunteer was actually selling his services as a design group and host provider. We discussed his proposed solution and I pointed out some of the limitations that I thought would hurt this particular venture. The designer assured me that he had a custom designed, home grown application that would be perfect for them, and promptly pushed me aside.

At this point I was shaken, but not down for the count. I tried one last time to urge the organization to reconsider their choice and reevaluate their options on the proposed solution. Again, I was ignored and the project began under my objections.

I continued to weigh in from time to time, as I had more interest in the organization as a whole, not just their web presence. The provider took 6 months to deliver his turn key product, and as I feared it is lacking basic functionality. What makes things worse is that the organization has asked if I would volunteer to maintain their site for them, since they believe all it is lacking is basic content. As a web professional I know that much more is needed.

My initial questions to the provider upon taking over site administration has led me to discover that you can't actually add pages to the site. Let me say that again, in this custom Content Management System you can't add pages! Wouldn't that be a basic feature for any Content Management System, light weight or otherwise? I would think that would be a requirement. What are users to do when new information is to be published? Do existing pages just grow exponentially? That seems a bit ridiculous to me.

My next gripe is the lack of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) capabilities. Pages, as they exist today do not contain any meta tags... at all. No keywords. No descriptions. There are no heading tags (h1, h2, etc.) of any kind. There isn't a single page that contains valid markup, even though each page is listed as XHTML 1.0 Transitional. When I asked the provider to grant me FTP and database access he questioned the need, the purpose. The need, quite simply, is to fix your lame CMS for you.

The "blog" is simply a link to BlogSpot, for goodness sakes!

Am I wrong? Would you be happy with a CMS with so few and lacking features? What should I do? Should I continue to fight the ignorant provider, or should I break down and port the site to a more feature rich (basic, even) CMS? Let me hear your thoughts, readers and fellow bloggers.

New Position, New Technologies

John Callaway — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 16:08:00 -0500

I've taken a new position with a relatively new custom web development firm. I've completed 2 full weeks with the new company. So far it's been really exciting.

With the new position I've had the opportunity to work on some newer technologies. For my first project I've had to chance to use Visual Studio 2008, C# with ASP.NET 3.5, SQL Server 2008, ADO.NET Entity Framework, LINQ to Entities, and more. New development with new technologies is a welcome change. It seems a lot of my career has been enhancement and maintenance programming on existing systems.

My question to my readers is, of the technologies listed above, what would you like the next few posts to focus on? Please contribute to the discussion by adding your comments below.

Retrieving aspnet Profile Property Data using SQL

John Callaway — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 15:08:00 -0500

Recently, I was working on a project that used ASP.NET Membership and Profiles. The application worked great, but there was a problem with the user profile data and reporting.

Using aspnet Membership and Profiles is great. It's quite easy to retrieve, update, and insert profile data using .NET. However, our reporting team was having difficulty retrieving the user profile data for their reporting cubes and data warehouse. This wouldn't be a problem using CLR in SQL Server 2005 or 2008, but for this particular project we were still on SQL Server 2000.

After an exhaustive web search I was unable to find any quick and easy way to retrieve the data using anything other than .NET code. This simply would not do. Surely there is a way to do this, right? Perhaps a User Defined Function?

So, I set about writing my own User Defined Function for this project.

SQL-Code: User Defined Function

CREATE FUNCTION [dbo].[aspnet_Profile_GetProfile]
(
    @UserID UNIQUEIDENTIFIER,
    @PropertyName varchar(100),
    @ApplicationName NVARCHAR(256) = NULL
)
RETURNS VARCHAR(100)
AS
BEGIN

    DECLARE @ApplicationID UNIQUEIDENTIFIER
    DECLARE @StartPosition INT
    DECLARE @PropertyLength INT
    DECLARE @Return VARCHAR(100)

    IF @ApplicationName IS NULL 
        SELECT TOP 1 @ApplicationName = LoweredApplicationName, @ApplicationID = ApplicationID FROM aspnet_Applications ORDER BY ApplicationId
    ELSE
        SELECT @ApplicationID = ApplicationID FROM aspnet_Applications WHERE LOWER(@ApplicationName) = LoweredApplicationName

    IF (@ApplicationId IS NULL)
        RETURN 0

    DECLARE    @RowData nvarchar(2000)
    DECLARE @SplitOn nvarchar(5)

    DECLARE @PropertyTable table 
    (
        Id int identity(1,1),
        Property nvarchar(100),
        DataType CHAR(1),
        Start INT,
        Length INT
    ) 

    SELECT @RowData = PropertyNames
    FROM aspnet_Profile
    WHERE UserID = @UserID
    AND PropertyNames LIKE '%'+@PropertyName+'%'

    SET @SplitOn = ':'

    While (Charindex(@SplitOn,@RowData)>0)
    Begin
        Insert Into @PropertyTable (Property)
        Select ltrim(rtrim(Substring(@RowData,1,Charindex(@SplitOn,@RowData)-1)))
        
        Set @RowData = Substring(@RowData,Charindex(@SplitOn,@RowData)+1,len(@RowData))
        
        UPDATE @PropertyTable SET DataType = (
            Select ltrim(rtrim(Substring(@RowData,1,Charindex(@SplitOn,@RowData)-1))))
            WHERE Id = @@IDENTITY
        
        Set @RowData = Substring(@RowData,Charindex(@SplitOn,@RowData)+1,len(@RowData))
        
        UPDATE @PropertyTable SET Start = (
            Select ltrim(rtrim(Substring(@RowData,1,Charindex(@SplitOn,@RowData)-1))))
            WHERE Id = @@IDENTITY
        
        Set @RowData = Substring(@RowData,Charindex(@SplitOn,@RowData)+1,len(@RowData))
        
        UPDATE @PropertyTable SET Length = (
            Select ltrim(rtrim(Substring(@RowData,1,Charindex(@SplitOn,@RowData)-1))))
            WHERE Id = @@IDENTITY
        
        Set @RowData = Substring(@RowData,Charindex(@SplitOn,@RowData)+1,len(@RowData))
    END

    SELECT @StartPosition = Start, @PropertyLength = Length FROM @PropertyTable WHERE Property = @PropertyName

    SELECT @Return = SUBSTRING(PropertyValuesString, @StartPosition + 1, @PropertyLength)
    FROM aspnet_Profile
    WHERE UserID = @UserID
    AND PropertyNames LIKE '%'+@PropertyName+'%'

    RETURN @Return
END
GO

This was simple enough and seems to work rather well. All you have to do is pass in the UserID, PropertyName, and ApplicationName and you get back the ProperyValue of the user profile. Here's the usage information:

SQL-Code: Usage

SELECT dbo.aspnet_Profile_GetProfile(UserID, PropertyName, ApplicationName)

I also included a default NULL value for ApplicationName, for the cases where there is only one application and/or the ApplicationName is unknown to the user. In this instance it will grab the first application from the aspnet_Applications table. Here's an example retrieving FirstName and LastName for all aspnet_users:

SQL-Code: Example 1

SELECT userid, username,
    dbo.aspnet_Profile_GetProfile(userid, 'FirstName', DEFAULT) AS FirstName,
    dbo.aspnet_Profile_GetProfile(userid, 'LastName', DEFAULT) AS LastName
FROM aspnet_users

Here's another example passing in the ApplicationName, joining to the aspnet_Applications table. Please note that the syntax is the same as any standard SQL query. Return as little or as much information as you like.

SQL-Code: Example 2

SELECT LU.UserID, LU.UserName,
    dbo.aspnet_Profile_GetProfile(LU.UserID, 'FirstName', AP.ApplicationName) AS FirstName, 
    dbo.aspnet_Profile_GetProfile(LU.UserID, 'LastName', AP.ApplicationName) AS LastName    
FROM dbo.aspnet_Users LU
INNER JOIN dbo.aspnet_Applications AP ON LU.ApplicationID = AP.ApplicationID
WHERE AP.ApplicationName = '[ApplicationName]'

Hopefully this will help those that may be struggling with how to retrieve profile data from the aspnet_Profiles table. This is done quite easily through .NET, but somewhat combersome with SQL. The User Defined Function has the added benefit of a single point for code change, should Microsoft change the way the data is stored in future releases.

More resources:

If you have any questions, comments, or concerns please use the Contact Form.

Download

UDF_aspnet_Profile_GetProfile_v1.zip (1.19 kb)

ShareThis Extension for BlogEngine.NET

John Callaway — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 09:31:00 -0500

Add ShareThis to any page or post!

After the great success of the my first two BlogEngine.NET extensions (Digg Button Extensions for BlogEngine.NET and jQuery Extension for BlogEngine.NET) I decided to try one more. Several of my coworkers and I have been using BlogEngine in our off hours. Some of the latest discussions have been around the use of extensions and user controls to eliminate the need to make any other code modifications. This lead me to create the following ShareThis extension. Below you will find download and installation instructions. If you have any questions please feel free to use the Contact Form.

Installation

Download the compressed file ShareThis_Extension_v1.0.zip, then:

Extract the file.
Copy ShareThis.cs into /App_Code/Extensions/ folder

Configuration

The component is completely configurable valuing the following mandatory attributes :

Publisher ID: Your ShareThis Publisher ID.
ShareThis File Location: The location of the ShareThis JavaScript extension.
ShareThis Style: At this time ShareThis Style options are Default and Rotate.
Character Set: ShareThis character set.
Tabs: Tabs to show.
Services: Which services to display by default.
HeaderBG: Background color of the ShareThis header.
InactiveBG: Background color of the inactive link(s).
InactiveFG: Foreground color of the inactive link(s).
LinkFG: Foreground color of active link(s).
OffsetLeft: Left offset of the tabs.
OffsetTop: Top offset of the tabs.
Popup: Popup true or false.
Embed: Embed true or false.
Position: Position to display ShareThis.
Insert in [P]ost, P[A]ges, [B]oth: Show ShareThis in Post, Pages, or Both.
CSS Style Code: Add CSS Style Code to change the display.

The extension will be loaded with default options. Don't forget to change the Publisher ID!

Additional Resources

The official ShareThis site - http://sharethis.com
Preview ShareThis settings - http://sharethis.com/publishers/getbutton/

Download

ShareThis_Extension_v1.0.zip (2.15 kb)

Please use the Contact Form to submit any bugs or feature requests.

Why Managing Your Pay Per Click Budget is Like Going to the Delicatessen

John Callaway — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 08:27:00 -0500

The following is a guest post from good friend and SEO and PPC expert, Amberly Stitzel.

by Amberly Stitzel

Managing pay per click budget can be somewhat tricky for those who have not had much experience in handling them. Some would say it is like a delicate art form but there are a couple of takeaways that I have learned that I would like to share so expectations are set ahead of time in order to help you have a successful pay per click campaign.

One of the quickest lessons I learned in managing pay per click campaigns is that your daily spending limit, or budget, is one of the most volatile pieces of the pay per click equation. When you go to the delicatessen and ask for a pound of turkey they don’t add or take away turkey until it is exactly one pound. You expect that it will be just under or just over (most often over) the amount you ask for because the precision it would take to get it exact is often not worth the time and effort. The same is true for your pay per click budget. If you are trying to get your budget right at $300 it would be pointless to sit there and refresh every 10 seconds until you hit that amount so you could turn the campaign off.

Instead of monitoring your budget constantly for precision, let the search engine assist you. Start by determining what your weekly budget is; for me this is often set by the client. Once you have the weekly budget you can set your daily budget based on how many days per week you are running your campaigns. I recommend testing all seven days of the week before deciding to eliminate days of the week from your schedule. Once you have your daily budget you can then set that amount in the engine and let it cap that amount for you. So what happens if one day has a larger search volume than your budget can handle? This is where the overage at the delicatessen comes into play. The engines will allow a slight overage on days when traffic is high to allow your campaigns to take advantage of the traffic when it is available. Search engine traffic for your keywords will not be exactly the same each day, week and month of the year. One days’ traffic could be lower than you budget and if the budget capped at $300 the first day and only reached $250 the following day you still have leftover budget you have not spent for the two days combined. The engines will not go over your weekly budget but will allow a variance by day to take advantage of differing levels of traffic.

The only other caveat in managing your budget is to pay special attention when you do have day parting turned on (campaigns only run at certain times of the day). One thing the engines do to help your budget last for more hours of the day is show them intermittently throughout the day if you do not have enough to fully fund all impressions and clicks in the hours you have the campaign running. One thing I have learned in this scenario is to set your budget higher than you actually want it so that you have the opportunity to hit the budget you want. Otherwise your ads will be shown at a slower rate throughout the day and will never have a chance to hit the intended budget if it is a substantial amount. This technique is most applicable when you have multiple campaigns running in one account and are not sure ahead of time what your spend per day for each campaign will be. Be sure to monitor your budget more closely if you are using this technique because there is a better chance that you will go over your intended daily budget if you set it higher than what you actually have available to spend.

In addition, it is important to coach your clients on the fact that pay per click is not an exact science so an agreed upon overage to a pay per click budget is recommended. I recommend a 5% overage on all pay per click budgets so that opportunities can be taken advantage of on high traffic days and to set a realistic expectation for your clients so that both parties are satisfied.

###

Amberly Stitzel is the Interactive Marketing Manager for LeapFrog Interactive. She has been in the search engine marketing industry for over three years and is certified inGoogle AdWords, MSN AdCenter and the Yahoo Ambassador Program.
astitzel@leapfroginteractive.com

A New Year, a New Look

John Callaway — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 16:33:00 -0500

A new look for Internet Blu!

Well, the new year has finally arrived. With it, I have updated the look of Internet Blu with a new theme.

Since Internet Blu went live in June 2008 I haven't done a very good job of monetizing or promoting this blog. I'm hoping I can rectifiy that situation in the first part of the new year. If you would like to support this site please visit one of our sponsor links. Or, if you would like to become a site sponsor please visit our advertising page for more information.

During the next few months I hope to continue to provide more useful internet tools. So far I've been able to provide a couple of BlogEngine.NET extensions. If you missed these, be sure to visit the links below.

jQuery Extension for BlogEngine.NET
Digg Button Extension for BlogEngine.NET
More to come...

If you have any ideas or requests for the coming months please add your comments below.

Looking forward to a great 2009!

jQuery Extension for BlogEngine.NET

John Callaway — Fri, 26 Dec 2008 11:08:00 -0500

Add the jQuery Library to your blog!

After the great success of the my Digg Button Extensions for BlogEngine.NET, I decided to try another. With the growing popularity of jQuery I chose to write a jQuery Extension for BlogEngine.NET. Below you will find download and installation instructions. If you have any questions please feel free to use the Contact Form.

Installation

Download the compressed file jQuery_Extension_v1.0.zip, then:

Extract the files.
Copy jQuery.cs into /App_Code/Extensions/ folder
Copy the jQuery folder into the root of the web folder

Configuration

The component is completely configurable valuing the following mandatory attributes :

jQuery File: File name of jQuery plugin file.
Description: Description of jQuery plugin file.

By default the jQuery Extension loads with jQuery 1.2.6 min file. Any additional plugin files should be copied to the jQuery folder and entered into the Extension configuration page. You can find many more jQuery plugins here.

Additional Resources

The official jQuery site - http://jquery.com
Chris Blankenship - jQuery Goodness for BlogEngine.NET
Dityo Nurasto - jQuery in BlogEngine.NET
Kyle Johnson - jQuery with BlogEngine.NET

If you have any trouble loading additional jQuery plugins be sure to check the above resources. In some instances there may be a confilct with the often used "$" as a shorthand method.

Download

jQuery_Extension_v1.0.zip (63.51 kb)

Please use the Contact Form to submit and bugs or feature requests.

Digg Button Extension for BlogEngine.NET

John Callaway — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 09:28:00 -0500

Add a Digg submission button to your post!

This is my first attempt at an extension for BlogEngine.NET. I used Cristiano Fino's code for Adsense Injector extension as a starting point for the Digg Extension.

Installation

Download the compressed file Digg_Extension_v1.0.zip (1.27 kb) , then:

Extract the single file Digg.cs.
Copy Digg.cs into /App_Code/Extensions/ folder

Configuration

The component is completely configurable valuing the following mandatory attributes :

Style (code): CSS code for its proper positioning.
Insert: B = display in posts and pages, P = display in posts, A = display in pages

Usage

Use [ digg ] the same as you would [ more ]. Insert the digg text where you want your submission button. You can modify the style attributes in the Control Panel to align left and right.

Download

Digg_Extension_v1.0.zip (1.27 kb)

Please use the Contact Form to submit and bugs or feature requests.

Alive and kicking, barely

John Callaway — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 15:15:00 -0500

Things have been incedibly busy for me for the last several months. No worries, there will be updates coming soon.

There's been a lot happening to improve Internet experiences across the Web. One such advancement comes fom jQuery. I'll be reviewing jQuery next week, so stay tuned!

Why SEO is Like Underwear

John Callaway — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 08:13:00 -0500

The following is a guest post from good friend and SEO expert, Amberly Stitzel. She was kind enough to share some interesting thoughts on Search Engine Optimization.

When performing optimization on your website for search engine rankings it is important to keep in mind the blend between optimizing for the "bots" and for users. If you gravitate more towards one than the other then your efforts may only win over one of the aforementioned and could have a lesser affect than both combined.

This is where the underwear part comes in. Have you ever seen someone wearing pants so tight you can see their underwear lines? Or better yet, have you ever not seen someone’s underwear lines and wondered if they were even wearing any? Okay, so maybe if you are a pervert you have wondered these two things but I’ll explain my point. Search engine optimization to improve organic rankings is a delicate balance between the visible and invisible. If you can see too much optimization on the page, for example, too many keywords that look spammy, then you may be penalized by the engines. If you can’t see any optimization at all and have curtailed your website toward the user experience, for example, designing all pages in Flash, then while you may not be penalized per say by the search engines,your rankings will certainly reflect these choices.

This is where the blended approach comes in. You want to make sure your website has your targeted keywords in the meta and content but you want to make sure the content makes sense for users. Simply repeating a keyword a hundred times on a page is just like walking around with your underwear lines exposed. It just looks questionable. That being said, having a website that has no optimization is like walking around with no underwear lines showing. It just looks tacky. Keeping these things in mind when you are developing your website will increase your chances of ranking organically in the search engines.

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Amberly Stitzel is the Marketing Coordinator for LeapFrog Interactive. She has been in the search engine marketing industry for over three years and is certified in Google AdWords, MSN AdCenter and the Yahoo Ambassador Program.
astitzel@leapfroginteractive.com

Louisville Geek Dinner

John Callaway — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 08:43:00 -0500

The next Louisville Geek Dinner is this evening, Monday June 30th. Unfortunately I won't be able to attend, as there is just too much work left for me to do today.

I got a chance to meet Ben Thomas (founder of Louisville Geek Dinner) at the Louisville Social Media Club meeting earlier this month. He was very amicable and enthusiastic while talking about all of the projects he's currently involved in. It sounds like tonight's Louisville Geek Dinner meeting should be well attended.

Here's a description straight from their site:

The purpose of Louisville Geek Dinner is to organize a social networking event for geeks. The original concept came from listening to London Geek Dinner podcasts. The first four Louisville Geek Dinners were quite successful, however there is still potential for significant growth. Let's build an environment like Silicon Valley!

For more information about Louisville Geek Dinner please follow the link below:

http://www.louisvillegeekdinner.com

Join the Weekly Buzz!

John Callaway — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 10:10:00 -0500

Join the Weekly Buzz at http://www.buzzmyblog.com!

Jeff at Buzz My Blog is highlighting a new blog every week with the Weekly Buzz. Blogs are featured in a post at the start of the week and linked to for the next four weeks. What a great way to have your blog highlighted and generate more traffic.

This is a free service that they are offering by bloggers, for bloggers, to bloggers. I think this is a great service, so I thought I would pass this along.

You can enter for your chance to win a free spotlight on your blog by following the link below:

http://www.buzzmyblog.com/post/2008/02/weeklybuzz.aspx?refid=223

Google, Friend to the Blogger

John Callaway — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 20:23:00 -0500

Why Google is on top, and how you can benefit from their success.

One of the many secrets to the success of internet giant Google is that they provide useful tools to the internet user. They didn't rest on the early success of the search engine. They continued to produce extremely useful tools and products for webmasters, site owners, and bloggers.

Google Trends

Google Trends is a great tool that helps determine the amount of search volume a particular term or phrase. This can help you determine the popularity of a particular term. Information regarding search terms can be a big help when determining which phrases to target in a particular campaign.

Google Webmaster Tools

Another useful set of tools from Google is the Google Webmaster Central site. Here you can check to see that your site is included in the Google index.

Google Analytics

If you don't want to fork over major amounts of cash on an internet reporting package, I suggest looking into the Google Analytics tools. The analytics site offers a number of great reporting options that help you analyze traffic. There are also a few options to track conversion rates and dollar values by integrating your Google Adwords information, another great tool from Google.

Google Alerts

Once you've got your site up and indexed you will want to stay on top of what those on the World Wide Web have to say about you and your site. Google Alerts provides you a great way to keep tabs on a phrase by receiving an email whenever your selected term is used on the Internet.

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What are your favorite Google tools, and how have they helped you succeed online?