My company is working on one of the largest projects we have ever done and the entire project (a 153 field application form, admin, scoring admin, etc) has to be done in both English and Spanish. This has been a fun project all around. This is the first time I have worked with Ruby on Rails and with localization. Fortunately enough, I found a great tool which I had never used before: Babel Fish Translation. I can input all my form labels and text into the English to Spanish translator and viola! I should mention I started with the Google Translator (still in beta) and did not have the luck I have had with Babel Fish.

Google just announced “My Maps which is a great way to add your personal routes, landmarks, etc on a Google Map. This would be awesome to plot out a trip using placemarks with photos/videos taken at specific places. I am excited to play around with this!

If you own a domain name or maintain a web site you have, at one time or another, wondered who is currently linking your web site. Wonder no more. If you have a Google account, you can log into the Webmaster Tools, add your site and view (and download) a table full of incoming links - both internal and external. Thanks Google!

Nice work Google! Check out the latest cool thing: Google Gadgets. Coming soon to a Jen web site near you? For sure! For now check out these examples:

[tags]Google[/tags]

I just happened to stumble onto something pretty interesting: jux2.com as I was reading about it's sale on eBay. If you are like me...live to search, search to live (if I do not know, I search for it) you might be interested in trying out jux 2 - a meta search engine that will show you the best results for your query but it also allows you to compare that with Google, Yahoo!, and MSN. SEO fans should find this useful as well. Give it a whirl - it is at least worth a quick look.
[tags]jux2, eBay, Google, Yahoo, SEO[/tags]

Today was one of those "nothing is easy" days. One of my tasks today was to customize my company's QuickBooks invoice template. As a UI person, I often need to customize pretty much everything I use in some way or another. I have to say, QuickBooks is not very friendly when it comes to making changes to the standard. After I added my letterhead as the background and changed the font/font color, and column widths, all I wanted to do is move the "Bill To" box at the top left over about 50 pixels to line up with my company logo. After doing some research via Google searches, I came up with nothing and have to settle with the "Bill To" box hanging out far too right, in my opinion. If any readers use QuickBooks and have any thoughts, I would greatly appreciate it.
[tags]SDAC Inc., QuickBooks, Google[/tags]

Over the years I have become more paranoid over who sees what on my web sites, and I have learned that one of the most important steps in creating/posting a web site on the web is the robots.txt file that goes with the site and the meta tags for each page. I will not go into how I learned the hard way, but do yourself a favor, check out:
http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/robots.html.
Know that you can control what search engines indexes.