We work on the Internet and are constantly consuming information. There's a lot of it out there. We'd forget it if we didn't write it down someplace…
Visual Lizard's blog covers everything from web standards to the muppets, from php to comic books to music, just about anything we find interesting
An eclectic mix of tunes for the holiday season! If you have any suggestions on tunes we may want to add, drop us a line with your favourites and we'll look at adding them to the list.
Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays from The Lizards!
There are times, though rare, when we occasionally don't have much in the way of client work to do. When this happens, it is still important to be productive. We can do that by catching up on where things are going in the industry, like learning the latest techniques in User Experience, Accessibility, Programming languages, etc.
There is also the service aspect side of working with clients. We need to keep up with the technologies that they are using for their web and app products and services. It is our job as website and app developers to be sure that we are at the very least acquainted with the various platforms that our clients may use to advertise and analyze their site traffic, app usage, and advertising campaigns.
Over the last few months I've taken the opportunity to research a variety of Google products and have received certifications for those products. The process of learning this information has provided me with a better understanding of how these Google products work and interact with each other. For instance by using Google Tag Manager in combination with Google Analytics and Google Ads, I now know how to read the information I see in various Google Analytics reports.
From my own personal standpoint, much of this information doesn't mean all that much to me. But from a marketing perspective I can now see why it may have significance to how a business may interpret that information and make marketing decisions based on it.
More importantly, however, the knowledge I now have can be useful in explaining to a client how these systems work together, and why they should consider learning more about these platforms (or similar non-Google products) themselves.
Our jobs as web developers are not to be marketing professionals for our clients, however we need to be familiar with how online marketing tools work so that we can help our clients navigate the complexities of these tools. Google has done a considerable amount of heavy lifting on the programming end of things to help marketing professionals use their tools and be able to analyze the results. As easy as these tools are to use from a web professional's standpoint, some of the technology can be intimidating to the marketing professional.
I'm not saying that this information was easy to learn. There was a lot of marketing speak that I had to wade through and learn about for me to understand what I was seeing and how to make the numbers do what I was expecting. For those who understand marketing and statistics, learning about the various Google Product tools will lead to some fascinating insights into the data that Google collects. For a company's marketing department learning how to use these tools will definitely be worth the time.
Google has designed these tools to "make your process easier" and the tools are free. There are enterprise level versions of these tools that come at a cost, but those are targeting larger scale businesses.
As a web developer I would recommend becoming specifically familiar with Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics as these tools are most closely connected to a company's web presence. Learning about Google Ads and Google Marketing Platform can help with conversations with our clients' marketing professionals.
To the businesses out there that are considering online advertising, an understanding of Google Analytics and Google Ads would be my recommendation. If you understand Google Ads, you will likely see similar processes and tools with other advertising platforms.
While the material being studied and created is quite dry for those who may not be enthusiastic about statistics, Google's development team have definitely worked through these interfaces to provide a really good User Experience.
You can get started on learning about Google's products in their Skillshop. Once you connect to your Google account you can access a wide variety of topics related to Google's tools. The Skillshop will also allow you to create your own education plan. As you make your way through the courses, Google offers certifications that are valid for a year. The certifications are limited since Google is continually updating their products and information can fall out of date. But as I said, we have to keep up with the technology that is being used, so re-certification in a year just means I can be a helpful resource to our clients.
Happy Googling!
Written 4 decades ago and still as relevant as ever.
It's NASA, still doing super cool space stuff.
CVE-2022-2856 is a fix for "insufficient validation of untrusted input in Intents," according to Google's advisory. Intents are typically a way to pass data from inside Chrome to another application, such as the share button on Chrome's address bar.
Apple has released a trio of operating system updates to patch security vulnerabilities that it says "may have been actively exploited." The macOS 12.5.1, iOS 15.6.1, and iPadOS 15.6.1 updates are available for download now and should be installed as soon as possible.
The federal government has announced that Anita Neville, longtime Liberal politician but retired for some time, has been appointed. At 80, she is older than the Lt. Governor she is replacing and is the first Jewish woman in Manitoba to hold the position.
A decade after all Zellers locations were shut down, The Hudson’s Bay Co (which owns its rights) will debut a new e-commerce website dedicated to the Zellers brand. They will also a Zellers sectionwithin select Hudson’s Bay department stores across Canada in early 2023.
The Google tag (gtag.js) is a single tag you can add to your website to use a variety of Google products and services. Instead of managing multiple tags for different Google product accounts, you can use the Google tag across your entire website and connect the tag to multiple destinations.
The vulnerability was first discovered by Patrick Wardle, founder of the Objective-See Foundation, a nonprofit Mac OS security group. Wardle detailed in a talk at Def Con last week how Zoom's installer asks for a user password when installing or uninstalling, but its auto-update function, enabled by default, doesn't need one. Wardle found that Zoom's updater is owned by and runs as the root user.
Discordo is a lightweight, secure, and feature-rich Discord terminal client. Heavily work-in-progress, expect breaking changes.
System.css is a CSS library for building interfaces that resemble Apple's System OS which ran from 1984-1991. Design-wise, not much really changed from System 1 to System 6; however this library is based on System 6 as it was the final monochrome version of MacOS.
Scientists in Switzerland have developed a battery made out of paper which will release its charge when splattered with water.
Meta Open Source releases an updated version of their static site generator designed to help build documentation websites via Markdown.
If using a Meta project isn't your thing, Myles Braithwaite provides a great list of other static-site generators for all manner of purposes.
Textbook publisher Pearson suggests blockchain tech could let it take a cut of secondary textbook sales, capturing a section of the book market that’s so far escaped it. As quoted by Bloomberg, Pearson CEO Andy Bird believes non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, could help publishers make money off textbook resales, although he stopped short of describing concrete plans.
Autodidacts has a "sophisticated" workflow for turning project ideas into reality. It’s so arcane it deserved its own branch of historiography, but they settled for an infographic...
EdgeDB, the graph-relational database, is back with the introduction of access policies, the GROUP statement, and a new admin UI.