Still FAR to com­plex for the aver­age user, Google attempts to “clar­ify” the com­plex­i­ties of their Google Apps product.

Via: Why Google Apps Users Miss Out on Reg­u­lar Gmail Features—and Some Solu­tions [Annoyances]

If you’ve taken the leap and hosted your domain email and other ser­vices with Google Apps, no doubt you’ve noticed that you miss out on ser­vices that “reg­u­lar” accounts get: like Google Reader, Voice, Wave, Ana­lyt­ics, and right now, Buzz. Here’s why:

After com­plain­ing about the dis­par­i­ties on a recent episode of This Week in Google, a help­ful Googler unof­fi­cially got in touch to clar­ify. Let’s call her/him “Help­ful McGoogler.” Here’s what HM said.

To the user, it may appear that there are three types of Google accounts: Gmail accounts, Google accounts, and Google Apps (for your domain) accounts. In truth, there’s only one kind of account: a Google Account.

Help­ful McGoogler explains:

Abstract the idea of a “Google Account” from being asso­ci­ated with Gmail or Google Apps. You can tie ANY email address to a “Google Account.”

Check out https://www.google.com/accounts/NewAccount and notice that it asks you for your “cur­rent email address.” So let’s say I go to school at Big Uni­ver­sity and I have an email address helpfulmcgoogler@biguni.edu… I can use that email address while sign­ing up and that will be my login name to access Google services.

Some of the con­fu­sion that leads to “you must have a gmail.com address” to access Google ser­vices is because a “Google Account” comes “for free” when you open a Gmail account. So using a gmail address always ‘just works.’

Google Apps accounts pro­vide “hosted ser­vices,” which don’t include every­thing vanilla Google accounts get.

Help­ful McGoogler says:

When you open a Google Apps domain account. You are essen­tially cre­at­ing a branded Google Account world for the Google ser­vices your domain is host­ing. You can see your ser­vices at https://www.google.com/a/cpanel/[domain.name]/Dashboard.

So, let’s say you have a Google Apps domain that is example.com and you cre­ated a user gina@example.com. You will be able to log-in with gina@example.com for all your Google Apps hosted ser­vices. Typ­i­cally this is email, docs, cal­en­dar, and con­tacts… but you can click the “add more ser­vices” link to expand that. Right now, you won’t find stuff like Reader, Google Voice, AdWords, Finance, Ana­lyt­ics, etc… but still there is some inter­est­ing stuff in there.

But what if you want to access ALL ser­vices through a sin­gle email address?

Help­ful McGoogler says:

What you do is cre­ate a NORMAL Google Account (described at the begin­ning) and asso­ciate it with your gina@example.com email address. That “vanilla” google account will now have access to all (well, I think all) Google ser­vices. You can have a Reader account, a Voice account, an Ana­lyt­ics account, etc all asso­ci­ated with your non-gmail address. It can even have the same password—but it doesn’t need to—to make it seem like it’s the same account… but in real­ity, it’s a very sep­a­rate account.

Still, this just means you have two dif­fer­ent Google accounts, with dif­fer­ent Con­tacts and Cal­en­dar and Google Docs data on each. A Google Apps account pro­vides a sub­set of the ser­vices you get with a reg­u­lar Google Account, and so dupli­cates those sets of data on those ser­vices. This is the sce­nario I com­plained about on TWiG.

Help­ful McGoogler acknowl­edges that this is indeed a problem:

Here is a sce­nario that really trips peo­ple up… Let say you are using your gina@example.com email and are all happy that you have your con­tacts all in-line and orga­nized and filled out. Now you go and cre­ate a vanilla Google Account using your gina@example.com email address (mostly because you want to use Google Voice and Google Reader with the same log-in as your Apps account—btw, this was totally me a cou­ple years ago). When you set up some­thing like Google Voice, you will expect your con­tacts to be full of all the good­ness you set up in your gina@example.com “hosted gmail” instance… you will be dis­ap­pointed to find your con­tacts are empty.

This is because the vanilla Google Account that is being used for Google Voice will be access­ing a DIFFERENT “Con­tacts” ser­vice which has no data (sad­ness). My ugly solu­tion was to ini­tially export the con­tacts from my Google Apps Account and import them to my Google vanilla Account and try to keep them in sync when I make edits.

This dou­ble set of Con­tacts espe­cially stinks for Android users who sign into Android with their Google Apps account, because your Google Con­tacts and Cal­en­dar are baked into your phone setup.

Help­ful McGoogler is with me on this:

When you add Android into the mix, Con­tacts get weird. Because, I think, you can add your Google Apps account to Android and not your gina@example.com “vanilla” Google Account. (GT: Yes, this is true.) But, when you sign in to Google Voice on Android, you will need to enter the pass­word (which might be the same) of your vanilla Google Account. BUT, on Android, your Con­tacts are read from the system’s phone book. Not nec­es­sar­ily the vanilla Google Voice Google Account that has its sep­a­rate con­tacts (acces­si­ble through the nor­mal Google Voice webapp). Ugh. The “Con­tacts” issue is by far the most ‘hurt­ing’ in this whole scenario.

Yup. Cal­en­dar is also an issue.

I thought this was the full extent of the prob­lem, so it’s nice to have even unof­fi­cial con­fir­ma­tion from the horse’s mouth. Help­ful McGoogler DID say s/he thought the teams at Google are aware of the issue and are work­ing to address it. It also sounds like some bits of Android need to get refac­tored to work seam­lessly with both vanilla Google accounts and Google Apps accounts.

After that episode of TWiG aired, at least three lis­ten­ers emailed me say­ing they use third-party ser­vice Soo­cial to sync Con­tacts across their mul­ti­ple Google/Google Apps accounts. I haven’t tried this myself—and you may have to enter your Google account pass­word into Soo­cial to set it up, which is a big red flag—but it’s something.

Are you hav­ing the Google Apps account dilemma? What are you doing to deal with it? Let’s hear it in the comments.

Google, Gmail, and Google Apps Accounts Explained [Smarterware]

Smarter­ware is Life­hacker edi­tor emer­i­tus Gina Trapani’s new home away from ‘hacker. To get all of the lat­est from Smarter­ware, be sure to sub­scribe to the Smarter­ware RSS feed. For more, check out Gina’s weekly Smarter­ware fea­ture here on Life­hacker.

Via: Stay Up Late Tonight to Watch The Last Night­time Shut­tle Launch Ever [Reminder]

If you live any­where on the East Coast and are at all inter­ested in cool stuff that hap­pens in the sky, you’d be remiss not to stay up late tonight to watch for the last ever night­time shut­tle launch.

Or you could wake up early, that works too. Either way, at 4:39 A.M. early tomor­row morn­ing NASA will launch the Endeavor space shut­tle, and it will be the last time it does so at night.

On its way up to the Inter­na­tional Space Sta­tion, the shut­tle will fly par­al­lel to America’s east­ern seaboard and the shuttle’s rock­ets will thus be vis­i­ble to a sur­pris­ingly huge area, weather per­mit­ting. Here’s a map of where the rocket will be in the first ten min­utes after launch and what areas of the coun­try will be able to see it:

I told you it was a sur­pris­ingly huge area! To find out more about what you’re look­ing for and where exactly you should be look­ing for it, check out Space.com’s com­pre­hen­sive run­down of the late night launch. [Space.com]

I would very much like to find a way to post Apple iChat tran­script files so that they are both read­able within the Word­press post and down­load­able as the orig­i­nal name.ichat file.  So a but­ton when I am com­pos­ing or edit­ing a post that says “Post iChat Tran­script” would be ideal.  I won­der if some­one could write the Word­press plu­gin that would accom­plish this as I am sure it would be popular.

So this Word­press Plu­gin Project would Entail:

1. Cre­ate the plu­gin that would include a “Post to iChat” but­ton within the post edit­ing screen.
2. On Click, plu­gin would ask for the local loca­tion of the xxx.ichat file.  Worth not­ing here is that the xxx.ichat files are sim­ple ordered xml for­mat so this can be done.
3. Use the cod­ing that rajbot cre­ated here to dis­play the con­tents of the chat within the post (uses CSS to style the tran­script in order to look like an ichat inter­face (includ­ing rounded edges on the bubbles).
4. In addi­tion to dis­play­ing the tran­script within the post, the plu­gin should include a link to the orig­i­nal (now on server) for down­load by read­ers as an option.

The Chat Bub­ble css code ref­er­enced in point #3 above looks like this when posted to Word­press (orig­i­nal posted here):

This exam­ple shows how CSS can be used to style a Word­press post to look like the iChat interface.

My iPhone 3GS has a prob­lem. When I take pho­tos, video, or screen­shots, the Photo Roll shows the count on the Photo Roll icon, but when I click the icon, the media is not inside. When I sync to my com­puter with iPhoto, all the media shows up. I tried restor­ing to a pre­vi­ous backup to no avail, but have read that if I restored back in time far enough, I can prob­a­bly make this prob­lem go away. I wasn’t inter­ested in this so I sought an alter­nate method and found it!

From: DLS Tip: Google Apps does Gmail aliases right

I found a solu­tion for the iPhone not show­ing pic­tures taken issue.

1. Backup/Sync your phone just-in-case
2. Use a direc­tory browser such as PhoneView or some other tool (Down­load the trial of PhoneView: http://www.ecamm.com/mac/phoneview/)
3. In PhoneView Browse to the /Disc/DCIM/ folder and delete the entire .MISC folder. (I actu­ally deleted every­thing in the DCIM folder)

This solved the issue for me with­out hav­ing to resort to a restore. Also, using those pro­grams you can recover any photos/videos that were taken that you could not get to.

In my ongo­ing mis­sion to rid my life of Apple’s MobileMe ser­vice, one fea­ture I must have from MobileMe is email aliases. I don’t like to give my pri­mary email address out to any­one but actual real-world friends and fam­ily, so have employed var­i­ous aliases for dif­fer­ent pur­poses. For exam­ple, I may want an alias for pur­chases: my.purchases@domain.com for exam­ple. While MobileMe has a sim­ple web-based sec­tion for aliases, it is a bit more involved when using your own domain with Google Apps.

From: DLS Tip: Google Apps does Gmail aliases right

Savvy Gmail users have known for a while that adding +any­thing to an address will cre­ate an instant, though dirty, email alias/nickname (exam­ple: downloadsquad+spam@gmail). Email sent to these addresses still arrives in your main inbox, but this method allows for all sorts of orga­ni­za­tion tricks that make email eas­ier to man­age (such as apply­ing a label and/or archiv­ing all of these mes­sages). While this works decently enough, it isn’t a true alias in the sense that spam bots and alert indi­vid­u­als can eas­ily spot this trick and still scrape out your real email address. Google’s hosted Apps for Your Domain ser­vice, how­ever, han­dles this whole alias issue in a much more effi­cient and use­ful way.

Under each user in Google Apps’s man­age­ment panel (in both Stan­dard and Pre­mium ver­sions), is a sec­tion for cre­at­ing what is referred to as a Nick­name. Why Google chose to call these by a dif­fer­ent name, how­ever, is beyond us, and even their own doc­u­men­ta­tion on the mat­ter uses con­flict­ing ter­mi­nol­ogy. Nev­er­the­less, as you can see, this sys­tem allows Google Apps users to cre­ate true-blue nick­names at which each user can receive email, and Google’s stan­dard instruc­tions for send­ing email from a dif­fer­ent address work per­fectly for set­ting up full send­ing and receiv­ing with these nick­names from your pri­mary email address.

Right. So there are two steps to be accom­plished here. Only the first is required to receive as an alias, but the sec­ond step is nec­es­sary for send­ing as the alias.

Step 1: Cre­ate an Alias/Nickname to Receive As

You must be a domain admin­is­tra­tor in order to com­plete this step. Once you are in the domain con­trols, nav­i­gate to the “Users and groups” sec­tion. Click the account you wish to add aliases/nicknames for, scroll to the “Nick­names” sec­tion and add away. You can now receive as the nick­names you supplied.

Step 2: Cre­ate an Alias/Nickname to Send As

You can send mail from a domain alias by cre­at­ing a ‘cus­tom from:’ address in your indi­vid­ual email account. This is a per­sonal account set­ting and not a domain-wide set­ting. You can’t cur­rently enable a ‘cus­tom from:’ address from your con­trol panel.

To dis­play another email address in the ‘From:’ field, fol­low these instruc­tions in your email account:

1. Click Set­tings at top of any page in your email account, and then select the Accounts tab.
2. Click Add another email address in the Send mail as: sec­tion.
3. Enter your full name in the Name: field, and the email address you’d like to send mes­sages from in the Email address: field.
4. Click Next Step », and then click Send Ver­i­fi­ca­tion to con­tinue the process.

Google will send you a ver­i­fi­ca­tion mes­sage to your email account to con­firm that you’d like to add the address as an option in the ‘From;’ field. Click the link in that mes­sage, or enter the con­fir­ma­tion code in the ‘Accounts’ sec­tion of your email account, to com­plete the process. Once you’ve ver­i­fied that you’d like to add the address to your account, you can start send­ing mes­sages using your ‘cus­tom from:’ address.

Note: Your pri­mary address will still be included in the full head­ers to help pre­vent your mail from being marked as spam. Most email clients do not dis­play the sender field, though some ver­sions of Microsoft Out­look may dis­play ‘From cus­tom address on behalf of username@mydomain.com.’

Thanks to this infor­ma­tion, I have linked a few of my 3rd-party sites and ser­vices to my Face­book account. Reminds me of the 90’s when we used to do Webrings – remem­ber Webrings? Remem­ber Webrings on Geoc­i­ties? Remem­ber the city names? Ha! That’s a mem­ory! I digress. This infor­ma­tion is grand!

From: How Do I Import Google Reader, Deli­cious, and Other Ser­vices Into Face­book? | Stay N’ Alive

With the new Face­book home page design, the vis­i­bil­ity of all my updates is mak­ing other peo­ple aware that I import my

Ser­vices avail­able in Face­book as of this post

Google Reader, Deli­cious, and other activ­ity into Face­book. It is one of my most fre­quent ques­tions asked in the mes­sages I get on Face­book. For this rea­son I thought I’d share how I do it. Believe it or not, no app install is required for this – it’s built right into Facebook.

Ser­vices Available

First of all, the ser­vices you can import into your Face­book wall feed:

• Yelp
• Pho­to­bucket
• Flickr
• Digg
• Picasa
• Deli­cious
• Google Reader
• Youtube
• Stum­ble­upon
• Last.fm
• Pan­dora
• Hulu
• Blog/RSS – you may choose one blog to import (in addi­tion to any note imports)

Start by choos­ing which of those you belong to and use, and which you would like to share with your friends. Now to set it up.

Set Up

Set up is easy.  Click on the “Pro­file” link in the top nav bar.  Then, under the “Write Some­thing” pub­lisher box, on the right, there is a “Set­tings” link. Click on that, and you’ll now see a list of sites you can import.  In the list of sites, just click on the one you want to import, and fol­low the instruc­tions.  Click “import”, and you’re done!  If you ever want to edit or remove your set­tings, just click on any of the ser­vices and you can change any of the set­tings you want.

Import­ing the other sites you fre­quent can be a great, viral way to ini­ti­ate dis­cus­sion amongst your friends and fam­ily.  It can also be a great way to bring more expo­sure to your brand or busi­ness if the arti­cles and links on the sites you share belong to your busi­ness, and oth­ers can always re-share on their pro­files, so it is viral as well.  So there you have it – you too can import these sites into your own pro­file.

Enter­ing account info in Facebook

Here we go Google Sync! Time to see how close we can get to killing off MobileMe!

Looks great right? One warn­ing caught my eye:

Google Apps user? This ser­vice needs to be enabled for your domain before you can use it. Please con­tact your domain administrator.

K, so I am said Admin­is­tra­tor. What do I need to do here? Please don’t tell me I need to upgrade to a Pre­mium Account, not after all this work Google. Don’t do it to me. Don’t!

Whew!

From: Google Sync via ActiveSync – Google Apps Help

If you’d like to enable Google Sync for your domain, fol­low these steps:

1. In the Ser­vice set­tings sec­tion of your Dash­board, click the Mobile link.
2. Select the check­box next to Enable Google Sync.
3. Click Save changes.

This fea­ture is cur­rently avail­able only in the Next Gen­er­a­tion ver­sion of the con­trol panel.

Did it, done. Whew!

Migrat­ing my MobileMe and Local Cal­en­dars to my Domain-Controlled Google Apps Google Calendar

So let’s start with get­ting my calendar.forsbergville.com Google Cal­en­dar set-up. I log-in and it con­firms the time zone, etc. and bam! Up.

Next I down­loaded a neat tool that basi­cally adds Google Cal­en­dars to your Apple iCal (10.5 and up only) pro­gram. Note that in 10.5 and up iCal, you can also do this man­u­ally as the new iCal sup­ports ical: sub­scrip­tions (love you Apple – had the Kool Aid made into con­ve­nient pop­si­cles and poured into baby bot­tles just so I can be near it more – you rock). The tool was called Cal­ab­o­ra­tion. Any­way, that got each newly cre­ated Google Cal­en­dar into iCal all talk­ing back and forth. Sweet. Next, I exported the cor­re­spond­ing cal­en­dars I already had either on MobileMe or locally into sep­a­rate .ics files vis iCal’s great Export… fea­ture. Once done, I used the Google Cal­en­dar Import… fea­ture and imported to each Google Cal­en­dar cal­en­dar. Again – whew! K, done.

After ver­i­fy­ing that each one looked good in iCal (I should and did have dupli­cates of every item as I should not see the orig­i­nal in iCal as well as the newly sub­scribed to items. I did. Sweet. I delete the local/Mobile me cal­en­dars com­pletely, quit iCal, start it again just to be sure, and walla. Cake.

Migrat­ing my MobileMe and Local Address Book Data to my Domain-Controlled Google Address Book

Will go here – need a break at the moment but will edit this post soon to round it off.

I would like to have inte­grated chat ser­vices on my domain. Users can con­nect via any Jabber-able client and inter­act with friends on other mes­sag­ing net­works (AIM, Yahoo, MSN, IRC, etc.). How? Well, I have already mar­ried a num­ber of sub-domains to my Google Apps account (cal­en­dar, email, etc.) and that’s work­ing awe­some. Now for chat.forsbergville.com. At first I thought I would install a Jab­ber server on my host. Then I real­ized that Google Talk may be able to do the leg-work for me. I can marry chat to Google Talk now, but Google Talk is under-populated and I want those other networks.

Enter the process of fed­er­a­tion. Google Apps Admin Help tells me that:

From: How can my users chat out­side the Google net­work? – Google Apps Help

How can my users chat out­side the Google net­work?
Print

Google makes it pos­si­ble for your users to chat with peo­ple using other mes­sag­ing ser­vices through a process known as fed­er­a­tion. Go to Google Talk and open com­mu­ni­ca­tions to learn more about fed­er­a­tion and who we’re fed­er­at­ing with.

While we’re fed­er­at­ing with a num­ber of other ser­vices, some ser­vices aren’t cur­rently acces­si­ble through the Google Talk net­work, and your users won’t be able to chat with users of those services.

If you’d like your users to have the abil­ity to chat with peo­ple con­nected to the Google Talk net­work through fed­er­ated net­works, you’ll need to edit your Ser­vice (SRV) records. You don’t need to edit your SRV records for your users to chat with other Google Apps and Gmail users. SRV records are man­aged by your domain host. We sug­gest con­tact­ing your domain host to find out if you have access to SRV records and how you can make modifications.

When you enter the fol­low­ing infor­ma­tion, make sure to replace gmail.com with your domain. Don’t replace google.com.

_xmpp-server._tcp.gmail.com. IN SRV 5 0 5269 xmpp-server.l.google.com.
_xmpp-server._tcp.gmail.com. IN SRV 20 0 5269 xmpp-server1.l.google.com.
_xmpp-server._tcp.gmail.com. IN SRV 20 0 5269 xmpp-server2.l.google.com.
_xmpp-server._tcp.gmail.com. IN SRV 20 0 5269 xmpp-server3.l.google.com.
_xmpp-server._tcp.gmail.com. IN SRV 20 0 5269 xmpp-server4.l.google.com.
_jabber._tcp.gmail.com. IN SRV 5 0 5269 xmpp-server.l.google.com.
_jabber._tcp.gmail.com. IN SRV 20 0 5269 xmpp-server1.l.google.com.
_jabber._tcp.gmail.com. IN SRV 20 0 5269 xmpp-server2.l.google.com.
_jabber._tcp.gmail.com. IN SRV 20 0 5269 xmpp-server3.l.google.com.
_jabber._tcp.gmail.com. IN SRV 20 0 5269 xmpp-server4.l.google.com.

Because there are many dif­fer­ent domain hosts offer­ing vary­ing options for SRV records, we rec­om­mend con­tact­ing your domain host directly for assis­tance. This includes enter­ing the SRV record data, assign­ing pro­to­cols and weights, and other con­fig­u­ra­tion ques­tions. Some domain hosts will allow you to copy and paste the infor­ma­tion above exactly as it’s offered while other domain hosts require gran­u­lar data entry.

I use GoDaddy to host both my web­server and domain. This trick is exclu­sively involv­ing the domain. So here you go:

How to Enable Mes­sag­ing Fed­er­a­tion on your GoDaddy Hosted Domain

1. Copy this code snip­pet to your favorite plain-text editor:

_xmpp-server._tcp.gmail.com. IN SRV 5 0 5269 xmpp-server.l.google.com.
_xmpp-server._tcp.gmail.com. IN SRV 20 0 5269 xmpp-server1.l.google.com.
_xmpp-server._tcp.gmail.com. IN SRV 20 0 5269 xmpp-server2.l.google.com.
_xmpp-server._tcp.gmail.com. IN SRV 20 0 5269 xmpp-server3.l.google.com.
_xmpp-server._tcp.gmail.com. IN SRV 20 0 5269 xmpp-server4.l.google.com.
_jabber._tcp.gmail.com. IN SRV 5 0 5269 xmpp-server.l.google.com.
_jabber._tcp.gmail.com. IN SRV 20 0 5269 xmpp-server1.l.google.com.
_jabber._tcp.gmail.com. IN SRV 20 0 5269 xmpp-server2.l.google.com.
_jabber._tcp.gmail.com. IN SRV 20 0 5269 xmpp-server3.l.google.com.
_jabber._tcp.gmail.com. IN SRV 20 0 5269 xmpp-server4.l.google.com.

2. Per Google’s instruc­tion in the cited quo­ta­tion above, change the “gmail” bits to your domain (Impor­tant to leave the “google” parts intact).

3. Save the file as a plain-text file.

4. Login to GoDaddy, get to your domain’s Domain Man­age­ment area, click “Import” and import the file.

5. Bask in your glory:

Imported SRV set­tings for Fed­er­ated chat

So obvi­ously I own my domain (forsbergville.com). After read­ing about map­ping my MX records for email to Google Apps, I started think­ing of other ideas for my sub­do­mains (cur­rent and future).

Sub-Domain Ideas

• www.forsbergville.com should resolve to pri­mary domain on web­host (of course)
• eric.forsbergville.com should resolve to this blog
• angela.forsbergville.com should resolve to her blog
• hik­ing.forsbergville.com should resolve to my hik­ing blog
• files.forsbergville.com should resolve to my Drop­box (www.getdropbox.com)
• music.forsbergville.com should resolve to Apache run­ning at home on my media server
• chat.forsbergville.com should resolve to to jab­ber server run­ning on my web host
• mail.forsbergville.com should resolve to google apps per this post
• legacy.forsbergville.com should resolve to a Telnet/ssh java-based con­trol on a black back­ground web­page that is auto­mat­i­cally attempt­ing to login to the web­server using ssh (green let­ter­ing – yeah). Installed tools would include Gopher, Lynx, Pico, Pine, etc. Just for fun.

The ideas will keep com­ing I’m sure, but I think that this is a great start!

Busy installing and test­ing plug-in’s for the blog today. The list is quite large, but I am sat­is­fied that, despite the amount of plug-in’s, I have the bare essen­tials for my design and usabil­ity desires. I snatched a few ideas from this won­der­ful arti­cle as well:

From: The 13 Most Essen­tial Plu­g­ins for Word­Press – NETTUTS

Word­Press is a very pow­er­ful and flex­i­ble blog/content man­age­ment sys­tem, but the thou­sands of plu­g­ins really help to extend the basic func­tion­al­ity. Here are 13 essen­tial plu­g­ins that you should imme­di­ately install after fin­ish­ing the Word­Press installation.