Are user submitted buttons disappearing from the Google Toolbar Button Gallery? Old categories have been removed. Links to author sites appear incorrect, broken…

When Google announced the Toolbar Button feature last year, it was too cute of a gimmick to pass up. I made a some custom buttons and found them quite handy to have sitting up on my toolbar. Not only that, but I made a few for SEO clients that resulted in extra traffic and even a few leads–yes leads, believe it or not.

According to the Google Toolbar Submit Button page, you can

“create a custom button XML file, upload it to your website and use this form to tell us about it. We’ll review it to make sure it meets our Editorial Guidelines, then display it in the Button Gallery for others to enjoy.”

I did this and my button soon appeared in the Google Button Gallery. I became quite endeared to the whole idea of Toolbar Buttons after seeing these PR 4/5 gallery pages with my buttons reported as backlinks by Google.

Like myself, most users who took the time to create and submit a Google custom Toolbar Button and even entire Toolbar Button sites didn’t expect any guarantees that their buttons wouldn’t be discarded. I did expect them to remain intact longer than a year. Think of how long the ancient Google Directory has been with us. Yet, on approximately April 30, 2007, the date iGoogle launched, entire categories of buttons started disappearing. Specifically, these categories were dropped:

• Blogs
• Education
• Entertainment
• Jobs
• Local
• Other
• Reviews
• Search
• Shopping
• Software
• Travel

Comparison of the old Google Toolbar Button Gallery with the new

The new menu (right) looks very similar to the menu that appears on iGoogle under “Add stuff to your homepage.”

Where are the buttons previously listed in the above categories? They are viewable only by searching the gallery for the specific site name. Worst of all, the buttons appear adjacent to broken and incorrect links back to the authors’ sites:

Feedster shows geocities.com as official site

GameSpot official site shows as i.i.com.com

Looks like TechCrunch has been acquired by a cable company

So what are Toolbar Button fans supposed to do? Do we resubmit or move on? Is Google discarding user buttons or should we assume this is a temporary glitch?

Update: I am seeing the old categories and buttons returning to life in the Google Toolbar Button Gallery! Looks like a happy ending.
Update: Oops, now the old categories are gone again. Broken links appear fixed though.

It’s a beautiful, graphically optimized, fully validating sunny fall day outside. Why am I ablogging?

The new Clickfire site design is finished!

Some things about the new design that I really like are:

The Logo - Even though the previous logo went through some serious obsessive compulsive iterations, I am convinced that the new one is fresher, more cheerful and colorful. I admit an attachment to the heavy handed mouse and fire components, but I believe the less overt new one is going to better serve.

Code Improvements - No more table containers. To my surprise, I was able to drop the content into the CSS divs in my favorite WYSIWYG editor (the name begins with a “F,” not a “D,” by the way. I have cleaned up most of the old pages, some dating back years ago to when I first started learning CSS. The new pages are in XHTML and tend to have a better chance at validating. A few hybrid pages are still floating around.

Colors - It’s goodbye green, beige and black and hello red, green blue on white. I got complaints about the previous colors being to loud and this finally sank in. I struggled with going to a white background because white just plain hurts my eyes as do fluorescent lights and flash grenades. Toning down the contrast and brightness in my LCD monitor pretty much gets rid of the pain. I hope the new color scheme will improve the user experience. From what I’ve read, dark text on white backgrounds seems to be the preferred user interface scheme. Read more of this post »

Just thought this graphic looked cool for some reason. Now time to get back to work and stop fooling around with Photoshop!

This image is not what it seems. A word of advice: don’t get in an argument with your wife while she’s learning Adobe Photoshop.

I’ve been noodling around and making custom buttons for the new Google Toolbar buttons for beta version 4 of the Google toolbar for Internet Explorer 5.5+. In Google’s words, a custom toolbar button is “a push button that you can add to the Google Toolbar that can have custom navigation, search, send and update capabilities.” Custom buttons offer cute and convenient possibilities of keeping visitors connected to your web site.

The Cute
The buttons are the same size (16 X16) as the standard for favicons. Webmasters can use their existing favicons or create one to use as the button image (must take the simple step to convert it to base64 encoding with a tool like this).

The Possibilities
What I really dig about the custom toolbar buttons is that Google lets developers add a search component to narrow a search to a particular site by entering text in the search field and clicking a button. For example, if you don’t find what you’re looking for on your favorite search engine, narrow your search to Slashdot by clicking the button (assuming you added it) and the query goes to Slashdot.org and displays results. The Whois.sc button shows you the the Whois data for the page you are viewing in one click–very useful. My favorite feature is the ability to create a button that displays your site’s rss feed with each entry refreshing in a drop down list. So, fans of your site or blog can see when you’ve updated something.

Essentially, to create your own custom Google Toolbar button, all you need do is look at the Google example in the api documentation and just substitute your own site info. Then, save it to an XML file and link the button. The below button for the Clickfire site displays the most recent articles and reviews.

The link code to install the button is this:

http://toolbar.google.com/buttons/add?url=http://www.clickfire.com/googlebutton.xml.

Substitute your own site URI and XML file name.

Here is the Google Toolbar Button code I used for the Clickfire Blog (http://www.clickfire.com/googlebutton2.xml). Substitute your own info for the circled items:

- Add the Clickfire button | - Add Clickfire Blog button | - Add Clickfire News button

Happy buttoning.

It’s coming up on something like 10 years that I’ve been using IrfanView Image viewer for Windows and it just keeps getting better. I’ve written about the unbelievable small, fast and efficient IrfanView features for viewing and even doing some light graphic design work like making favicons. This is one of the most useful software programs I’ve ever used and a tribute to the power of freeware.

Read more of this post »

So you think you’ve “seen” every favicon out there? If you don’t feel like creating a favicon (the little icon that shows up in many browsers when your site is bookmarked), then you can take the easy route and go transparent. The neat thing about this one is that it blanks out the default Microsoft icon in Internet Explorer. It might have the effect of getting someone’s attention or at at the very least serving as a conversation piece.

A while back, I wrote about my efforts to determine how the topic of company logo design should be defined while I was figuring out how to create a logo for the new Clickfire site design. I was honest about my ignorance of logo design methodologies, which I was sure existed somewhere, perhaps deep in the depths of some art school professor’s power point presentation.

I really relish finding a company logo that communicates the company message in a minimalist way like this one from IT.com, a “vertical search engine for information technology solutions.” You gotta love that domain name. The colors of each letter contrast but form blocks that fit together into what could be construed as a human figure.

See what I mean?