Stan Carney

Interesting Tech

Navigation Menu

Google Geo-Targeting

Google Geo-Targeting

Posted by on May 30, 2012 in Programming, World Wide Web | 0 comments

It appears sometime around March 2012 the Google geo-targeting policy. I’m pretty sure (not 100% though) prior to March I was able to set http://stancarney.ca/ as ‘Unlisted’, meaning that it would not be geo-targeted in Google search results. After some more digging I found a help page explaining Google’s Geo-Targeting rules and confirmed it via my webmaster tools account. If you have a country specific TLD Google will not allow you to geo-target any search results besides the country of which the ccTLD is assigned. They have a list of generic country code top level domains that they deem to be exceptions and allow you to change the geo-targeted country.

twitterlinkedin Read More

My Love-Hate Relationship With Grails and Groovy

My Love-Hate Relationship With Grails and Groovy

Posted by on Apr 20, 2012 in Programming | 3 comments

I started writing this post a month ago but delayed posting it until now. We are almost all the way through a re-write/re-design of vogogo.com in Django and I must say it has been a pleasure.

The comments below represent my findings after developing and deploying several Grails production applications over the last several years.

twitterlinkedin Read More

Grails 2.0 Breaks mockLogging

Grails 2.0 Breaks mockLogging

Posted by on Dec 30, 2011 in Programming | 0 comments

I’ve been fighting with Grails 2.0 over the holidays in order to put together a plan to migrate at least one of our Grails systems from 1.3.7 to 2.0. I’ve made some headway in sorting out some of the expected problems like controller methods now being publicly callable as well as labelling some classes that should have been abstract but couldn’t be because Grails wasn’t able to work with them in earlier versions.

twitterlinkedin Read More

Why Are You Still Writing Java?

Why Are You Still Writing Java?

Posted by on Nov 1, 2011 in Programming | 0 comments

I recall building a small graphical user interface using a beta version of the ‘Swing AWT Extensions’ in the late 90’s and thinking to myself that it was going to change everything. Fast forward 12+ years, things have changed but much has stayed the same.

twitterlinkedin Read More

Grails 301 Redirect

Grails 301 Redirect

Posted by on Oct 19, 2011 in Programming, World Wide Web | 2 comments

301 redirects are the correct way to signify content available at a URL has been permanently moved to a new location. Returning a 301 redirect instructs browsers, web crawlers and other clients accessing your site to use the new page from this point forward. From a development perspective a 302 redirect and a 301 don’t appear to be any different. You hit the old URL and you are sent to the new one.

twitterlinkedin Read More

Google ‘Search Engine Rankings’ App in Groovy

Google ‘Search Engine Rankings’ App in Groovy

Posted by on Oct 4, 2011 in Programming, World Wide Web | 0 comments

I wanted to see where certain sites rank for a given search term. Normally this is accomplished by heading to Google, entering your search query and potentially paging through N pages using ctrl + f until I find the site I’m looking for. Obviously there is a better way. Searching around I found only questionable sites offering the service so I figured it wouldn’t be that hard to build.

twitterlinkedin Read More