Scargill

Posts Tagged ‘Google+ Business Pages’

It’s amazing what a spot of sunshine can do… solar lights that have been in hibernation for months suddenly spring to life… the lamp on the right hasn’t been this bright since it came out of the box. In reality it’s so good it’s almost worth drilling a little hole through the corner of the window to put it’s solar panel outside.

Meanwhile a whole army of external solar lights are out there being tested – we’re planning on moving in the not too distant future and I’m only taking lights that work perfectly – the rest are going in the bin – so they’re all on trial right now. Meanwhile my own design is sitting languishing in my office as the controller which is supposed to stop the batteries getting flat isn’t quite doing the job. I’ve had so much to do recently it’s on the back-boiler for now.

After a busy week which saw me once again over in Blackpool (and I must say quite enjoying the meetings I either attended or ran) but I’ve a few days at home to catch up. I came back to find that some mangy feral cat had managed to get past our magnetic cat-flap, into the bedroom and sprayed the bed cover – that’s currently in the queue at the dry-cleaners at a whopping £27 to sort out – I had no idea they charged that much! 

Said cat is now on my hit-list though how I’m going to capture him is another matter – he’s way too quick for me.

Meanwhile I’ve been tackling a thorny problem with Google+

Google have been trying to muscle in on Facebook for some time now and they’ve brought together their Google+ product along with Google Web albums and others all into the one place. And that’s great – you have a profile just as you do with Facebook – but unlike the latter, Google have not quite gotten their act together yet. Facebook is about people, not companies- so if you want to promote your company or product you need to create a Facebook PAGE with it’s own photos, discussions etc… 

Google have done the same thing but not quite finished it off yet. The problem is with photos – one of the finest tools you can get for handling online photos is the free Picasa – which lets you put your pictures into albums – edit them and sync them to the web – in fact it’s such a good combination that it works really well – except…   Picasa won’t even look at Google Business Pages – it does not even know they exist. Which is fine unless you happen to have put hundreds or thousands of photos into your profile account before realising they are in the wrong place. If you’re looking for a way to do this – forget it – here’s what I ended up doing.

I downloaded all the albums, via Picasa to my PC. Right now the only way to get them into the Business pages account is then to go to that account – and upload the albums one at a time via the web interface. TRUST me – at the time of writing that’s the only way to do it. If you’re planning a Google+ Business page  – take my advice – leave the profile well alone – put nothing in it and do EVERYTHING in the Business page – even though the tools are not yet there – much easier than the hours I spent moving the stuff after the event!

Ultimately one assumes Google will get their act together some day (just like some day they’ll add bandwidth throttling to the otherwise excellent Google Drive which right now sucks the life out of your PC whenever it starts backing things up).