Tag: google

Google Doubleclick DFP – Getting the Debug Console When Running in Asynchronous Mode

When trying to find out why a particular ad campaign isn’t being delivered as you thought it should, the DFP documentation indicates that you should apply “google_debug” to the URL and a new window show pop up with the debug information. After digging through documentation and searching Google for a couple of hours without getting this to work, I finally found the relevant part of the DFP documentation.

Here’s the kicker: in the new, improved ad handler (gpt.js) you’ll have to append “google_console=1” in your URL, then press CTRL+F10 to launch the debug console. No google_debug, no google_pubconsole, just google_console and CTRL+F10.

Hopefully this will help someone trying to find out by searching for relevant terms.

Google Releases Their Protocol Buffers

Fresh from the Google Open Source Blog comes news that Google has released their Protocol Buffers specification and accompanying libraries. The code and specification has been release at Protocol Buffers on Google Code.

Protocol Buffers is a data format for fast exchange and parsing of data and messages between computers. It is similar to simple uses of XML in this manner, but the messages size on the wire and their parsing time is very much optimized for busy sites. There is no need to spend loads of time doing XML parsing when you instead could do something useful. It’s very easy to interact with the messages through the generated classes (for C++, Java and Python), and future versions of the same schema are compatible with old versions (as new fields are just ignored by older parsers).

Still no PHP implementation available, so guess it’s time to get going and lay down some code during the summer. Anyone up for the job?

Google Launches Friend Connect

Google announced their release of Friend Connect today, a platform built to share social data across social networking site, and for allowing 3rd party applications for building applications on top of the social networks already available at other sites. Together with OpenSocial this will hopefully make it possible to maintain your friends graph across sites and available applications, so that you don’t have to reconnect with your friends on ALL the social sites that you use out there. I also hope that it moves some of the lock-in and power of the largest players in the market, and will allow us smaller developers to allow our customers to use their existing data with us. I’ve signed up for the beta program, but I’m guessing that there’s quite a few companies that’s going to get in before my ticket shows up.

Anyways, the plan is to integrate the service over at the best site for electronic tournaments (pwned.no) and at a few other projects that I have brewing in the “this will be cool” section. More about those projects later.