ErrorHelp blog

Google doesn’t close its HTML tags, on purpose

matthew — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 19:55:08 +0000

According to Google’s latest guidelines to speed up the web, there are a number of optional tags in HTML4 that you can omit to save speed, even if it makes you feel a little queasy as a developer. (Google is quick to point out these tricks are for HTML and not XHTML.)

For example, according to the HTML4 DTD — you can omit tags like and and all sorts of optional tags that browsers have to cope without.

But are you feeling lucky enough to actually exclude those tags? Do you believe browsers all handle that particularly well in the wild west of the web? It may annoy your development tools and code beautifiers when you leave it out, but I can assure you browsers have long since managed this process so well that you can depend on it almost without fail.

What surprised me:

The Google homepage and search results pages don’t end their and elements. They just leave them open– a lot like a lazy developer might do and then feel guilty when he comes back and sees the mistake.

Only this “mistake” is really part of Google’s strategy of treating their performance as a competitive advantage. All browsers work well without the tags and the tags take up time, so they’re excited to eliminate any millisecond they can for their visitors.

If you already knew and used this trick, well, then you’re in the minority because none of the other top 10 sites (Alexa) take advantage of this to reduce bandwidth and improve the download speed. Admittedly, for complex pages it’s a very small percentage of bytes per view (14 bytes or so per request), but why would you send your visitors more information than they need?

How many times have you tossed in added HTML cruft and not thought about it? Well, visitors will feel it again and again over time, so you might want to think a bit about the junk you add in your HTML– even if you don’t cut corners as tightly as Google does on their own homepage.

bug.gd coverage on Buffalo local news

matthew — Sat, 08 Nov 2008 21:45:55 +0000

I’ve never been to Buffalo before, but WIVB-TV News4 in Buffalo, NY found our site and ran a story on it recently. Take a look on Lindsay’s Links:

[ Full Coverage ]

Recent coverage of bug.gd relaunch

matthew — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 19:23:48 +0000

Just a quick update on some of the things people are saying on bug.gd.

Altsearchengines gave a solid write-up on our new launch:

There’s also a nice and succinct write-up on our new bug.gd relaunch over at makeuseof.com:

New: bug.gd 2.0 and ErrorHelp.com

matthew — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 16:40:23 +0000

We’re very excited to announce a major new release of bug.gd and our new corporate error search engine, ErrorHelp.com.

Stop repeating research

If this is the first you’ve heard of bug.gd, here’s our goal: No one should ever have to solve an error that someone else already solved. We all need to stop wasting time on things people have solved! Let’s work together.

We make this work on bug.gd by remembering the errors you search for and reminding you to come back and provide a solution. Our service has been used by thousands of people and over the past year, we’ve accumulated thousands of solutions.

Solving errors better than ever

Today we launch the second generation of bug.gd. The three biggest changes are:

Web Results– We now offer web results for your error messages, which we can optimize to find the best matches for your error better than any other search engine.
Easier to use– We’ve streamlined the solution interface– you can enter your solutions quickly and easily just by visiting your My Bugs page.
Fresh decor– We got a lot of feedback from people who loved our site concept, but couldn’t stand the strong black/white theme. We’ve redesigned the look of the site from the ground up to be more comfortable.

Combined with our recent Firefox extension, there’s no reason you should search anywhere else for error messages.

The guy down the hall solved your error before– but how would you know?

Along with our relaunch comes ErrorHelp.com, which is our service for employees who are tired of solving the same stuff their coworkers solved beforehand.

Think about it. Surely you’re not the only one who has run into that intranet error, data-entry program crash, or random Windows popup. Should you send out a public email blast? Nope. You search for the error on ErrorHelp.com and you find others who had the same problem. If you’re the first, you can save the company time down the road by saving your solution forever.

ErrorHelp.com is for companies trying to get the most out of their IT budget without waiting on the help desk– any employee can start their own free error database and leverage their coworker’s knowledge.

The base service is completely free with no obligation– you can begin searching right now. Over time, we’ll add premium features for privacy, metrics, monitoring, tools, and other things that IT managers love. But you don’t need any of that to get started.

We’re very excited about the new features and will be talking about them again. We’d *love* to hear your feedback, so let us know how we’re doing.

Improved search relevance and updated Firefox extension

matthew — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 02:27:03 +0000

We just pushed live some search relevance enhancements so you should see more applicable results for your searches. There was also a bug with “Show next 25 results” sometimes not showing 25 additional results and we’ve pushed live a fix for that.

Recently we released some minor performance tweaks for the bug.gd Firefox extension. If you don’t have it already, pick it up on Mozilla’s addon site.

Beyond these fixes, our team has been working hard on a major site redesign. Stay tuned for some (hopefully) impressive changes in the near future.

Sysinternals Live launches, access debugging tools from UNC path

matthew — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 00:53:35 +0000

As a bit of industry news, we wanted to mention that Sysinternals just exposed all of their great Windows troubleshooting tools via UNC (at \\live.sysinternals.com\tools\) and they’re listed in a browsable web directory.

This is great for those of you who rely on tools like Regmon and Filemon to troubleshoot systems. Now you can get them very quickly and launch them from the network whenever you need.

Solution saved you time? Show a token of gratitude with TipJoy

matthew — Tue, 27 May 2008 16:43:09 +0000

The kindness of strangers

Since we started bug.gd, we’ve been amazed at the kindness of strangers. There are so many people taking time out of their busy schedules to share solutions they discover. They do this out of their own generosity in the spirit of helping other poor souls avoid repeating their work (or giving up).

These kind people are attracted to our site because it’s fundamentally the problem we’re trying to solve. By searching for error messages here, you help everyone in the world (or your company) in the future. If everyone did the same thing, errors would become minor speed bumps rather than things that can consume hours of your time.

I owe you lunch sometime!

In the physical world, when someone does you a favor out of generosity, there’s this desire to repay that somehow. Many of us are inclined to offer a beer or a lunch in thanks for saving hours from the day. I think this is fairly natural for a lot of us.

Unfortunately, there’s not enough of that online these days. People blog about tricks and tips, but there’s no real way to pay that back. Sure, they can make money off of advertisements, but that doesn’t apply to people in forums and communities working together to solve problems. This is where TipJoy comes in with their new API they announced today (on TechCrunch).

Hey Internet, it’s time to show a token of gratitude.

On bug.gd, we’re excited to announce that you can tip users who post great solutions. The vast majority of that donation goes from you directly to the kind gentleman or lady that submitted the solution. The opt-in tip buttons make it very easy to schedule a 10-cent tip later, so click on them whenever you have an opportunity.

We’re really pleased that TipJoy has released this new platform– the world is overdue to show appreciation to the zillions of people who make our lives easier online. These micro-tips are a great way to encourage user-generated content while avoiding turning every corner of the internet into a buzzing wasteland of advertisements.

Adding TipJoy buttons to your solutions

When you submit a solution to an error, you’ll see the following page:

Just click the checkbox and you’ll see a button a lot like the one on this solution. Once enabled, your quick generosity lives on and helps people repeatedly, collecting tips for eternity.

Visit TipJoy’s site for more information about their hassle-free tip buttons. As always, we’d love your feedback as well. Many thanks to the TipJoy development team– they’ve been great to work with.

error_help() for Python hackers

matthew — Sat, 29 Mar 2008 20:55:47 +0000

In the last days before Pycon08 we hastily scripted support for error sharing (based on bug.gd) for use inside the Python interpreter. This is a bit of a hint of some of our long-term plans with our technology. You should give it a whirl and let us know what you think.

Install

It’s in the Python Cheese Shop, so you can install it pretty easily:

easy_install bug.gd

(If you don’t have easy_install, you really should get it.)

After finishing the installation steps (it requires you to run error_help_config.py from your scripts directory), the error_help tool is now accessible from the interactive interpreter whenever you need.

Using error_help()

Whenever you run into an exception in the interactive interpreter, you can type error_help() and you’ll find everyone else who ran into that same error and (hopefully) how they solved it.

Here’s an example session:

>>> 0/0
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "", line 1, in 
ZeroDivisionError: integer division or modulo by zero
>>> error_help()
========== 1 of 8 ==========
Error: Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "", line 1, in 
ZeroDivisionError: integer division or modulo by zero

Solution: I divided by zero as a test. Maybe you did the same thing?
The trick is not to divide by zero!
========== 2 of 8 ==========
Error: Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "", line 1, in 
ImportError: No module named shinynewmodule

Solution: (Example error and solutions)
I didn't have the shinynewmodule installed.
You can install it via fake_easy_install shinynewmodule

As people use this feature, in a couple of days, they’ll receive email asking how they worked around the error. Their solution will then be visible for every future Pythonista that runs into the problem. If everyone gives back to the community, mysterious errors will be a thing of the past.

If you wanted to see some of the other results from the search, for example the 7th result, you’d just use:

error_help(7)

Anyway, we’ve love to hear your feedback on this quick proof of concept. Keep your eye out for more “formal” versions of this feature in other applications.

bug.gd named a Fantastic Freebie by PC World

matthew — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 00:05:15 +0000

We’re extremely pleased that bug.gd has been honored as one of PC World magazine’s 101 Fantastic Freebies for their May 2008 issue. Each year they pick their favorite free services and software and spread the word.

A quick quote they sent our way:

“Each download or service on the list impressed the editors with its functionality and usability,” said Harry McCracken, VP/editor in chief of PC World. “These are some of the most well-crafted services available – congratulations to bug.gd!”

Thanks to everyone for spreading the word about bug.gd!

We plan to announce some new bug fixes and features tomorrow. Some of them are already live and hard to miss, but we’ll tell you more about them soon.

New features for Presidents Day

matthew — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 01:50:39 +0000

Things have been really exciting around the bug.gd offices as we absorb all the great feedback and usage we’re seeing from our bug.gd Firefox extension we announced recently. We feel this is one of the best ways to use the site, so give it a whirl.

We just rolled out a handful of new features and tweaks, and thought we’d share those:

Improved Search Engine. We’ve switched to a new backend search engine that is faster and a good bit more accurate. Expect additional tweaks in this area, but hopefully you’ll find it easier to find results.
Search Other Sites.
- Now we offer the ability to search on other sites and knowledge bases when you submit an error. For Google in particular, it can get a little picky about multi-line and long errors, so bug.gd will help you trim it down (if needed) before passing it over to a custom Google engine. This custom Google engine allows you to filter your error down into specific genres if needed, too.
- We expect we may get a little flak about this feature, but remember our number #1 goal is to help you find your error solution so you can record it for future searchers and save them the hassle.
Look and feel.
- Reduced some of the overall wasted space on bug.gd. Hopefully you’ll find things fit better in your browser now.
- Changed positioning for the “I made a mistake” links when submitting a solution, as many users were overlooking these.
Miscellaneous tweaks.
- Improved general external search engine friendliness for solved errors.
- Preparing the site for new features coming up soon.

We hope you like the changes. If you notice any problems, please email bugs@bug.gd and we’ll get back to you as soon as we can.