Google launches online Powermeter tool

Google's new online Powermeter tool allows householders to monitor their energy use and greenhouse gas emissions.

Google believes that being able to see your electricity usage in real time will encourage consumers to reduce their overall consumption and save themselves money.

UK users wanting to use the tool will need an advanced electricity meter or "smart meter."

The Powermeter home page states that

Many of today's smart meters don't display information to the consumer. Consumers should have access to data on their personal electricity use, control who gets to see this data and choose from a range of services to help them understand and benefit from this data.

The new tool could lead the way for companies claiming to be 'green' to show their customers real-time data of their energy consumption.

Will visible Google PR become a thing of the past?

Marvel's Comic Book Creator

Magento - Importing configurable and simple products

At Fuse we are nearing the launch of another eCommerce site using the Magento platform. The biggest headache we have found with Magento is handling products where different sizes have different prices. The Magento documentation suggests that this type of product should be set up as a 'configurable product.' However in Magento, to create a configurable product, you have to create your parent product and then another product for every size and colour variation.

This means if you have a shirt in 6 colours and 12 sizes, you need to create 72 products and associate them all to your main product. Importing the data for all these variants using the standard Magento import function works, but you still have to manually associate all the products to their parent which is incredibly time consuming.

Brian at his Magento Developer Information blog has an impressive work-around for this using custom attributes. With a few code changes to one of the core Magento php pages you can import your product as one 'simple' product and use the custom attributes for the sizes and colours.

Using the standard Magento import format with Brian's code you can add your extra columns, determine whether you want the field to appear as a dropdown, radio button or text field and specify prices.

Thanks Brian, you have made our job so much simpler and saved us hours of time.

One other thing we have learned along the way is that Brian's import method loads the images (place them in the /media/import directory) but they are invisible due to a bug in Magento's import code which automatically flags uploaded images as 'exclude.' See this post on the Magento site to fix the bug in another of Magento's core files.

Does Yahoo still support the keyword meta-tag?

At Fuseo we have always believed in adding good quality unique non-spammy meta-keywords to every page where possible. You can never be sure which search engines are gathering the data and when they may change their algorithm to incorporate the meta-keywords.

SearchEngineLand recently published an article about how Yahoo has quietly dropped the use of meta-keywords but as a test they placed a string of non-sensicle characters (xcvteuflsowkldlslkslklsk) in the meta-keyword field. 2 days ago they searched for the string again and the page appeared in the Yahoo results even though the string of letters is nowhere in the copy.

It remains to be seen what will happen if the Bing/Yahoo deal is finalised as Bing does not support the keywords meta-tag either.