David Demaree

Two Domains, One Google Apps

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 11:08:36 -0600

Since almost the beginning, Google Apps has worked like this:

Every account has one domain name (let’s call it yourdomain.com) that users use to log into their mail/calendars/etc, which Google calls the primary domain name. You set this up when creating your Google Apps account, and for all intents and purposes it can never be changed.
Accounts can also have one or more domain aliases. Let’s say in addition to yourdomain.com you also have yourdomain.net, and you want emails sent to david@yourdomain.net to end up in the same mailbox as those sent to david@yourdomain.com. You’d log into your Google Apps control panel and add yourdomain.net as a domain alias for yourdomain.com, and voila, it works (well, as soon as you’ve completed the absurdly complicated ownership verification and MX record setup steps).

But let’s say you (or your business) has a third domain name, kittensareawesome.com, and you want to set up the email account david@kittensareawesome.com, but you don’t want emails sent to that address to go to the same place as david@yourdomain.com — in other words, you want mailboxes on kittensareawesome.com to be entirely separate from the ones on yourdomain.com or yourdomain.net.

For most of its history, Google Apps had no way of letting you do this without creating a second, separate Google Apps account for kittensareawesome.com. But today I discovered that is no longer the case: Google now lets you add additional domains to a single Google Apps account.

In a minute I’ll explain why you might want to do this, but first, here’s a guided tour of how to add an additional, non-alias domain to your account:

Log into your Google Apps control panel.

This is always located at http://google.com/a/YOURDOMAIN.COM. You’ll need to log in with the username and password you created when you initially set up Google Apps; this will usually be the same as your first/primary Gmail mailbox, and in fact you can usually get to this page more easily by logging into your Google Apps Gmail and clicking on ‘Manage My Domain’.
Click on Domain Settings.
Then click on the tab labeled Domain names.
Click on the link labeled Add a domain or domain alias.
Finally, on the next screen, check the second-from-top radio button, labeled Add another domain.

Then you click the button labeled Continue and verify domain ownership, which takes you through the same annoying steps you have to follow any time you ask Google to do anything with a domain name that’s not google.com.

Once you’ve verified ownership and set up MX records (or had a friendly nerd in your office do it), you should be able to come back to the control panel and add users to either yourdomain.com or kittensareawesome.com. (Or, in my case, demaree.me or practical.cc.)

To add a new mailbox on the new, second domain, go into your Organization & users tab and create a new user. You’ll now see a handy drop-down menu letting you choose which domain the new user should belong to:

Why did I need this?

Years ago when I started doing freelance work, my main personal domain name was practicalmadness.com and — being 24 years old and brilliant — I decided it would be sensible to set up my business on the far-too-similar, not-remotely-professional practicalmadness.net domain, and created a Google Apps account for it.

Not long after that I came to my senses and changed my business domain to the shorter, simpler practical.cc. But by then I had plenty of mail (and inertia) built up in the old practicalmadness.net account, and at that time Google was somewhat stingy about letting users create multiple Apps accounts. So for years I’ve had to keep that domain going — and have kept paying for renewals every year — just because it was attached to my old freelancing business’s email account.

I started looking into this today because practicalmadness.net comes up for renewal in about 2 weeks, and this year I decided to let it lapse. But I still use practical.cc for a number of things, so I wanted that to remain active.

A quick side note before I continue: one thing I learned after Adobe acquired Typekit — and turned our typekit.com Google email accounts into adobe.com Exchange ones — is that Google does not care if the primary domain on a Google Apps account stops working. Even though Google is no longer receiving mail at typekit.com, we can still log into those Apps accounts to search our mail archives or use non-Mail services such as Google Docs.

So if I didn’t mind having a second Apps account, or the cognitive dissonance of logging into it with an email address that no longer works, I could have simply let the domain lapse. practical.cc was set up as an alias and would have continued to function even after practicalmadness.net went away.

But now that I know I can manage all my domain names from a single Google account, that’s the way I want it.

Caveat nerdor

The first small complication: the domain I wanted to add to my Google Apps account at demaree.me was already associated with my other Apps account at practicalmadness.net. Google won’t let you add a domain to two accounts at once. Here’s what I did:

I logged into the practicalmadness.net control panel and deleted practical.cc as an alias domain.
Then I switched to the demaree.me admin and went through the steps to add practical.cc as an additional, non-alias domain (as described above).
Finally, I then immediately added a new david@practical.cc mailbox on the demaree.me account.

Google says domain changes can take up to 30 minutes to take effect, but in my case they were virtually instant, and I immediately started receiving emails in the new Gmail account.

A couple of big caveats to doing what I did:

The new account is a totally new, empty Gmail account. None of my filters, labels, settings, or messages made the transition to the new mailbox.

When I set out to make this change, I’d originally planned to implement some complicated migration plan, in which I used GData or IMAP to copy all the mail from the old mailbox to the new one. But my experience with the typekit.com mail made me realize: I don’t need to. All the old mail will remain in the old practicalmadness.net account (which remains active, even though it no longer receives new messages), and I can always log in if I need to retrieve something from my archives. If it turns out I need to move over something important, I can figure that out later.
If you receive a high volume of mail on an address you want to move between Google accounts, I might recommend against doing this switcheroo during business hours. Or, if you pay for a Google Apps business/enterprise account, I recommend contacting Google’s customer support to ask if they can help you do it safely.

I say this because I quite frankly have no idea what may have happened to any messages received during the 60-or-so seconds between when I removed my domain in one place and added it in another. That address receives a low volume of mail so in my case it was harmless, but it may not be harmless for you. Caveat nerdor.

Now that all that’s done, I’m pretty happy to have one fewer Google Apps account in my life, and now I’m looking to see if I can eliminate some other ones.

Questions? Hit me up on Twitter at @ddemaree or email me at david@demaree.me.

"Path is pretty in the same designy way as our modern museums. These museums are very exciting when..."

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 16:41:07 -0600

“

Path is pretty in the same designy way as our modern museums. These museums are very exciting when they open. You show up and marvel along with all of the other fans of architecture. Maybe you return for one of those nights where they stay open late and there is a band and drinking. “A great space,” you think. Maybe one day you’ll be rich and rent out the atrium for a private party. The art doesn’t get talked about so much at these museums. The museum itself is the “social object,” as it were. Eventually the particulars around which the museum was designed fall out of fashion. A fresh crop of architects finds it to be too flashy, or too dull, or to have been guided by faulty principles. There is congestion where there should be flow. Certain rooms are simply exhausting. Maybe it is even an eyesore. This is good for the museum. Now they can really fuck up the place…

Path is a monument to Path. It is no place to scribble in. I wish it longevity so that it might find shabbiness.

”

- Sexpigeon, via Buzz Andersen

Spot on. I’ve enjoyed using Path and I like how fluid the user experience is, and this version 2.0 is definitely more versatile than their first one. But it’s not where my friends are, and it’s not going to be. My friends are on many platforms, not just iOS. They leave links and comments, not just smileys, photos, and check-ins.

Path is a social network for people so swamped in the tech sector to be bored with social networking. Most people don’t want or need a simpler Facebook.

Developing Facebook's New Photo Viewer

Mon, 02 Jan 2012 12:01:10 -0600

Developing Facebook's New Photo Viewer:

Yesterday I spent a few hours building an elaborate web photo gallery for our wedding photos before my wife and I realized we’re more interested in seeing everyone’s likes and comments than in building yet another elaborate web thing for our wedding. (That’s to say we do value building nice web things, we just value getting Facebook love from our friends more.)

The photo gallery I made is modeled after Facebook’s newest lightbox UI for browsing and viewing photos, which has some nice details that I love, such as pushState support so browsing between photos doesn’t break your browser’s back button. But the best one is how they handle scrolling: you can scroll the contents of a photo lightbox (which can include comments, likes, and other metadata that can make the viewer taller than your browser window) while preserving your scroll position on the photo grid underneath.

I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to figure out whatever strange web magic they used to create this effect. But it turns out Facebook’s own frontend dev team posted a detailed explanation of how it all works, and it’s beautifully simple. In fact, almost all the important layout and scrolling magic is handled with just CSS. Really cool.

"The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already..."

Sun, 01 Jan 2012 10:15:07 -0600

“The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.”

- From Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities.

May we fight the things that reduce us for the company and truth that make life big. Happy new year, everyone. Here’s to 2012.

(via viafrank)

Heroku Supports PHP! Yay! (Yes, Yay!)

Thu, 29 Dec 2011 18:44:13 -0600

This week I (re-)discovered that Heroku’s polyglot Cedar stack supports PHP. The PHP support was launched a while back in partnership with Facebook, to attract developers of Facebook apps to Heroku’s cloud. While it’s not listed on their website as a fully supported, featured language alongside Ruby, Python, Node.js, and Java (not to mention JVM languages Scala and Clojure), it works amazingly well for really basic stuff. You can try it out for yourself by just creating a new project folder (i.e. Git repo) with an index.php file in it, then creating a Heroku project. When you push to Heroku, they’ll automatically identify it as PHP and compile/install Apache and PHP into your slug.

PHP on Heroku could be more accurately described as “Apache+PHP on Heroku” — PHP apps are Apache web server instances, including support for .htaccess directives. I haven’t run everyone’s favorite security hole, phpinfo(), to determine what modules are compiled into Heroku’s PHP, but it seems like support for PostgreSQL and MySQL are both present, which means PHP apps can use either Heroku’s Postgres-based shared DB storage or a cloud-hosted MySQL like Amazon RDS.

I’m excited about this because it allows me to stop maintaining a fully fledged Apache server on a VPS just to publish the occasional semi-static web site. Need to publish one or two pages? Before I’d have needed to configure a virtual host in Apache, then create some directories, then figure out a publishing thingamabob, which was different for every project…now I can just git push heroku master and it’s done. Boom.

My wife’s yoga site is mostly plain HTML with some PHP. It’s not at all demanding in terms of server horsepower, and while Coda makes it fairly easy to track and publish changes over SFTP, Heroku’s Git-based deployments are just so much nicer, and I like being able to run all of my small, personal projects on a single app platform.

Our wedding photos are up on our photographer’s blog....

Fri, 23 Dec 2011 10:17:11 -0600

Our wedding photos are up on our photographer’s blog. They’re UH-MAZING, just like my suit.

Siri Failures, Illustrated

Wed, 21 Dec 2011 18:21:02 -0600

Siri Failures, Illustrated:

As a software developer currently working on a search feature, I understand why Siri falls short. I acknowledge it’s logical to expect that an electronic brain capable of understanding the semantic relationship between “broke a tooth” and “dentist” is also capable of mapping “raped” or “attacked” to “crisis center” or “dial 911”.

The problem isn’t that Apple has programmed Siri to suppress information about abortion, emergency contraception, or rape. (They haven’t.) The problem is that Apple hasn’t yet trained Siri to handle anything outside of a small, family-friendly, easily demoable box. What’s worse, her default “cheeky” responses when queries fail — meant to imply a personality and intelligence you can trust — don’t account for the difference between trivial or important questions. Siri needs a better database, but more than that she needs empathy (or at least a convincing simulation of it).

Apple has set expectations very, very high, and their stipulation that Siri’s in “beta” won’t fly with most users who see it in a commercial or try it in stores and expect it to work.

In Focus: Kim Jong Il, 1942–2011

Tue, 20 Dec 2011 09:15:05 -0600

In Focus: Kim Jong Il, 1942–2011:

A photographic recap of the late North Korean dictator’s life.

Related: The creator of the Kim Jong-Il Looking At Things Tumblr blog says he plans to keep going even after his subject’s death.

Gaug.es for iPhone

Mon, 19 Dec 2011 17:52:06 -0600

Gaug.es for iPhone:

A really nice, simple iPhone interface for the really nice, simple website analytics service from GitHub (who acquired it a couple of weeks ago along with its developers, Ordered List). I tried using their web interface to look at my Gaug.es stats on my phone this past weekend, and it was an okay, not great, experience. This app is much better.

Trailer for 'The Dark Knight Rises'

Mon, 19 Dec 2011 16:42:05 -0600

Trailer for 'The Dark Knight Rises':

Thank goodness. Now I never have to see Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows.

The Failed Promise of 'The Verge'

Mon, 19 Dec 2011 15:21:35 -0600

The Failed Promise of 'The Verge':

Verge, the new project from the former Engadget editors who left to start their own site after theirs was acquired by AOL, is probably the best shitty gadget rag out there. But it’s still a shitty gadget rag, and Ben Brooks wanted more:

There is just a lot of vanilla tech reporting going on — the kind that I expect to see on CNET. Which is a shame because by all accounts the writers for the site are smart — the type that should get it, but refuse to spell it out for readers.

In fact the most compelling and interesting writing in The Verge are the posts that its senior editors post in the “forum” in response to criticism. That shouldn’t be the case, yet they are the only posts I look forward to reading on the site.

Given I’m what many internet people would call an “Apple fanboi”, and that Gizmodo was making me vomit even before they stooped to theft in pursuit of an exclusive scoop, I can’t honestly say I expected much from The Verge. I will grant them this: if you’re gonna read a gadget rag, theirs is the best one.

But if you want to read a technology site that aims higher than just cataloguing an endless parade of mediocre crap, sorry, but it doesn’t exist. No one is trying to hold technology companies to any kind of standard.

Then again, press outlets generally don’t hold anyone accountable for anything these days. Just as there’s “a debate” about whether global warming is real when it’s 45º in Chicago on December 19, a cell phone that’s too big to fit in your pocket, and can’t hold a battery charge for more than an hour, is said to have “drawbacks.”

Someone should try putting out an Onion-style satirical publication devoted exclusively to the tech industry. It wouldn’t be at all hard to find material for it.

PayPal: Feel the Love

Tue, 06 Dec 2011 19:52:49 -0600

PayPal: Feel the Love:

Watts Martin:

The key to understanding Paypal is this: Their policies in dealing with their customers are all crafted with the assumption that their customers are out to screw them. It’s not that they don’t want to do business with you, it’s that they don’t trust you. Ever. Under any circumstance. They want your money, but they hate you.

They hate you because in a measurable percentage of their transactions, people are trying to screw them over. As the cliché goes, it’s not paranoia when they really are out to get you.

Except that approaching every transaction with that attitude really is paranoia.

And it gets better from there.

"To most customers, search is just expected to be there, and it’s expected to search everything all..."

Tue, 06 Dec 2011 11:50:49 -0600

“To most customers, search is just expected to be there, and it’s expected to search everything all the time. They don’t realize and don’t care how much complexity is behind the scenes to make it happen. The best designs hide as much of that as possible and just present the customer with a single search box that works.”

- Marco Arment

Facebook Acquires Gowalla's Team; Gowalla Itself Not So Much

Mon, 05 Dec 2011 11:59:16 -0600

Facebook Acquires Gowalla's Team; Gowalla Itself Not So Much:

Gowalla co-founder Josh Williams:

About two months ago, my co-founder Scott [Raymond] and I attended F8. We were blown away by Facebook’s new developments. A few weeks later Facebook called, and it became clear that the way for our team to have the biggest impact was to work together. So we’re excited to announce that we’ll be making the journey to California to join Facebook!

Gowalla, as a service, will be winding down at the end of January. We plan to provide an easy way to export your Passport data, your Stamp and Pin data (along with your legacy Item data), and your photos as well. Facebook is not acquiring Gowalla’s user data.

A few disconnected reactions:

This was inevitable. The fact is that Gowalla was a distant second to Foursquare in the social check-in app space. Gowalla was never a serious competitor in hyper-local advertising and daily deals, which are practically the only way besides an acquisition that a company like that can make money for their investors.

Plus, though I liked Gowalla’s product better as a piece of software, I can’t deny Foursquare’s “game” was more accessible and fun. I have friends who never really “got” Gowalla yet check in on Foursquare constantly. Gowalla tried adding its versions of badges and titles, but not until after half the internet was working to take over the mayorship of their favorite coffee place.

Also, I’m really starting to respect Facebook for the simple fact that when they buy companies just to acquire their teams — something they’ve done a lot recently, of which Gowalla is just the biggest example — they don’t even pretend to be interested in keeping the products going. There’s no uncertainty. Facebook knows what they want, they say so, and everyone knows where they stand.

"We all know what to do, but we don’t know how to get reelected once we have done it."

Mon, 05 Dec 2011 09:35:05 -0600

“We all know what to do, but we don’t know how to get reelected once we have done it.”

- Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker of Luxembourg, quoted by Jared Bernstein in a post about the ongoing Euro crisis.

Bernstein’s post skirts the fact that Juncker actually said that in 2005, so it’s not in response to anything happening now, but it seems a perfect catchphrase for why our smart, capable leaders more and more seem incapable of smart leadership.

Taking Pictures of Taking Pictures

Sun, 04 Dec 2011 10:47:00 -0600

Taking Pictures of Taking Pictures:

Mark Richardson, for Pitchfork:

“Wicked Game” covers were as common this year as covers of Springsteen’s “I’m on Fire” were in 2007. Washed Out’s tossed-off take was weak, but something about the Widowspeak’s carbon-copy version hit home when I working through Retromania. Faithful covers of existing songs are as old as popular music, but something here felt new: It was part of what I heard as the subtle Tumblr-ization of indie; music-making as re-blog. They weren’t just covering a song that they loved, they were essentially re-producing it, unchanged, and saying, “This is me.” It’s the band as lonely teenager in a bedroom: What do people think of me? “Oh that band Widowspeak? They’re the ones that are into Lynch, right? ‘Wicked Game’?”

At the end he references the “Most Photographed Barn in the World” passage from Don DeLillo’s White Noise, a passage I think about at least every other week.

This is cute: if Google knows your birthday (i.e. if it’s...

Sat, 03 Dec 2011 17:26:49 -0600

This is cute: if Google knows your birthday (i.e. if it’s in your Google+ profile), on your birthday they display a special birthday doodle on the homepage. The alt text is a personalized birthday greeting (“Happy Birthday David!”).

On a related note, I’ve gotten automated birthday greetings from:

OKCupid, who say “ordinarily we’d send you on a birthday fling, but our records show you’re in a happy relationship.” So instead they just send a JPEG of a cake.
My dentist’s office (via whatever software they use for online appointment booking). They also send a cake image, but theirs is more reminiscent of Microsoft Word clip art.
Starbucks, who also (as part of the Starbucks Card Rewards thingy) always send a birthday postcard good for one free drink.

All this in addition to the many tweets and Facebook posts from friends and colleagues.

Thanks, everyone!

The "Bomb" Buried In Obamacare

Sat, 03 Dec 2011 14:02:05 -0600

The "Bomb" Buried In Obamacare :

Rick Ungar, for Forbes:

[The medical loss ratio, a provision of Obama’s Affordable Care Act,] requires health insurance companies to spend 80% of the consumers’ premium dollars they collect on actual medical care rather than overhead, marketing expenses and profit. Failure on the part of insurers to meet this requirement will result in the insurers having to send their customers a rebate check representing the amount in which they underspend on actual medical care.

This is the true ‘bomb’ contained in Obamacare and the one item that will have more impact on the future of how medical care is paid for in this country than anything we’ve seen in quite some time.

Today, that bomb goes off. Today, the Department of Health & Human Services issues the rules of what insurer expenditures will—and will not—qualify as a medical expense for purposes of meeting the requirement. As it turns out, HHS isn’t screwing around. They actually mean to see to it that the insurance companies spend what they should taking care of their customers.

Ungar goes on to predict two things: that this is the beginning of the end for the current crop of private insurance companies, who simply aren’t set up to survive on just 20% of their current revenues, and—consequently—that this is the first small step toward a single-payer health care system in the United States.

Either thing would be change I can believe in. But this sounds too good to be true—there must be a loophole.

No, Siri Isn't Pro-Life

Sat, 03 Dec 2011 12:32:06 -0600

No, Siri Isn't Pro-Life:

Adam Engst, writing for TidBITS:

In a move reminiscent of how Greenpeace harangued Apple for the PR value, MoveOn.org even sent out email encouraging people to sign a petition asking Apple to modify how Siri works, claiming that Siri “won’t tell you where you can get an abortion or even emergency contraception — instead she’ll promote anti-abortion pregnancy ‘crisis’ centers.” MoveOn went on to say, “When a user asked her why she is anti-abortion, she replied, ‘I just am.’” Oh, please.

Search engines are only as accurate and capable as the data they have to work with. (And despite seeming like magic from the future, for all intents and purposes Siri is just a search engine.) Google doesn’t have a perfect algorithm for telling the difference between a vapid, spammy page about green tea weight loss and an actual article on the health benefits of green tea. Both look similarly relevant, in that they both contain a similar set of search terms—it’s the context that makes one spam and the other scholarship.

If you ask Siri for “abortion clinics” and its (her?) data set doesn’t use that word, then Siri can’t answer your question. From its perspective, there is no such thing as an “abortion clinic”, though “Planned Parenthood”, “birth control”, or “family planning” might exist, depending on your location and what clinics in your area call themselves. And if you asked Siri a different question, like “what is abortion”, you’d get a different answer because you’d be searching within a different data set.

That said it’s not impossible for a search engine to have an agenda. For instance, if Google detects a query for a local business name (e.g. “longman and eagle chicago”) they now always promote their own local listings at the top of the page over competitors like Yelp, even if Yelp’s pages are (objectively) older and more authoritative. But that takes work, and Google benefits by selling ads on those place pages. Apple doesn’t benefit by hiding abortion clinics in Siri’s search results.

Code Blog: Sexy instance_eval proxies in Ruby

Wed, 30 Nov 2011 09:59:00 -0600

Code Blog: Sexy instance_eval proxies in Ruby:

Some of the most mind-blowing language features in popular Ruby libraries/frameworks are made possible through the use of delegate proxies: objects that invisibly intercept method and variable calls in your code and forward them to one or more receiver objects.

For example this pattern is used in ActiveRecord to provide association methods that behave like Enumerables sometimes, like scopes at other times, while also providing some association-specific tasks like build or clear. One attribute can behave like three things at once — an Array, a scope, and an association — because when you send it messages, you’re actually talking to association proxy, a fourth kind of thing that serves as a kind of message bus between you and your data.

What I’m interested in right now is a simple, petty question: why is it that the block syntax in Sunspot — Mat Brown’s fantastic DSL for working with Apache Solr — lets me use variables or methods from outside its scope, like controller params or model attributes, but Karel Minarek’s ElasticSearch library Tire doesn’t? Again, the answer is a proxy.

In this gist, I go through each part of the ContextBoundDelegate proxy from Sunspot, explain how it works, then use it to describe a zoo using sexy block syntax.