On a client project, we wanted to prevent search engines from accessing pages on the site. It needed to be directly linked to from some various sources, public, but not queryable. So we did the reasonable thing. We modified our robots.txt and added our metatags. Unfortunately, this didn't seem to work as we would expect and pages still showed up in Google searches.

Recently at work I developed a quick and dirty Google Calendar plugin for WordPress called gCal. In all simplicity, it needed to grab the public calendar XML file, parse it, shoot out a list and provide event details in a JavaScript modal popup.

Watching file sizes and following coding standards are only one simple way to optimize your website. Proper HTML will ensure you page is processed as smoothly as possible, but does not mean a major speed boost.

Over at Business MBA, I found this awesome infographic labeled "Behind the Numbers" that breaks down some information about one of the largest companies out there, Google.

When developing web applications it is always wise to use the most up to date APIs and know when to scale back on certain functionality.

Google+ has released a rough outline on their API for accessing data.  The Google+ API only allows for read-access to data, but this will still allow you to integrate a visitors social features around Google+.

Google just made it easy to link your Google+ profile to your blog or other articles. Simply ensure to put a link to your Google+ profile with a rel="author" tag.

<a rel="author" href="https://plus.google.com/101530880977549569019/" title="Google+ Profile">