Google released what looks to be a very useful piece of software around noon today: the Google Web Toolkit. Bret Taylor broke the news on the Google Blog. As those of us who work in web development know, AJAX is a pain to code and deploy. With the Google Web Toolkit, you can write the code in Java, then convert it to browser-compliant JavaScript and HTML on the fly. Nice!
Tag Archives: code
Hurrah!!! ComeAcross is alive!
ComeAcross is live and well, thanks to a few days of feverish work! I am deeply grateful to my beautiful wife, for helping me sort through all of the content and helping me link and categorize it! Love ya, sweetie! 😉
Those of you wondering why I’m calling this site new when it’s chock full of content, take a peek at this. This is, indeed a brand new site, in many, wonderful ways! So put on a propeller beanie, folks, and sing for joy, because our new, “free for all to use and enjoy” site is up and running! Okay, if you won’t put on the beanie, I won’t mind, but at least belt out a couple of verses from your favorite song. Come on, do it like you’re in the shower!
Here on ComeAcross, you’ll find all sorts of interesting information such as “Pigs in a Polka“, all categorized, searchable, and updated regularly with new, “fresh as the spring air” content. As a matter of fact, I’d be tickled pink if you thought of this site as a source of information from now on, and came back often to see what’s cooking!
➡ Updated 2/17/08: I’ve changed my site’s name to my own since I published this. This site could initially be found at comeacross.info. It is now found at raoulpop.com, which is where you are right now.
This site has been a labor of love for me, and it represents the culmination of years of publishing articles and other information on the web, for various of my sites. I was finally able to put together a great site with a single, large collection of content, where users can interact with each other and discuss the topics presented, thanks to a wonderful CMS/platform called WordPress. It would have taken me several months of coding to get this site going without WordPress, so the amazing capabilities of this platform can’t be underestimated.
Please, pull up a chair and enjoy! If you like it, spread the word! If you don’t, still spread the word, maybe others will! 🙂
Thanks!
Creating a module for Google's home page
Just spent the entire afternoon getting acquainted with a fun little document called the Google API Developer Guide. I think it’s cool because Google will let me create a module that I can submit to them for inclusion in their directory of modules. These modules can then be added to a user’s personalized home page, sort of like MSN or Yahoo do it.
I say I spent the entire afternoon because it may be fairly easy to write a basic XML file, it’s hard to write it in such a way that it pulls data correctly from an existing feed. In my case, I wanted to pull the latest blog entries from this blog. There was some fancy codework involved, and the directions just weren’t very clear. They showed me how to pull the text from the feed, including the entry title and content, but I just couldn’t figure out how to make my module look like the others in the directory. I guess one either has to be a good JavaScript programmer (which I’m not) or have access to some secret directions that Google isn’t sharing with everyone… I don’t know…
At any rate, FeedBurner once again saved me from coding hell. Because the only other alternative for me would have been to update a static XML file by hand every time I had a new blog entry, and I wasn’t going to do that! Well, FeedBurner has this nifty Headline Animator service, that will create a simple animated GIF which rolls through the latest blog entries very nicely. I used that to create the XML file, and bingo, I got my module done and submitted it. Now I’m curious to see if Google will accept it!
Oh, one more thing. I’d like to see if Google will expand the module directory categories. They’re fairly limited. I would like to see categories like Blogs, Personal, Culture, Travel, Photography, etc.
Designed by Braggadocio
I do web design and development consulting in my free time. I always strive for quality and originality in my designs. It never fails to amaze me how people always fall for cheap, imitative designs, simply because they’re flashier.
These “web designers” promise more traffic, more exposure, better looks, more and better everything, and of course they don’t deliver on any of those things, except on the surface. Yes, the designs may be flashier, and buttons might move, or the top banner might be in Flash, and it might do something that’ll make the site owner go “Wow”, but that’s all empty. It doesn’t do anything for the site’s substance, nor does it do anything for the search engines, because the site hasn’t been properly coded for them. Or, they’ll design the site in Frontpage… The telltale signs are easy to spot: _vti files are everywhere, the page weight is large, and the graphics just aren’t that good. But people fall for this stuff!
It never fails to amaze me… It leaves me speechless, really. I compare the bragging with the product delivered, and I can see the wide gap between what’s been promised and actually created. Yet the site owners don’t see it. How can I make them see where the real value lies?
How I use FeedBurner
I think FeedBurner is one of the coolest sites out there today, and I wanted to share how I use it with the world. My life is a lot easier because of it – I can manage my feeds in ways I couldn’t even imagine before. I love it. Here’s why:
I was able to move the location of my feeds from one domain to another, one directory to another and one web host to another without any interruption in service or problems accesing my feed items. Now that’s cool! Portability, here I come to enthuse about you! 🙂
I’ve been able to splice my feed with my del.icio.us bookmarks, and that’s been wonderful! Not only is that a “nice to have” item for me, but it’s saving me lots of time! You see, I put out the ComeAcross Podcast. It’s a quick summary of interesting stuff I stumble on. Well, along with it, I provide the audience with a collection of detailed info about the things I mention in the show. For the 1st three episodes, I did it with zipped PDFs – but you know, publishers aren’t too keen on reproduction of their content – so I decided to drop that before one of their lawyers contacted me…
Next I switched to coding a summary of links to each of the articles or websites I talked about, but that was getting bothersome. I’d have to copy shortcuts to those websites to my hard drive when I found the articles, then when I put the show together, open them up again, and write the summary in Dreamweaver. Well, I thought, why couldn’t I do away with that step? When I discovered the Link Splicing feature in FeedBurner and realized I could use that to distribute the links, I jumped up for joy! Yes, less headaches! Now for my next show, my 8th, I’ll simply tell my subscribers to check my FeedBurner feed for the del.icio.us links mentioned in the podcast! Cool!
Here’s more good news about Link Splicing: with the help of support folks at FeedBurner, I was pointed to a hack which allows me to use only specially tagged items from my del.icio.us bookmarks for my feeds. So, for example, I use items tagged Dignoscentia on my three Dignoscentia feeds (The Dignoscentia Blog, Dignoscentia Bible Podcast and Dignoscentia Podcast Biblic). And I use only items tagged for the podcast on the ComeAcross Podcast feed.
Of course, I love the FeedFlare option as well. Boy, does that come in handy to make it easy for people to add various blog or podcast items to del.icio.us! That’s like a guaranteed traffic increase right there! The easier it is for people to share things with others, the easier it is for me to get my content out there!
I am enamored with BuzzBoost and Headline Animator. I use them to promote my content. I use the Chicklet Chooser a lot. I post the Feed icon on all my sites to let visitors know they can browse my feeds directly. And it’s also on the FeedBurner Support Forums that I found out how to advertise my feed to crawlers by posting the links in my code. Check out the source code for my home page to see what I mean. All of my feeds are present there! 🙂 Cool!
The stats are really, really cool! FeedBurner breaks down my readers by app used to access the feed, and also gives me stats about which feed items get accessed. Last, but not least, I love PingShot! It’s instant gratification. Everyone (about 10 or so of the biggest blog or podcast locators) knows about a new item on my feeds as soon as I ping FeedBurner.
The FeedBurner support folks are the quickest in the biz, and for a free service, that’s saying a LOT. They’re right on the money, they’re friendly, and they understand English! They’re not outsourced! Yes! 🙂
Thanks, FeedBurner, for making my geeky life easier and more fun!
Raoul Pop 