Tag Archives: google

Thoughts

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…

RaoulAt 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.

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Reviews

New Google Calendar

Just read about Google and its work on developing CL2 – a web calendar. The link will take you to a page with screenshots. CL2 will be done in AJAX, like Gmail, and it’ll be tightly integrated with it, but what I think is really cool is its integration with other calendaring products, like iCal for the Mac. Yay! Integration and information-sharing across programs is always the way to go!

If CL2 and iCal could work seamlessly, and if CL2 would provide a dynamically generated web page which would combine multiple iCal calendars, that would be ideal. What bothers me about iCal is that it won’t let me combine my Home and Work calendars into a single view when I publish them to my .Mac account. If I could do that with CL2, that would be great!

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Events

Google publishes National Archives videos

Remember all of the old newsreels people used to see at the theater, before movies? Okay, so you don’t… but if you saw any old movies, you might have seen it there… Well, Google is working with the National Archives to put all of those old videos on Google Video. They already have about 120 of them up. Here they are. This is cool! They’re bringing back a part of our history that was simply not accessible to the majority of the population until now. It’s a wonderful thing. Here’s the article where I found out about it.

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Thoughts

Google should offer web hosting

Google has been tinkering with the idea of immediate indexing of changed content in websites for some time. Its current solution is to have you place certain files and bits of code inside your site, that can notify the Google bots when your content has changed. But there’s a much simpler solution: why not offer web hosting? With content already on its servers, Google won’t have to go out over an Internet connection to index stuff – it will be able to do it much faster in-house.

Granted, this sort of a decision from the juggernaut may run afoul with web hosting companies, but it’s a thought. If they’re giving away 2.5 GB of space for Gmail, why can’t they give away the same amount for web hosting, or offer paid plans?

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Events

Google Print launched today

Google Print just launched its first set of scanned books today. Go to http://print.google.com to search the materials. You’ll need a Google account to get access to all of the search results.

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