Archive for April, 2007

Apro25

Christian Decker

3

Getting the most out of Google Homepage

Google Homepage has been around for quite some time now and I’ve been using it for most of it. Last month I figured out that using it as a productivity tool, instead of just using it to waste time reading the last Digg headlines or watching random movies from YouTube, may be a good idea. So first of all I threw away all those time wasters, or better, I banned them into a separate Tab. So now I have 3 Tabs:

  • Work
  • Admin
  • Time Wasting

Google IG - RememberTheMilk
So first of all we need to decide what we is usefull and what isn’t, obviously the YouTube Widget and the Digg Widget aren’t fit for the Work Tab, because they distract and don’t help working. Also an overkill of 5-6 todo lists are unnecessary, best thing would be to have a todo list for things that can be done regardless of time, think of it as a bucket where you throw in the idea that just popped into your head so you can get back to it once you finished what you are currently doing (remember: multitasking is bad :) ). RememberTheMilk has done the trick for me, and also their module allows me to add, edit and complete tasks without leaving the Homepage, which is really important.

Google IG - Google Calendar
Next we need something to keep track of appointments, they are no todos, and are fixed in time, so what better than a nice Calendar Widget, I personally prefer to just see the next upcoming appointments instead of having a calendar and then having to click on items to see what they are. So the tool of choice is Google Calendar MarkII Magic which again allows you to add new appointments without having to leave the Homepage, and when you click on an item the details are shown in a balloon. Another usefull feature is that it allows you to display all of your Google Calendar Calendars, all in a one widget.

Google IG - Google Notebook
So now that we have taken care of the Tasks and Appointments, we can move on to other issues. Sometimes an idea jumps into mind, an idea for a project, or anything that can’t really be described as a task, so that you have to take a note of it, maybe elaborate it later. What could be better than Google Notebook? It takes close to no time at all to write down two lines, no need to organize it, just write what comes to your mind, and you can safely forget about it until you finished what you are working on, because you will later be able to restart exactly where you left it. So the Google Notebook Widget is an absolute must

Google IG - Gmail
Since Gmail has replaced my Desktop client I keep track of all of my Inboxes aggregated using the Gmail Gadget. This actually depends on how big your daily mail traffic is, if it isn’t too high, like mine, it is perfectly ok to have it, because it won’t distract you too much, otherwise you probably better not add it to your homepage, as it can become really distracting when every minute or so new messages come in.

Google IG - ClearCheckboot
And finally, being a student, I’m always a bit short of cash, so it’s best to keep track of my expenses, so I just added the ClearCheckbook Widget. Nothing fancy here, it just displays the current contents of my accounts, can be depressing sometimes :p

So putting it all together we have the following Homepage:

  1. RememberTheMilk
  2. Google Calendar MarkII Magic
  3. Google Notebook
  4. Gmail Gadget
  5. ClearCheckbook

So this is my Homepage, what about yours?

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Apro20

Christian Decker

0

Google’s new Feed API

JSONP feeds are great! They allow you to access information in a secure way across domains, build slim mashups and keep the load off your own servers. Sadly though they aren’t as widespread as many of us would like them to be, still RSS Feeds and Atom Feeds have the majority. But now Google comes into play: the new Service from the Google Ajax API’s team Google AJAX Feed not only translates RSS and Atom Feeds into JSONP Feeds, but also caches them for you, speeding up the loading, and keeping the load off the publishers side (a feature Digg & Co. will be grateful for).

And so with only a few lines of code 

<html>
  <head>
    <script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.google.com/jsapi?key=YOUR_KEY_HERE"></script>
    <script type="text/javascript">
 
    google.load("feeds", "1");
 
    function initialize() {
      var feed = new google.feeds.Feed("http://www.digg.com/rss/index.xml");
      feed.load(function(result) {
        if (!result.error) {
          var container = document.getElementById("feed");
          for (var i = 0; i < result.feed.entries.length; i++) {
            var entry = result.feed.entries[i];
            var div = document.createElement("div");
            div.appendChild(document.createTextNode(entry.title));
            container.appendChild(div);
          }
        }
      });
    }
    google.setOnLoadCallback(initialize);
 
    </script>
  </script></head>
  <body>
    <div id="feed"></div>
  </body>
</html>
you can grab the Digg.com feed via Javascript.

What a beautiful day to be a developer :)

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Apro04

Christian Decker

0

Y! Pipes support for Prototype

Dojo did it about a month ago, they added support for Y! Pipes to dojo.io.bind. So I figured I should write a small wrapper that works like the Prototype Ajax.Request object (as I did a few months ago for Google Calendar) for Yahoo! Pipes. So here it is: YPipe Library 0.1.

To use it just find the id of the pipe you want to request, so if the URL of the pipe is something like this

http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=vp9FNLji2xGA7PYxEpPZnA

then just take the bold part of it and create a new request just like this: 

cal = new YPipe("vp9FNLji2xGA7PYxEpPZnA",{
    onsuccess: someFunction
  });

This immediately fires up the request and after completing the someFunction will be called with the first argument being the returned JSON-Object. It’s as simple as it gets :-P

For a quick demo head over here.

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Apro03

Christian Decker

1

State of OpenID – April 2007: By the numbers

Scott Kveton of JanRain (the company behind Jyte and MyOpenID) has posted his first post in what will hopefully become a long series of State of OpenID posts. He quickly runs through the numbers behind the ever growing adoption of OpenID in the wild:
  • Adoption continues: some big companies are joining in.
  • User totals: 75 million potential OpenID users.
  • More sites coming on-line: 5 – 7% growth
  • OpenID 2.0 continues to bake: the standard is actively being developed.
  • More servers than sites: this is actually negative, many providers but few consumers.
  • Integrated social networking: first steps towards a decentralized social network?
It’s really interesting to see some official numbers, let’s hope he keeps us informed :-)
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