Jacob’s Technical Blog

A while ago, I found myself needing to upload many document files into Google Docs. I saw that Google had a new API for doing such, so I decided to write a quick little app for the Mac to do just that. Just drag and drop documents onto the icon, and away their uploaded.

I had never written any sort of real Mac application, so I just kind of glued something together out of Python, applescript, and a couple of helper apps. I threw the source up at Google Project Hosting, which has been good, because otherwise I would have been supporting the thousands of downloads.

Recently, my little droplet app became more famous. It was featured on lifehacker.com as a featured Mac Download. My favorite line from their post was, “Gdocsuploader is still new and a bit unpolished.” I think it should be considered more than just a bit unpolished. They should have said, “this thing might work, and is about as unpolished as lava rock.”

There have been a multitude of other posts about my little project:

• Web Worker Daily claims it could save you a bit of friction.
• VinodLive says it shines with some cool drag and drop options
• i use this shows 2 people are using it. I wonder how many people use i use this.
• samjones jaiku’ed it saying it saves time. Erik also jaiku’ed it when he added it to his del.icio.us bookmarks.
• Geekout.tv actually mentioned me by name! Thanks to them for the nice personal reference
• It hass even gone international at macworld.idg.se. I don’t know what they’ve said, but I hope it is nice.

Thanks to everyone who wrote something nice about it.

Google should provide an option to allow projects hosted at Google Code to display and profit from Google Ads. Project owners who would opt into the ads would benefit from the revenue they collect. Google would benefit as well by collecting their share of the advertising revenue. Users might benefit because they can perhaps find other advertised services similar to the project they might be currently looking at.

Recently I’ve decide to open source some more code and templates that I’ve written. I could either share that code from my own website, or I could share it on Google Code, being able to make use of some of the other features they have there. The biggest advantage to providing the code from my website is that I’m able to collect on any advertising revenue, which in the past has been around a dollar or two per thousand views. If Google could provide me a way to generate similar revenue by hosting my code on their site, not only would I consider hosting my code their, but I would find more incentive to write open source code projects.

The only major problem with this might be abuse. If I wanted to make a few extra bucks, what is stopping me from “forking” someone elses project just to host their code under a slightly different name on Google code and profit from the visitors I would have stolen from the more legitimate site.

While Google is perhaps one of the most innovative web development companies out there, sometimes I am slightly disappointed because they fail to meet my exceedingly high expectations. Google has developed and released very few applications that I would consider as world changing. The short list includes Search, Gmail, Maps, Spreadsheets, and Calendar. That isn’t to say that Google hasn’t purchased and developed other emerging technologies which might also been revolutionary–Blogger, Picassa, Writely, Keyhole, and YouTube–but those applications got their start outside of Google. That also isn’t to say that Google hasn’t developed other standards and technologies which have greatly furthered the Internet. I’m simply making the point that Google has developed, from the start, only a few applications that most Internetizens would consider life-changing.

There is perhaps one product which is little known that I consider as having changed the Internet forever. This app has never really seen daylight outside the lab. In fact, its been a part of Google Labs for the last three and a half years. The product of which I’m referring is Google Suggest. If web applications were a family tree, Google Suggest would have been the grandfather of the so-called Web 2.0 apps we have today.

Google Suggest makes use of a web browser feature called XmlHttpRequest. This feature allows the browser to connect back to the web server and download additional content after the web page has already loaded. Today we see this feature used all around the web, but when Google Suggest was first released, few people ever knew that it existed. Post-loading content from the server was so revolutionary, that it has seen incredible adoption all over the net. So although most people never really knew about Google Suggest, it has indeed been the spark that lit the Web 2.0 firestorm.

Today Google released a new product platform which may be listed among the great revolution products from Google. Google App Engine (not to be confused with Google Apps for your Domain) is a service which allows web application developers to host their applications on Google’s servers, using Google technology.

Google App Engine solves the single biggest challenge in web application development: hosting. Having a web host that is well configured, well connected, and well tested is usually expensive, but it seems that Google will be providing at least some level of hosing for free. This really gives developers a whole new level of freedom for creating apps, and I think this will foster a whole new level of web application creativity. Who knows, this might be just the beginning of something called, Web 3.0.

Google has a calculator built right into its search engine. For example, if you want to know:

• 33/3
• pi dollars in euros
• 1 mile in furlongs

One thing it doesn’t do is date calculations. For example, how cool would it be to type in today + 155 days or 12:59am + 10 minutes?

Please Google, help me calculate dates!

In my attempt to clean up my jacobbrunson.com inbox (hosted through Google Apps; powered by Gmail), I wanted to take all the email messages about voicemail from GrandCentral, Gizmo Project, and others, and apply a label to them so I can sort them away.

I thought an appropriate label for these types of messages would be Voicemail.

When I tried this, it returned the following error message:

System specific names are not allowed. Please try another name.

I don’t understand why Voicemail would be a system specific name, unless Google has something special coming to Gmail.

When Google calculates the importance of a page, they use an ranking algorithm known as Pagerank to produce a numerical value for the page. We don’t know very much about Google’s Pagerank algorithm, except that it is complicated and evaluates lots of criteria, such as number of links, quality of page, and freshness.

Every once in a while Google exports their Pagerank values into a database that can be accessed by the Google Toolbar (also available as a bundled download with the Firefox browser). When Google performs such an update, people can see the Pagerank value for a particular site or page.

The latest export is currently underway, and I’ve noticed that the new Pagerank values for some of my sites and pages have been kind of disappointing. For example, I was excited when my main blog was promoted from a 4 to a 5 during the last Pagerank update, but has now fallen to a 3. This technical blog has fallen from a 3 to a 2, and my other blogs have stayed at about a 3 or 2.

I blame the lack of freshness of my blogs. During the last Pagerank update, I was blogging a new post almost every day. During the last three months, this has slowed down considerably, as blogging isn’t as important as it used to be for me. As a result, my Pagerank is down. This is too bad, but I’m not devaluing my life because of it.

Recently, Google released their Google Desktop product for Linux. I found out about it just this evening. Earlier today, I was searching through my home directory looking for some old files from a long time ago, and I though, “Wouldn’t it be great if Google Desktop Search was available for Linux?” About two hours later, my wish came true.
Continue reading Keeping Linux under Ctrl-Ctrl…

For one of my web developer projects, I've tasked myself with building a homepage similar to Google's Personalized Home Page, now called iGoogle.  I thought it would be great to provide various modules on the page, and that I could provide a custom set of modules based on audience.

Continue reading What is it? It’s a whatsit…

I noticed recently that Google has a web page widget for Google Talk.  I have one major suggestion:

I manage an instance of Google Apps for Your Domain.   It would be more than great if Google could work out an instance of the Talk Widget to work with a Google Apps domain.  The widget could be either added to the customized Google Apps homepage, or it could even be added to another homepage for the domain.  

Continue reading Suggestion for Google Talk Widget…

I was reading various blogs this evening, and I saw that Google has released version 3 of their toolbar for Firefox.  I immediately thought, "Cool."  So I went to my extensions menu in Firefox and selected "Find updates."  Nothing happened.  I expected it to come back to me and say that there were some new updates available, but nope.  Not for any of my extensions which is kind of weird.  Maybe it is because I'm using a Mac.

Update: About 10 minutes later, I'm re-reading this, and I realize that I could have actually read the Google blog post.  They released the version 3 beta of the toolbar. That would certainly explain why it isn't automatically updating in Firefox.  I guess I got over excited about it and posted before thinking.  How embarrassing.