Hackszine.com: Google Archives

Archive: Google

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October 11, 2008

Fine-tune Gmail's IMAP settings

Tweaking IMAP settings

Gmail Labs has released Advanced IMAP Controls, which lets you control the labels that appear as IMAP folders and make Gmail behave a bit more like a traditional IMAP server:

From the team that brought you Mail Goggles, here comes...Advanced IMAP Controls, a Labs feature that lets you fine-tune your Gmail IMAP experience. You can choose which labels to sync in IMAP -- useful if you find your mail client choking on a big [Gmail]/All Mail folder.

After enabling this Lab, just go to the Labels tab under Settings. You'll see a new 'Show in IMAP' checkbox next to each of your labels. Uncheck the box and the corresponding folder will disappear from IMAP.

New in Labs: Advanced IMAP Controls [via jkOnTheRun]

September 24, 2008

Google Gadget that monitors Arduino sensor data

Matthew Karas sent us a hack for creating an iGoogle homepage interface for physical measurement devices. Using an Arduino and a python script, he found a clever way to send real-time sensor data to a Google Gadget, and it doesn't even require having a web server.

I managed to hack up an arduino to upload data to google docs in real time. I then created a real time data gadget and sent that to google home page. That way I can monitor a sensor network from anywhere, with minimal cash outlay. I don't need to have a web host. I did it in two evenings.

The python code can run on a laptop connected the the Arduino. This script reads sensor data from the device and then posts it to a Google Spreadsheet using the python gdata API. From there, you can easily use the spreadsheet as a datasource for a Google Gadget which is then embedded in iGoogle or wherever you want to view your sensor data.

He's posted the necessary code and instructions for making this work. You should be able to customize it for your own projects and get something like this up and running in no time flat.

Real Time Arduino Data To iGoogle Homepage
gdata - Google Data Python API

September 8, 2008

Run Google Chrome in Linux with Wine

If you're waiting impatiently for the native Linux release of Chrome, check out the instructions by Romeo Adrian Cioaba, who was able to get Chrome running on his Ubuntu box using Wine. The latest Wine release (1.1.4) contains a fix that corrects some rendering problems with the application, so make sure to upgrade first.

Most of the application is functional, except for HTTPS support. Unfortunately, according to the Wine wiki, this is because SSL support has only been stubbed in at this point. I can't say for sure if it'd work, but you could try copying the native Windows secur32.dll and crypt32.dll files into your Wine installation (assuming you can get your hands on them). There's a chance that there might be a few other incomplete libraries that you'll run into along this path, but if you get it to work, let us know.

Install Google Chrome on Linux using wine [via Lifehacker]

August 17, 2008

Use iPhone version of Google Reader on your Mac

I'm fond of iPhone-specific versions of web sites; they usually have just the minimal set of features you need and are very easy to use. Adam Darowski just posted a great way to get the iPhone version of Google Reader running on a Mac as a desktop app:

Do you find yourself checking feeds on your iPhone and thinking, "Man... I wish Google Reader looked like this on my computer, too." I have. Using Fluid.app and a bit of user agent trickery, you can make it happen...

Read all about it; thanks to Adam's instructions, you can get this going yourself in minutes. Using Fluid.app to Bring Google Reader for iPhone to your Desktop

August 12, 2008

10 Google Apps Tips

1. Create special email addresses to better filter your mail

This one's an oldie but goodie. If you're using Gmail, you can append "+something" to your name in your email address to better sort incoming mails. For instance, if your name is John Doe and you wanted to separate work mail from family mail, you can use "john.doe+work@gmail.com" and "john.doe+family@gmail.com"... and then create a filter in Gmail to differently label incoming mail to these two addresses. Just use the Create a Filter link in Gmail, and enter your customized email in the "To:" field.

On that note, you can also remove the dot in the name of your email -- as in "johndoe@gmail.com" -- and messages still reach you fine. (On yet another note, is there anybody out there who's actually really named John Doe? He must get an awful lot of spam.)

2. Check the online discussion of your blog posts

If you have a blog, you might want to check who talks about the things you post. There are many ways to go about this, and one involves Google Blog Search. Just type the full URL of your blog post in question -- say, http://example.com/archive/102.html -- and hit the search button (you can also use the "link:" operator preceding your URL, though Google adds that one automatically for you). To the right hand side you can now sort the results by date, and you'll see the latest other blogs linking to yours.

As another interesting way to keep updated on discussions circling around your blog, company or person, you can also use Google News Alerts (for extra usefulness, include spelling errors in alerts you set up -- like ["acme inc" OR "amce inc"]).

3. Prepare to be moved away from Google Page Creator

This is more of a warning than a tip... if you're currently using Google Page Creator as a website creation tool, note that Google on their help page for this service announced they're slowly closing it down! Instead of Google Page Creator, Google say they shifted their focus on the newer Google Sites, and new sign-ups for Page Creator are not accepted anymore. Google writes, "If you are currently a Page Creator user, you can continue to use Page Creator and your pages will automatically be transitioned to Google Sites later this year. We are committed to making this transition as smooth and easy as possible, and we will post more details as we get closer to the transition time. You can also manually move your web pages from Page Creator to Google Sites or other service providers at any time."

4. Get a replacement for Google Answers

Have you ever had a chance to see the Google Answers service while it was still active? Google shut it down for actual usage a while ago, but while it was live, it was a nice service to ask a paid question and then have a researcher get back with an answer to you (somewhat similar to Yahoo Answers, but in higher quality... if I may say so as an ex-Google Answers Researcher in 2002). However, there's a cool replacement for this service: Uclue. In fact, they have nothing but ex-Google Answers Researchers on board; I'm using that site quite a bit myself.

5. Create a quick link to your unread mails

You might have heard of the Gmail Labs which allows you to opt-in to special, prototypical features. I just wanted to mention my favorite experimental feature of them all: a Quick Link to your unread mail. Now first of all, let me say there's several user types in Gmail (as Gmail designer Kevin Fox explained), and if you're the kind of Gmail user who archives mails as soon as they're read, you won't need the following tip. If, however, you let everything flow into your inbox but you don't like to archive read mails, creating an "Unread mail" quick link comes in handy.

To do so, just click on Settings on top and switch to the Labs tab. Check the "Enable" box next to Quick Links. Approve by hitting Save Changes at the bottom. Now search Gmail for [in:inbox is:unread] (without the square brackets) and in the Quick Links box appearing to the left side, click Add Quick Link. Enter "Unread" for the title and approve the dialog. Next time you want to see all your unread mails in one go, just click the Unread link to the left!

6. Automatically expand spreadsheet sets

Are you using Google Spreadsheets as your web-based spreadsheet editor alternative to desktop programs like Excel? If you do, give the "magic" auto-completions a try. To understand what this does, enter "Superman" in the top left cell, and enter "Batman" and "Wonder Woman" in the cells below. Now select all three cells you created. Hold down the Ctrl key, and drag the bottom right corner of the selection downwards over the other cells. Notice something? Your list is now continued with entries like "spider man", "x men", "green lantern". (Admittedly, not all continuations make sense -- "star wars"? -- but where would be the fun in magic without surprises.)

What's happening here? Well, the Google Labs have a member called Google Sets. (Being from 2002, it's the oldest member still listed in the Labs, too.) This tool automatically expands a given set of items. Like "Batman" and "Superman", but also anything else that could be thought of as a group. For instance, entering "google" and "yahoo" also shows "altavista", "lycos" and "msn". Entering "tom cruise" and "nicolas cage" yields "brad pitt", "angelina jolie", "johnny depp" and others.

7. See the images of a website

Do you want to get to see only the images of a particular website? You can, by using Google Image Search in combination with the "site:" operator. To see all images Google crawled on Makezine.com, for instance, you'd search Google Images for site:makezine.com. This returns around 44,800 images, though as things go, Google will restrict you to look at around the first 1000 pics. Note that you can combine this search type with other keywords, too -- like the keyword "screenshot" -- and you can also mix it with other settings from the advanced image search page... like by checking the "faces" box to show faces only (with 117 results for that one on Makezine.com).

8. Use the Google Toolbar to translate a document

I like my Firefox browser relatively uncluttered but there's one or two features I don't want to miss... like the Google Toolbar's "Translate Page into English" functionality. You can find it as part of the Google Toolbar for Firefox. On any page you're on, you can click the arrow icon next to the translate button, and pick Translate Page into English. The translated page will load in place of the original one after some seconds. Not only is this approach quite quick, it's also useful if you're not sure which source language the page in question is held in (like when you check discussions in other blogs by using tip #2 above).

9. Search through several sites at once

If you often search through a set of sites to discover something, creating a Custom Search Engine can be helpful. Already in a normal Google search, you can enter something like [site:makezine.com google] to get all Make posts containing the keyword "google". But what if you want to have results on that keyword from all O'Reilly blogs?

First, let's assemble a list of some O'Reilly blogs. Open up oreilly.net/blogs/ and note down the URLs of the sites printed in the footer, like http://radar.oreilly.com, http://ignite.oreilly.com, http://craftzine.com, http://makezine.com and http://hackszine.com. Now jump to the Google Custom Search Engine service and hit the "Create..." button. Name your search engine -- like "O'Reilly Search" -- and provide something for the other fields as well. Leave the "Search engine keywords" field empty, but in the "Sites to search" field, enter the URLs you assembled above one by one. Hit the Next, and then the Finish button, and you're done. You can now visit your Google Custom Search Engine's homepage (as listed in the dashboard) and enter a keyword as usual -- you'll see the results will be restricted to those hosted at the sites you previously provided.

10. Find online content to re-use

Do you want to find content on the web you can re-use on your blog, homepage, and other places? The Creative Commons license comes to the rescue. Creative Commons is an effort to bring a more relaxed copyright system to people in order to better share and re-use content (check out their homepage to see how you can license your content as Creative Commons).

To search for content using this license only, skip Google's normal search box and go right to their Advanced Search, as linked from the Google homepage. On that page, expand the part linked as "Date, usage rights ...". Select "free to use or share" or a similar license in the "Usage rights" field, and enter a keyword on top as usual. Now when you hit the Advanced Search button, you'll note how pages in the results are using the CC license; clicking on the respective license on a page will let you know what specifically you can do with this content, as there are different CC frameworks available.

From the Maker Shed:

Google Apps Hacks by Philipp Lenssen - all about Google Docs & Spreadsheets, Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Presentations, and more! Price: $29.99 Buy it in the Maker Shed

[This post originally appeared at Lifehacker]

June 30, 2008

Google Apps Hacks Slashdotted today!

Yay! Philipp Lenssen's Google Apps Hacks just got reviewed on Slashdot by JR Peck, who had some kind words for the book:

Well, this book is an excellent introduction to Google's many on-line applications. I use many already and still learned of a couple new ones when I read this book. It also does bring all that instruction into one place, and provides a very user-friendly style of instruction. There is also a very nice feature, 8 sections that take the reader "Beyond Google...". Each of these sections informs the reader about alternative software that provides similar functionality to the Google software described in the preceding chapter. This is really a great resource and an unexpected bonus for anyone who reads the book.

Slashdot | Google Apps Hacks

(In the review, JR raises a good point about the definition of a Hack. We use the definition "A non-obvious solution to an interesting problem", although JR leans toward some other definitions mentioned in the review).

From the Maker Shed:

Google Apps Hacks by Philipp Lenssen - all about Google Docs & Spreadsheets, Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Presentations, and more!
Price: $29.99
Buy it in the Maker Shed

June 23, 2008

How we made Google Apps Hacks

When Philipp Lenssen started writing Google Apps Hacks, we made up our minds that we'd develop the book in Google Docs. A while back, Philipp wrote up Part I of the story of how we made the book. From Writing a Book in Google Docs:

Currently, my editor Brian Jepson and I are collaboratively writing the book (tentatively titled) Google Office Hacks by O'Reilly using Google Docs. I wanted to outline the process we came up with, and maybe it's helpful for you too for certain needs.

I just wrote Part II of this story, and Philipp's posted it to the Google Blogoscoped blog. From From Google Docs to InDesign:

One of the tricky parts for us was getting the chapters into InDesign, the book layout program we use for our books and magazines. I know where we were coming from - Google Docs' HTML format - and where we were going to - InDesign's tagged text format.

From the Maker Shed:

Google Apps Hacks by Philipp Lenssen - all about Google Docs & Spreadsheets, Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Presentations, and more!
Price: $29.99
Buy it in the Maker Shed

May 1, 2008

Server-side Google Analytics

Peter van der Graaf did a little analysis of the URLs that are generated by the Google Analytics Javascript API and put together a very useful tutorial for building Analytics-enabled applications without the use of Javascript.

When you look at the analytics javascript code you see that it combines several sets of data into an image request. This image request sends the right data to Google (not the javascript). When you know what url you should use for the image, you can call the image directly and send the same data. Of course you need to be able to request the image url and that isn't easy from another image, rss feed or pdf. This is why we request it "server side".

You can add the code to the PHP that drives a blog site, for instance, and generate page views when your RSS feed is hit. You can even write a very simple script to proxy images and downloads, which will let you track hit data for all files on your site, not just the html pages viewed by a javascript enabled browser.

Taken a step further, you could even use this on the client side, triggering analytics views from standalone Flash apps or even desktop applications.

The one thing you need to keep in mind is that server-side analytics requests will appear to come from your server, not the client's machine. So while you can track page views and download events this way, you'll loose a lot of the information about your user base. Because of this, it would probably make sense to use a separate tracking ID for the server side events.

Google Analytics Without Javascript

April 11, 2008

Automatic outbound link analytics with jQuery

I had the challenge of adding Google Analytics tracking code to all the outbound links on a site I've been working on. There are hundreds of these links scattered around the site, so rather than try and edit a bunch of links, manually adding onclick handlers in an error-prone fashion, I decided to get lazy and write some code to handle it for me.

First I was thinking about doing some sort of regular expression search and replace throughout the site and database, but that reminded me of CSS3 selectors and their ability to do simple pattern matching. I've seen people apply a special style to outbound links this way, so after a few minutes of monkeying around with things, I now have a chunk of jQuery that will automatically track clicks on all outbound links.

Here it is, in a nutshell:

jQuery(function($){ // Match all anchor tags in the "maincontent" div with // urls that begin with "http" but don't contain the // string "yourwebsite.com" $('#maincontent a[href^="http"]').not('a[href*="yourwebsite.com"]').click(function(){ try { // Get the href url and toss out the "http://" var href = $(this).attr('href'); if ( href.indexOf("://") > 0 ) { // Track the page in Google Analytics as // "/tracking/outbound/www.somesite.com/foo" var outbound = '/tracking/outbound/' + href.split("://",2)[1]; pageTracker._trackPageview(outbound);
} } catch( e ) {} } }

With this running, all of my internal pages get tracked as usual, and any external links will appear as pageviews that look like "/tracking/outbound/www.somesite.com/foo".

If you link out to many different pages on several sites, keeping the full site url in the tracking code and building these deep paths is particularly useful. Google Analytics will allow you to drill down into the tree like it was normal content and quickly pull numbers on how many total outbound clicks you received (/tracking/outbound), how many went to www.somesite.com (/tracking/outbound/www.somesite.com), and how many people clicked out to a particular page on the site.

This saved me quite a bit of time and is immensely more flexible than any other outbound tracking method I've used. I hope this helps someone else. Drop me a line in the comments if this works out for you.

Update: it looks like I wasn't the first to do this. An article by Rebecca Murphey shows how to do something similar, while also adding the referring post title to the tracking code. Pretty cool stuff, I must say.

March 20, 2008

Visualization API for Google Docs

This looks really useful. Google recently released an API for using Gadgets and visualizations inside of (or pulling from) the Google Docs spreadsheet system. Developers can create useful visualization models, like Gantt charts or geographic heat maps, and Docs users can use these tools inside their own documents.

The Gadgets in Docs framework also allows the visualizations to be plugged into iGoogle, so you can have an up-to-date visualization data on your iGoogle page that pulls from spreadsheet data in real-time. I found the timeline gadget, pictured above, to be particularly useful, but if you don't find the particular visualization you need, you can now go ahead and make it yourself.

Visualization API [via Google Blog]
Example Visualization Gadgets

March 10, 2008

SketchUp has a Ruby API

I guess it's been available for a few months, but I just noticed that there's a Ruby API for Google SketchUp. Looks like a cool tool for extending the building interface, integrating SketchUp entities with external software, and building procedural stuff, like making terrain or stairs.

Here's a video of SketchUp developer Mark Limber talking about some of the possible ways to extend the software with the Ruby API.

Google SketchUp Ruby API - Link
SketchUp API Blog - Link

January 18, 2008

Homebrew Google Analytics API

It's too bad that Google Analytics doesn't have an official API, but Chris Riley came up with a fun solution for pushing analytics content into a format that is easily accessible from your web applications.

Using Google Analytics' scheduled reporting feature, you can have an analytics report automatically sent to a public, read-only Google Group in XML format. From there, the group's latest post can be pulled in through Yahoo pipes where it is filtered and exposed as a JSON service, ready for you to pull into a web application via Javascript. Yoikes!

Chris' example shows you how to do this to add a popular posts feature to your blog. You should be able to tweak the code to export other information from Analytics as well, including geographic distribution, popular search terms, or even visitor and pageview data.

No Google Analytics API? No Problem! - Link

August 31, 2007

Google Earth has a flight simulator

The latest version of Google Earth contains a hidden feature: a full-fledged flight simulator! Press Command+Option+A in OS X or Ctrl+Alt+A on a PC or Linux box and you'll be greeted with a hidden dialog box that lets you choose an aircraft (F16 or SR22) and an airport. Once you've made you selection, you'll be placed inside the aircraft. You can then fly around the globe in a free flight simulator, viewing the scenery that is pulled from Google Earth's map files.

I wasn't able to get things to work at first, so if the key combo doesn't work for you, try zooming way into Earth and try again. It seems like you can't activate the feature when you are out in space looking down on the eath. Once you've activated the feature, it will be available from the Tools menu.

Force feedback joysticks are supposed to be supported, though I've only been able to test with a mouse and keyboard. The basic controls are PageUp/Dn for thrust, G for gear up/down, Left/Right for aileron, Up/Dn for elevator and Shift+Left/Shift+Right for rudder. You can also click the screen to enable the mouse to control the aileron and elevator controls. See the link at the bottom for the full set of controls.

Google Earth Flight Simulator - Link
Keyboard Controls - Link
Download Google Earth - Link

August 14, 2007

Google Office Hacks

Philipp Lenssen of Google Blogoscoped is working on an upcoming book on Google Office:

I'm happy to tell you I've started writing a book with O'Reilly's Maker Media group, currently titled Google Office Hacks! The book will not focus on search, but on the existing & growing applications suite Google provides. It will provide tricks to get things done with Google Docs, Google Spreadsheets, Gmail, Google Calendar, iGoogle, Google Analytics, Maps, YouTube, SketchUp, Presentations (if Google decides to release it!) and more...
For this book, we'd love to get your hacks in it too.

Check out Philipp's blog post for more details, and keep an eye on Hackszine.com for more information - Link

July 21, 2007

Use Adsense on password protected sites

In order to display relevant advertisements, Adsense has its own web crawler which scans Adsense enabled URLs for page content. This helps Adsense get a clue of what the particular page is all about, and enables it to display ads with purchased keywords that match your content.

For forums and other password protected sites, however, the Adsense crawler is usually able to see only an error or login request page. With little information to go on, ads cannot be placed correctly, so Adsense on password protected sites was a bit of an impossibility. Until Google added the "Site Authentication" feature, that is.

If you go into Adsense setup, there's a new tab called "Site Authentication". On that tab, you can configure Adsense with the login and password information that it needs to authenticate with your site before indexing your pages for content. You'll need to know a little about how your login form is configured for your particular site, but it's fairly simple to figure out from looking at the source. Here's an example:

Locate Form URL and Variables
The login form on a Drupal website that I run looks like this. I've stripped out everything but the form anf input fields, and your site may differ, but you can use this as an example:

<form action="user/login?destination=node" method="post">
<input type="text" maxlength="64" class="form-text" name="edit[name]" id="edit-name" size="15" value="" />
<input type="password" class="form-password" maxlength="64" name="edit[pass]" id="edit-pass" size="15" value="" />
<input type="submit" class="form-submit" name="op" value="Log in"  />

So from this I know that the form method is "POST", the URL for the login page is http://examplesite.com/user/login?destination=node and the're are two user input fields for the username and password: "edit[name]" and "edit[pass]". There is also the submit button, with the name "op" and the value of "Log in". The submit button value may or may not be important for the log in script, but we'll use it just in case.

Give Adsense Authentication Information

Now you can jump over to the "Site Authentication" page and add the necessary information. First, make a speical username and password on your site for Adsense to use. Adsense will be using this account to log in and browse your site's content, so make sure it has the neccessary permissions to see everything that you want ads to appear on. For the purposes of this example, let's say the new user is "adsenseuser" and the password is "123abc".

In the restricted directory or url field, put the portion of your site's URL that restricted content is under. This might be http://www.restrictedsite.com/ or https://www.testsite.com/membersonly or something like that.
For the authentication url field, enter in the url that you discovered earlier which the normal log in form is posting to. In the above example, this was http://examplesite.com/user/login?destination=node
Select the correct authentication method. This will be "POST" in most scenarios.
Enter the login form field names and values. Our example has three fields: "edit[name]", "edit[pass]", and "op". The values in this case would be "adsenseuser", "123abc", and "Log in", respectively.

When you've finished, save your settings and you'll be directed to Google's webmaster tools to "claim your site". This is the same tool used by Sitemaps, and all you'll need to do is upload a small file to your site. This proves to Google that you are the owner of the site.

After your site is verified, and Adsense has had some time to index your site, you should notice more targeted ads start appearing on your restricted pages.

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