Posts Tagged ‘Google’

Random Updates: Megen Uses Docs, Vanity Searches, and New Toys

Monday, June 2nd, 2008

Google Docs Saves The Day

Megen’s been using Google Docs for doing a lot of her work for Medical School.  They aren’t allowed to save to the computers at school so using Google Docs lets her work from any computer and continue working at home.  There were some small issues with formatting but other than that it sounds like it worked really well for her.

The Ben Golub

I now have the number one search for Ben Golub (but not “Ben Golub”).  I used to be the Benjamin Golub but now I’m also the Ben Golub.  This is pretty big news because Plaxo’s CEO is also a Ben Golub.

Another Ben Golub was hired at my company recently and I’ve been getting all of his meeting invites and emails (including one asking me to record my hours in order to get paid; super confusing and scary because I’m on salary).  Lame.

New Toys

I purchased a 50mm 1.8 and a DK-21M today.  This cheap ($115 for the lens and $30 for the eyepiece) combination will open up a whole new realm of photography for me: low light and narrow DOF.  The 50mm will be manual focus only on my D40 but the DK-21M will help by magnifying and brightening the viewfinder.  I’ll write more about these when I get a chance to use them.

PageRank Update; RSSmeme is a 6!

Wednesday, April 30th, 2008

Looks like another PageRank update has been pushed out by Google.  This blog comes in at a 4 (compared to a 3 in October).  But the big news is that RSSmeme debuts at a 6!  Not too shabby.

Migrating My Email to Google Apps

Tuesday, April 29th, 2008

I’ve switched over entirely to my Google Apps email address: bgolub@benjamingolub.com.  Any of my old email addresses will forward to this one so there should not be any disconnects.  My Google Apps account is currently downloading email from my Gmail account via POP so that all my mail is in one location.

The only outstanding issue was that I had to add all of my Google Talk contacts on my Google Apps account.  This could have been much smoother but it looks like most of you have already accepted the invite.  I had to send them out in batches because Google limits the number of chat invites you can send at once.  Not terribly painful but it could have been easier.  I also had to edit my SRV records to that I could use Google Chat outside of the benjamingolub.com and gmail.com domain.

There is a bit of a disconnect because I’ll still be using Google Calendar, Reader, etc with my Gmail account but I can live with it until Google comes up with a solution.

RSSmeme In Everyone’s Language (for real this time)

Monday, April 28th, 2008

My last post, RSSmeme In Your Language, was a bit misleading.  I had a small problem sending unicode to Google to detect languages.  Any language that could not be encoded from unicode to ASCII was not being detected.  This is a big deal because that includes languages like Chinese; China accounts for more page visits than any other country so I had to fix this.

Today I fixed that issue.  RSSmeme language filters now work for every language.  Here is the Chinese homepage:

http://www.rssmeme.com/?language=zh

Spanish:

http://www.rssmeme.com/?language=es

Persian:

http://www.rssmeme.com/?language=fa

Next on my agenda: add language filters to the RSS feeds.  This will require dumping the Django built in feed framework.  A side effect of this will (hopefully) be an easier to develop API using JSON.

RSSmeme In Your Language

Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008

The number 1 feature request by far has been for me to add language filters to RSSmeme.  Detecting language is no easy feat.  I didn’t want to half ass this feature; it needed to be solid and elegant.  So I waited, and waited, and waited.  And then, yesterday, Google announced their REST Language API!  Finally I could add language filters to RSSmeme!

Here’s how it works.  I ask Google the language of each story by sending them the title.  I accept any answer from Google (even if the reliability is very low).  By default RSSmeme does absolutely no language filtering but if you tack on a language parameter like so:

http://www.rssmeme.com/?language=de

RSSmeme will do it’s magic and only give you stories in that language.  This doesn’t work for RSS feeds (yet).  I haven’t come up with a great UI for this so for now you’ll have to tack the parameter onto the URL yourself.

It is far from perfect but I always believe in releasing early and releasing often.  It doesn’t even work for the language of the country that visits RSSmeme the most (China).  Python and unicode aren’t exactly best friends and I haven’t worked out all of the kinks yet.

Spread the word!  Any feedback (especially UI ideas) would be greatly appreciated.

UPDATE: The UI is done, what do you think?