Programming, Online Community, Web 2.0 and Sri Lanka
Google Chart API lets you embed small charts by calling a URL to Google's service. Here is a Hello World example URL and the chart.
http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=p3&chd=s:hW&chs=
250x100&chl=Hello|World
You get 50,000 charts a day free. With some local caching that can go a long way. I suppose later you will be able to rent the service.
Now you can get more storage for Gmail and Picasa web albums.
I did not know this. Anyway I'm well under my free limits so I won't need to upgrade anytime soon. Then again having this kind of space accessible from anywhere is tempting.
Now you get a 'Offline' link on the top right hand side of Google Reader. You need to install Google Gears which enables you to write offline web applications.
Once the Google Gears Firefox extension is installed you can click the green down arrow to download about 2000 article headings to read offline.
When you are back online you can click the blue top arrow to sync your marked/read articles back to the service.
Applications like Google Gears will enable the last step for web applications to cross over to the desktop.
Following up to Google Mobile Applications I thought I'd check out how Yahoo was doing in the mobile web department. I have to say Yahoo looks pretty decent and well thought out with their mobile portal.
The place to start exploring is the Yahoo! Mobile website. There are 2 main ways you can access Yahoo! Mobile from your phone.
Yahoo! Mobile Web interface
Google Mobile is the place to watch for Google's web applications that are crossing over to the mobile world.
Recently Google Calendar was added to this Google Mobile suite of applications.
Here is a current list of mobile web applications by Google.
I found some more features down http://www.google.com/m. Lets hope someone standardizes these links. Right now they are all over the place. In case Google asks me heres my take for more sensible mobile urls.
http://m.google.com - Google Mobile Search
http://m.google.com/mail - Gmail
http://m.google.com/news - Google Mobile News
http://m.google.com/reader - Google Mobile Reader
http://m.google.com/ig - iGoogle
The word on the Internet is that Yahoo Photos is going down in favor of Flickr in the next few months.
I had a few old albums on Yahoo Photos. One album as old as 2001! The Yahoo Photos might be merged into Flickr at some point, but I'm not taking any chances.
I downloaded some photos I wanted to keep and imported them into F-Spot. Problem was they showed up on top as new photos from today, which is not what I want. When I copied them over the created date on the photos has changed to today's date.
Here is the bash command I used to send the photos back in time.
touch --date=2001-10-05 *
In the future when selecting a good web application try to choose one that has a good export mechanism so you can get out if the service starts to go down.
I've had my Yahoo Mail account for a long time and I get a lot of spam. Here is one way to deal with it.
Just under your "Inbox" title there is a "View" menu.
In the "View" menu select "Messages from Unknown Senders". Now most of the messages will be spam. But go through and see if someone new has sent a message and select them. Now click the "Add to Address Book" to add known mailers.
Now when you return to the unknown senders screen you should be left with a screen full of spam. Click on the header checkbox under the "Delete" button to select all the mails then click the "Spam" button to make them go away.
You might need to do this on Multiple pages if you have a lot of spam.
2 things happened in the past few days related to website/blog statistics.
1. WordPress.com released a stats plugin so that we can install it and use the wordpress.com stats application.
2. Google Analytics launched their new interface.
Contactify looks like a good idea. You give them your email address and they give you a contact form. Hmm you still have to give out your email. Why? What if these sites get hacked or start selling your emails?
How about this?
Looks like a clean and simple approach to website statistics.
Check out the demo account. I've been using Google Analytics for a while and its complicated and boring.
I think small apps like Pmetrics and Mint are the future of webapps. Other companies have shown that these kind of simple small focused webapps just work.
Recent Comments