The Blog that Noone Reads

I had some left over soup at work and nothing to reheat it in. I think Tux would agreen that using one of those flimsy red cups was a bad idea.

I’ll bet most people that use google have no idea how cool Google really is. How many other search tools have their own verb? You know, as in “I Googled myself today” or “Just Google ‘weebles wobble’.”

There is so much you can do with Google. An experience Googler can find anything in just a few minutes. How can one become a skilled master of the Google? Here’s a few pointers to get you started discovering the power that exists behind that one simple text box.

To really use Google well, it helps to understand how the tool works. Searching is a fairly simple principle. A search engine first has to “spiders” the web. It will read one page and follow all the links on that page, then read those pages, then follow the links on those pages, and so on. Once it grabs the pages, it creates an index much like the index in a book only its designed to be read by a computer. When the user inputs his search criteria, the software looks through its massive index and tries to return the most relevant data.

This is an incredibly simplified version of what’s actually going on. Google does all kinds of stuff to make sure everything is fast and highly relevant. They have lots of criteria for making those decisions and some of the smartest minds in tech world putting their tools together.

Some interesting things about google searching:

• case dOes NoT MattEr
• Google will not match partial words: a search for ‘apple’ will not find ‘Snapple’
• Google will perform query extensions: ‘apple’ will find ‘apples’ (this is not the same as partial word matching)
• by default, Google will ignore extremely common words like ‘where’ and ‘how’
• Google will try to help you by offering corrections to common misspellings: look for “Did you mean …” at the top of your search results
• Searches are ‘and’ searches by default: you can search within results simply by adding more search terms

Remember that Google’s database is built off of the web. It created by software, not people. When you do a search, try to be as specific as possible. The less common the word is, the more specific your results will be. ‘Pine tree’ will give better results than ‘tree’. ‘Douglas Fir’ would be even more specific.

All this is great, but we haven’t gotten to the real special stuff yet. Lets look at some of the special features.

Dictionary:
When you look something up, on the right side, near the top, you’ll see your search term as a link. It’s actually each word linked individually. If you click on a word, it will take you to the dictionary.com page for that word. Another way to use Google as a dictionary is to ask it for a definition. Use ‘define: term’ to request a definition. In my experience, I find that dictionary.com is better for general words, while Google’s ‘define:’ search is better for less common, more industry specific. Google doesn’t just search standard dictionaries. It also looks through specific dictionaries, like medical terminology, tech term definition sites, etc.

Tracking:
Drop a FedEx or UPS tracking number into that beautiful search bar and it will take you right to the tracking info for that package. Pretty handy.

Translate:
If you run into some site in German, Japanese, or any one many languages, Google can translate if for you. Look for the “Translate this page” link in search results or use ‘translate: URL’ in your search string.

Formatting:
Google is so magical, it can even index PDF documents. What’s even better, it can translate PDF pages into HTML docs if you don’t want to wait the nine minutes it takes for Acrobat to load up into your browser (or whatever). You can even search for files of a specific type by using ‘filetype:type’.

Calculator:
This is one of my favorites. You can use an amazing variety of queries to perform calculations. Try googling ‘how many feet are in a mile’, ‘100 miles at 65 miles per hour in minutes’, ‘4 cups in tablespoons’, ‘4 times 10′ or even figure out the benefits of carrying your friends around using ‘200 pounds times one mile in calories’. The point is, Google is amazing as a calculator or converter.

Etc:
There is so much more. It would take the rest of my life just to describe to you all the things you can do. Instead, I’m just going to point you in the right direction. Look at:

• http://www.google.com/help/features.html
• http://www.google.com/help/index.html
• http://labs.google.com/
• http://desktop.google.com
• http://groups-beta.google.com
• http://www.google.com/about.html
• http://www.google.com/options/index.html
• http://www.google.com/advanced_search

I got the new Cake album from the iTunes Store when it came out a couple weeks ago. There’s something strange about those guys that I just can’t get enough of. I’ve never really appreciated a Cake album on first listening. But the music grows on you. Pretty soon, you’re humming it in the car, or reciting the bizarre lyrics in an immitation of the magical talk-singing you remember from the album.

I wasn’t always a Cake fan. I actually didn’t like them until a friend of mine got really into “Fashon Nugget” and had it on all the time. The new album had a similar effect. I was a bit disappointed the first time I listened. But I decided to give it another shot considering the history I have with Cake. I love this new album. There are so many tracks just have that special something that is Cake.

Oh yeah- I’m still at work. Its nearing 2am here. Its not uncommon for Benny and myself to be burning the midnight oil. The wee hours are often the most inspiring for me. Studies have shown that if you can fight past the initail tiredness, you will have a few hours of clarity before you get really freaking tired. I don’t know if that’s true. It could just be that I’m concentrating harder because I want to get shit done so I can go home.

The battery died on my mouse. I forgot to set it on its charger over the weekend. The battery was low when I came in today, so I’m impressed that it even lasted the 12 hours I’ve been using it. I have one of those Logitech bluetooth mice. It was by far the most I ever spent on a mouse, but it’s worth it. Its comfortable and accurate. Its also a bit heavier than the average mouse, which gives it a really nice feel. Im thinking of stuffing a weight in my Microsoft Blue wireless mouse at home just to emulate the feel.

Statement: Every RSS feed in the world should have an XSLT stylesheet.

I was listening to a discussion from Gnomedex that iPodder grabbed for me. This guy from Yahoo was talking about their new RSS tools. One of the things he mentioned is the new button. He made a good point. A lot of people see that little, orange “RSS” button and give it a click. They’re then faced with a naked XML document. That can be very confusing for the average user.

While the Yahoo link is a good option, it really is limited to only Yahoo’s users. XML documents have the option of linking in other docuemnts for formatting their data. One format that’s particularly insteresting is XSLT, which is a formatting markup language for XML. Most modern browsers can parse this data, and will do so automatically.

What this means for the user is this: Instead of seeing some confusing looking XML document, users who navigate to an RSS feed with their browsers can actually see a very usable web page. At the bare minimum, it should be a doc that explains to them what an RSS document is and how to use it. Even better, it could be a formatted version of the content of the XML document. Idealy, it would do both. Using XSLT, an RSS doc can become just like any other page a user might view. They can even bookmark it and just go there instead of downloading some RSS aggregator.

The really cool part is that all this is done without messing with the actual XML doc. Thus, all RSS aggregators can grab the exact same document and do their magic with it.

I really can’t think of any reason why someone would not want this on their site. If you can think of any, I would love to hear them.

There doesn’t seem to be a link on the page (aside from in the meta data) to the site feed. So:

Here’s The Link: http://theblogthatnoonereads.blogspot.com/atom.xml

I’ve spent a good amount of time working with GD in the past. Mostly photo manipulation stuff: cropping, scaling, watermarks, etc. Currenlty, I’m working on an actual database driven content generation application using GD. All I can really say about it is goddamn, I totally have a new respect for graphics developers. Its freaking hard.

If you’re interested in working with GD, its actually quite easy to use. PHP.net has the API documented. The comments on the function pages are very helpful. If you look at skinnable applications, such as mp3 players and such, you can find a lot of interesting techniques for drawing scalable content containers.

There is a prety simple technique used all over the web as well as in most window managing engines for GUIs that I’ve found really helpful. The idea is: for a scalable panel, maybe an image container with a drop shadow and rounded corners, you have to break the border image up into pieces. You cut out the for corners and take a chunk from each side. Then, when you go to build your content frame, you draw your corners and repeat those side chunks until you’ve filled in the sides.

It’s pretty easy to do with html tables or css. Its not quite as easy to do with GD, but its still not impossible.

I own an iPod. I just got it a little over a week ago and I freaking love it. There are so many reasons why it’s the best thing ever. That’s not really what I want to talk about hear. What I want to talk about is a little app called iPodder. It’s basically a blend of TiVo and RSS.

For those of you who don’t know, RSS is an XML format (like HTML) that is designed to allow a computer program to collect data from websites and present it to you the way you like. More specifically, RSS feeds generally list new articles on a blog or news website. Programs exist that will read the RSS files that you specify and list all the updates in one place. Maybe my description is not great, but the idea really is. I can open up my web browser, and find out what’s new on all the sites I regularly read on one page.

Some people are doing really creative things with this format. For example, Netflix now offers RSS feeds of new releases as well as my queue. Someone else, Adam Curry seems to have had a hand in it, came up with the idea of putting links to audio files in these RSS feeds.

What exactly does all this mean? Well, first of all you do not need an iPod to use iPodder. This technology allows anyone to have their own audio show. There are quite a few shows already online and many of the one’s I’ve heard are quite good. What happens is, you pick your shows. You tell the iPodder software which shows you want to listen to and it will automatically grab those audio programs and add them to your audio library.

If you have an iPod or one of the competing porables, you can have these audio programs automatically synced onto your device. You really have to use the software to find out how cool it really is. So, go now. Grab the software. Subscribe to “Daily Source Code” and “Rock and Roll Geeks” and spend the week with id. Adam Curry puts out a new Daily Source Code most weekdays at least. Spend your morning listening to something interesting on the way to work, instead of listening to commercials. Listen to radio broadcasts from around the world. Listen to an audio blog that your buddy makes. Just don’t spend another day listening to crap because there’s nothing else. Listen to what you want, when you want.

If you’re interested in creating your own podcast, blogware.com has an article on how to get started.

Why is it people always want to get “First Post” in there on the newsgroups. Is there an award: “Congratulations! You are the biggest nerd. Here’s a cookie.”

Well, this is a different type of first post. This MY first post. Its just after 1 am. I’m working on some crap for my job.

I work for a software company. I think I’m supposed to be pretty non-descript about what we actually do, so I’m going to leave it at “A Software Company.”

I’ve wanted to put up a blog for a while. I sat down a few times to write some tools to put my thoughts online. The problem is that I only have so much time to work on this stuff. So, I can either put together a blogging app, which I believe there are way too many of already anyway, or do I actually want to blog. Well, the answer is, I don’t really know, but this is a good way to find out.

For the next month, I am going to post at least one note per day. That’s right, at least seven notes by the end of the week. Is blogging for me? Time will tell.