In my spare time I have been researching what all would be involved to create a Google Gadget.  I have posted my intentions in earlier blog entries but haven’t really had a lot of time to look at doing this.  What is a Google Gadget?  A Google Gadget allows you to place your “feed” onto the iGoogle page of people interested in your content.  The iGoogle page, or customized desktop is really taking on some momentum these days, I see a lot of my friends with customized desktops, no two are alike, that’s what is really cool about iGoogle.

I have found quite a few resources online, including the Google Gadget API.  There are even several example Gadget’s out there for developers to dissect, most I think are pretty cut and dry, but what I am wanting to do is to take my RSS feed from this Blog and create a running Gadget from that. 

The first place I have started looking is at the basic code for doing a “hello world” ap.  It looks something like this:

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?>
<Module>
<ModulePrefs title=”hello world example” />
<Content type=”html”><![CDATA[
Hello, world!
]]></Content>
</Module>

The idea behind this one is that you just take the Hello World out and enter in whatever HTML you need to put your Gadget together.  Google also provides you with a pretty cool online development environment for doing this all in: http://www.google.com/apis/gadgets/gs.html#Scratchpad.  There are some other examples on this page as well like Dynamic Tabs, Drag and Drop, etc.  All pretty cool examples, but still not anything close to what I am wanting to put together really.

I ran across another website that looks pretty informative, I am probably going to sit down this weekend and review what Mike has to say about creating a Gadget, here is a Link to How to make a Google Gadget in 15 minutes or less - I’m Mike.  Once I get it figured out I will post an update here for all of you Wordpress Users interested in creating your own Gadget.  I figure this will be a popular topic since I don’t see anywhere where it’s been done before, or at least shared with the rest of the world.  If I am missing something and someone has actually done this before please let me know.

Oh, I did find where Google had posted an example Gadget that was constructed from an Atom Feed of the Google Blog, here is their source code for that:

<?xml version=“1.0″ encoding=“UTF-8″?>

<Module>

<ModulePrefs title=“Google Blog” render_inline=“optional”

category=“news” category2=“technology”

author=“Jesse Shieh”

author_email=“jesse.feedback+googleblog@gmail.com”/>

<UserPref name=“post” datatype=“enum” display_name=“Post Number” default_value=“1″>

<EnumValue value=“1″/>

<EnumValue value=“2″/>

<EnumValue value=“3″/>

<EnumValue value=“4″/>

<EnumValue value=“5″/>

<EnumValue value=“6″/>

<EnumValue value=“7″/>

<EnumValue value=“8″/>

<EnumValue value=“9″/>

</UserPref>

<Content type=“html”>

<![CDATA[

<!-- load the NXSL library -->

<script src="http://www.google.com/js/nxsl.1.js" type="text/javascript"></script>

<div id="content___MODULE_ID__"></div>

<script> _IG_RegisterOnloadHandler(function () {

var url = 'http://googleblog.blogspot.com/atom.xml';

_IG_FetchContent(url, function (response) {

var prefs = new _IG_Prefs(__MODULE_ID__);

var nxsl = xmlParse(''

+ '<div select="/feed/entry[' + prefs.getInt('post') + ']“>‘

+ ‘ <h3 select=“title” content=“.”></h3>‘

+ ‘ <div select=“content” content=“.”></div>‘

+ ‘</div>‘);

nxslProcess(xmlParse(response), nxsl);

var content = xmlText(nxsl);

content = content.replace(/</g, ‘<’) .replace(/>/g, ‘>’)

.replace(/&/g, ‘&’)

.replace(/["]byline-author["]/g,

‘”byline-author” style=“font-size:84%;color:#666666;”‘);

_gel(’content___MODULE_ID__’).innerHTML = content;

});

});

</script>

]]>

</Content>

</Module>

Still not exactly what I am looking for, but I think that we are getting closer…

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I just launched my Mom’s Classmate Website.  The entire site project was built in PHP/MySQL using PHPR.  Basically this site consists of only two database tables “classmates” and “events”.  Each classmate will register on the website with their information (name, spouse’s name, address, city, state, zip, telephone, cell phone, email, current photo, short message, etc.).  This information is stored in the classmates table when they register on the site.  I have it coded so that only registered classmates have permission to view information on other classmates.  Also, another feature I added was to allow classmates the ability to only edit their own information.  I figured that this would come in handy in the event they relocated, got a new email, etc.

I have sent off an email to all of my Mom’s classmates alerting them to the new website launch and that they can come in and register now.  I have tested the process a few times on my test box as well as having a few others login and try the process a few times.  I think it’s ready to go, if i do hit any bugs w/ the software though I will post it back here along w/ whatever fixes, etc. I have to put into place.

Since this project is saved as a PHPR project I have the ability to go in and add other features down the road such as a Blog, Photo Gallery, etc., which I am sure we will be doing in the future as time allows.

I also just found out that there is an article published on Xline’s website that outlines a very similar project to this, this solution I did for my Mom’s website is totally custom and very different from the one mentioned on their website but if you are interested here is a link: http://www.xlinesoft.com/articles/alumni.htm?1057

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Ran across this article on WHIR this morning and thought that it was pretty interesting.  Apparently a website operated by The Colorado Rockies that handles ticketing for their games had some issues staying online while a lot of people were trying to get tickets to the world series games, here is a Link to Web Host Industry News | FBI Investigates Ticket Site “Attack” and an excerpt:

“We have initiated an investigation into whether or not the server [used in selling the tickets] was compromised deliberately … whether or not there was a deliberate intrusion [that] compromised the site,” said Laura Eimiller, spokeswoman for the FBI in Los Angeles, California.

The server was operated by Irvine, California-based Paciolan, the vendor for selling the World Series tickets. Eimiller says agents have contacted Paciolan officials. While she could not say whether the investigation was triggered by a complaint by the Rockies, she did mention that the FBI had received “a number of calls” regarding the site crash.

The website apparently received about 8.5 million hits on it that were registered in their logs or analytical suite but the provider hosting the site / application reported that there was an external malicious attack on the site that brought it down.  The FBI is looking into the issue, not for sure where a report on their findings will be posted, if it is at all, but this just goes to show the world that we live in these days.  The article goes on to say that despite the slow processing times for ticket purchases, 50,000 tickets were sold just after a few hours of launching it.  wow!

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IBM’s Developerworks section has a good tutorial for setting up a PHP / MySQL Development Environment on a Windows XP machine, here is a  Link to the Resource if you are interested in checking this out.  This is pretty much what I do on my test machine so that I can stress test applications before I load them onto a working production box for deployment.  It is definitely the way to go in my opinion if you can afford the costs related to having another machine on your desktop.

Before you do this though you will want to make sure that you have a few prerequisites in place, here are some tutorials also provided by IBM that might be worth checking out, especially if you are new to php/mysql development:

1. Creating dynamic Web sites with PHP and MySQL
2. Access an enterprise application from a PHP script
3. Introduction to PHP

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I recently decided to start using my own domain, www.cottonrohrscheib.com to house my personal blog as oppossed to hosting it on other sites where I was a community member just because I saw some potential for SEO advantages.  I had let my website pretty much go over the years since I registered it in 2001, at one time I think that I had a Google PR of like 5 or 6 but as of late I had a PR of -0.  I posted an update to an old thread on Outfront’s SEO forum, see my post below:  (this was posted on 10/25/2007)  Here also is a Link to Google Page Rank question full thread w/ other members comments.

I am in a similar situation that this lady was in last year and was wondering if anyone can offer their opinion as to what might have happened…

I registered a personal website just for fun in 2001, www.cottonrohrscheib.com. For the first 5 or so years I just posted about 5 or 6 pages there for fun w/ photos, etc., just something for friends and family to have fun with. The website then was just static pages, nothing dynamic at all, my Google Pagerank for as long as I can remember was 5. It would occasionally teeter between 4 and 5.

Along about 2006 my web development business started to picking up so I just made things a little easier on myself and revamped the website with pages that had RSS Feeds embedded in them from my corporate blog, picasa photo blog, microsoft spaces, and other external sources that I sometimes posted content so that I wouldn’t have to keep track of my personal website along with all of the other communities I was a part of. Somewhere along the way my PR in Google dropped completely to 0. ??

I have since redesigned my personal site using the Wordpress Platform, it is now located at: www.cottonrohrscheib.com/blog (I used an Apache Redirect). The site has been up there now for about 3 months and I have been noticing my position in the search engines come up dramatically on my keywords since re-launching my site BUT my PR is still at 0. I know that PR isn’t that big of a worry as long as I am coming up good on searches but this really has me shaking my head… I have called on my SEO Guru to work her magic and help get the site submitted to a couple of directories, etc., and I am confident she will do a great job at this but I was wondering if anyone else out there might have some suggestions for me, or maybe an explanation as to what might have happened to my PR?

 

Well, to make a long story short, this morning I got on and noticed that my Google PR had jumped from -0 to a PR4.  This by no means is no 6 yet but it’s still pretty good considering i just started paying attention to it last week.  I think that whatever I am doing, a long w/ my SEO guru Erin, who has also been handling some submissions for me, must be paying off.  I just wanted to update the blog w/ this update.  I also just posted an update to the forum, that update is located below:

I just wanted to update this thread to show how quickly your Google PR can change. When I updated this old thread that I found related to Google PR I had a PR of 0-, and that was last week. I get into the office this morning and I find that over the weekend my PR was bumped to a Google PR4. It’s still not where it used to be at which was about a 5 / 6 as best I can remember but it’s definitely better than -0.

I guess all of this to say, if your PR is not good or where you want it, be patient, a lot can change pretty quick.

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I had another developer inquire over the weekend as to what MySQL GUI Tools I used / recommended.  Honestly I spend 80% of the time inside my IDE (phpr) so I don’t often reach for any other GUI tools becuase PHPR has a MySQL modeling tool built in that acts a lot like a wizard, for lack of a better word, but occasionally when the need arises I will use MySQL Administrator or the MySQL Query Browser. 

Both of these tools are readily available for free on the dev.mysql.com resource site, here is a Link to MySQL AB :: MySQL GUI Tools Downloads where all of these tools can be downloaded for free and ran.  Please note that when installing MySQL administrator on my test box I ran into some issues but I think that the issues were related to my OS installation on the box. 

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