Straw Dogs

The Tao of Ruby, Python, and….Straw Dogs?

Posts Tagged ‘google’

Your MP – Google Desktop Gadget

October 15th, 2007

I was playing around with the Google Desktop Search API again at the weekend and threw together a gadget that queries the TheyWorkForYou.com UK MP database. It basically enables you to gather all sorts of interesting info about various MPs, Peers, debates and committees.

This gadget is just a simple interface so you can enter your postcode and the panel then shows your local MP with links to their profiles (BBC, Wikipedia and the Guardian) with the list of the most recent debates they’ve been involved in. All of this is done with three requests to their server resulting in three seperate JSON responses. The first response is used to get the “person_id” which is necessary for the next two which retrieve further info and debates listings.

The gadget is hosted on Google’s Code Project Hosting site and released under GPL 3 so anyones free to tinker if they wish.

Download Your MP Gadget

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Posted in javascript, web technologies

Tags: desktop gadget gds google javascript open source plugin search

Google Tech Talks

September 15th, 2007

I’m a recent convert to Googles Tech Talks and I’ve been totally taken in by it! Its a huge selection of posted videos searchable on Google Video of lectures, demonstrations and talks from a wide array of difefrent people. All rated and commented on by the community. What’s also great is its got RSS so I can keep an eye on it from my Netvibes page.

Here’s a couple of examples of recent great talks:

How to Design a Good API

A great intro to writing a good API and also why writing a good API should come naturally if you’re coding in the right way.

Everything is Miscallaneous

Fantastic talk on categorisation and how the net is helping us sort and manage much better – if only it helped me sort my ‘misc drawer’ out!

Python 3000

There couldn’t be a list of videos without mentioning Python 3000. As you may have heard they recently released the first alpha of Py3k and there’s lots to be excited about – though you’ll have to wait until this time next year before we get the final.

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Posted in web technologies

Tags: google tech

Google Desktop Search

October 13th, 2005

As a shameless plug of my main site and a recent component I made for Google Desktop Search. You can get the GDS Opera History Component from hereIt does exactly what you’d expect – indexes Opera 8+ history and includes it for searching using the Google Desktop Search app – which is currently at Beta 2.
Written in C# and the plugin was released, with source, under the GNU GPL in the hopes people will take it and tear it to shreads in a flurry of critical derision – well either that or learn from my ‘eccentric’ coding.

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Posted in general

Tags: gds google

Google Adwords PHP APIlity

October 10th, 2005

Its been around for a few weeks now but I thought I’d point it out to those who hadn’t noticed its release. Google have unleashed a PHP API to their Google Adwords system called APIlity.

The APIlity PHP Library provides an object-oriented way to easily access and manage the Google AdWords API from within PHP. This comes along with an abstraction from the SOAP and WSDL details.

I’ll likely be producing some form of implementation example of this and posting it at a later date as it ties in quite well with my paid job.