Category Archives: Programming

Google Custom Search

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Google Search

Google offers a custom search engine (beta version) to webmasters to create a local search tool on a website or a blog. A quick and easy way consist in integrating a javascript code provided by Google on your webpage. The search engine can be customized to include more sites or to adapt the style of the results pages to the style of the website. Google provides tutorials, FAQ’s, developer documentation and featured examples to help webmasters to design the search tool.

Google’s “Terms of Use” state that you may not in any way frame, cache or modify the Results produced by the Google search engine. The results pages include advertisements placed by Google. For enterprises wanting ad-free results pages, Google offers various price plans for the Google site search.

A solution used in the past by several developers was based on javascript code to open a small search window for doing a local search on a website. An example for searching the saraproft.lu website is given below:

=======================================

<p><a href=”javascript:(function()

{ p=prompt(‘Entrez un texte pour faire une recherche dans le site saraproft.lu via Google Luxembourg.’,”);

if(p)

{ document.location.href=’http://www.google.lu/search?

q=site:saraproft.lu ‘+escape(p)} })();” >

Search</a></p>

=======================================

This solution has some disadvantages with the security mecanisms of the new browser generation and is no longer recommended.

Google gadgets and Yahoo widgets

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In 2003, Konfabulator, a startup, released a paid software that consisted of cool standalone applets that did all sorts of stuff from telling the time, to monitoring stock market prices, to displaying your calendar. Mid-2005, Yahoo acquired the startup, and then offered Konfabulator as freeware, both for Mac OS X and Windows. They call it now widgets. In 2006, Google introduced Google gadgets, a precursor has been the side panels in the Google Desktop.

Google Gadgets are interactive mini-applications that can be placed anywhere on your desktop or on your iGoogle page to show you new email, weather, photos and personalized news. Other gadgets include the clock, calendar, scratch pad, todo list and many more. Google Gadgets are made by users that offer cool and dynamic content and can be placed also on any page on the web.

All Desktop gadgets use the Gadget API. They can also use core JavaScript features and the XMLHttpRequest class. Windows-only Desktop gadgets can include native Windows libraries and use selected Search APIs to take advantage of Google Desktop search features.

Google offers a Desktop SDK that has everything you need to write Google Gadgets and to integrate desktop searching into your applications. A development forum, a FAQ webpage and a hall of fame are available to provide valuable feedback on creating gadgets.

Google gadgets can also been used in Lively, a 3D virtual experience that is the newest addition to Google Labs and that was released as beta on July 10th, 2008. Lively gadgets provide rich media and interaction capabilities to users.

A great site for gadgets, widgets and SEO is Seoish, run by Patrick Sexton alias Feedthebot.

Google Desktop et iGoogle

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Google Desktop

J’ai installé aujourd’hui Google Desktop sur mon portable. Google Desktop permet de faire des recherches locales aussi facilement que sur le Web et de trouver et de lancer des applications et des fichiers en quelques clics.  Google Desktop permet d’ajouter des plug-ins Google Gadgets pour personnaliser son bureau et pour consulter les actualités, la météo et bien d’autres informations. Pour aller un pas plus loin, on peut installer sa page d’accueil personnalisée avec iGoogle.

Il y a un blog officiel de Google Desktop qui constitue une source très riche d’informations concernant Google Desktop.

BlinkM & ambient light’s

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BlinkM

ThingM Labs presents a smart LED (BlinkM) that makes prototyping, experimenting, and hacking with light easier than ever! An affordable drop-in replacement for a regular LED that can be any color, any brightness, and can blink and fade in virtually any pattern. Pick a color, fade between two colors, or make a crazy blinking sequence with our open source software, then just drop it into your project and go!

Designed by Tod E. Kurt, co-founder of ThingM who engineered hardware and software for robotic camera systems that went to Mars, BlinkM modules are distributed in Europe by Tinker in Milan and London and by Coolcomponents in South London.

MoodBeams

Another cool light device are Mood Beams, kaleidoscopic critters, a funky tribe of supremely portable, battery-operated characters that cycle through a spectrum of hypnotic colours. They’re sensitive to sound, so if you put them next to your radio or CD player they’ll change colour in time to the beat of the music. It’s like having a ravey light show emanating from within an amorphous Japanese cartoon character. Mood Beams can be set to perform at five different speeds: Heartbeat, Rainbow, Strobe, Colour Dance and Colour Hold – simply set the mode to suit the mood. Three series of four characters are available, they are called Curious, Surprised, Silly, Shy, Puzzled, Smiley, Chillin, Love Struck, Gloomy, Peppy, Dizzy, Chipper and are manufactured by Radica in Southern China for its customer Mattel GirlTech.

Ambient Orb

 

A glass lamp that uses color to show weather forecasts, trends in the stock market, or the traffic on your local homeway, called “Ambient Orb”, is offered as an online service by Ambient Devices.

The first emotional lamp, the Dal, a WiFi-connected device that can be programmed to respond to real-world events by emanating sequences of gentle color, was created in 2003 by Violet which created two years later the Nabaztag. The Dal lamp has been exhibited at some of the world’s most prestigious museums, including the Centre Pompidou in Paris and The City of Science and Industry in Seoul, Korea. It received the “Star of the Observeur de design, 2004,” a design award from the French Agency for the Promotion of Industrial Creations.

Dal Lamp

OpenNab

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J’ai installé ce week-end le logiciel open-source php OpenNab en mode stand-alone sur mon serveur local wamp2 pour tester les interactions directes avec mon lapin communiquant Nabaztag Ouschterhues.

Grâce aux nombreuses contributions fournies par les développeurs et testeurs sur le forum Nabaztag, depuis la version OpenNab 0.02 jusqu’à la version 0.09, j’ai réussi à faire fonctionner le système. Il importe de disposer d’un fichier bootcode.bin (taille 59K) relatif au serveur HTTP de Violet et de désactiver la fonction Log() dans le code vl/includes/ping.php.

Le projet OpenNab n’est plus poursuivi par ses développeurs du fait que le logiciel n’est plus compatible avec la version jabber du serveur Nabaztag de Violet. Les idées et résultats des analyses effectuées dans le cadre de ce projet sont intégrés dans le nouveau projet open source OpenJabNab.

Social Web

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OpenSocial is a set of common application programming interfaces (APIs) for web-based social network applications, developed by Google, and released November 1, 2007 (version 0.6). Based on HTML and JavaScript, as well as the Google Gadgets framework, OpenSocial includes four APIs for social software applications to access data and core functions on participating social networks :

  • General JavaScript API
  • People and Friends : people and relationship information
  • Activities : publishing and accessing user activity information
  • Persistence (simple key-value pair data for server-free stateful applications

OpenSocial is currently in alpha development, version 0.8 was released on May 28, 2008. Applications implementing the OpenSocial APIs will be interoperable with any social network system that supports them. OpenSocial is rumored to be part of a larger social networking initiative by Google code-named “Maka-Maka”. An Apache incubator open source project, Shindig, was launched in December, 2007, to provide a reference implementation of the OpenSocial standards.

Scratch for Kids : imagine – program – share

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Scratch

Scratch is a new programming language that makes it easy to create interactive stories, animations, games, music, and art — and share the creations on the web. Scratch has been created by the “Lifelong Kindergarten Group” at the MIT Media Lab under the lead of Andrés Monroy-Hernández.

Scratch is designed to help young people (ages 8 and up) develop 21st century learning skills. As they create Scratch projects, young people learn important mathematical and computational ideas, while also gaining a deeper understanding of the process of design.

W3C validation and valid XHTML code

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Quality

Laste update : 15 February 2011
The W3C offers a markup validation service to check the markup validity of web documents in HTML, HTML, SMIL, MathML, etc. or specific content such as RSS/Atom feeds or CSS stylesheets.

The present weblog is valid XHTML 1.0 code.

W3C CSS

W3C HTML

To create valid XTHML code, you need to declare a DOCTYPE, specify the character encoding, indicate the language and include a minimum of tags in the head (title) and the body sections.

CSS

If you use the EmbedIt WordPress plugin, you must use the following structure to embed your special code in a wordpress entry to get valid XHMTL 1.0 code.

</p> <div> your code </div> <p>

To get the right MIME type for valid XHTML 1.1 code, the webpage needs an .xhtml extension.

The code YouTube shows on the embed field is not valid XHTML! Tools4Noobs offers a code generator to create valid xhtml code for embedded youtube videos.

A unified W3C online validator is available at the Unicorn website.

World Wide Web, World Live Web, World Life Web

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In 1994, in the wake of Tim Berners Lee‘s work, the World Wide Web was officially born. A global web, wide in its dimensions as in its contents. Over the years, these contents have literally exploded, imposing the use of search engines to try and sort out this fertile chaos on the basis of the principle of a classification ‘by relevance’. The domain name (DNS) to identify and classify web sites and to adress documents and the  “http protocol” (hypertext transfer protocol) to retrieve them are the main features of this first documentary age of the web.

Then came the World Live Web, an instantaneous subset of the World Wide Web, a web giving the latest published information in real time. Google News service was one of the pioneers of this second documentary age, but it also enables to refer to what is called micro contents (citizen media), e.g. comments on blogs. Specialised search engines like Technorati are integrated with tools that power the blogosphere and are able to index new content within ten minutes. According to Technorati data, there are over 175,000 new blogs every day. In april 2008, Technorati is tracking more than 100 million blogs and over 250 million pieces of tagged social media. For instance searching for artgallery.lu in Technorati gives more than 100 results.

We are now entering a third documentary age, the World Life Web, in particular with the extraordinary boom of social networks (Facebook, MySpace) and of virtual worlds  (Second Life). The main issues of this new age are the sociability and the indexable and remixable nature of our digital identity as well as its traces on the network.

Olivier Ertzscheid, enseignant-chercheur (Maître de Conférences) en Sciences de l’information et de la communication au département Infocom de l’IUT de la Roche sur Yon (Université de Nantes) a publié un petit texte à vocation pédagogique sur ce sujet sur son blog personnel affordance.info.

Blogs, Blogrolls, Blogosphere, RSS newsfeeds, Permalinks

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A weblog, or “blog”, is a personal journal on the Web that is updated frequently, most often displaying its material in journal-like chronological dated entries or posts.  Weblogs cover as many different topics, and express as many opinions, as there are people writing them. Weblogs are different from traditional media. Bloggers (someone who writes a blog ) tend to be more opinionated, niche-focused, and partisan than journalists, who strive for editorial objectivity. Many weblogs allow readers to write a reaction (comment) to what was written in the blog entry. A blogroll is a list of blogs and bloggers that any particular blog author finds influential or interesting. The online community of bloggers, their writings and the comments is called Blogosphere.

Weblogs usually offer RSS feeds (a file format that allows anyone with a website to easily “syndicate” their content)  to make part of their content (excerpts and links back to the originating website) available to other sites to use and publish the informations. Excerpts are optional hand-crafted summaries of the content. To provide an easy way to capture specific references to posts or articles in a blog, permalinks (a permanent identifier to a specific weblog post or article) are the preferred solution. Inbound links refer to hyperlinks from other sources citing that weblog. Outbound links refer to hyperlinks from the weblog to outside sources. The leading monitor of the world of weblogs is Technorati, a real-time search engine that is the largest source of fresh information about the global and local conversations going on all across the Web.