Life, the Universe and Everything » google

Photocastr my first Google AppEngine experience

wnagele — Thu, 28 Jul 2011 17:10:07 +0000

It’s been a while since Google AppEngine was first released to the public. I liked the idea ever since. When it comes to testing I fell short on it, simply because I do not like running yet another Hello World application.

A couple of days ago I wanted to get some of my Flickr sets into iPhoto. I did not want any fancy two way sync but just read them in. I discovered that iPhoto can read RSS feeds in a format that Apple calls a Photocast. Unfortunately the RSS feeds from Flickr are limited to your public content and only return the last 20 or so results. Translating this information from the Flickr API into the RSS format should be a simple thing to do. I’ve used the Flickr API before so that was the first thing I went for. I briefly thought where I would want to deploy this – I am not a big fan of maintaining infrastructure for things like this. I remembered that Google AppEngine should be able to do this. Within a couple of hours I was able to whip up what I now call Photocastr in Python using Django. Overall the experience of creating something like this could hardly be better. Deployment is simple and the learning curve is steep. Know the limitations of the platform (granted, I already did before) and you have results very quickly.

So if you are interested in the result and have a Flickr account – give it a go. It’s free as long as it stays within the limits of the free quota provided by Google. Find it here: http://photocastr.appspot.com

Authenticated Feeds with Google Reader

wnagele — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 20:48:57 +0000

Recently i wanted to include my status updates from XING into Google Reader. Turns out that Google Reader has no support for (HTTP) authenticated feeds. There is however a service called FreeMyFeed that takes care of this by proxying these feeds. Although they claim to not store any of your credentials i would not use it for sensitive data. This is not only because of the credentials but also because the obfuscated URL you will end up proxying through is of course unauthenticated and a leak would mean anybody can see the feed content.

Google now offering opt-out for it's services

wnagele — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 11:51:26 +0000

http://www.theonion.com/content/themes/common/assets/onn_embed/embedded_player.swf

Don't be evil?

wnagele — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 08:39:47 +0000

It’s not that i’ve been surprised when i read this article, but it should give to think.
Anyhow, at least they have humor – something a lot of companies don’t seem to have (anymore).
Released to avoid attention for the first link? *spin*

Google Maps – Drag & Drop routes

wnagele — Thu, 28 Jun 2007 21:46:18 +0000

Google just added an awesome feature to their maps service. You can now easily drag the route and drop it on another street you’d like to take. This makes rerouting as easy as it can be.