#google

Google Maps Bookmarklet

I’m sick of Cmd-T, maps.google.com, Enter, ‘address’ + ‘, sf, ca’ so I made this quick little bookmarklet to speed up the process a little.

Drag it to your bookmark toolbar, then click it, enter a street address (eg. ‘2000 Bush St’) and hit ‘Ok’ to get an instant Google Map to that location in San Francisco (my current hometown).

map

Obviously editing this to work for different cities in the US would be trivial – knock yourselves out.

Here Comes The Giki

You heard it here first – I predict that Google will soon release a wiki-based product of some kind. I don’t know what they will do, or how they will make it ‘simpler’ or ‘smarter’ than wikis are already, but that’s their problem I suppose.

I got my most recent copy of the ‘Google Friends‘ newsletter, and towards the end, completely unrelated to anything else in the newsletter, they offer a definition (sort of) of what a Wiki is. They provide a link to Wikipedia and then leave it at that.

Google have already delved into the world of blogs (they own Blogger.com and run their own GoogleBlog), so I guess it was only a matter of time before they got into wikis as well. I wonder where this is going to go… especially since Yahoo! is already an avid supporter of Wikipedia at least (hosting some of their servers).

XooMLe Download Finally Available!

After a very long wait, a downloadable version of XooMLe is now available!

This means that you can now download XooMLe and install it on your own PHP-enabled server so that you can use it locally for integrating Google search results (and cache and spelling suggestion power) into your web-based applications.

In the near future, a ‘XooMLe In Action’ page will also be added to the site, showcasing some of the ways that people are making use of XooMLe and Google.

Resizable Google

I don’t know if anyone else noticed, or indeed when it actually happened, but I know that a couple months ago, you couldn’t successfully resize the Google results pages using the ‘Text Size’ option in Internet Explorer.

Purely by accident, I opened a Google page with my text size set to ‘largest’ and lo and behold, they have modified their HTML to allow for resizing of fonts. Even their AdWords ads resize according to the browser preference.

Looking at the source, it looks like they are slowly moving towards a CSS-based layout/design, although they still have a ways to go. Incidentally, I did a copy of their layout with CSS for an internal search engine that I built and it wasn’t that hard at all, their design even lends itself to being done with DIVs, UL/LIs and A tags, styled up with CSS.

So here’s their style definition on a results page now-days;

body,td,div,.p,a{font-family:arial,sans-serif } 
div,td{color:#000} 
.f,.fl:link{color:#6f6f6f} 
a:link,.w,a.w:link,.w a:link{color:#00c} 
a:visited,.fl:visited{color:#551a8b} 
a:active,.fl:active{color:#f00} 
.t a:link,.t a:active,.t a:visited,.t{color:#ffffff} 
.t{background-color:#3366cc} 
.h{color:#3366cc} 
.i,.i:link{color:#a90a08} 
.a,.a:link{color:#008000} 
.z{display:none} 
div.n {margin-top: 1ex} 
.n a{font-size:10pt; color:#000} 
.n .i{font-size:10pt; font-weight:bold} 
.q a:visited,.q a:link,.q a:active,.q {color: #00c; text-decoration: none;} 
.b{font-size: 12pt; color:#00c; font-weight:bold} 
.ch{cursor:pointer;cursor:hand} 
.e{margin-top: .75em; margin-bottom: .75em} 
.g{margin-top: 1em; margin-bottom: 1em}

As you can see, they are not defining a font size for a lot of their elements, which is a good move, as it will inherit the browser settings automatically. One thing that I did notice is that the fixed-size fonts they are using (“.n a” and “.n .i”) are only applied to the numbers used for the links to different pages of results. I am assuming that they have done this because otherwise there’s the potential that thei cool little string of ‘o’s will be messed up from font sizing 🙂

Good Work Google! Good to see more of the big-boys embracing CSS design, I just hope that they continue down this path and have a completely CSS-driven design in the near future, browsers are almost up to speed so that it’s a valid move for them I think.

XooMLe-Lite?

I’ve been playing around with the idea of creating a “lite” version of XooMLe, which would have less information passed back in the resulting XML, making it easier to work with for simple projects, and probably quite a bit quicker as well. The system would be based on the current one, but for the search, things would be cut down, so it might just be that I end up making a /search-lite/ method available via the normal XooMLe server.

If this happens, it will probably be a chance for me to clean up the code on the entire project, and then I might also release the code so that you can “install” your own XooMLe server 🙂 Information will be posted here if that’s the case, and I’ll also post to the XooMLe-News mailing list (sign up on the XooMLe Project Page).

Anyone else hanging out for an even simpler version of the XML results? I am thinking of having something like this;

{sample removed}

Comments? Suggestions? Please use the comments link below (to the right).