I don’t know if you guys have seen this, but it is a tutorial that explains how to get the vista windows sidebar to work in xp. I got it to work, and it is very cool that you can do it, but there isn’t much there. There are only 4 “Gadgets” that it comes with, and you can’t get any more. It has a clock, a rss reader, a search bar and a picture viewer. The rss reader can only read 1 rss feed. Also the sidebar is way to wide to use. As for the Search Bar here is a little hint. To make it search Google, go to the settings for the search bar and type in http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=$w&btnG=Google+Search. Basiclly, you can put in any search you want. When you search google for rootsmart, it gives you this url http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=rootsmart&btnG=Google+Search. You can see the search term is in there. For that to work with the search Bar you just replace that with $w. Then when you search the search bar replaces the $w with your search term. So you can set this up for site that has search.
Archive for Cool Things
Blummy
These days all of the rage is with bookmarlets. Bookmarklets, are those little things that you put in your toolbar so that you can do things like add bookmarks to del.icio.us, or email something with gmail. The problem is that there are plenty of different bookmarlets, and not all of them will fit on your toolbar. So Blummy came out. This will use a little bit of AJAX to have all all of your favorite bookmarklets into one easy bookmarklet. Also, it makes it so easy to find new ones that you had never even heard about.
Google Base
I don’t know if you guys have heard of this yet, but it seems that google released a database like web app, and then took it back. It seems odd that Google did this by “accident”. I think this was probably a way of viral advertising. By, placing this out for a couple of hours they got everyone (including me) to talk about it, and wonder what exactly it is. This is free advertising, that you can’t even pay to get. Before the site went down, somebody was able to get a screenshot, and posted it on flickr, here is what the writing says: Post your items on Google.
Google Base is Google’s database into which you can add all types of content. We’ll host your content and make it searchable online for free.
Examples of items you can find in Google Base:
• Description of your party planning service
• Articles on current events from your website
• Listing of your used car for sale
• Database of protein structuresYou can describe any item you post with attributes, which will help people find it when they search Google Base. In fact, based on the relevance of your items, they may also be included in the main Google search index and other Google products like Froogle and Google Local.
So, this seems to be a sort of MySQL frontend. They seem to be wanting to get into the access market these days. I find that I have no need for databases, but I know many people who swear by them when it comes to contact management. If they integrate it with gmail, so that you can do mailing headers, that would be wonderful. Google, really is cataloging everything and it will be interesting when someone hacks into their servers.
Rolllyo
I don’t know if any of you have found a posting on Rollyo in your feedreader yet, but you need to check it out. I have created a portfolio already, and I will be posting some of my own searchrolls. Currently I have only played with one searchroll. The searchroll is on the RootSmart.com Family. It searches the main site, this blog and the podcast. That way you can search everything that I have posted up on any of the sites.
Now, when first playing with this site, I noticed a couple of things. The first and most foremost is that the search is powered by Yahoo. That means that Rollyo uses Yahoo’s index. This is fine, except that Yahoo’s index is not as large as Google’s. Also, I find that Google does a much better job and getting to every link and every image on a website. One major pitfall of this service is the fact that for a website to be searchable, it must have been indexed by Yahoo. As of the writing of this post, my blog has not been indexed yet. So, even though it says it is searching my blog, it isn’t. This is a major flaw, and one that Rollyo probably should post somewhere.
Other than that one gripe, I find services like this amazing. With the world of AJAX, all of this wonderful functionality can be integrated into the site, without huge browser requirements. That is a very new, and nice thing to have.
So, with that downfall in mind, go check out Rollyo and have fun with it. If you come up with some great searchrolls, post them in the comments and we will check them out.
