Archive for November, 2008

Nominations for Mashable’s Open Web Awards have officially opened, and we hope our faithful users, publishers and followers will help Snap Shots be voted the #1 Blog Plugin! To vote, simply type in your email and hit the "Submit" button in the widget below. Then spread the word and share your vote with your Twitter followers [...]

The Reader team is happy to announce that another 20% project has come to fruition: automatic translation in Reader! Post by 20% volunteer and glottology expert, Brett Bavar.

Believe it or not, the web truly is world-wide. That means there is a lot of interesting content out there in languages other than your own. You might have missed out on this content in the past, but now, with automatic translation in Reader, you don't have to miss a thing!

Next time you find an interesting feed in another language, just subscribe to it as normal in Reader. When you view the feed in Reader, check off "Translate into my language" in the feed settings, and (voila!) the feed will be immediately translated for you. Also, this setting will be saved so you can always view this feed in your own language.

Many thanks go out to the awesome engineers on the Google Translate team, who have provided the technology to make this possible. As they continue to make their translation systems better, you will get to reap the benefits automatically.

Have fun discovering all the great content out there on the truly world-wide web!

As the important holiday shopping season draws near, we've compiled a list of tips merchants can use to increase their Google Checkout conversions.

1) Make sure that your "Google Checkout Accepted" logo is on all of your site's pages. Shoppers may arrive at your site at places other than your main landing page, such as product reviews or customer support. Make sure they know you offer Google Checkout even if they find your site in ways you didn't expect. Here's more about Acceptance Logos and how to use them properly.

2) Have your Checkout button placed "above the fold" -- the part of your webpage that's visible without scrolling. This is usually good practice for any element on your site that you want to prioritize.

3) Include a link to a "What is Google Checkout?" page underneath your Checkout button. Guidelines for implementing this Google-hosted page that answers basic buyer questions can be found here under the section labeled "Messaging."

We hope you find these tips useful for increasing your holiday conversion rates. And here are even more ways to help drive sales using other Google products.

Posted by Heather Folsom, Product Manager and Christian Yee, Product Marketing Manager
Google Checkout Team

Lijit released their very useful widget statistics based on data collected between Sep-Nov '08. This time Lijit chose to remove Snap Shots from the "search" category but in the overall ranking, Snap Shots remains in position #9. We agree with Lijit that Snap Shots is not a search widget. Snap Shots serves users much better than [...]

With over 180 million unique URLs tagged, Delicious is celebrating its five year anniversary. To date, 5.3 million users have turned to Delicious to enhance their social search experience. Not only is it a free and easy way for people to discover, tag and share web content, it continues to evolve to provide greater value to the Delicious community through the introduction of new features, such as browser add-ons or an improved user interface.

Happy anniversary, Delicious, and here's to many more.

Yahoo! Search Blog Team

We thought it would be fun to have some guest bloggers write about how they use Reader. Ann Verbin is a friend of the Reader team, and a pretty avid user. In this post, she writes about how Reader helps her find and organize recipes. If you use Reader in an interesting way and would like to share, get in touch. -- Mihai

I started using Google Reader around the same time that I started cooking more – in fact, it was probably Reader that inspired me to really get into cooking. Shortly after Reader launched, one of my friends recommended a cooking blog, Chocolate & Zucchini, and I subscribed to it. I really liked reading about new recipes on the blog on a regular basis, and I would star the ones I particularly liked so that I could find them later. Soon, I was subscribed to many more cooking blogs, and was starring more and more favorite recipes daily. My starred items list became very long, and it was becoming hard to find things that I remembered I liked (this was before Reader had search).

This is when I discovered item-level tagging. Instead of just starring each recipe I liked, I would also add a tag (or several tags) to it. My tags were generally divided into meal ideas (e.g. "dessert", "breakfast", "main-course") and ingredient specifics (e.g. "eggs", "vegetables", "meat", "pasta"). This way, if we were having people over and one of the guests was vegetarian, I would browse through my pasta and vegetables tags for ideas on what to make. Even after Reader added search, I continued to star and tag my favorite items. Search is very useful when you know what you are looking for, but less appropriate when you are just considering what to make for dinner and don't have anything too specific in mind.

The last tags that I have created for my item-level tagging are "cooked" and "cooked-good". This way I can keep track of all the recipes that I have actually tried out, and not just read about. And any time I am feeling in the mood for something (somewhat) familiar, I can browse through my "cooked-good" tag.

You may already know that you can do searches directly from your My Yahoo! page. Here are a few tricks to help you save time and get more out of your search experience. To name a few:

Music shortcut – If you love music, you can search for a band name or music artist (such as Taylor Swift) and play full music tracks (not 30 second snippets – the entire song) and watch music videos right on the search results page.

Sports shortcut - Searching for your favorite NFL football, baseball, or basketball player gives you game logs, stats, news, scores & schedules, and Yahoo! Fantasy rankings right at the top of the search page.

Recipe shortcut – To help you decide what to cook tonight, you can type in the name of a cuisine or ingredients followed by “recipe” (e.g. pumpkin pie recipe) and see popular recipes to get cooking ideas.

Give it a try and see for yourself with these sample searches:
- Music shortcut: Keith Urban
- Sports shortcut: Braylon Edwards
- Recipe shortcut: chicken recipe

You can enjoy these features whether you search from your My Yahoo! page or the Yahoo! homepage. Happy searching!

Melinda
Product Marketing, Yahoo! Search

Posted by Sapna Mehta, Online Operations Associate

Have you ever wondered if anyone watches the videos you've uploaded? Or perhaps you've uploaded a video presentation and want to be able to illustrate its success with some numbers? We've added Insight to Google Video so that you can capture some of this information, and use it to optimize your videos.

With the launch of Insight, we're now offering more statistics for your uploaded videos. You can access this feature by clicking on the 'Reports' tab on your Google Video account page. The first tab gives you a convenient summary of the data.


From this summary, you can access specific data pages by clicking on the links for Views, Downloads or Popularity. You can also access these specific pages by clicking on the corresponding tabs at the top. Here, you can change the date range or focus on a specific region of the world to see how your videos are doing.

Rest assured you will still be able to see the statistics that were previously available through Advanced Reports (Views & Downloads). This information is now available right from your Video Status page. You can also click on the 'Stats' link, next to your individual video's status, to view the stats for that particular video.


Hopefully this feature will offer you some new Insight into your uploaded videos and reveal some interesting facts about your viewership.

This week’s developer webcasts include a new game development series featuring DarkGDK, an introduction to the new Geneva Server, Unit Testing for Mobile Devices and Observer Patterns.< ?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />

 

MSDN Webcast: "Geneva" Server and Framework Overview (Level 300)

Attend this webcast to see how you can use Microsoft code name "Geneva" Server and the claims-based identity model to enable single sign-on, strong authentication, federation, and the ability to flow user authentication between applications. Learn how to use "Geneva" with Microsoft ASP.NET, Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), Active Directory, Windows Live ID, and Windows CardSpace. Presenter: Stuart Kwan, Principal Group Manager, Microsoft Corporation

11/4/2008 11:00 - 12:00 PM AM Pacific Time (US & Canada)| Duration: 60 Minutes

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MSDN Webcast: BenkoTIPS Live and On-Demand: Windows Presentation Foundation Demystified (Level 200)

In this webcast, we examine the core concepts of WPF, such as layout panels, data binding, styles, and control templates. We then use these to develop an application UI from the ground up. Today's applications need to do more than simply work. They need to draw in the user and provide a differentiated experience. This means moving beyond battleship-gray forms and boxy UIs to providing a positive user experience. Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) provides powerful capabilities to develop a compelling user interface, the kind that makes an application stand out. Presenter: Mike Benkovich, Developer Evangelist, Microsoft Corporation

11/5/2008 9:00 AM - 10:00 AM Pacific Time | Duration: 60 Minutes

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MSDN Webcast: 24 Hours of Windows Mobile Application Development: Unit Testing for Mobile Devices (Level 300)

With Microsoft Visual Studio 2008, unit testing is now available for mobile device developers as well. In this sample-filled webcast explore unit testing for devices. Not only do you learn how to create unit tests for your smart device application, you learn how to debug unit tests and how to run unit tests inside a command prompt. After attending this webcast, you should rest assured knowing that your code works as intended. Presenters: Constanze Roman, Community Program Manager, Microsoft Corporation, and Maarten Struys, Windows Mobile Developer Evangelist, PTS Software

11/5/2008 10:00 - 11:00 AM Pacific Time | Duration: 60 Minutes

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MSDN Webcast: How to Watch Applications with the Observer Pattern Using Visual Basic and C# (Level 300)

They say ignorance is bliss. Unfortunately, that is not the case with objects. Keeping your objects aware of what is going on is vital to the success of your applications. In this webcast, we use the all-seeing, all-knowing Observer pattern to learn how we can keep an eye on things that are happening in our applications. Presenters: Zain Naboulsi, Developer Evangelist, Microsoft Corporation

11/5/2008 1:00 PM - 2:30 PM Pacific Time | Duration: 90 Minutes

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MSDN Webcast: Developing for Your Digital Life (Part 1 of 5): Introduction (Level 100)

In this introductory webcast, we explore some of the free resources available to beginning developers who are looking to learn the basics. We tour the beginner developer learning center on MSDN, take Microsoft Popfly for a spin, and start working on our first programming project. At the end of this five-part series, you will have a few applications that can help you share photos with your friends and family. Presenter: Sam Gazitt, Product Manager, Microsoft Corporation

11/6/2008 9:00 AM - 10:00 AM Pacific Time | Duration: 60 Minutes

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MSDN Webcast: Game Programming in DarkGDK and C++ (Part 1 of 6): Introducing DarkGDK (Level 100)

In this first webcast, we explain what DarkGDK is and describe how it can make programming games much easier than it would be normally. The actual game will be available for you to download with all resource files. This is the game we dissect over the coming sessions in this webcast series. Presenter: Lee Bamber, The Game Creators Ltd, CEO and Founder

11/6/2008 12:00 PM Pacific Time (US & Canada)- 11/6/2008 1:00 PM | Duration:60 Minutes

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MSDN Webcast: Windows Embedded CE and Handheld Solutions (Level 100)

In this webcast, we cover what you need to know when you build a handheld Windows Embedded CE powered device. Windows Embedded CE is the ideal handheld platform with hardware support and software components to satisfy all the requirements of the next generation of connected, service-oriented handheld devices. Presenter: Dion Hutchings, Technical Product Manager, Microsoft Corporation

11/6/2008 1:00 PM - 2:00 PM Pacific Time | Duration: 60 Minutes

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Webcast/Podcast/Virtual Lab Series Page

Webcast Calendar

Search On-Demand Developer Webcasts

 

Scott Lum

 

So, the other day, I was asked by the AJAX APIs dev team if I'd like to write a guest blog post, but they didn't tell me what to write about. I thought about telling you how the AJAX APIs revolutionized how I think about life, design websites, and slice bread, but then I realized that I buy my bread pre-sliced. So I started going back through the group looking for common questions or themes to threads, and I realized that a huge portion of the questions asked can be summed up like this: "How do I style the google.search.SearchControl?" For instance, how would one make it so that only a result's title and URL appear (i.e., the description is not visible), or even just the URL? What if you want to change some of the default colors? What if you, being the stylish computer geek that you are, want to make your SearchControl into a 24th century Starfleet console to fit in with that first-season spandex Star Trek: The Next Generation uniform you're wearing right now?

Well, you're in luck! Using Mozilla Firefox with the Firebug add-on installed (an absolute must-have for any web developer, by the way), you can do all this and more simply by inspecting the structure of the default search control and taking advantage of the fact that almost every one of its individual elements is given at least one className that can be used with Cascading Style Sheets to apply different style rules. We've put together a spectacular video to provide a very brief overview of using Firefox and Firebug to inspect the structure (and tinker with) the structure of the control.


For even more information on how you can do more with Firefox and Firebug, you'll want to check out Ben Lisbakken's excellent tutorial, which includes even more video! And for good measure, we've included the control's structure (complete with a few of my own comments) below:

<div class="gsc-control">
    <!-- FYI: This form is the same as the google.search.SearchForm -->
    <form class="gsc-search-box">
        <table class="gsc-search-box">
            <tbody>
                <tr>
                    <td class="gsc-input">
                        <!-- This next input is the search box itself -->
                        <input class="gsc-input/>
                    </td>
                    <td class="gsc-search-button">
                        <!-- This next input is the search button itself -->
                        <input class="gsc-search-button"/>
                    </td>
                    <td class="gsc-clear-button">
                        <!-- This next div is the clear button (i.e., the little x) -->
                        <div class="gsc-clear-button"/>
                    </td>
                </tr>
            </tbody>
        </table>
        <table class="gsc-branding">
            <tbody>
                <tr>
                    <td class="gsc-branding-user-defined"/>
                    <td class="gsc-branding-text">
                        <div class="gsc-branding-text">powered by</div>
                    </td>
                    <td class="gsc-branding-img">
                        <img class="gsc-branding-img"/>
                    </td>
                </tr>
            </tbody>
        </table>
    </form>
    <!-- In tabbed mode, this is where the tabs will appear; in stacked mode, this will be absent! -->
    <div class="gsc-tabsArea">
        <!-- The following div would be the active tab -->
        <div class="gsc-tabHeader gsc-tabhActive"/>
        <!-- These spacer divs will appear AFTER every tab to do exactly what their className would imply -->
        <div class="gs-spacer"/>
        <!-- And this one would be an inactive tab -->
        <div class="gsc-tabHeader gsc-tabhInactive"/>
        <div class="gs-spacer"/>
    </div>
    <div class="gsc-resultsBox-visible">
        <!-- The next divs contain the actual results. The classes in square brackets are ONLY present in TABBED mode -->
        <!-- This would be the active tab -->
        <div class="gsc-resultsRoot [gsc-tabData gsc-tabdActive]">
            <table class="gsc-resultsHeader">
                <tbody>
                    <tr>
                        <td class="gsc-twiddleRegionCell gsc-twiddleRegion-opened">
                            <div class="gsc-twiddle">
                                <!-- This next div will contain your searcher's title or label (e.g., Local), but it won't be visible in tabbed mode -->
                                <div class="gsc-title"/>
                            </div>
                            <!-- This next div will contain your search's estimated result count, but it's invisible in tabbed mode, too! -->
                            <div class="gsc-stats">
                            <!-- This is the selector that chooses 1, 4, or 8 visible results. Please note that only ONE of the options in square brackets will be visible -->
                            <div class="gsc-results-selector [gsc-one-result-active OR gsc-more-results-active OR gsc-all-results-active]">
                                <div class="gsc-result-selector gsc-one-result"/>
                                <div class="gsc-result-selector gsc-more-results"/>
                                <div class="gsc-result-selector gsc-all-results"/>
                            </div>
                        </td>
                        <td class="gsc-configLabelCell">
                            <!-- This next span will only be present if the searcher has configuration options -->
                            <!-- Also, it will only have ONE of the options in square brackets, depending on whether or not the configuration form is visible or not -->
                            <span class="gsc-configLabel [gsc-twiddle-closed OR gsc-twiddle-opened]"/>
                        </td>
                    </tr>
                </tbody>
            </table>
            <!-- This next div is the configuration form for a searcher. It is only present if the searcher has configuration options -->
            <!-- The exact className of the config form will depend on the type of searcher. So you'll only have ONE of the options below.  You can probably figure out which one your searcher will have -->
            <!-- By the way, I have no idea why it's gsc-locationConfig instead of gsc-localConfig :) -->
            <div class="gsc-config [gsc-locationConfig OR gsc-videoConfig OR gsc-blogConfig OR gsc-newsConfig OR gsc-patentConfig]">
                <!-- The exact content of the config div will vary depending on your searcher's options -->
                <!-- Use Firefox with Firebug to explore the possibilities here! -->
            </div>
            <div class="gsc-results [gsc-localResult OR gsc-webResult OR gsc-blogResult OR gsc-newsResult OR gsc-imageResult OR gsc-bookResult OR gsc-patentResult OR gsc-videoResult]">
                <!-- This is your FIRST actual search result. All results will follow this pattern -->
                <!-- Please note, again, that only ONE of the classNames in the square brackets will apply, depending on the searcher -->
                <div class="gsc-result [gsc-localResult OR gsc-webResult OR gsc-blogResult OR gsc-newsResult OR gsc-imageResult OR gsc-bookResult OR gsc-patentResult OR gsc-videoResult]">
                    <!-- The contents of this div will be the same as outlined in the documentation for your searcher's results -->
                </div>
                <div class="gsc-expansionArea">
                    <!-- This is where the REST of your search results show up, again following the same pattern as above -->
                </div>
            </div>
        </div>
        <!-- And the inactive one -->
        <div class="gsc-resultsRoot [gsc-tabData gsc-tabdInactive]">
            <!-- All the rest of the structure of this is the same as above -->
    </div>
</div>

So, thanks to Firefox and Firebug, we have access to the SearchControl's structure. Now we can get to work making our control look like one of those 24th-century consoles that we see every day on the starship Enterprise! To get this done, we're going to start with the stock "Hello, world" example for the AJAX Search API. Then we're going to remove the style element that comes with it and plug in a new external stylesheet below the inline script that initializes the whole thing.

Once that's done, we need to (a) change a bunch of colors; (b) rework a number of background images; and (c) open a small hole in the space-time continuum to get ourselves a starship console to put it all on. Okay, so that last one isn't exactly possible, but we can do all the rest with a little CSS. And the whole thing, put together, looks like this.

Now, you will notice that a number of those rules have complex selectors (e.g., .gsc-resultsHeader td.gsc-twiddle-opened...). This is because Google's default CSS is rather specific in places. And it's also why Firefox with Firebug is so very important. It really makes the whole process almost painless.

So there you have it: style. Well, for your SearchControl, at least. Next time, we'll talk about why the Starfleet quartermaster abandoned spandex.

Until then, happy styling!

Jeremy R. Geerdes
Generally Cool Guy
jrgeerdes@gmail.com

p.s. What cool custom designs have you come up with? Share them in the Google Group! Ben Lisbakken has promised some Google schwag for interesting designs...