Neohawk.Info

As I commented, I think I have figured out to use a private domain with google apps. I found as I was trying to figure out why this was so hard for me to get my head around, my eyes I kept re-reading Jannis’ comment on the original post. Besides the fact that I could get it to work with google pages, I couldn’t get it to work anywhere else — Calendar, Sites, etc.

To quickly review, I followed this documentation. I added google pages from the control panel, logged into godaddy, forwarded to the domain to www.neohawk.net, masked it, and set the @ to 64.202.189.170. This worked. But all the other apps would redirect to google’s domain in the location bar.

Okay, the key in Jannis’ comment was the domain masking. I could figure out how to do it with “naked” domain(above). And I just kept thinking there has got to be a way to do it with other ones, that it really couldn’t be that they limited you to one.

So for the first time, I looked more closely at the GoDaddy screen. And I noticed “add subdomain”.

and

Ah ha! And so I made the connection between Jannis’ comment about masking, and thought I’d give masking a “subdomain” a try. Then I read this help document on godaddy. Turns out it was real easy. Add a subdomain called “calendar”, forward it to the google app url(google.com/a/neohawk.info/calendar/render) and mask the domain.

If you already have ‘@’ defined as 6x.xxx.xxx.xxx, adding a subdomain called “calendar” creates an A record pointing to 6x.xxx.xxx.xxx. Wait a little bit and it works. My subdomain box now looks like this:

And my A records looks like this:

Each “subdomain” is forwarded to the following:

Each of these is “masked”

From what I have tested so far, it works for sites, calendar, googlepages, and the start page.

Issues

Unfortunately, there are couple of issues I see. First off, both “docs” and “mail” redirect to google.com domains, even with the above. I am not sure why that is. Perhaps these two need a different setting? If you know, let me know.

I will do a separate post on some of the other issues I have with Google Apps.

Okay, so I am over my initial infatuation with google apps. I must say that it is a potentially very powerful set of services even considering using the “standard” or free version.

But…there always has be one of these, eh?

For the life of me, I cannot figure out how to get it to work with my domains. I spent quite a bit of time trying to figure this out. I know you can do it, I just can’t find the documentation to do it. What I am trying to do is this:

If you are using google apps with your own domain, wouldn’t that make sense? Can’t figure out how to do it. I did find this page which helped to get me part of the way. I was able to get www.neohawk.net to correctly display my “google pages” site. However, if I am logged into that domain and try to hit calendar.neohawk.net, I can access the calendar but with the google.com domain.

This is not so much a problem for me personally, but it doesn’t make much sense. I have seen other people that seem to have got it down, but I for the life of me can’t figure it out. Nor have I seen a document in Google’s help center that explains how to do this across all google apps applications.

Can anybody enlighten me?

Yesterday, I saw over on GAE Monologista that voluntas submitted an update using the api (JSON only for the gae version). I did some googling but couldn’t figure out how to do it. So, I broke down and asked…..

Voluntas was kind enough to point me in two directions. The first was a firefox addon called poster. By the time I got it downloaded and installed into firefox, he then pointed my to a small python program he created, here. So I did that first. Works like a charm!

A post by Bill Katz, of bloog fame, posted on the google app engine group a link to Techmeme techcrunch where the pricing for google app engine usage (over the free-of-charge caps) is posted for all to see:

"That cap will continue to apply until later this year, but they will announce the 
following usage fees tomorrow:

    Free quota to get started: 500MB storage and enough CPU and bandwidth for 
about 5 million pageviews per month
    $0.10 — $0.12 per CPU core-hour
    $0.15 — $0.18 per GB-month of storage
    $0.11 — $0.13 per GB outgoing bandwidth
    $0.09 — $0.11 per GB incoming bandwidth

This pricing puts Google App Engine storage and bandwidth costs competitive with 
Amazon S3 (plus Google doesn’t have a per-request fee)."

According to techmeme, the limitation on the number of GAE developers will be lifted and an additional 160,000 will be added tomorrow. Or at least announced tomorrow at Google I/O. That means I’ll be able to register my other google accounts! Nice.

I was creating a presentation for a client using google docs. Basically, I was making a pitch to get him to move to Google Apps. So while I was making the presentation, I went into the control panel to make sure I wasn’t missing any functionality. Well, I was.

Now that I think back on it, I remember looking at it before, but seeing as I use django for my actual website and blog, or plone in the case of neohawk.org, I blew right by it without out really checking it out. Well, today, I finally checked it out — Google Pages.

I know the particular client I was creating the website will not be looking for anything overwhelming difficult, web design wise, so most likely the default templates are just fine. However, the other client will most like want some customization of the templates. It’s not clear how to do that though — at least until I hit the google groups for pages. There was a hint of how to change the css, widen the usable portion of the layout etc. I’ll admit, it’s not elegant, but it seems to work. I did a quick test trying the neohawk.info css stylesheet

Google Page Test

I am personally not interested in them whatsoever, but for this particular client and one other it’s absolutely perfect. They have maybe three pages of content, largely just to say that have a web page. Both clients pretty much work on a face-to-face basis only.

I ran across two GAE blogs this weekend. Both of ‘em look pretty good, and seem to be under rather heavy development. Both are available under open source licenses.

Potlatch

Bloog

Commenting on Potlach is provided by a commenting system developed as a proof of concept for demisauce by the same author. I’m actually fascinated by the idea, but haven’t really spent much time getting my head around it yet. Both of the above are straight up “blogs” as opposed to Monologista or Meow type of twitter micro-blogs.

Speaking of which, I noticed that on themonologista trac, they are looking for developers of client applications. So taking a hint from spaz (for twitter) and the pownce Air client, and realizing that both Air and Flex Builder are available for Linux I decided to give the tutorials a try. I finally installed Eclipse 3.3 (K/Ubuntu version is 3.2, but Flex Builder requires Eclipse 3.3) and started watching the quickstart video in creating a RIA app. It was my intention to follow along with the video, and creating the application. But no go for now.

Took me a while to figure it out, but design view mode is not currently supported by the Flex Builder for Linux alpha(it is alpha after all). But one of the very first things the video tutorial does is to go into this mode to set up the UI for the application. So for now I gave up. I did download the code but haven’t gotten around to running it in Eclipse yet.

One final thing, but on a different note, I saw that you can use google app domains for authentication on a google app engine application. So, for example, neohawk.info is registered as a google app domain. I did not that in the control panel you can click on “advanced services” and add a google app engine application using your own domain. I assumed that you had to use a google account for authentication, so I was assuming that it was a tad bit limited in terms of a closed environment (I use the term “closed” lightly). Being able to authenticate against the neohawk.info domain removes that limitation.

Ah, I’m getting sleepy. I’m not even sure if what I am writing is making any sense. I’ll post it for now, and review it again tomorrow AM.

Good night all.

In the lost version of this blog, I had a post on monologista, a twitter-like clone built in Django. I even had a screenshot and I had begun a simple english how-to. Then, came along GAE and I got distracted.

Monologistaの皆様、ごめんなさいね。しかも、GAE版がある気がつくのも遅かったな。　

So the other day I posted about Meow, a twitter-like clone running on GAE. I thought it was pretty darn cool until about 15 minutes ago. Since Twitter was done (suprise), I decided to go take a look at monologista. I noticed that some one had mentioned a version that ran on GAE, so I headed over to the monologista trac.

Sure enough there was a link to http://monologista.appspot.com/. Sure enough, monologista running on google app engine. As far as I poked around, there isn’t any “following” on the GAE version while there is on the django version. Thinking about it, moew and twig don’t have it either. There must be something about GAE that makes it difficult. <-- you would think that somebody who is "watching" 4 people would realize that monologista does in fact have "following. Dunce. What it doesn't have are the little profile pics that twitter has. Then again, that my be part of twitters problem, eh?

On the trac server there is an API thingie for monologista and you get an API Key when you register for the monologista on gae. In fact, you, as with all GAE applications, login with a google account, but then create a “username” or nickname used for posting. To the right of the posts, there is a little profile box that tells you who you ware watching, etc. In that box, is your API Key.

I haven’t read the documentation yet, so I’m not really sure what you can do with the API Key.

Would be nice if there was a rss feed or something that I could plug into my webpage or blog. Then again, just the existence of monologista on GAE is more than I could have every asked.