Neohawk.Info

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.

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.

I was playing around with Google Apps this morning. Recently I discovered that you can use your own domain with google apps — google will even register you a domain for $10 for a year. What that means, for example, is that my rbh at neohawk.info email account is now handled by gmail on the backend, I have a calendar (not open to the public yet), a google docs section, a “start page” and a sites page, which is really like a shared wiki for “internal” use.

As you should be aware, Google announced Friend Connect the other day, and being the dutiful google fanboy, I applied to participate in the “preview release”. What I noticed in filling out the form, was that it was “powered by google docs”. And then this morning, via Ma.gnolia was a simple how-to on how to create a webform using google docs’ spreadsheet. So I decided to give it a try.

I recently got an email, most likely because the person in question saw Planet NEO, which was asking to add me as a contact to the company’s media list — the person in questions appears to work for a PR firm. Of course I responded, (queue old lady from Wendy’s commercial) “Where’s the RSS feed”. And that got me to thinking about the number of website’s I’ve seen that have “news” sections on their website, but no RSS feed. And that gave me the idea for my first google docs’ spreadsheet webform. Note, it’s real simple and not really thought out — I did say I was testing yes?

Feel free to give it a shot: Survey. Results are here