To build a Google gadget it is best to start with a completed web application. Your application may be Javascript, php, perl, cgi, or some combination of these with HTML. It can be practically anything as long it is accessible via a URL which you will enter in the gadget_url field.

This 'Google Gadget Generator' builds an XML wrapper around the URL of your existing web application. Any user preferences are passed as URL parameters.

Once you enter the Gadget Preferences and any User Preferences press "Submit" and you will be presented with the source code appropriate for a Google gadget.

There is help text available for each field that appears in this space as you fill out the form.

This is a way to navigate through webpages without clicking - just use the mouse wheel.

... a demonstration of a method for browsing through a list of web pages using only the vertical scroll bar. One application of this would be in those cases where it is desirable to rapidly scan through a list of webpages sequentially, in a manner such as flipping through the pages of a book.

I overran the bottom of the page the first few times I tried it but I got the hang of it pretty quickly. It would work really well in the right circumstances, such as in a long list of webpages that are typically accessed sequentially. The source is available under the GNU Public License.

Applied Bayesian Filters uses Spambayes e-mail filtering application to rate the 'spaminess' of a given website. You can even submit sites to train the Bayesian filter or access the rating service as an RPC

Right now the current rating for my blog is...

X-Spambayes-Classification: unsure; 0.50

... but it has only been trained on with a handful of sites so far so hopefully the classifications will be a bit more discerning later.

Do you need to add the tracking code block to every webpage on your site? Depending on the nature of your site and the tools you use to publish webpages this can be as simple as filling in the blank in one form or as daunting as the prospect of editing every single file the site. My site has been around for a while and over the years I have used a variety of techniques to publish pages depending on my current skill level at the time. So in my case adding tracking code to every page ranges from dealing with plain html pages written with vi to the results of content generating techniques based on lMaker, mySQL or php.

For this example we imagine the worst case, a site of plain html files that have to be handled individually and we have to insert that snippet of tracking code into each file just before the </head> tag. The plan is to use the find command to walk us through the website one file at a time and then use the ed command to insert our code where we want it to appear.

In the top level directory of the website we need to make three small files to help us out. First we copy our tracking code into a file:

tracking.txt:

<script src="http://www.google-analytics.com/urchin.js"
type="text/javascript">
</script>
<script type="text/javascript">
_uacct = "UA-######-1";
urchinTracker();
</script>

Note that you need to replace the UA-######-1 with your own website's tracking code.

Next we will need a set of instructions for ed:

ed.cmd

/<\/HEAD>
-1r tracking.txt
w
q

Those four little lines will save us a lot of work. The line /<\/HEAD> tells ed to go the first occurence of a line containing the closing </head> tag. (That is a case-sensitive search so if you need to, change it to /<\/head> instead.) The next line, -1r tracking.txt tells ed to read and insert the contents of tracking.txt above the current line. The 'w' command writes out the file and 'q' is for 'quit'.

Finally we need a shell script to pull it all together for us:

install_tracking.sh

#!/bin/sh

for FILE in `find . -name "*.html" -print`
do
    ed $FILE < ed.cmd
done

At the Unix command prompt enter "sh install_tracking.sh". That's what I did and now my site is ready to reap the benefits of all those cool reports available from Google Analytics.

Phase I is simply an archived version of this blog but it will have other elements soon. The ultimate goal is to automatically construct a site perfectly optimized for search engines. I have been worried about duplicating content during the test but I ran across this:

I have just started using Adsense on my e-commerce website. I am
pleased with the early results however I would also like to use it on
another site I run. This second site is purely informational ...
... Many of these articles are currently available on numerous websites
and in addition and most importantly, many of these articles are also on my
ecommerce site.

My question is this: Will the fact that I have some of these same
articles on two different websites be allowed?

Here is Google's reply:

You can place the ad code on your second site. From your description,
the site does not violate AdSense policy. Simply copy and paste the ad code
or search code onto your website, and we'll automatically detect and serve
ads to the new site. For specific instructions on implementing the
Google code, please visit https://www.google.com/adsense/quickstart.