Programming

In today's digital age, knowing how to program is a great ability.

In the past couple months, I've built Google gadgets to show Child and I how much money we have left in our bank account, and how many minutes we have left on our phone plan (see below).


(Most of the content [text/images] is grabbed directly from our account at tmobile.com. The black and white bar across the gauge is a custom addition, however. It marks where we should be for the time in our billing cycle--currently we have minutes to spare.)

I've also built custom RSS feeds for some forums and sites I frequent. This has a downside, however. In the past, whenever I'd get bored, I'd browse my collection of sites. Now, however, any updates to the sites are delivered right to my door, so it takes me 10 minutes to scan all new content, and I'm bored again.

My most recent project has been learning how to build Firefox 3 extensions. As my first example, I built a word-replacement extension. It can run automatically, or you can run it per-page from a right-click menu item. It replaces a list of words with replacement words on all webpages you view. Good for cleaning up forums with a lot of bad language, replacing common misspellings or abbreviations, etc. Something maybe parents might be interested in.



The first comment someone posted after I submitted the extension to the extension-directory was as follows:

First- I find this hysterical... not because it exists, but because I have a list of friends that I could get to transfer from IE to Firefox just for this extension. (I live in Utah- and all my friends are Mormons- turns out the stereotypes are true)

This person doesn't know that I'm also a Mormon living in Utah. :)

I found the comment amusing, but I'm really not sure why people are so (egotistical? self-centered? close-minded?) that they think everyone else in the world shares their exact same moral standards.

I don't laugh at, look down on, or denigrate your use of language on your (website, blog, whatever). You didn't ask me to read it, and I accept you for who you are. So why do I get laughed at or looked down on for holding to my own moral standard?

An Idea Actually Worked!

A few months ago when I first started fiddling around with Google Gadgets, I tried to think of something useful I could make. Then I got a Good Idea.

I went to a website that listed the top 100 sites of the internet, then started going down the list, checking to see if each website had an associated Google Gadget. Wikipedia did, CNN did, etc. etc. Then, I found one that didn't: Bloomberg.com. It's a financial website of some sort.

So, I made a gadget that simply displayed the headlines from Bloomberg's site, and uploaded it to the directory. Now it gets an average of 675 users a day.



(I was also just informed by Child that the entire time she read "Where the Red Fern Grows," she was picturing the two dogs as dachshunds.

...Dachshunds?)

Google Analytics Google Gadget

With the NaNoWriMo gadget a success, I've been working on another gadget. This one displays your Google Analytics statistics.


So my blog doesn't really get that many hits, that's just the screenshot of the gadget in action that the Google Gadget Directory wanted.

Note how the gadget creates a new tab for each profile in your account. Also, that's what the previous couple posts about PGP and GnuPG/GPG encryption were all about--I'm encrypting the Analytics username/password.

I barely published it, so it won't show up in the Google Gadget directory for a few days, assuming Google doesn't have a problem with it.

NaNoWriMo Google Gadget

I create a Google Gadget for NaNoWriMo (an event where writers get together and try to write 50,000 words during the month of November.

Here's a screenshot:



If you want to add the NaNoWriMo Google Gadget to your Google homepage, click the button: