Google: March 2008 Archives

If you are a fan of Flickr and happen to use iGoogle you may want to check out a Flickr Gadget I recently wrote. It looks like this:

The gadget currently offers three tabs/views. You can see either the latest photos from your Flickr contacts (requires specifying your flickr userid in the settings), a sampling from recent 'interesting' photos, or specify keywords to search across all Flickr photos. You can view larger versions of the thumbnails overlaid in the gadget or jump right into Flickr proper.

I enjoyed creating the gadget and would love to hear any feedback or ideas for improvements.

To add the gadget to your iGoogle page just click the screenshot above or install with this button:

Disclaimer: I work on the iGoogle team at Google.

Having one's email address appear plaintext on a website is something most people try and avoid. Spammer's actively harvest email addresses from the public web and very few want their address on yet another spam list. In situations where it is unavoidable, people often use techniques like spelling out their address (Eg. user AT example DOT com) or adding in extra text (Eg. user_NOSPAM@example.com) or a variety of other approaches. Unfortunately these are easily detectable and extractable with some simple regular expressions and don't do much more than maybe prevent copy-and-paste of your address for legitimate users and maybe force spammers to add another regular expression to their script.

Some quick searches with Google shows how common these approaches are and also how easy it is to detect such patterns.

A slightly better approach, although not always feasible depending on the input restrictions, is to use JavaScript to write out the address. Something simple like:

<script>
document.write("us");
document.write("er@ex");
document.write("ample");
document.write(".com");
</script>


If a spammer were to process each scanned webpage with a JavaScript engine before extracting the addresses then the above wouldn't work, but the overhead (technically and CPU) is such that I don't see this happening anytime soon.

A quick post to try out the new Google Translation API. This API allows web developers to do dynamic text translation from within a webpage. Specify some text, set the language to translate from/to and then display the text that Google returns. Let's see if it works on this very appropriate Richard Feynman quote. You can also check out the Official Google blog post announcing the API. Note this won't likely work if you are reading this within a feed reader.

English

There is a computer disease that anybody who works with computers knows about. It's a very serious disease and it interferes completely with the work. The trouble with computers is that you 'play' with them!

French

Spanish

Japanese