Getting started with Google Geo (Maps, Mapplets & Earth) APIs

Posted by admin on October 19, 2008 0 comments

There is a great quantity of quality resources to help get you started on making your first geo mashups. This page links to all those great resources from one easy location. Google Maps API Google Streetview API Google Mapplets API Google Earth API Google Earth Google Maps API Get started with the Google Maps API [...]

User-friendly 404 pages

Posted by admin on August 26, 2008 0 comments

If a user types in or follows a URL that does not exist on a website they are usually taken to a 404 (page not found) page.  Returning a standard 404 page to your user tends to provide a less-than-optimal user experience and may cause you to lose them altogether.  A solution is now at [...]

Using the Google Static Maps API to include maps in your emails

Posted by admin on August 11, 2008 0 comments

The Google Maps API is a great way to utilise Google’s Maps platform on your own website. The standard Maps API, however, does not work in e-mails as it is reliant on JavaScript which most (if not all) e-mail clients block. Luckily there is a solution thanks to the Google Static Maps API. The Static [...]

Python: Inserting characters into a string

Posted by admin on August 3, 2008 0 comments

Disclaimer: I’m a Python newbie … if you know of a more efficient way let me know! I needed to take a sequence of 4 digits (eg 1145) and modify it to look like clock-time (eg “11:45″). After a bit of online (what else?) research I decided to take the approach of converting the integer [...]

Python: removing repeated values in a list

Posted by admin on July 29, 2008 0 comments

PLAIN TEXT CODE: list = ['one', 'two', 'three', 'one', 'one', 'four', 'two'] #convert the list into a set.  An element can only exist once within a set set = set(list) #convert the set back into a list type list = list(set) print list Are those variable names confusing? Let's look at that example again: PLAIN [...]

Testing your regular expression Goal URLs for Google Analytics

Posted by admin on July 28, 2008 0 comments

Your dilemma: You want to create a Google Analytics Goal that defines a Goal URL using a regular expression match.  But how do you test it without having to wait 24 hours for your Google Analytics reports to be updated? Help is at hand: Regular expressions can be tested using the search box in Google Analytics [...]

Google Analytics and Troubleshooting AdWords Auto-Tagging

Posted by admin on July 15, 2008 0 comments

When reading your AdWords reports in Google Analytics, there are many possible reasons why there may be discrepancies between Google Analytics visits and AdWords clicks.  If you see wildly different numbers for visits and clicks, the likely culprit is that the AdWords auto-tagging parameter is being stripped from the landing page URL. What happens when [...]

Triggering the Source Code view of the current page using JavaScript

Posted by admin on March 29, 2008 0 comments

I was recently writing a demo to showcase the new Google Language API, and in my demo I did the usual thing of instructing users to View > Page Source in order to view the source code and comments. I know this is less than ideal, because it forces users to have to process the [...]

Class Inheritance in Javascript

Posted by admin on June 5, 2007 0 comments

My previous post showed how to create classes in Javascript. This addendum post shows how to create an inherited class from a parent class. The concept is simple. Declare and define your parent class Declare and define your child class without defining the parent-child relationship Add a new instance of your parent class to your [...]

Creating classes with Javascript

Posted by admin on June 5, 2007 0 comments

Javascript is a prototype-based language rather than a class-based language (e.g. Java). For an explanation of the difference, see Mozilla's comparison of class-based and prototype-based languages. In short, in a class-based language, objects are created by instantiating classes. The classes' list of properties and methods cannot be altered (e.g. added to) at runtime. A prototype-based [...]