Web-Design web-design Google, Twitter and Facebook.: January 2011

Sunday, January 16, 2011

Google Docs and Twitter.

So I needed to create a supporting framework between twitter and google spreadsheet. The aim was a google spreadsheet with pre-populated data that would automatically output tweets.

This I personally believe to be very useful as students can follow a particular twitter channel in my project and it will reinforce concepts that they have learnt by pushing daily tweets that are subject specific.

I'm not sure what to actually show you as the result but I will explain the concept.

Lets say you have a spreadsheet with History dates (I hated history, but Im just saying!).
What would be done is that all the necessary historical events that happened would each be summarised as a 120character tweet (twitter uses the other 20 for ids). Now each day a tweet would go out automatically from google docs more specifically, google spreadsheet.

The entire thing is nothing shy of a thing of beauty and very useful. Personally, I'm happy.
Check out our website and follow one of our subjects to see exactly what you get as the end result.

Thanks to Martin over at JISC RSC Mashe for sharing his ideas.

Friday, January 14, 2011

Google Docs, something everyone should know!

As a consultant I'm all to familiar with the need of business owners to get feedback from their customers. Incidentally, not only business owners but every one at some point in time need to get feedback. A website developer that needs a contact us page or a sign up page, a student that's doing a project and needs responses.

Here are some more specific examples.

Thursday, January 13, 2011

Facebook Like Button on Google Site

This is the time of social media, when tweets and facebook rule so I definately needed to incorporate the much needed "like" button from facebook that seems to be such an easy way of associating persons that like a product or company, with their own facebook account.

With google sites, this couldnt have been an easier process

All I had to do was the following

Sunday, January 9, 2011

SpreadSheet Formula Vs JavaScript

Problem: I need to copy a spreadsheet formula in google docs down to other rows when a new form is submitted.

Solution: Create formula Cell c2 = b2 + a2
              Delete (shall I say it louder? DELETE all other rows below this row (row 2 in which u entered the formula)
            Then like magic, whenever any other forms are submitted, the formula will automatically copy itself down into the other rows. Of course, remember to use your absolute ($) expression etc depending on what you want to do.

Solution 2: Write a JavaScript file that reads the input from your spreadsheet, does the calculation and assign it to a variable. Then manually set the script to run each time a form is submitted (just google for google docs triggers).

I think I'll come back to this post and put up a nice and nifty little documentation with images and such.

Cheers.

The beginning... thanks google

Firstly, let me start by saying google is easily the greatest invention. Single Sign_On is super great not just only because of the integration between your gmail (goodbye outlook), calendar (goodbye phone calendar and outlook) but also because google keeps acquiring more and more great products e.g. Blogger!

Btw, I live in Jamaica and I got an automated voice call from google with my verification code. I hate to sound like a noob but dude this is just really super officially easily the most effective strategy I've ever seen a company that want to convince others that it is interested in real development have. I'm convinced. I'm a believer.

Anyways I've started really using google apps and GAS (google apps script, which is really javascript, just like fbml- facebook mark up language is really html) and its been nothing short of refreshing and amazing.

Very simple to use and intuitive, I think I can literally count how many word, excel or presentation documents I have stored on any local machine. I do keep files backed up on my external though, wouldnt be wise to leave everything in the cloud after all, I dont work at or for google and I'm not paying them so I cant demand anything back, none the less, something tells me they are safe so long as I again, back them up.


So I'm prototyping an educational tool, and google seems really big on education (after all that's how they got started in the first place). Hopefully it will definately help my country to excel even the more in academia as well as the caribbean region. I'd however really love to see this whole thing have an entire community behind it, filled with educators, innovators/programmers as well as students who keep demanding more from technology.

As weezy would say... ""here I go!"


Cheers.