If you’ve switched from a dynamic publishing tool like WordPress to a simpler, static site — whether to take advantage of cheap Amazon S3 hosting, or because you want to publish from flat files, without a database — there’s a few things you may be missing.
Some content is necessarily dynamic. If your site is just flat html files with no database behind them, there’s no easy way to build comments, contact forms or built-in search indexes. Luckily the web has a few solutions. For comments there are JavaScript solutions like Disqus or IntenseDebate, and contact forms can be built with Wufoo, but search is a little more difficult.
You could use Google’s Custom Search Engine tools, but then you’ll need to display things on Google’s terms (including a logo). Yahoo has a similar offering, but its results are often sub-par. The lack of search options for static sites led developer Jeff Kreeftmeijer to create Tapir, a JSON search API that indexes content from your site’s RSS feed.
Designed with static publishing systems in mind (like the popular Ruby on Rails tool, Jekyll), Tapir handles search through RSS and JavaScript without the overhead of a database on your own server. Tapir offers a JSON-based API and relies on Tire behind the scenes (which is powered by Elasticsearch, which in turn is powered by Lucene).
To use Tapir all you need to do is write a simple JavaScript-based search form, query the Tapir index for your site and then parse out the results to display for your visitors.
Tapir will parse and store the RSS feed you supply roughly every 15 minutes. For older posts (i.e. posts already long gone from your RSS feed) you’ll need to use the API to send over the data — something of a pain, but at least it’s a one-time pain.
If you’d like to give Tapir a try, just head over to the site, sign up for a token and read through the basic API docs for details on how to implement your search engine. The Tapir website says that sample code and better reference materials are coming soon, along with a JQuery plugin[Update: As Tapir creator, Kreeftmeijer, notes in the comments below, the JQuery plugin is now available].
Angry Birds, currently one of the most popular games for iOS, Android and other platforms has made the leap to the web. Rovio, the company behind the game, has unveiled a web-based version of Angry Birds at Google’s I/O conference in San Francisco.
You can install the new Angry Birds for the web as an app in Google’s Chrome browser, or just play from the URL, chrome.angrybirds.com, which works just fine in any modern web browser. Just don’t hit that link if you’re planning to get any work done today.
Behind the scenes, the web incarnation of Angry Birds is powered primarily by HTML5. However, if you happen to have ditched Flash, you’ll notice that Angry Birds on the web won’t work.
What’s interesting is that the offending code appears to use gwt-voices, a cross-browser audio shim from Google. In theory gwt-voice only falls back to Flash when needed, but using the Aurora release of Firefox brings up a “You need to install Flash Player” message for Angry Birds (most likely because Firefox does not ship with mp3 support).
Calling Angry Birds an HTML5 app, is, in that regard, somewhat of a stretch.
Still, the primary rendering and logic of the game does use HTML5 elements like canvas, and HTML5 APIs like localStorage. The latter is interesting because it makes Angry Birds on the web hackable.
As per Rovio’s releases on other platforms, Angry Birds for the web offers in-app purchases for additional playing levels. But because Angry Birds uses the localStorage API, a clever dose of JavaScript will, at the time of writing, unlock the extra levels sans payment.
Welcome to the web, Angry Birds, where everything is hackable.
Google has some good news for those of you stuck using Internet Explorer 6, 7 or 8. The company’s Chrome Frame technology, which injects the Google Chrome rendering engine into Internet Explorer, can now be installed without needing admin privileges in Windows.
For now the new features are only in the experimental dev channel, but once this build has been stabilized the new features will roll out to the beta and final release channels.
While it’s true that simply switching web browsers is a far better solution than using Chrome Frame, for those who can’t switch browsers because they’re stuck in corporate IT environments where old versions of IE still reign supreme, Chrome Frame remains the only real solution. Of course such environments are also precisely the sort of places where users can’t install their own software, which is why Google has eliminated the need for admin rights to install Chrome Frame.
Triggering Chrome Frame is left up to individual sites, which must add a meta tag to their pages to check for Chrome Frame.
For more info on what’s new in the latest release of Chrome Frame, check out this video from Google’s ongoing I/O conference in San Francisco:
Rusty Oliver, here in his workshop otherwise known as the Hazardfactory, created this sculpture he calls “the Singularity.” The voltage he’s pumping through those manifolds shape the flames to create a really beautiful EQ meter. Imagine this at concerts. [Wired] More »
There are already plenty of apps that mimic old-school turntablism, but Morpho DJ is an app that lets you mix tracks with your iPhone or iPod touch while keeping the analog turntables at your fingertips. Very cool. More »
Posted by Navneet Singh, Product Manager – Google News
Google News for mobile lets you keep up with the latest news, wherever you are. Today we’re excited to announce a new feature in the U.S. English edition called “News near you” that surfaces news relevant to the city you’re in and surrounding areas.
Location-based news first became available in Google News in 2008, and today there’s a local section for just about any city, state or country in the world with coverage from thousands of sources. We do local news a bit differently, analyzing every word in every story to understand what location the news is about and where the source is located.
Now you can find local news on your smartphone. Here’s an example of a “News near you” mobile section automatically created for someone in Topeka, Kansas:
To use this feature, visit Google News from the browser of your Android smartphone or iPhone. If this is the first time you are visiting Google News on your phone since this feature became available, a pop-up will ask you if you want to share your location. If you say yes, news relevant to your location will appear in a new section called “News near you” which will be added at the bottom of the homepage. You can reorganize the sections later via the personalization page.
You can turn off the feature at any time either by hiding the section in your personalization settings or by adjusting your mobile browser settings. Please visit the Help Center for further details.
So, go to news.google.com from your smartphone and get the latest news from wherever you are.
If you’ve switched from a dynamic publishing tool like WordPress to a simpler, static site — whether to take advantage of cheap Amazon S3 hosting, or because you want to publish from flat files, without a database — there’s a few things you may be missing.
