DRAGNET goes gadget

In my IGoogle career I had only created a few actual gadgets - to someone who grew up in the 1950's XML is a very hard thing to learn. Unlike HTML it is absolutely unforgiving of any inconsistency. Miss so much as a quotation mark and you're in the dark. I got back into the game in a funny way. One day I noticed that I was listed in Google's Top IGoogle developer at around #200. This is because I had a wildly popular fall shot and it landed me in an area that was way out of my league. Later on I found out that I was also at #400 using a slightly different Google account. That got me taking another look at my gadget files to see if I could add more information like quotes and links to my web page. After a few weeks of this, my XML capabilities were way up. Previously when it was time to parse I had ten failures for every success. Now those odds have flipped. Up until this, my gadgets were just simple photo cubes. I was able to replace these with slide shows that would have up to 100 images of Ireland, New York or Dogs. Then I realized that I could imbed our DRAGNET search engine of free legal databases into a gadget file. There was some trial and error followed by actual success. I'm still tweaking, but we do have a working gadget now with the full functionality of DRAGNET and it's getting better every day.

Meantime, the improved data started showing up in the top developer's list. Earlier this week, my two entries were in adjacent spots.

DRAGNET and its offspring

My summer project this year was to create a search gadget to put on our Facebook page. Google gives you access to something called Custom Search if you have a Google account (and why wouldn't you?) I'd used this to little effect in my Quinnipiac days, but I knew that there are many good free sites in the legal world, so I gave that another try. Once I had added about thirty sites, I knew I was on to something big. The more sites I added the more powerful this became, and the speed was always lightning-fast. Over the summer we finalized it, got the database count up to 80, and launched it with a new name "DRAGNET." The idea came from library director Camille Broussard, and I worked out the acronym "Database Resource Access using Google's New Electronic Technology."


Once I announced DRAGNET to some listservs it became an immediate sensation. I got several good suggestions about how to expand and fine-tune its results screens. The new expanded DRAGNET went live yesterday with search tabs for New York, International, Federal and a tab that displays the most recent hits from all 80 sites. Then I added the same search technology to a screen we keep that tracks 150 law journals with current issues and archives available free online - "Law Reviews with online content." More recently, at Camille's suggestion, I created a search page to use DRAGNET technology to track the constitutions and state codes of all 50 states and the federal government. This went public today at the NYLS Website.

I have about 10 custom searches in progress, including a few that I did just for practice. One of them tracks suggested recipe sites, to avoid the ones that have abusive popups. That will appear on my personal web page one of these days. Christina Crocker of the East Meadow Public Library used the technique to track book talk information. There is just no end to this.

Full Screen Google

Just found out by accident yesterday that Google now lets you add your own pictures to the Classic Google screen. I went to the Irish vault and had no trouble picking out an appropriate shot. Then I went to my wife's account and added one for her. I emailed her and told her to look. The response was "Wow!" I can't wait for September to start rolling out the fall shots.

New Gadgets

I finally figured out how to code the XML to create a Google gadget and get it in the interface. The first was a spinning cube with the theme "Love your Libraries." Then I resurrected a similar globe with images from the West of Ireland. I'm now busy adapting several customized Google searches dealing with legal data. Once you get the hang of this, the only limit is your imagination.

Inheriting the earth

I recently set out to do a Google map that provided an interface between Google's map of the world and our online catalog. In other words, when you click on the placemark for the Philippines, you can hit a link and see which books we own about that country. I did the initial set myself. Then I passed it along to my work study law student and had him add a further link to the CIA World Factbook. With that done, we added links to the online law archives of every state. Currently, he is adding photos from Wikimedia to show scenes from each country. Meantime, this has quietly attracted an audience - more than 600 views and the pace appears to be accelerating.

http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?hl=en&ie=UTF8&vps=1&jsv=169c&oe=UTF8&msa=0&msid=107227665862340505019.0004617b83392504880aa

Google themes

For some time Google has opened up its IGoogle theme bars to developers. I looked into it a year ago and found that the instructions made the 1040 tax form look easy by comparison. Recently, I noted that they have put in an interface that makes theme creation about 100 times easier. I started by creating a few from my vast library of pictures from Ireland. Getting the images to display correctly was a process of trial and error. I created 3 or 4 that I wish I could take back, but then got into the swing. Some of these started appearing in the index within days. You can see whatever has been listed so far at: http://www.google.com/ig/directory?q=terry+ballard&hl=en&type=themes . By today, I have nearly 200 themes in the index (If you add one or two a day it adds up pretty fast). The usage counts are interesting. Most show up as <100 subscribers. At first I was doing this just as a lark without any sense of others using the themes. Then one day, one of the themes showed 120 subscribers. Since then more than 30 have popped up with more than 100 at one time or another. Lately, there are always 7 or 8 at a given time with known counts. Things got really interesting in the fall, when one of my themes got some attention, apparently from Google France, and the theme got more than 12,000 subscribers.

YouTube

A few months ago, I realized that my 'B' digital camera can take video with sound that can be uploaded to YouTube. I found out that snippets less than a minute long are most likely to be seen. I've also proved that people will look at anything. See for yourself at
http://www.youtube.com/user/terryballard