Gadgets Apps Hacks

There are several articles out there on using mod_rewrite and .htaccess to convert from dynamic pages with query strings in the urls, to a cleaner more permanent looking link. But even after reading the documentation on RewriteCond and RewriteRule it took me a few hours of experimentation to get the desired effect. So I thought I would share my settings to help serve as examples for others trying to do something similar. Using PHP and MySQL I have pages that are dynamically created from a database. The URLs for those pages look like: http://budgetweb.com/budgetweb/details.php?id= 2825 &provider= CravisHostFive I wanted to use mod_rewrite so that the links in my feed would look like http://budgetweb.com/service/ 2825 / CravisHostFive / Here's what I added to the .htaccess in the root of my web site RewriteEngine on RewriteRule ^service/ ([0-9]+) / ([^/]*) /$ /budgetweb/details.php?id= $1 &provider= $2 I also wanted to handle links typed in which did not have the trailing sla

Google Analytics lets you track subdomains in multiple profiles or a single profile. This article describes how to set it up in a single profile. If you follow the first steps in the article then visitors to the following pages http://www.budgetweb.com/ http://www.budgetweb.com/whatsnew.php http://blog.budgetweb.com/ http://blog.budgetweb.com/1997/12/some-history-of-budgetwebcom.html Show up in Google Analytics as / /whatsnew.php /1997/12/some-history-of-budgetwebcom.html

About 10 years ago Heather published a Pathfinder on James Grover Thurber , which continues to receive a lot of traffic to this day. I recently migrated the site to a new domain hosted on Google Sites. The move was pretty simple, except for one page which was a quiz on James Thurber. It's a fairly simple multiple choice quiz with 6 questions but it is implemented in an html form with JavaScript. Google Sites doesn't allow JavaScript. So I started looking for web sites where I could build a quiz online. First, I found gotoquiz.com, and began to build the quiz. After entering the 6th question I discovered that the quiz had to have a minimum of 10 questions. So I abandoned that and found quibblo.com, and setup an account. This seemed much more involved than what I was looking for. So I decided to implement the quiz as a Google Gadget. If you want to checkout the quiz, visit the Pathfinder on James Grover Thurber . If you want to build a similar google gadget, then feel free to cop

When I was moving my blog to its new location I decided I wanted some of my recent photos from my Flickr account to be shown. In the Layout style of Blogger it seemed that the way to do this was to add a Gadget. I clicked Add Gadget and searched for Flickr and back came 151 gadgets. The first page was things like photos of Christmas, Cannes, France, Italy. Not what I was looking for. I googled for "which is the best google gadget for flickr" and found a zdnet article on 10 essential google gadgets. It recommended Flickr Nugget which I tried, but it didn't let me do exactly what I wanted which was to show a particular label out of my photostream. I also found that when added to my blog it didn't look good and had scrollbars and things. This was the problem with the next 2 or 3 gadgets that I tried as well. Either they didn't fit well on the page, or they didn't do what I wanted. It seemed that I - like 151 people before me - was going to have to build my own go