Things that were not immediately obvious to me

Over the past few days I’ve talked about the process of converting my puzzle site from a webapp into a Google Gadget. A few twists and turns aside, the centerpiece of the effort was eliminating the page reloads that I’d used to navigate between puzzles, and editing my markup slightly to created a gadget XML spec from my existing HTML code. This seems to have been the Right Way to do things, but today I want to look at a different issue: “What’s the fastest, dumbest way to convert an existing web site into a Google Gadget?”

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I’ve dropped the first version of my widget, available here. (I don’t have any nice “click here to add” functionality yet; that’s for tomorrow.) I’ve collected a few more random observations while getting it out the door, which might be of interest to you.

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In order to convert my puzzles to work with Google Gadgets, I’ve shifted from a page-reload mechanic to an AJAX-y XHR-driven one. As a result I’ve discovered first-hand that the new thing isn’t always better. I’m sure that this has been covered before, but here are a few ways in which an AJAX approach is inferior to a more explicitly REST-ful one.

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I’ve been working on widgetizing my puzzles as Google Gadgets.  The biggest change has involved converting from a page-reload mechanism for navigating between puzzles to something more AJAX-y.  This conversion has gone well, but along the way I’ve found a number of non-obvious characteristics of Gadgets that I’d like to talk about here.

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I’ve been looking into making my puzzles available as a Google Gadget. The process doesn’t seem too difficult – just a little unwieldy. Today, I want to talk about one small (but important) aspect of Google Gadgets: Views.

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How can you make money online? Well, the same way you can make money anywhere else: By selling stuff. You can either sell your own stuff, or get paid to sell someone else’s stuff. Today, I want to talk about one way to sell someone else’s stuff.

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Today I set up a very simple Postfix instance on my Fedora 10 Slicehost VPS. Although Slicehost offers an excellent series of articles on setting up a mailserver, that series assumes that the base OS is Ubuntu Hardy. Naturally, there are some small differences when working with a different distro, and so I wanted to document my observations here.

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Today was tax day. It was a triple-whammy for me. I had to pay:

• personal ’08 State & Federal taxes
• personal (estimated) Q1 ’09 State & Federal taxes
• corporate (estimated) Q1 ’09 State taxes

This was not nearly as much fun as it sounds, even before considering the fact that the whole point of the exercise is to take money from my pocket. Anyway, only slight progress on the marketing project today: I added some more sites to the whitepaper.

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