What not is SOAP?

Dave Winer: "Back to scripting. I've heard a lot of people say that SOAP was designed to circumvent firewalls. In fact, that wasn't one of the goals for SOAP. We chose HTTP because it was broadly supported in scripting environments, and we wanted the lowest possible barrier to adoption. It was also done with respect, don't reinvent something that already works...."

Usability for Senior Citizens

Jakob Nielsen's latest alertbox is on usability for Senior Citizens. And if you want to continue on the theme of usability, check out this months feature article of Digital Web magazine titled Accessible By Design by Anitra Pavka.

Identifying Fonts

We can easily identify the difference between serif, sans serif and script fonts. But how many fonts can we identify, 10, 20 maybe even 100. Well that should be enough, for we don't use more than 10 fonts in our day to day working. For example in this site we have used verdana font at all the places barring the Logo image which we made using "Trajan Bold" font from Adobe.


But, at times we need to find that particular font we saw someplace. At such times, services like Identifont and WhatTheFont comes into play. Identifont allows you to identify a font by asking you a series of simple questions whereas at WhatTheFont, you can upload the image or specify the URL to the image and it will give you a list of matching fonts. We now have our many questions answered except for just one. What's that font Andrew Sullivan is using on his site?

New Site Layout

We have a new layout. This layout adheres to W3C HTML and CSS Standards quite comfortably. This would be a lot more easier to maintain also. We have tested this layout on IE 5.5 and Netscape 6. We don't see any reason why it should not scale well for other newer browsers. Let us know what you think of this.

Thank You, David

David Watson blogged about our Google API implementation today. So, Are we famous now?? :)

Google API implementation

Here is an implementation of Google API in VBScript. I have modified the original source by David Watson. This code should run on any windows machine which has the Windows Scripting Host and Microsoft SOAP 2.0 Toolkit installed. You can run this script by saving it as a .vbs file and double clicking it or by issuing "csript <filename>" command at the command prompt.

REM Declare the variables

Dim soapClient, ResultCount, Results, i, key, query

Dim ResultElements, ResultCount

REM Create the object 

set soapClient = createobject("MSSOAP.SoapClient")

on error resume next

REM Extract the WSDL file from the googleapi.zip in the same directory as this script file

soapClient.mssoapinit("GoogleSearch.wsdl")

key = "Your key here"

query="Your query here"

if err then

     wscript.echo err.description

     wscript.echo "Faultstring =" + SOAPClient.faultString

     wscript.echo "Faultactor =" + SOAPClient.faultactor

     wscript.echo "Faultcode =" + SOAPClient.faultcode

     wscript.echo "Detail =" + SOAPClient.detail

end if

REM If you are connecting through a proxy server, Keep the following three lines

 soapClient.ClientProperty("ServerHTTPRequest") = True 

 soapClient.ConnectorProperty("ProxyServer") = "Proxy"

 soapClient.ConnectorProperty("ProxyPort") = 8080

set Results = soapClient.doGoogleSearch (key, query, 0, 3, False, "", False, "", "", "")

For i = 0 To Results.length - 1

  If Results.Item(i).nodeName = "resultElements" Then

       ResultElements = Results.Item(i).nodeTypedValue

       Exit For

  End If

Next

if err then

     wscript.echo err.description

     wscript.echo "Faultstring =" + SOAPClient.faultString

     wscript.echo "Faultactor =" + SOAPClient.faultactor

     wscript.echo "Faultcode =" + SOAPClient.faultcode

     wscript.echo "Detail =" + SOAPClient.detail

else

     wscript.echo ResultElements 

end if

This should return you three(3) results of your query. This example can be extended to take care of other search responses. For example the following will return you the estimated total number of results that exist for the query.

For i = 0 To Results.length - 1

 If Results.Item(i).nodeName = 

              "estimatedTotalResultsCount" Then

       ResultCount = Results.Item(i).nodeTypedValue

       Exit For

 End If

Next

wscript.echo ResultCount

We are indexed

Atlast we are indexed. Need proof, Search Google for webjives and what do you get....See, You Don't believe us, Do you?

Higher and Higher

Barry Bonds does it again. He hit his 574th career homer(his seventh for the season) which moved him to the sixth place all time. I feel so bad for the pitchers. What do you do when you know that when pitching to Bonds, one of those pitches is gonna be dispatched to the bay. So Bad, So Good.

Google releases Web APIs

Google has unveiled the Web APIs service which will allow developers to search google from their code. It uses SOAP to achieve this so almost anyone using their choice of languages can make great use of the APIs. Developers can issue search requests to Google's index of over 2 billion Web pages and receive results as structured data; access information in the Google cache; and check the spelling of words. Google Web APIs support the same search syntax as the Google.com site.


Within hours of releasing, samples were available in a host of languages. So cool!

Eric (of Glish.com) has a new layout. This one is certainly more accessible but we will miss the nice photographs of flowers in his old layout. Also, the text preference widget is real cool. Good Job.

Do you know this? Well we didn't.

The secret technology behind Google's amazing accuracy.