For the Developer » google

Google AJAX Library CDN Versioning

Randy Merrill — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 01:34:51 +0000

It’s amazing what you find when you read the documentation. Since I always forget the address for Google’s CDN hosting of jQuery I have to search for it each time. This time when I found the address I was looking around a bit and found out this interesting tidbit that I didn’t know before about Google’s CDN for their AJAX libraries.

Specifying a version of “1.8.2″ will select the obvious version. This is because a fully specified version was used. Specifying a version of “1.8″ would select version 1.8.4 since this is the highest versioned release in the 1.8 branch. For much the same reason, a request for “1″ will end up loading version 1.9.1.

Google AJAX Libraries API Developer’s Guide

For example, if I were linking to jQuery I would normally have used the following and updated semi-regularly:

http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.3.2/jquery.min.js

But if I just want the latest for the “1.3″ version I could reference:

http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.3/jquery.min.js

Or if I was feeling really risky and trust jQuery not to break between versions:

http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1/jquery.min.js

Hope its as useful to others as I found it!

The Search For Sitemap Ping URLs

Randy Merrill — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 03:11:13 +0000

Sitemaps just make sense. You create a Sitemap file, or a set of files and a Sitemap Index, that has all the your site links crafted purely for search engine consumption. It’s like candy for the search giants since they get spoon-fed your site structure by you. Not only can it tell them where your content is, but it can tell them how often it changes, when it was last changed, and what priority it is to your site. Pure confection!

But the problem, for me at least, was finding the urls to ping so that you are not waiting for the giants to get a sweet tooth and come looking for you. The page on informing giants talks about a magical searchengine_URL that can be replace by your supporting giant. The problem: the site never tells what searchengine_URLs exist for your giant companions.

After some searching I finally found the urls that I was looking for. Where did I find the mystical urls you ask? Well it wasn’t from a google search (returned a lot of non-helpful links), it was from a wordpress plugin. In my opinion it is not a very good way to promote a service that is supposed to make it easier for you to get your content into the giants’ mouths.

Without further ado here are the urls that should work for sending your updated Sitemap to the search giants:

http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/ping?sitemap=
http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=
http://webmaster.live.com/ping.aspx?siteMap=
http://search.yahooapis.com/SiteExplorerService/V1/updateNotification?appid=<Yahoo! Developer Key>&url=

I would also suggest reading the other options for informing the search engines, such as adding ‘Sitemap: ’ to your robots.txt file and actually visiting to the giants’ playground.

Google IO T-Shirt

Randy Merrill — Wed, 28 May 2008 23:57:43 +0000

Just looking at the Google IO T-Shirt for this year’s attendees and it appears they spelled GOOGLEIO wrong. I was curious as I was sitting in a session and typed in the binary that is on the shirt and it came out GOOGLEKO.

Here is my translation of the shirt to binary:

0100011101001111010011110100011101001100010001010100101101001111

Here is what that is translated:

GOOGLEKO

Just something interesting, we’ll see if it is true.

UPDATE: Thanks TechCrunch for verifying the shirt for me!