Open Source Computing and GIS in the UK » google

Google Groups problems

Archaeogeek — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 12:55:32 +0000

A quick post to give people a heads up that there seems to be a google groups problem affecting the portable-gis group, amongst others.

If you have signed up with a googlemail account (not gmail, or any other email account) then your messages may get bounced back with a permissions error. This seems to be a general problem affecting many groups, so no doubt a fix is in progress, but just so you know, I’m not blocking anyone (hell, I can’t post to my own group at the moment!).

Thursday Tip Day: Fixing Google Desktop

Archaeogeek — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 22:38:52 +0000

I’ve been a big fan of google desktop for a while now, not so much for the search options but because I like the gadgets. There’s nothing like the Remember The Milk gadget for making you feel guilty about tasks you’ve put off, and I’m currently addicted to the Twitter gadget. However, for some time, Google desktop refused to let me click any web links, access the options, view my google calendar, open links in google chats etc.

A search of the google group suggested it might work if I set Internet Explorer as my default browser, and it does, which is great except for the fact that I loathe IE7 upwards with a passion. Curse it’s non-default layout and shiny tabs and buttons. However, I finally found a solution:

In registry editor (type regedit at the run prompt), and find the following key:

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\htmlfile\shell\open\command

and change it’s value from the path to Internet Explorer on your system to the path to Firefox.

Now, I guess I ought to caution you about making changes to your registry and how it might accidentally cause your hamster to get run over or similar, so consider yourself cautioned…

A Cool Thing

Archaeogeek — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 14:29:55 +0000

In which I finally learn how to add a dynamic blogroll to my blog…

Those people who read this blog via the website rather than by rss (hi there!) will no doubt be pleased to know that I’ve finally added a blogroll to my site, listing some of the many other blogs that I like.

I held back from creating a static blogroll using the built in wordpress tool, because the sites that I like pretty much change daily, and it seemed like there should be a way of reflecting this using google reader’s public pages option. And there is- it just took me a while to get it to work. You will find some instructions here, but I needed even more help!
This blog explained a few months ago how to create a html/javascript element from a public google reader tag, for insertion in a blogger site or similar. It even gives you the ability to save the resulting blogroll as opml, which I think is really handy. However, wordpress doesn’t like things like that. You can manually edit your template to include the code but if, like me, you use the widget plugin, then you have to do something extra. Enter the execphp plugin, which executes php code in a widget.

So, for those of you who, like me, need a little extra help with this complicated web-design stuff:

In google reader, create a tag for all of those sites that you want in your blogroll.
Make that tag public and follow the instructions here to create the html/javascript element
Download and activate the execphp plugin
In an html editor, add html, head and body opening and closing tags to the code you generated above
Echo every single line of this as follows: echo “\n”;
Surround everything with php tags
Paste the resulting code into a php widget in your blog and Robert is indeed your mother’s brother

Hope this is helpful!

Disclaimer- I’m sure it’s possible to do all sorts of damage with the php plugin, so please be careful and do this at your own risk. I will try and help getting this particular process working (confession- I had help from my own tame web designer) but can’t really offer support with the plugin in general.