Innovation Updates

It's been a while since my last post. What have I been up to the past few weeks? I took a week off and instead of working on MyVoteforPrez.com like I hoped to I decided to be lazy. I've been working on a few small projects though. One of them is ZlataPR.com. This is a domain I bought for Zlata a few months ago. She'd eventually like to have a site like TMZ or Perez Hilton which act as sources for entertainment news and gossip. I decided to use the Google AJAX Search API to display recent news articles and videos for Zlata's Hot Topics. For now the site only displays links to other sites and news sources. The search APIs are really easy to use and can be configured without too much knowledge of JavaScript or AJAX which is nice for beginners. I downloaded the Google Web Toolkit today and played around a little bit. I'd love to develop some cool widgets with it when I have some time...need to refresh my Java skills now!

Update: MyVoteforPrez.com

One feature I'd like MyVoteforPrez.com to show off is a bio page for each 2008 Presidential candidate with a dynamic listing of current news articles about the candidate. I've been experimenting with the Google AJAX Search API to provide these recent news clippings. Yesterday I was able to get the AJAX Search API working the way I want it to. Basically when the bio page is loaded an Google News Search is executed for the candidate whose bio page is loaded. This is done by configuring a Google Search control to query Google News for the candidate and display a list of resulting news stories with links to the full article. Google makes it very easy to configure the AJAX search control by making the search sources and result displays configurable with simple JavaScript. In order to hide the search control I added a CSS rule and added a DOM element to show the Google branding "Powered by Google" image. Check out the finished AJAX Search control on Joe Biden's Bio Page.

General Updates JessesGadgets.com and MyVoteforPrez.com...

This week I haven't had the chance to do too much development. I've been real busy with work and haven't been that motivated after work to work on my side projects. Here's some brief updates to a few projects I'm currently working on:

MyVoteforPrez.com: Currently there isn't a whole lot to look at. I've listed all of the candidates who have either declared they will run or officially filed papers to run for President in the 2008 elections. My next steps are:
1. Post detailed information about each candidate and create a candidate bio page. In the bio page I would like to use the Google AJAX Search API to show a list of recent news articles for each candidate. I'm excited to learn another Google API and use some AJAX on the site! Check out my progress here.

2. Start tracking votes. I need to set up some PHP/HTML forms to submit votes to a MySQL database back-end

3. Display the results on a Google Map.

JessesGadgets.com: Unfortunately I've had to put the "KissNet" gadget (detailed here) on hold for now to work on MyVoteForPrez.com which is more exciting to me right now. The functionality on JessesGadgets.com is all set so now it's just a matter of running/maintaining the site. Yesterday one of my friends gave me some inspiration to sell my extra Yankees tickets on JessesGadgets.com. I checked and ticket sales are allowed on Froogle so I think I will post all of my extra tickets on JessesGadgets and see what happens. Since I can email-forward my tickets the whole process will be very smooth. If anyone wants to sell sporting events/concert tickets on JessesGadgets let me know. I will not charge any listing fees.