Entries from December 2008 ↓

First, Happy New Year to everyone from AdSense for feeds and FeedBurner teams here at Google.

Second, this is a quick one – but we get asked this a lot, so we thought we’d cover it.

If you currently use the Competitive Ad Filter with AdSense for content, you may also wish to use it with AdSense for feeds. In order to provide publishers with ultimate control, the filter for AdSense for feeds is separate from that of AdSense for content, but operates in the exact same manner.

To block competitors ads from showing in AdSense for feeds, login to your AdSense account, go to the AdSense setup tab, and select Competitive Ad Filter. Then make sure you have selected the tab marked “AdSense for Feeds” and enter the domains or partial domains into the text box.

With one week until the start of Macworld, we wanted to give you a glimpse of what to expect at Google’s booth.

At any given time, there will be plenty of Googlers at our booth available to answer questions about any Google software made for Mac or iPhone.  Demo stations will be placed throughout the booth so that attendees can try out Google software on their own, and in many cases, talk to the people who helped create that software.

Additionally, there will be larger presentations in the booth each day covering specific topics in more depth.  Our goal is to make these presentations as interactive as possible, so we are hoping for feedback from Macworld attendees in the booth on the topics they’d like to see discussed.

We are very excited about Macworld and hope that you’ll stop by our booth if you’re in the area!

If you’ve been following some recent posts at the venerable Burning Questions, you’ll be happy to know that we are now starting the next phase of FeedBurner integration into Google, right here in our swanky new digs on the Adsense for feeds blog. AdSense for feeds isn’t just about earning revenue for your feeds; it’s also the starting point for managing syndication and tracking feed analytics. We hope to give you some tips to how to earn the most revenue from your syndicated content, but we’ll also be offering tips to help ensure your feeds remain in tip-top shape.

A few months ago, we announced that we would be moving all FeedBurner accounts to Google accounts and we have been steadily doing just that ever since. However, as many of you know, this has been a manual process and has taken some time to smooth out.

Now, we’re happy to announce that if you have a valid AdSense account and a FeedBurner account, you should now be able to initiate this account move directly from within your AdSense account. (Moving accounts starting from within FeedBurner.com and FeedBurner.jp to Google will be available soon. We’re grinding away on this feature right now.)

Why move? That’s the easy part. Moving to a Google account means:

* We can tie your FeedBurner feeds to other Google products and services easily as you see fit
* You can participate in AdSense for feeds
* You will get access to all the new services and publisher tools for syndication we are developing in the future

We will still be contacting FeedBurner publishers by email, based on previous account information you provided that matches information in Google accounts. But if we are not getting to you fast enough, please use the self-serve form to initiate your account move, even if you requested a move at a prior time. This helps us reach as many of you as possible, as there may have been a typo in your request that prevented us from successfully moving your account previously.

We know there are a lot of questions around this process, so we have created a FeedBurner to Google Account Transfer FAQ. We look forward to helping you earn more money from your syndicated content and streamlining your feeds in the New Year!

As 2008 draws to a close, we’d like to leave you with a little gift. And since we know the one thing everyone wants is more stuff to read (don’t forget you can hide unread counts!), we’ve got just the thing.

You may have noticed that we added a little “What’s hot” section our blog’s sidebar that shows some algorithmically generated stuff that is interesting across the web. Who are we kidding… you’re probably reading this blog in Reader, so this is news to you. If you’re interested in Google’s Top 10 Hidden Treasures, meat-scented body spray, or being a little more environmentally friendly, what are you waiting for? Go check it out (view in Reader)! We’ve also added it to our Staff Picks bundle, so if you haven’t yet taken a look at some of the other awesome blogs there, go ahead and treat yourself.

We hope you enjoy it, and hope you have a happy holidays! See you all in 2009.

Special thanks goes out to Derek on the Recommendations team for making this awesome feed possible!

Updated 12/19/2008: Clarified that “What’s Hot” lives in the Reader Blog’s sidebar, not Reader itself.

Posted by Pam Benjatanaporn, Program Manager

Posted by: Tyler Morse, Software Engineer and Dylan Casey, Product Manager

When we set out to build a timeline to commemorate Google’s 10th birthday, we wanted to add an experimental search feature. We may be a little biased, but because we needed to search a specific subset of the web, and needed customized presentation, we decided to use Google Site Search, which is powered by the Custom Search platform. Using Site Search, the team designed a customized user interface and user experience, tightly embedded within the timeline application, in a few days.

The Google Timeline data is stored and served up as static files of JavaScript objects and arrays. While this was very efficient for the Timeline JavaScript application, we needed to massage the data in order to get it indexed and searchable, as well as tie it back to the timeline objects.

We generated static HTML files for all timeline events. The filenames have identifying data in them that allow us to correlate a search result with the original event; this way, we can translate a user click on a search result to the appropriate timeline event. Since we wanted explicit control of event dates, we also encoded the event date in each HTML file.

We use Site Search’s flexible XML interface for retrieving the results. When we get back search results, we parse the XML data, extract specifically the information we need, and render these results.

Since we did not want to take users away from the timeline application, we presented the results inline. As we had limited real estate available, we only displayed 3 results at a time. As shown in the screenshot above, we added pagination to the results section, and the ability to sort the events by event date.

We couldn’t treat our search results like typical URLs, as on Google.com. We wanted to show users the event within the actual timeline when they clicked on a search result, instead of navigating them to the indexed static HTML file. Clicking on a result provides an interactive experience, and brings up the specific timeline event.

The end result: a Google search for Google’s history, custom fit to meet the specific needs of our timeline, just before we blew out the candles on our cake.

Whether you are sharing best wishes and memories with friends and family or organizing winter activities, Google Sites can help you enjoy your holidays more. We love seeing how people are using Google Sites over the holidays, and wanted to share a few fun things we noticed.

If you are looking to spruce up your site or blog with some holiday imagery, take a look at karlaslayouts. Or perhaps you’d like to bring friends together for ice skating or sledding like the FCCC club site does. Going to a cool (no pun intended) winter festival? Share your experience online like this site does for the Harbin international ice and snow sculpture festival.

There are many ways to get into the holiday spirit, and we liked the tips from the Sweet Autumn project on ways to give back during the holidays. If singing is your thing, the TCCC Youth Group site has lyrics and videos of popular Christmas carols. And don’t forget all the great holiday foods out there, like the deserts and fun treats in Christmas gift baskets on these sites.

We hope all our users have a great holiday season, and if you haven’t finished your holiday shopping yet, make sure to check out these popular gift ideas and special discounts from Google Product Search and Google Checkout.

Posted by: Brian Hutchins, Marketing Manager

Today’s release features a brand new graduate from the Blogger in Draft testing ground: Import and Export for Blogger blogs.

The import/export feature opens up a whole new range of portability for your blogs, as well as allows for a few new options in the blog creation process. To get you started, we’ve rounded up a handful of ideas that can be done with importing and exporting:

• Merge two or more blogs into one. Have a few scattered blogs and want to get a fresh start? Now you can combine comments and posts from multiple blogs into a brand new blog.
• Move individual posts from blog to blog. Cross-publish your posts on multiple blogs, or transfer large batches of posts from one blog to another with a single click.
• Back up your blog to your own storage. It’s never a bad idea to create backup copies of your own content, and now you can easily export an archival copy of your blog to your hard drive with a simple tool.
• Move your blog somewhere else. Our standard Atom XML export format will open up new blogging channels between providers, and let you take your content with you should you decide to move somewhere else. And of course, if you decide to come back to Blogger, importing your export file will get you back up and running in seconds.

We have also added new importing options to the blog creation process:

For some more detailed info on all of the things you can do with Import and Export, please check out our accompanying help article.

A couple caveats

• Currently we only support importing Blogger blogs. We don’t yet support importing from WordPress, Typepad, LiveJournal or any other blogging platforms.
• Before importing a blog for the first time, we recommend that you create a new, throwaway blog to import into so you get a sense for how the process works. Once you’re comfortable, import into your public blog.
• If you have enabled a content warning for your blog, then you will have to remove it before your blog can be exported.

Posted by Michael Zalewski, Security Team.

Many people view the task of writing secure web applications as a very complex challenge – in part because of the inherent shortcomings of technologies such as HTTP, HTML, or Javascript, and in part because of the subtle differences and unexpected interactions between various browser security mechanisms.

Through the years, we found that having a full understanding of browser-specific quirks is critical to making sound security design decisions in modern Web 2.0 applications. For example, the same user-supplied link may appear to one browser as a harmless relative address, while another could interpret it as a potentially malicious Javascript payload. In another case, an application may rely on a particular HTTP request that is impossible to spoof from within the browser in order to defend the security of its users. However, an attacker might easily subvert the safeguard by crafting the same request from within commonly installed browser extensions. If not accounted for, these differences can lead to trouble.

In hopes of helping to make the Web a safer place, we decided to release our Browser Security Handbook to the general public. This 60-page document provides a comprehensive comparison of a broad set of security features and characteristics in commonly used browsers, along with (hopefully) useful commentary and implementation tips for application developers who need to rely on these mechanisms, as well as engineering teams working on future browser-side security enhancements.

Please note that given the sheer number of characteristics covered, we expect some kinks in the initial version of the handbook; feedback from browser vendors and security researchers is greatly appreciated.

By Jason Toff, Google Mac Team

I’m thrilled to officially announce Google’s presence at the upcoming Macworld Expo (taking place January 5-9, 2009). We had a great time last year (see picture of our booth below), and we’re excited to share our range of offerings for Mac and iPhone with everyone who can make it this year.

With exactly one month to go, we are busy preparing fun demonstrations for the 50,000+ expected Macworld attendees. Stay tuned in the coming weeks for previews of what to expect this time.

And if you’d like to come see us and don’t yet have a pass to Macworld, use this link and code for 20% off the Expo Hall pass.