The other day I was inspired by a story on Reddit about a guy who had created a Python script to automatically play the olympic hurdles Google Doodle. The Python script just passed the correct keyboard commands to the game so that the game was finished in 1.5 seconds, earning a gold medal.

When I found about the ability to create QR codes using the Google Charts API I decided to sit down and create a little tool that would generate QR codes for me. I've had this tool for a while and I recently noticed that the QR code mechanism has become depricated. The API will still work for a couple of years so I thought it was worth posting this. Creating a static QR code using Google Charts is quite easy, all you need to do is create an image. For instance, to create a QR code for the #! code address I would do the following.

Google has very recently released access to the API for their URL shortening service (ie, just a couple of days ago) so I have put together a class that allows access to that API. The official site is goo.gl; where you can manually go and enter your own URL's.

Download the goo.gl API interaction PHP class.

When Google looks at a page it takes a snapshot of that page and uses this to match against the query a user entered. To view these cached pages run a Google search and look at the Cached link next to the green URL text of the result. When you view the cached page Google will also give you a date that the page was last cached on. This can be used as a metric of your sites importance as the more often the site is cached, the more favourable Google views your page.

After running coding sites for a couple years there is one little problem that really annoys me, so when I set up #! code I resolved to fix it. The issue arises when you use some JavaScript based analytics software that allows multiple domains to be used, like Google Analytics. There is nothing wrong with analytics software that allows this, and it is potentially useful for tracking all manner of things. However, some web masters might not be that good at running sites and will lift code from your site (analytics and all) in order to implement a single widget on their site.

Strictly speaking the Google Ajax libraries don't contain only Ajax libraries, but they are very useful for a variety of reasons. Google host a variety of different JavaScript libraries which you can link to on your pages rather than download the library and host it on your server. You can use MooTools, JQuery, Prototype/Scriptaculous, Dojo and even the Yahoo! User Interface Library.

How To Use Them

Using the Google Ajax libraries on your own site is quite easy, and you can do it in a number of different ways.