Google Sites - Hiding Site Activity Links

Whenever anyone asks me how they can easily create a web site - guess what I say...

"Get lost freak!" (no, not really, but give me an excuse to use a quote from a kids movie, and I take it)... anyway, I say Google Sites! It really is an easy way to get content up on the web quickly - so while I may be biased, I think Sites is the most accessible tool with the right balance of features and simplicity for the average web user.

There's one thing still about our current version of Sites that I've encountered enough times that I felt I should just post about it and point people here the next 5 times I'm asked:

"How do I get rid of that Recent Site Activity link at the bottom of every page?!"

It's not the intention of most Site authors to give people a link to all the "recent activity" on a site - they just want viewers to see the current version in most cases.

Well, it's not the most obvious thing to find... Here's how to change that:

1. Sign in to Google Sites and open your site
2. Click the Gear/Flower ("More Actions") button on the upper right corner and select "Manage Site" option in the menu.
3. On the left side under Site Settings, click the "General" Option.
4. The 8th option down (or so) is called "Access Settings" - which has 2 selectors, labelled:
• Users who can access site activity:       and
• Users who can access revision history: 
5. Set BOTH of those options to "COLLABORATORS ONLY"
6. Click SAVE CHANGES (at the top or bottom of the page)

Hope that's helpful... ping me here if not (and I promise not to use a silly line from a kids movie to dissuade you).

How to TURN ON the NEW Google Docs editors

You may have heard that Google actually offers a product which lets you create, edit, share and collaborate on spreadsheets, documents, presentations and drawings using only your browser (nothing to download, etc... ) - yeah, yeah, I thought so.
You may have heard that there was a recent update to the product which made the editing experience more realtime, more collaborative and just generally faster and better - yeah, I thought so.
You may have heard that if you are a current user of Google Docs, you need to TURN ON these new editors explicitly - no? You didn't hear that part?  Well - it's only temporary... but you do need to do that!

Enough people (more than 1) have asked me this question, that I thought I should just post a quick How To, so I can point people here once... even though this post will be useless soon, when the new editors are standard for everyone...

So, the story is different for spreadsheet and document editing...

For Spreadsheets - very simple... When you are editing any spreadsheet, just look for the "New Version" link in the upper right side of your browser screen. Once you click that, ALL your spreadsheets will open using the new version of the spreadsheet editor (except for a small number of those which use a couple of lagging features which are not yet supported).   If you decide you need to switch back, do the reverse, and use the "Old Version" link in the upper right.

For Documents - less simple, but easy still.... Click the "Settings" link in the upper right side of your screen. Then, click the "Document Settings" sub-menu. In the dialog which shows up, click the "Editing" tab - and then check the box which says "Create new text documents using the latest version of the document editor. Only New Documents will use the new editor... old documents are currently forced to use the old editor.  Just for now...


One more thing to know - if you are on a Google Apps Domain (meaning at school or work or in an organization which uses Apps), you'll only see that new document editor option if your domain administrator wants you to ;) - so ask them if you don't see it.

You see photo, I see template

I've always been excited about the templates gallery we have on Docs - but over the past few days, I could probably be more aptly described as *crazy* about templates - presentation templates in particular. It's the "submit your own" thing that pulled me in and got me thinking that practically everything around me "would make a great template". And I really like the way the embedded template summary/thumbnail looks in a blog post or on a site - like this:

It started with the billboard...

That was just a cool way to show simple messages, and it seemed like something others could make use of. I suddenly started seeing other things around me which could also be good backdrops for simple message slide shows - like the side of a barn, a laptop screen, or even a mobile phone! I even went through my own photos and started pulling other things out to make into templates - flowers, shells, frogs - anything with some topical relevance.

Here's instructions on how to make your own (using one of my templates, of course):

I'll try to improve that presentation with screenshots and more detail if people ask... but really - the hardest part is finding and editing the right photos... some might say that I failed at that ;)

Twitter says: Coldplay follows the unpopular, Oprah doesn't

Coldplay follows 2,624 tweeters on twitter - who, on average, are only followed by 10 people each. Oprah on the other hand only follows 14 people, who, on average, are followed by 709,350 people (as of this post on 9 June, 2009). I know - I spent the past 14 weeks counting! Nah... actually - there's a cool way to do this in - yes, you guessed it - a spreadsheet.

In tweaking the TweeterScore and other TwitSheets I've discovered that using xpath, you can quickly summarize data from an XML feed into a spreadsheet... that is, you don't have to do the adding and looping yourself.
In one command, you can summarize data across all the entries in any XML feed.
For example... the twitter XML data for "friends statuses" (the recent tweets of all the people you follow) can be grabbed with a URL like this:
http://twitter.com/statuses/friends/whatsername.xml - and you can do that for any tweeter, to see the statuses of (and other stuff about) all the people they follow...

The actual XML data - in brief form - includes something like this (shortened massively):
<users>
  <user>
    <id>1010101</id>
    <name>Whatsher Name</name>
    <screen_name>Whatsername</screen_name>
    ...
    <followers_count>1031</followers_count>
    ...
    <status>
      <created_at>Tue Apr 07 22:52:51 +0000 2009</created_at>
      <id>1234567890</id>
      <text>brb - going to get ice cream now</text>
      <source><a href="http://www.tweetdeck.com/">TweetDeck</a>
      </source>
      ...
    </status>
  </user>
</users>

So - for the given tweeter (that you gave as the tweeter-screen-name.xml file name) it gives information for every other tweeter that person follows. A cool way to get the raw data for every person they follow. But the best part is the ability to summarize across all the entries... and XPath lets you do that.

Example: Let's say I wanted to know not just all the names of the people that Oprah follows (no idea why i picked her) - but I wanted to know the average number of people who follow the people she follows. That would tell me whether Oprah is following her fans (unpopular) or other celebs (popular, with lots of followers themselves).
I can do that in a spreadsheet in one command (almost).

I use the ImportXML() command with an XPath command string of "sum(/users/user/followers_count)" to get the total number of followers of all the people being followed by this tweeter... so for Oprah, the spreadsheet formula looks like this:
=importXML("http://twitter.com/statuses/friends/oprah.xml","sum(/users/user/followers_count)")
Divide that by the number of people she follows, and you have the average...
I'll leave it to you to check out this sample spreadsheet which does a whole bunch of this xml manipulation to compare 10 tweeters.

Embed a form in your blog post to collect data fast

In a recent post regarding using forms to collect data easily, a couple of people thought I should have used my own advice for one of the collection methods - that is, to embed the actual form in a web page - in my blog post in this case. Great idea...

So - below is an embedded version of my Blogging Survey. Took me literally 30 seconds to get the embed code from the "Form" menu of the spreadsheet. This is just a sample survey, but feel free to answer this survey and I'll post results soon if I get enough respondents.

Go wide (or narrow) with your Blogger Template

When I created this blog, I couldn't seem to find a blogger template that had both the look I wanted AND full-width (filling the browser window as it re-sizes - both wider and narrower)... So, I took the template I liked the most (thanks Darren) and then fiddled with the template code a bit to make it fill the width of the screen the way I wanted it to and to fill the empty space between the top header, the main content area (the posts) and the right pane (side-bar).

A few people have asked me which template I used (I know, hard to believe), so I am finally posting both a sample blog using that template and instructions on how to use my adjusted template... I figure at least I'll have a place to point the people who have asked for this.

The sample blog shows how the template looks and gives a link to the template file itself... Don't be scared off by the colors, as those can easily be adjusted using the blogger layout tools from the dashboard.