Ian Oxley » google

How to Export a List of Google Docs With GoogleCL and a Bash Script

Ian — Wed, 20 Oct 2010 22:40:43 +0000

I was playing around with GoogleCL recently and came up with this: http://github.com/ianoxley/googlecl-export

It's a Bash script that lets you export a list of Google Docs to a specified format. For example, to export a particular folder to PDF you'd type something like this:



googlecl-export -f pdf -d yourfolderofdocs

You need to have GoogleCL installed for the Bash script to work (GoogleCL can be downloaded from http://code.google.com/p/googlecl/) but otherwise you should just need to make the script executable e.g. chmod u+x googlecl-export and possibly stick it somewhere on your $PATH

A Meta Keywords Tag Does Nothing for your Site’s Google Rank

Ian — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 14:04:37 +0000

Are you fed up with so called SEO experts extolling the importance of meta “keywords” tags on a site’s Google rank? Me too. I therefore created doesgoogleusethekeywordsmetatag.com.

So the next time anyone moans about their site’s lack of a keywords meta tag, you know where to send them

Google, BigTable and YAGNI

Ian — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 20:27:09 +0000

YAGNI – short for “You Aren’t Going to Need It” – is the acronym given to not writing code until you are sure you are actually going to need it. While reading Google’s paper on BigTable the other day it was interesting to read that this was one of the lessons learned during its development:

Another lesson we learned is that it is important to delay adding new features until it is clear how the new features will be used. For example, we initially planned to support general-purpose transactions in our API. Because we did not have an immediate use for them, however,
we did not implement them.