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Add Your App Engine Recipes to the Google CookbookAugust 30th, 2008 at 11:30 amSource:Mashable! The reasons people have for keeping passwords that grant access to various online accounts close at hand are many. Fear. A desire to risk as little as possible. Lack of trust of software systems, whether they exist on your PC or out in the cloud. The list goes on. But for those of you who tend not to fret over such matters, or simply frequent services that don’t require users to submit sensitive data, keeping your passwords stored in your Web browser isn’t a biggest concern. Perhaps you would like to do yourself one better, then. How about allowing an online service to handle those details? That’s exactly what MashedLife, based in Sunnvale, CA, has set out to do. The service is free, so other than having to clear the hurdle of consciously entrusting it with your login information, its a quick test. It is also being positioned as a very safe and secure facilitator. Once your information is saved, and you later return to a page, a MashedLife bookmarklet sends the website data and a “big random number” to request information registered with the service. This process is said to operate “on top of SSL.” once MashedLife authenticates the transmission, it “encrypts (the account info) and sends it back via the secure HTTPS session.” (It also sports Yubikey integration for extensive character set generation.) Seeing as how I tend to enable my Firefox installation to remember most password-based services I use, this seems worthwhile. It operates in a relatively small and nondescript way. And if you use more than one browser across multiple machines - or even just one - and you wish to do away with redundancy, this is something to check out. Naturally, its feature set and memory mechanism might spook some folks in terms of just how much it knows about what is happening during a users’ login efforts. (See screenshot above.) Yet altogether it doesn’t seem terribly invasive. I wouldn’t submit bank data, to be honest. But accounts for news sources and sites like Digg and Delicious and the like I’d have no trouble keeping out on the Web. For what it’s worth, it is said to have received certificates from Truste, Better Business Bureau, and VeriSign. While MashedLife is free at the moment, and will continue to be so in one regard, its says it will soon be sending targeted advertisements users’ way. A paid plan offering no ads and more features is in the works. How trusting of MashedLife are you? ( polls)
In order to allow parties positioned outside the Googleplex to contribute knowledge to a single source, Google assembled the framework for Knol. It’s had a mixed response. Now the company is offering the Google Cookbook built specially for App Engine developers. With the Cookbook, users can add “recipes” to the mix in a series of 11 categories that anyone can access, learn from, use, comment on and provide a 1- to 5-star rating for. And if they manage to construct a piece of code they find valuable in one application or another, they can offer it up to the masses in kind. The old give-take model enacted once more, in short. At the moment the Cookbook is comprised of just several brief notes and lessons. Some categories are yet to show one entry. And a few have been published by Google’s own Marzia Niccolai, the member of the App Engine Team. (Niccolai writes on the App Engline Blog that a Google engineer by the name of Amaltas Bohra created the Cookbook.) But it will presumably grow soon enough, what with the increasing attention and interest given to the App Engine since it debuted earlier this year. And as it does expand with time, the option to give feedback will help organize the database and ensure that a decent level of quality is maintained. The better the submissions, the greater the praise. And vice versa. The “busiest” segment at present is the label sitting atop the list, Datastore. Nearly a half-dozen contributors have provided roughly the same number of tips. To add your own, you’ll just need a Google Account. Recipes can only be provided in plain text, though files (such as .py, .xml., .js, .html, .xhtml, .php, .css extensions) can be attached. Google notes that a maximum of 5 files can be provided, and any old files previously added to a recipe are removed once new additions are made. —Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:2.0 Moniker Jumps The Shark: Food 2.0Enter the Search Engine Marketing Scholarship ContestAllrecipes.com Introduces Customized Cookbooks Through SharedBooksCodase: The Source Code Search EngineLexxe - Natural Language Search EngineAsk.com Partners with Blinkx for Video SearchYahoo Didn’t Give Up On Its Widget Engine (Yet)
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