To insert a header or footer into your document, click on the “Insert” tab and select “Header” or “Footer.” A box surrounded by dashed lines will appear, and anything you place in that box will be repeated on each page of your printed document. This has been a highly requested feature, so we’re launching it now without a lot of bells and whistles. But we’re not stopping here and we’ll continue to improve your printed pages in the weeks and months to come. We’d like to hear from you, so please post your comments and suggestions in our Help Group.

[Source: http://googledocs.blogspot.com]

A few weeks ago we blogged about how Google News personalization works. Now let’s take a look at getting the most out of Google News feeds.

For one thing, you can get articles from your favorite news source directly on your iGoogle page. Here’s what you need to do: perform a Google News search using our site: operator. In the results page click on the link “RSS” or “Atom” located on the lefthand side of your screen. You’ll be taken to a new page that lets you choose where to receive this feed. You can add this feed to your iGoogle page, your favorite newsreader or another application you like.

Remember that you can subscribe to feeds for any sections of your personalized Google News homepage, or for any of the queries you perform in Google News. Another very nifty use of feeds: you can also subscribe to the content of almost all of our 41 editions. So if you speak another language, or just get a kick out of reading news headlines in different languages, you can set up as many feeds as you like for as many topics as you like. For instance, let’s say that you only care about articles on “Google” coming from the Italian edition, but don’t want to create a dedicated section on your Google News homepage for this topic. Here’s what you can do:

- go to the Italian edition of Google News using the link available at the bottom of our homepage
- perform a search for “Google”
- click on the RSS or Atom feed links in the results page (placed in the same location for all our editions)
- subscribe to the feed.

Don’t forget to check out our Terms of Use and feel free to post on our Help Group to share ideas and tips from other news fans.

[Source: http://googlenewsblog.blogspot.com]

In the past year, we’ve seen a lot of enhancement requests from you in our issue tracker for project hosting, and we can tell which issues are the most important to people by sorting them according to the number of times each issue has been starred. Last fall the most popular request by far was for us to support non-Gmail accounts (a.k.a “Google Accounts“), so we’re no longer limiting project owners and members to Gmail accounts, and users can now use any email address with their project on Google Code. If you need to create a Google Account for your address, you can do that at the account creation page.

So keep starring those issues—not only will you receive issue updates via email, but it also tells us which bugs and enhancement requests are most important to you.

[Source: http://google-opensource.blogspot.com]

[Source: http://google-opensource.blogspot.com]

Lately many folks have been asking us, “Are you going to hold Google Summer of Code again this year?” The answer is a resounding “Yes!” For full details on our program to introduce university students to open source development, check out the Google Summer of Code blog.

[Source: http://google-opensource.blogspot.com]

The first time I wrote a piece of code with the intention of making it open source was, like many other people, when I was still a student. As a project for a computer vision class, a classmate and I wrote a plugin for The GIMP to smart-generate textures.

Since this was just a project for college, I wasn’t expecting very much from it except good marks, which we got. However, I was pleasantly surprised to receive a lot of kind feedback from the GNOME community, and especially from happy users. I then realized that the community was one of the most important parts of the open source world, probably as important as the code itself. I certainly wouldn’t have bothered to maintain and enhance this software, releasing a version 2.0 a few months later, if I didn’t get all this feedback showing me that my code was actually useful to people out there.

So when Google announced their first “Summer of Code” program in 2005, I thought I’d give it a try, even though the competition looked pretty tough. I was, again, pleasantly surprised to be selected to work for Ubuntu.

This time I wasn’t just coding alone or with a classmate - things got international! I spent a lot of time on IRC discussing my project, seeking advice from developers all around the world: French, German, Australian, American, Mexican, you name it, everyone was hanging around in the IRC channels. They were always kind and patient with my newbie questions, especially my mentor for this program, Sebastien Bacher. Interacting with the community was one of the best parts of this experience, along with writing code and designing user interfaces that would be used by everyone running Ubuntu. If you hate that dialog to add an applet to your panel, or the Ubuntu logout dialog, you now know whom to rant at!

I had so much fun that when Google announced they would have the same program in 2006, I applied again, and was pleasantly surprised yet again to be selected to work with the OLPC project. This time my mentor was none other than Federico Mena Quintero. Things were getting serious.

I decided to go to GUADEC 2006, GNOME’s annual conference, so that I could meet Federico, and also Sebastien whom I hadn’t had the chance to meet yet. It was really interesting to see all those familiar IRC nicknames suddenly transform into actual people and be able to communicate with them in ways more sophisticated than “/me pings seb128″! Here’s a short video (about 10 minutes) explaining what I did during these two summers.

GUADEC also allowed me to discover a bit more about Google and find out that it looked like a really great company to work for… and here I am now, a few months later, working for Google! I must say it is as great as I had imagined. And even though I’m obviously busy enough with my main project, GMail, I have chosen to work on GNOME as my “20%” project. I thought it was the best thing to do given how much I have learned from Sebastien, Federico, and everyone in the open source community. See all of you soon on IRC!

[Source: http://google-opensource.blogspot.com]

As we mentioned last week, many of the mentoring organizations participating in the Google Highly Open Participation Contest had a difficult time choosing their Grand Prize Winners. All of our projects had stellar participants, and we’re pleased to join them in sharing kudos with their unofficial “runner-ups.”

Angela Byron and Adam Light from the Drupal project sent us these accolades:

Jimmy Berry

Jimmy Berry was a pleasure to work with over the course of GHOP. He has a real knack of coming in, tackling a difficult task that’s been long-neglected (such as SimpleTest coverage for most of Drupal core, or the new Git back-end for our Version Control API module), and knocking it completely out of the park. Jimmy rocketed his way up the Drupal learning curve and is now one of our best new contributors.

Edward Yang

Edward Z. Yang already has open source development experience, as the developer for the HTML Purifier project. During his time with the Drupal project over the course of GHOP, he has shown a penchant for impeccable code quality, and takes incredible pride in his work, always going above and beyond (often way above and beyond) what has been asked for by the task description, as particularly evidenced by his work on the Coder Format module.

Charlie Gordon

If GHOP were based solely on community participation, Charlie Gordon would far and away take the prize. In addition to suggesting tasks and helping to answer other students’ questions, he also spear-headed efforts to setup the Drupal community’s successor to the GHOP contest, DROP. Oh yeah, and he also kicked butt on several GHOP coding tasks, and made very short work of everything from writing SimpleTests to porting Revision Moderation module to 6, and even creating and maintaining the new Citation Filter module.

Wilson Lee

Wilson Lee took on a wide variety of GHOP tasks ranging from documentation to code to marketing. Kourge did a particularly awesome job on a marketing
presentation for Drupal 6 (.zip) and a Core Hooks Cheatsheet (.zip) which will be of great use to Drupal module developers everywhere. Kourge was also frequently found in our IRC channels and helped other students find answers to their questions.

Dmitri G.

Dmitri G. was actually too *young* to participate in GHOP, being only 12 years old, so wasn’t eligible to claim any tasks or prizes. However, he more than made up for that by helping to mentor and guide the GHOP students throughout the duration of the contest. So we’d like to name him as honorary GHOP runner-up.

[Source: http://google-opensource.blogspot.com]

Since the Google Test Automation Conference last year, it has been no secret that Google uses Selenium for functional testing of web applications. We’ve also constructed a Selenium farm for the distributed and speedy testing of select applications on a range of operating system and browser combinations. We all work at Google and contribute to the project in our 20% time, so we are proud to announce that we are hosting an open evening for users of Selenium at the Googleplex in Mountain View, CA, USA on Monday, February 25th at 6:30 PM. If you are interested in using Selenium for web app testing and sharing your thoughts with other Agile developers, please join us for an evening of discussion, presentations and lightning talks. You’ll hear from representatives of several Selenium projects, including Selenium core, Selenium Remote Control, Selenium IDE and Selenium Grid. Some of these folks will have come from as far afield as London and Tokyo, and we hope you’ll take this opportunity to explore Selenium’s future with them. Google’s Open Source Team will be providing hors d’oeuvres and a delightful selection of soft drinks.

We hope to see you there. If you’re planning to join us, please make sure to pre-register.

[Source: http://google-opensource.blogspot.com]

As the January blues began to lift, web developers, designers, neophiles, hardware hackers and hardcore programmers all descended on a local Oxford pub last night for the first in 2008’s Oxford Geek Nights (OGNs). Thanks to Google’s drinks sponsorship the atmosphere at the Jericho Tavern was warmer and more convivial than the chilly February evening outside.

The OGNs are semi-formal evenings consisting of alternating speakers and chat. People interested in the web, new technology, beautiful design, or fascinating ideas can get together and be inspired by the event. Last night we began with two fascinating keynote speakers: Rufus Pollock from the Open Knowledge Foundation talked about how the techniques behind distributed software projects might help us crack open the vast silos of information already available on the web; and Denise Wilton from Moo explained how to establish a character for your website, paying careful attention to exactly how you want your visitors to see you, and how to establish consistency of tone.

After some announcements from local groups (discussing among other things the mooted Barcamp Oxford), and another break for the thirsty (courtesy again of Google’s Open Source Team), we began our microslots. These are less formal, five-minute talks that anyone can volunteer for, in the weeks leading up to the event. We heard some really interesting talks from such as: Tom “Carbon” Dyson, technical director at Torchbox (the OGN’s other major sponsor), discussing development of CO₂ emissions accounting software; Jon “Firefox” Hicks on the fundamentals of icon design; and Andrew “Who Should You Vote For?” Chapman, who treated us to some lessons learned from going viral.

To a still-full house of happy geeks, we ended the night with a raffle of books from Friends of ED, and a brief look forwards to OGN6, planned for mid-April. Everyone present seemed to have a great night, and we’d love for you to join us whenever you’re in the neighborhood. If this post hasn’t got you convinced, you might want to check out the video from

.

Full talks are available as always on the OGN website.

[Source: http://google-opensource.blogspot.com]