Get ready to say good bye to Google Page Creator

When I get some spare time, I plan on revamping the layout of this blog.  Right now, it’s an ugly mess of hacks placed in Blogger templates.  I want to make use of external CSS and Javascript files, but Blogger doesn’t allow you to upload those types of files.  Since of the design goals for this blog is to run it for free, I wanted to have a way of hosting CSS and Javascript files without having to use a paid hosting account.

I read a cool blog article writen by Lars Gersmann on how to add WordPress style calendar pages to Blogger based blogs to jazz up the blog post timestamp.  Lars provided the links the .css and .js files, hosted on his Google Page Creator account.  That looked vaguely familiar, I have a Google Page Creator account gathering virtual dust out in the cloud.  I logged in my Google Pages account and saw an announcement that Google was pulling the plug on Google Page Creator.  if you don’t have a Google Page Creator account now and go to the site, Google Page Creator, you’ll see one of the messages.

On August 4th, Google posted an announcement that they would be shutting down Google Page Creator later this year in favor of Google Sites.  Both sites let you create simple web sites very easily, but Google Sites, will not let you host your own .css or .js files.  Sometime later this year, Google will be shutting down Google Page Creator and I’m assuming that any site left there will be purged.  Google Page Creator was part of Labs.Google.com, which basically means it was a beta project with no guarantee that it would be around as a permanent fixture.

Google is making Ratproxy freely available

Google has just released the source code to one of their internal testing tools.  Ratproxy is a web proxy that is designed to scan for and log potential problems and “security-relevant design patterns” as you (the user) test your site or web service.

It’s not an automated test tool, it follows the actions of a user and examines the pages that the user would hit during a test run.  By following the user, ratproxy sees the same payload the user receives.  All of the login authentication is handled by the user, ratproxy only observes the data as it goes back and forth.  That allows the user to use any browser and browser specific behavior can be tracked by ratproxy.

Since the actions are directed by the browser, AJAX related traffic is picked up and ratproxy will check for cross-domain script inclusion.  It also has the ability to decompile Flash applets, as there are a few Flash security holes that could allow cross-site script injections.  If you are testing your own code, that shouldn’t be a problem, but if you have some 3rd party Flash applets it's always a good idea to check them.

To install ratproxy, you have to download it as a compressed tarball from it's Google Code download page.  You have to compile it yourself with the included source code.  For Windows, you'll need to have Cygwin installed.  If you are not familiar with Cygwin, it's a collection of tools that provide a Linux-like environment under Windows.  From what I read on the ratproxy documentation page, you may need to tweak the makefile to get it compile with the Cygwin GCC compiler.  Someone mentioned that ratproxy was written for GCC 3.4 and the version that is bundled with Cygwin is version 3.4.4.  If that is the case, version 4.3.1 can be downloaded directly from gcc.gnu.org or from one its mirror sites.  If you want to use 4.3 under Windows,you 'll have to install Cygwin first and build it with the version of GCC that comes with Cygwin.

I don't have Cygwin installed (yet).  I plan on doing so in the near future and I want to compile ratproxy and see how it works.  The idea sounds cool and if it's not too painful to build under Windows, I would like to add it to the test arsenal.  The cool part of ratproxy is that you can use it with your existing test methods, all you need to do is to direct your browser or test tool to use the ratproxy as a proxy server.

Ratproxy was written by and is maintained by Michal Zalewski, a computer security expert on the "white hat" side.  His personal site has some interesting side projects.

Backing up your Blogger hosted posts

This blog is hosted on Google's Blogger platform.  It has it's own domain name, but it's still on Blogger.  While I have faith in our Google Overlords, I still like keeping a local backup of the blog posts.  There's a nice open source Blogger backup utility named "Blogger Backup".  It's written in C# in VB.NET and is hosted on CodePlex.

When it's running, you'll see a window that looks like this:

Sell photos on photrade | By Chris Miller

You save each post as it's own file, or put them all inside one big, honkin' file.  The posts are saved as XML to make it easier to process.  You can use Blogger Backup to restore the posts back to your blog.  That would be handy if you accidentally delete a blog post.  You could also use the saved XML files to port your blog to another platform.  While I have no intention of moving this blog off of Blogger, it's good to know that I would have a way of migrating all of my posts to a new platform.

Blogger Backup is a .NET application, you'll need to have the .NET Framework 2.0 installed.  To communicate with Blogger, it uses the GData.Net (Google Data API for .NET) library.  I wasn't familiar with GData, it's a Apache licensed API that provides programmable access to many of Google's services:

• Base
• Blogger
• Calendar
• Spreadsheets
• Google Apps Provisioning
• Code Search
• Notebook
• Picasa Web Albums
• Document Feed
• Contacts
• YouTube
• Google Health

GMail is not on the list, but that would be asking for trouble.  The last thing we need is a Google API for sending spam through GMail.  The API is not limited to .NET, they have versions for Python, Java, and Objective-C.  I think you could do some interesting things with the GData API and their Calendar.

If you are wondering about the screenshot, I'm playing around with the beta for Photrade.  It has some cool features, it's worth checking out.

[Updated on 6/12/2008]
For some reason I thought Blogger Backup was written in C#, when it’s actually VB.NET.