I have a personal finances spreadsheet on my Google Drive.
For some practice and ease of use, I wanted to make a desktop and mobile app to manipulate it:
add an expense
list my expenses
filter the expenses
etc...
Is there a way to do this?
Since it is something so small, I'm trying to avoid anything that needs a dedicated server that I would need to set up or needing to rent any services because it's just a ease of use project and not a "must-have".
I've been searching a lot but most of the time I get confused with responses from 2-3 years ago.
EDIT:
So I found a way, using this video:
https://youtu.be/3OakodfKjrU
Basically using Google App Script you can make some post and get requests, which for me is a step in the right direction. Just needed to think outside of the box a little and I got a simple way to send post requests to create or update, and get requests to read, for now I also use get to delete but this just seems wrong, might change later.
Also I've searched and started doing a PWA (progressive web app) to be the interface, just so I can make it with a single code base and work with almost any device, using pure js, html and css, the only "non-pure" thing is Onsen Ui for the GUI.
You can use an NPMJS package such as google-spreadsheet to work with the Google APIs and manipulate your spreadsheet; the issue for you with trying to build the app without your own server is the need to securely store your Google Account credentials (you don't want this being publicly accessible).
If you could compromise and use a read-only solution, a package such as tabletop might suffice as you don't need to bother with any back-end work; I doubt this would be ideal for you though. You will need to host the application regardless if you want to be able to access it through the world wide web.
Alternatively, you could run the application locally if you would be happy with only being able to use the app that way. Hope it helps and sorry for the rambling!
Related
I am creating software that helps me and my colleagues to work on tickets at work, as our current software is really bad. At this moment I am using program that I wrote in Tampermonkey, it is giving information about queue and all other fancy stuff. But I reached limit of that, as website is a limitation, so I started to create website that could do much more, yet I am not sure how to connect it as when I am using Tampermonkey to create overlay with all needed data. My idea was to: 1) Gather all data by tampermonkey and send it to nodejs server. Node would keep array (that's all I need) locally and then I would be able to access it.
Is this possible, is this a correct approach? Unfortunately I am limited by options that I can use by company security policy.
I have been asked to create some custom content on a wordpress site, basically just some web app stuff (html/css/js), but leveraging data from another source via restcalls. There is a service account un/pwd required, and I am wondering what is best practice/approach in terms of the cross site calls with this un? The wire is encrypted but I certainly don't want to store the creds on the client (wordpress admin stuff). I am assuming there is a mechanism to store such on the 'back-end', filesystem, but I am not even sure such access exists? How you get to this....I have gone through the wordpress admin board and haven't found anything that provides access to the filesystem/php files, etc. Perhaps I am not looking in the right place or after the wrong bits?
I have googled but am such a noob with wordpress I am not even sure I have the right approach in mind; any help/advice is greatly appreciated.
EDIT: so if curl is the standard approach for this type of thing, where/how am I able to access the filesystem/php? Is there a specific place this type if thing lives or a convention of where it is placed? Just help with some 101 direction please.
First things first, you will need to develop a plugin for WordPress to properly hook into everything and play nice with everyone else. There are many tutorials for getting started. Here's one that integrates with an API
If you have to store things to make your plugin integrate with this third party, you should use the Options API that WP provides to you, with the information set from a settings page. Please don't hardcode that into a file somewhere in the code. (I'll also mention if you need something more powerful than the plugin options, you can add custom tables)
Now we have code running on WordPress with the information it needs, now it needs to do something. To pull the information from this third party, we can use PHP cURL.
Last, depending on how we want this information to end up being consumed by the user. We can do something simply such as just fetching/injecting the data during a regular WP page load on our custom page. Or we could be fancier and set up a WP REST API endpoint that re-serves the information we got from the 3rd party. Shortcodes? Widgets? Custom Templates? Filter Hooks? There is a lot of ways to present our final interface to the user.
Me and my friend have created a website which we want to use as en experiment for school purpose.
https://www.daniellindgren.se/
But we are encountering some problem when we want Google bots to crawl the subpages, like CV and contact.
When we use Google webmaster tool to how the indexing from Google goes, it says that they can't crawl anything else then the startpage.
We have built a sitemap and we have also declared that in the robots.txt.
But we read somewhere that Mithril can cause problem for Google bots because their links to subpages starts with an "?".
Is there any workaround for that we can use or what other solution is there? Should we maybe try to re-make it a single-page application instead?
I don't see any "?" in the links on your site, and in general Google should be able to index SPA:s nowadays.
But it's not always working, so an option could be to use Mithril to render the templates server-side as well. Depending on your backend it may take a little bit of work. If you're using Node.js it's easy with mithril-node-render, if not I recommend Haxe and mithril-hx for cross-platform support.
Then you need to change the routing strategy so a request from outside the application hits the server as well. Unless you think about it from the beginning, you probably need to rewrite quite a bit of the backend to make it more isomorphic.
But your site doesn't have much client-side functionality however, so as it is right now, I'd treat the site as a non-SPA, and use Mithril when you want some dynamic, ajax-driven functionality.
I would like to start looking into Angular or React, but I'm having a hard time at the minute figuring out where they fit in?
I currently build all our sites using PHP based Expression Engine or Craft CMS. Is it possible to use Angular or React with these? Would I be correct in thinking they act as the whole front-end?
So for example, would I use EE/Craft to just create the API's to fetch/post data, and then Angular/React would generate the pages using the data from these calls?
That is exactly what I would do. I am not overly familiar with the CMS frameworks you are using, but do have a good bit of experience with CMS development. Typically I leverage the provided APIs to bring the data to the presentation layer, and then use a JavaScript framework such as Angular to create my UI.
This approach will work great if you can get away with not using any of the CMS server controls, and perform all data operations through API calls.
Using a CMS for your data as an API is fine, but you might be better off with something custom made (like a rails or nodejs project). CMS's are not ideal if you're are building just an API. Typically, you'd built your React/Angular website as a static website that you can deploy to a hosting provider (like S3 or Github Pages), this gives the immediate benefit of improved security, speed and scalability. From your static React or Angular site you then leverage your server-api's to fetch the data.
However, this only fixes the data problem, not the content management problem. Since you have a static site, there is no way for your content editor or marketers to be able to change the content on your website. Everything has to be done in the source code - by a developer. You can fix this by adding a drop-in content management solution like INSTANT on top of your static website. Without any coding, it allows anyone with an account to change content directly on the website.
I am working on a Google Gadget that will collect some data through Google API's. What I am getting stuck on is how to collect the data and then save it somewhere to be processed later. The final idea being that I would run the gadget on my own computer it would collect the data and then save it to somewhere on my own computer. (I guess I want to emphasize that this is, for now, a small personal project and does not necessarily need fancy server scripts, I want to be able to run this all on my PC running XP).
Is there a pure Javascript way to save a file on a computer?
Can I use other languages besides XML, HTML, and Javascript to add functionality to my Google Gadget?
Edit: The goal of this is to be able to log how many of my contacts are signed into gchat over a period of time. I decided on a Gadget because that was the only way I could figure out how to access that information. Any other ways to approach this idea are welcome!
No, Javascript alone cannot save a file automatically. And be careful, javascript is affected by the no cross domain rule. If you're hosting the project on your own computer, why bother writing a complex Google Gadget?
I suggest a simple PHP script, and MySQL, if you like, to store the data. By itself, PHP should be more than enough to run most tasks. If you would like me to add in more info about this, please tell me what type of task.
In increasing order of flexibility:
The options object is almost certainly the easiest approach - not really designed for that kind of usage but I suspect it would be fine for your use case.
On windows you could use system.filesystem to get hold of the WScript FileSystemObject which you can then use to create files and write to them.
Also see the Google desktop API blog for embedding an SQLite database in your gadget (looks pretty easy).