google-api on S Anand

Get this blog via email on Google Groups

Mon, 05 Jan 2026 17:50:35 +0800

TL;DR: Join this Google Group to get my blog updates via email.

My blog is over 25 years old. At first, people had to visit it to read it. Then I added an RSS feeds. Then email subscriptions. Then via social media, cross-posting on Twitter, now LinkedIn.

The RSS feed remains. But I feel it’s time to bring back email subscriptions. It’s the oldest of the technologies, the most robust, and the one I believe will last the longest.

My blog might last another 25 years. I’m willing to bet email will outlast RSS and certainly the social media platforms.

So, I’ve created a Google Group: s-anand@googlegroups.com where I will post new blog entries. You can join the group to get email updates whenever I post something new.

For now, I will post updates manually. After a few weeks of testing, I’ll automate the process.

PS: I use a htmlemail.py script to send blog posts as HTML emails via the GMail API. It was vibe-coded by Claude and taught me a few things:

The frontmatter package is a clean way to parse YAML frontmatter from markdown files.
LLMs aren’t familiar enough with the markdown2 package, which is the new standard for processing Markdown. They prefer markdown instead.
premailer is a well-maintained package to inline CSS for HTML emails.
pygments is the de facto standard to generate CSS for syntax highlighting code blocks.

Things I Learned - 10 Mar 2024

Sun, 10 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This week, I learned:

Mughals just replaced the top of most temples with Mosque domes as part of the conquer or die policy
“Math is racist”. Because people who can’t solve it can’t because of their underprivileged background!
Winners: commodity businesses, companies that own lots of data like Reddit and Stackoverflow, profitable bootstrapped businesses
Making a tool more usable, e.g. a video, can have a 10-100X impact. Yet every developer thinks it’s redundant
All in one podcast. Can Google save itself?
- the success of a developer platform is the number of people using it. But not everyone uses it equally. Some people create winning products which drives attention to the platform. Use llm proxy like that to measure weekly average users and cost saving through caching
- one week ago, if someone at Google stood up and said we have too many black people in our images, the responsible AI team would have shut them down calling them racist. They had too much power and it was a one-way conversation. With the backlash now, there is a lot more awareness and acceptance of the balance. Security is like that. It’s too easy to empower and shut things down until there is a backlash
- the lawyer’s job is to tell you what’s not possible. But like Travis, your job is to decide whether it’s worth the risk of running a taxi company without a license or not
- Americans pronounce Sundar pichai’s name as Sun Daar!
- data licensing has become a business model. Reddit, Accel springer, stack overflow and many others are licensing their content to Google and open AI for several million dollars.

Customizable CSS interface

Wed, 16 Oct 2002 12:00:00 +0000

AllTheWeb’s Alchemist: customizable CSS interface. Possibly the first non-Google search-engine innovation I’ve seen in a few years. AllTheWeb lets you customise the look and feel of your search results. It looks quite flexible, but I wonder how much the interface will be constrained by the bounds of Cascading Style Sheets itself. Google’s API may end up being the truly customizable interface. via andersja

Oracle of Google

Wed, 11 Sep 2002 12:00:00 +0000

The Oracle of Google is the coolest Google app so far. Ask it a question with 4 choices, and it uses Google to guess the answer. It knows that Abdul Kalam is India’s President, though it did prefer Vajpayee to former Presidents. via Google Weblog

Mozilla

Tue, 03 Sep 2002 12:00:00 +0000

I’m trying Mozilla. It has native SOAP support. So I can make a web page that has dynamic Google searches (and Amazon booklists, etc) without a web-server.

BookWatch

Wed, 24 Jul 2002 12:00:00 +0000

A cool combination of the Amazon and Google APIs to BookWatch. (Incidentally, I downloaded the Amazon and Google APIs.)

Google blog

Wed, 17 Jul 2002 12:00:00 +0000

A Google blog. And while we’re on the subject, I’ve found Google labs’ glossary very useful. So are some Google applications based on their API. (Incidentally, their server is overloaded. I tried getting a key yesterday, put it politely declined.)

Google API

Sat, 13 Apr 2002 12:00:00 +0000

Google has released a Beta API. Programmers, please do something with it. I honestly wish I had the time to use it, too!