Slashdot Mirror
A GMail-based blog With 1000 MB of entries
Jean-Luc R. writes "Via mediaTIC blog. Gallina is a GMail blog tool created by Jonathan Hernandez that uses GMail messages as "entries" (so 1000 MB of entries!!), replies to conversations are the "entry comments", uses Libgmailer (gmail-lite project) to connect to GMail. It uses XML/XSLT and by the way it's a GPL software.
You can download it there.
See the Gallina Demo Blog as for an example."
First "Entry"
first post!!!
-----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK----- Version: 3.12 GCS d-- s+:+ a18 C++ L++ P+ E--- W+++ N+ o K- w--- O---- M+ V-- PS PE Y+
OMG i got first post!
ok
people are making so much use of gmail for different things
i wonder when ill be able to run off a remote OS installed on a gmail account
Google was pissed at third-party tools which check emails. Now I wonder what Google is going to think of a program or script which uses the Gmail email directory as a sort of web-hosting deal. I'm not too optimistic about Google's response. :-(
I am defenseless. Use your button. Mod me down with all of your hatred.
from the just because you can doesn't mean you're allowed dept. http://gmail.google.com/gmail/help/terms_of_use.ht ml
My other car is a slashdot UID.
I am sick of google and the way they handled 'gmail'. By invitation my ass. This is a company that supposedly caters to the commoners and techies yet they create an invitation only web based email system. An email system that does not support POP or IMAP or anything revolutionary. Screw google, I will never use them or buy their stock. This has really left a sour taste in my mouth.
C'mon folks, you're not trying hard enough. Give us a GMail-based web-server and I might start being impressed. And not just plain HTML, that's too easy, I want Javascript and CSS 2 support at least!
For those real hackers out there, I also need GMail-based p2p, IM, PVR and espresso-machine.
How are they getting past the new gmail authentication?
Many of Google's other functions, like the search, they openly published interfaces to via web services and such. They explicitly disallow in the GMail TOS using web-fetching "screen scrapers" like this thing uses, but I'd imagine their main objection would be not so much the loss of control as that they don't want to be locked into a specific set of HTML-- if they significantly change their page layouts then any program which fetches and reprocesses GMail web pages will break.
But this bloggy thing is a very cool feature and Google might well publish a public web-services interface to GMail as well to allow things like this to happen before the end.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
Can I now mount my blog using gmailfs?
;-D)but a blog????
Seriously, this is getting silly. It's supposed to be an email system and it's going to be financed by google targeting ads specificly to their users (based on their emails, but who cares about privacy anyway?), so I don't think google will let these things survive.
Now I could understand if someone developed a technique that allowed for bigger attachments (pr0n anyone?
I just hope all these "smart" apps. wont force Google to reduce the greatness of Gmail. Because Gmail is great.
This is not an automated signature. I type this in to the bottom of every message.
What, Google create an free, optional service that you aren't personally interested in? How dare they?
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
Cheers,
Erick
http://www.busyweather.com/
It won't be long til google flips out, and changes their protacols again, they are so paranoid about 3rd parties using their storage for other means.
Dude, its in BETA. Its not ment to be for everyone yet. Its still in testing.
Also, how else do you think they will finance it? 1gb of email with no Ad's? Maybe they will release POP3, but with inserted ads, who knows.
Hotmail has ad's - but no one goes mad about that - surely you don't think those ads are not targeted???
Is it a boat?
I'm a bit concerned that everyone seems to want to find a way to fill up their Gigabyte on Gmail. If storage becomes the main feature of Gmail, people will eventually open up 500 accounts and built a Gmail array for their file storage. This will force Google to lock down their application, and those of us using it for EMAIL will suffer.
If you want a gmail invite you just have to search on Google. Google is giving invitations away a lot more now to current subscribers. Visit my website, I have 5 gmail invites left to give. And I'm giving them away for free, no strings attached. Gmail is still in beta too, so that's probably why it's currently invitation only. Not sure if they have plans to make it open to all though.
Btw, POP access is currently in the works, though IMAP would indeed be nice. I'll make a suggestion.
What is with these units of measure? Isn't the term "Gigabyte" accepted in these parts?
If you are trying to impress, why not just say 1 Billion Bytes!! Or 8 Billion bits??
Oh, and here in grown-up land, we also put a comma after the thousands. "1,000" please.
"If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid." - Epictetus
... so now we'll have spam blog entries!
You don't think enough... therefore you better not be!
I thought Google already provided a free blogging service?
What's next, disallow people who write using a minority language, because Gmail can't attach meaningful ads to those messages?
Seems to me like Gmail should charge for the account, charge for the bandwidth, and pay you back each time you buy a product through one of their ads.
If they except some particular buisness model, why not try to enforce it economically?
But even google with all its servers have limitations. Would love to see gmail grow in kind of uses it could have, but simplicity and speed are some of its strengths that it could lose if it is abused.
please don't mod me down but share my pain.
I suffer from deep angst. I have watched trailer in doom3.com upteem times. I have nasty feeling in my stomach and you guys talk about something as irrelevant as gmail and blogging. aaaagggh.
i just wanted to tell all of you how i wait for doom3 binaries for linux. new nvidia card installed, ready take leave from work in short notice. come baby come. (and no you ****ers i'm not going to use windog emulators or install windows)
Dyslexics have more fnu.
For me it's rather logical that ppl try to use this service as much as they can - including applications like this blogger.
But on the other hand google will not like this because it pretty much abuses their service and causes way more costs than planned.
It's always the same game:
1. company offers something
2. user finds a way to use this for something not intended by company
3. company complains about it/ sues the user/ develops a way to block the user
At the end it will be annoying for both sides.
If only google had a blogging service, hacks such as this wouldn't be necessary.
1000MB may sound like a lot but at current hard drive pricing that is only about a half dollar if you buy a 100GB drive. Why do people go to so much trouble to redirect GMail for other uses? If people do things that make their advertising less valuable then they will strike hard on everybody and that only hurts us normal users if they make it harder to login or use as an email service.
You can't offer 1GB of free storage and not expect abuse. The sheer manpower required to enforce GMail's Terms of Use policy will be astronomical.
GMail was a neat and innovative idea... but it just isn't going to work. The only way I can see GMail succeeding is if they get rid of the 1GB of free storage. It just isn't economical to offer that much space for nothing. Their storage requirements will go into the Petabyte range... you just arn't going to pay for that with advertizing.
...so why would they allow a third-party kludge to run a web log?
Anyone who needs a gig of space to write down what is on his mind has a bigger problem than finding space online.
What a specious argument! There is quite a big difference between how Google wants to use their service and having their services/storage essentially hijacked for other purposes. It is a mail system. It they want a blogger than they will come out with one. And, yes, probably put ads on it. Or did you want to pay for it yourself?
Cheers,
Erick
http://www.busyweather.com/
So now I have 1gb of online, searchable mp3's.
Email. Blogs. Mountable drives. And all built on GMail. I'd be quite concerned about becoming too dependent on the good graces of a third party for maintaining my data. I recall the number of people who got caught flat-footed when free email services and photo hosting went belly-up with little or no notice. Not to mention putting potentially sensitive material in a convenient place for hackers to target, or law enforcement or aggrieved spouses to subpoena.
So when do the cease and desists start coming in?
The post-IPO google isn't the type of google that would be happy with this kind of thing. (And if you say there are no post IPO pages, just take a look at the recent furor over parodies, and just a couple of days ago, I noticed an image ad for Picasa (TM) on google image search.)
Is that they force us to look at Gmail in many different ways beyond the "Jesus Christ, look at all that space" factor.
When I started using Gmail I really liked the threaded messages feature and the search engine. Having to use labels instead of folders was (and still is) annoying, but I still place more value in the threading of the messages so all is well.
Some of my friends put more value in the fact that they can pretty much forget about their mailboxes getting too big and their PC choking on it. The mailbox here can be almost a gig and all your PC sees is just a web page.
Some friends also discovered that it is a great way to store memos, since is is very easy to pull them back between the labels and the search engine. I liked the idea so much that I sent myself every shareware license and CD key I have as separate emails so I can easily pull them.
The blog thing will probably break by the time it hits production, but it tells us (and Google too) that Gmail is so versatile that you can do all these crazy things with it.
Now Google can look at it and go uhm, maybe this is faster than whatever it is we are doing to store Blogger entries, and it also takes care of the post comments! And since you are already giving people a Gig of space, you can in theory claim that your *hosted* Blogger option is now free and allows you to share your 1GB of Gmail space. Then later plug the whole thing into an Orkut that doesn't suck and also into Google Groups.
Pedro
----
The Insomniac Coder
i cant get it to work ... any luck?
GmailFS is still a much cooler hack.
Imagine a bootable linux distro, upon boot asking for your Gmail login info then automatically mounting it as your home directory. Instant linux box wherever you go and have a internet connection.
Fucking cool.
------------------------------ SirPhreak - "It's Thinking..."
If you want a blog that's associated with Google, you could always just mosey on over to blogger.com. Last I checked, there's no limit with them as to how much storage you get and it's probably a bit easier than getting this running. Yes, this is kinda cool and innovative, but couldn't this creative/technological skill go toward something that everyone would benefit from, like, say, easy sound/3d in Linux?
Stop doing shit like this. Yeah, it's "fun", yeah it's "cool", but it's gonna piss Google off so much that they'll just put more and more limits on the service which piss off the majority to stop the minority.
I don't know about you, but I want to READ MY FUCKING EMAIL with GMail, not use it as some file storage solution, file system, blog client and kitchen sink. Leave it be. Google is generous, they've released APIs and other fun shit to do with their service, and they've been nice enough to let people try their beta service. If I lose that service because morons like fucking with it to store their porn, I will be MAJORLY pissed off.
Don't be so fucking selfish and stick to the friggin' ToS already.
By summer it was all gone...now shesmovedon. --
There has been masses of invites spammed out to everyone with a GMail account this past week, before I only got 1, then a second, then the next day I had 6, now I have 9, 1-9 in about 3 days. All my friends with GMail accounts have invites in double-figures now too. Obviously GMail is under strain in anyway or they wouldn't hand out invites like crackwhores.
is a gmail block device driver. That would be neat. Thank you for listening to an old uncle.
Oh, sure, let's use a blogging script which uses a webmail service as its database. It can fetch data from this service by internally connecting to the web site, parsing the HTML, and pulling out the relevant data.
Uh.
Seriously, people, install a fucking SQL server. Not only is this going to be extremely extremely inefficient for you, but you are basically taking a nice service provided to you free by a nice company and exploiting the hell out of it. I am quite certain that if this thing gets a lot of use, Google will implement measures to break it. And I'm guessing Slashdot will whine when that happens, and I will be disgusted.
Really... When your girlfriend offers you a blow job do you forcefully ram your dick down her throat until she vomits? Why on Earth would you do this to Google?
"'Scuse me, salesdroid, can this mobo boot off a GMail drive?"
Redundant Array of Inexpensive Google Accounts.
google RAID.
any takers for this newly-starting project?
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
Gallina *g = new Gallina();
alo += g->PonerHuevoDeOro();
Somebody ought to ban this!
JESUS people, it's a goddamn EMAIL SERVICE.
What are you all DOING?! You're out of your Minds!
*ala William Shatner*
HAVE ANY OF YOU EVER EVEN KISSED A GIRL?!
"Champagne for my real friends - and real pain for my sham friends!" http://ericblade.postalboard.com/
Oh my god, heh, I just told myself the answer for this question of why give out invites to current users and not just have a beta signup or something.
So they can get to everybody. An invite isn't something you sign up for, it is something given to you, current users would give it to their close friends and relatives, who are prolly not technical users and know nothing about current tech news and development of something as bland as a new email service, but thus letting people know of how good it is, and making sure the word spreads out that much farther. wow, no wonder google mostly or only employs phd's...
smart aren't they? also, google is still free, and I saw many people say they would be completely willing to pay for it on slashdot just because it is pretty much better than any other search engine that is currently available, and it is so damn fast. But Google doesn't need to slow down their conquest of the internet market, by doing something like making their services fee-based, at least not yet. First something as unimportant as a search engine. then an email service. next an efficient and elegant messenger with most features you need and enough userbase from gmail and google to make it the most popular messenger in the world. then a web browser with all these features integrated into a slick and resource efficient application, along with it a security package guarding your internet experience.
then an operating system.
then manufacturing it's own line of computers. most common type at first, but after maybe making it's own type of a portable computer system.
sounds like Apple, in the way that it is so popular right now with the iPods, but only iPods, and the way their products are so elegant and clean and efficient. ut much less expensive than Apple, currently at least.
Along the way probably Google will make a bad decision or in one of the processes I described something better than a Google's product would be released and would gain popularity and the plan would fall through. but Google probably isn't stupid enough to create a plan that isn't fault-tolerant. the course of this plan may take 15, maybe 20 years, and then Google will control humanity and make a cluster of human brains integrated with computers to find out the meaning of life?
oh wait, that would be evilI pwn this comment. "The Fine Print" says so.
They have a blogger. It's called Blogger.
Here you go (first come first serve):
One!
Two!
Three!
Four!
Five!
After you sign up, your new e-mail address will be shown to whoever clicks on the link you signed up with, FYI. Enjoy.
"screen scrapers" are prohibited because they circumvent the content based advertising in Gmail.
duh?
Google will need to start doing this - just stating an abuse policy is not good enough, they will need to start detecting abuse and counteracting, otherwise they will go broke trying to buy enough drives to make the exploiters happy.
the fact that they own Blogger probably gives them some interest in not wanting this :)
Although this may be a little off-topic: I think google should keep Gmail invitation only, as it is doing with orkut. I don't see any downsides, that is unless you refuse to communicate with any other person on the internet. But then why would you be using email?
I think this could turn out to be a serious miscalculation on Google's part. It would be quite trivial to write a web app that front ends Gmail with a virtual file system to which you can upload and download hierarchically structured folders and files. The system could even seamlessly encapsulate more than one account so you could have multiple Gbs of storage available totally free, with huge bandwidth and no maintenance.
I imagine that Google's estimates of required storage assumed some relatively moderate average consumption for each user. This would make it really easy to eat up more space than they expected. This, combined with the fact that they won't get any advertising revenue from accounts using this trick, might make it difficult for them to continue the service.
Peer Pressure
fundisom.com/free-gmail
first come, first serve.
and if you manage to catch one, and feel like saying thanks -
have a look at the ads there...
"Gallina" means hen (in Spanish), and it's also used in the sense that one use, in English, "chicken".
Gmail invitation 1
Gmail invitation 2
Gmail invitation 3
Gmail invitation 4
As always: first come, first serve. Enjoy!
Avoid, or, clicky. But you've been warned.
how the hell is this insightful? helpful, yes. insightful, NFW.
Tell you what I'm using gmail for ? ;)
Daily backups for my website are being emailed to my gmail account. Now I won't have to open gmail to check whether they arrived or not, I use rss2email to get RSS feeds, Now I can have gmail RSS feed, r2e'll email them to my primary pop3 enabled mailbox, Done!
I'll know whether the backups are there or not without need to open gmail to check
First 6 people to email me get invites darcon at gmail.com
First 5 people to Jabber me get gmail invites. JID: afraz@jabber.killerbees.org.uk.
Don't worry if I'm not there to respond, I'll know in which order the messages came. Don't forget to include your name and e-mail address.
now, that'd be a pretty cool thing if you could integrate it with livejournal!
Just reply to this thread w/your email address. I have six to give away.
It looks like someone is getting greedy:
6 12 57a-f08e9460d0
3 7f 14d-8031ff00b5
http://gmail.google.com/gmail/a-997c844f36-8053
http://gmail.google.com/gmail/a-997c844f36-0482
I suppose it is possible that jrainville@gmail.com and joel.rainville@gmail.com are two different people who just happened to use two different invitations on the same page, but only to a similar extent that it is possible that Jesus Christ and Mohammed have corporealized in Silicon Valley and are at this moment procuring pizza and beer for a party at my place tonight.
I don't see it on those pages. However I signed up for a GMail account a few days ago, and that was definitely one of the clauses of the clickthrough agreement I was presented with at that time. It appears their clickthrough agreement is different from their posted TOS policy? I guess you'd need to find a gmail invite in order to read the clickthrough...
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
if you want invited email rainspherebomb@gmail.com
See, I have no friends... (really)
Let me see if I understand you all: You're pissed that someone playing around with the underlying tech of gMail is going to cause you the *disaster* of losing your oh-so-vital e-mail!?!?!?
Let's all just agree right now, that anyone worried about their gMail (and thus obviously unable to run their own Internet-accessible mail server) is SO clueless and SO *user-like* that they are NOT to comment on gMail hacks...
Insert the various tired-out cautions here: It's a free service (you didn't think it would last forever did you?); What, you didn't back up your e-mail locally (are you nuts, it's not like you were paying them to...).
This guy is just one of many blurring the whole distinction between file systems/datastores/mailservers/etc. and what in the world is the harm in that? (That's kinda how gMail came about, isn't it?
If you are so worried, go get 10-12 yahoo accounts and don't worry/be happy--I haven't noticed anybody hacking yahoo's webmail service...
Google offers a free blogging system, blogger.
Wouldn't suprise me if they linked the two systems at some point.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
First 6 people to email me at rjlynn@gmail.com get gmail invites. Meh.
Uh, they have a blogger already. Blogger.com. The people doing this project are just stupid or something.
Comment of the year
is that your account could get TOS'd. with hotmail, all you need to do to kill someone's account stone dead with no recourse is to moan about them to the hotmail abuse desk. they don't check anything, they just close the account. i'd imagine google'd be less evil than this, but even so; given the number of gmail accounts there are and will be, can you really expect an impartial personal investigation for each abuse report?