I have been really into making App Engine sites lately and one of the developer itches I have had for a while was being able to just grab a valid OAuth2 token for Google Data APIs so I can use it in plugins like Rest Client or just on the URL bar in order to preview data. So I wrote a quick site to do it.

https://oauth2helper.appspot.com/

A sample use would be to get an XML feed of all of your Google Docs.

Scopes:

https://docs.google.com/feeds/

https://docs.googleusercontent.com/

https://spreadsheets.google.com/feeds/

URL to hit:

https://docs.google.com/feeds/default/private/full?v=3&access_token=[put your token here]

I used a CSS layout template called YAML to give the site a simple yet more elegant design.

http://www.yaml.de/

Just made some quick updates to the layout of the site. I put a bit of a more geospatial focus to the design since most of my professional work is in the realm geospatial technology. The background map just loads a random location over the continental United States.

I have been messing around with Google Fusion Tables a lot over the past few months and I really like the service. However it really bothered me that the only format that the response data came in was CSV. I also wanted to be able to work with Fusion Tables query data entirely on the browser/client side. So I spent part of the weekend writing an application that proxies Fusion Tables API queries and transforms them from CSV into JSON. I also added a simple Javascript that you can embed on your page and then make Fusion Table queries directly from Javascript.

I posted the application on App Engine and you can find it here: http://ft2json.appspot.com

I wrote it in Python and used Tornado Web Server to help parse requests. Tornado works quite well within App Engine.

I was looking to learn about the Google Data Protocol so I wrote a quick Python script that will fetch Youtube videos by their playlist.

This utility allows you to download all the videos from a playlist on Youtube. It creates a folder in the current directory (or in the specified path) named after the playlist name and then downloads each video in order and places it within the folder.

If the script fails in the middle of the playlist you can restart it with the same options and should pick up where it left off.

The script depends on youtube-dl for the actual downloading of videos. It is also an easy to install Python script.

The script can be found on GitHub: https://github.com/jordoncm/youtube-dl-playlist

You can also get more details on the project page.