Dark SkyLine - Free Blogger Template

Dark SkyLine is another free blogger template that I have created. The template has a nice navigation menu in the header section, which can easily be customized with your own links. The template can be downloaded for free at TheBlogTemplates.com. If you have any questions on how to implement this blogger template into your blog, please feel free to ask.

Features:

2 Columns, Blue, Fixed Width, Right Sidebar

Screenshot:

Live Demo - Download This Template

DatenDialog - Big Tent goes to Berlin

In May, we held our first Big Tent conference near London, where we debated some of the hot issues relating to the Internet and society with policy-makers, academics and NGOs. The term "big tent” not only described the marquee venue but also our aim to include diverse points of view.

After the U.K. success, we decided to export the concept. Yesterday we welcomed more than 200 guests in Berlin, Germany to the second Big Tent event, entitled DatenDialog.

This dialogue about data tackled the issue of online privacy from a variety of angles. It was appropriate to hold it in Germany, which is a pacesetter both in its concern about privacy and its ideas for safeguarding personal data. During the one-day event, we debated questions such as: what does responsible collaboration between the tech industry and the data protection authorities look like? Do we need new regulation to manage the Internet and the large amount of data produced in the online world? Who is responsible for educating users and how does the tech industry make sure it builds privacy controls into its products?

Speakers included the German State Secretary for the Interior Cornelia Rogall-Grothe and the Federal Data Protection Commissioner Peter Schaar, alongside international authors and bloggers Cory Doctorow and Jeff Jarvis who appeared via live video chat from the U.S.



The debate was always lively, sometimes polarised—Cory likened amalgamated data to nuclear waste while Jeff appealed to governments not to regulate for the worst case—but all seemed to agree that it was a worthwhile and timely exercise to explore these important issues.

You can watch the highlights soon on our Big Tent YouTube channel, and stay tuned for more Big Tents on a range of topics around the world in the coming months.

Posted by Wieland Holfelder, Engineering Director, Germany

(Cross-posted from the European Public Policy Blog)

10 Facebook Widgets and Tools for Your Website and Blog

Facebook is the largest social networking site with more than 400 million active users and is growing larger every day! Make sure to use these Facebook widgets for your website or blog to connect with your large Facebook audience. You can use these tools to easily share certain profile information, websites, blogs, and businesses with the Facebook community.

Personal Profile Widgets

Like Badge
Display your Facebook pages for all to see.

Profile Badge
Create a Facebook profile badge to share selected profile information on your website. A profile badge will allow your users to easily connect with you and add you as a friend.

Photo Badge
This photo badge allows you to share your Facebook photos on websites and blogs. Choose from a vertical, horizontal, or two-column layout and also choose the number of photos to be displayed.

Basic Widgets for Website or Blog

Like Box
This allows your users to publish their content and activity to Facebook.

Share Button
A powerful facebook widget which allows your visitors to share your content on Facebook! An excellent Facebook widget for blogger.

Page Badge
Lets you share your Facebook page (one that you have created) information on your website.

Twitter Link
Connect your Facebook page with Twitter. Whenever you update your Facebook page, your twitter followers will be updated as well with a tweet. A great Facebook widget for your website!

Developers Widgets for Website or Blog

Like Button
Allows facebook users to share web pages from your website on their profile.

Comments Box
Lets your users comment on your website content with their Facebook account.

Recommendations
Provides your website users with personalized suggestions for pages to visit.

Live Stream
Lets Facebook users to post and share content in real-time.

Activity Feed
Lets users know what their facebook friends are doing on your website through comments and likes.

Login Button
Displays a login button along with profile pictures of facebook friends who have already signed up.

Facepile
Shows profile pictures of people who have liked your facebook page or have signed up for your webpage.

Registration
Another way for users to sign up for your site.

Free Blogger Templates

TheBlogTemplates is a website where you can browse and download Free Blogger Templates as well as Free WordPress Themes. The website is run by my friend James Morgan and I and they also offer reviews of the Best Web Hosting Plans. You can follow them on twitter: @TheBlogTemplate or join them on Facebook.

Lego robots and their young inventors come to Google

“He makes his way down the field, finds his target, aims—can he make it before time runs out?”

Nope, we’re not at a sports game, but rather watching a robot, made of Legos, and built and programmed by a team of young students, compete at the FIRST® LEGO® League (FLL) robotics tournament. Last Saturday, November 19, marked our sixth year hosting a qualifying tournament at Google headquarters. This year, 16 Bay Area teams made up of 9-14 year olds participated, energizing our campus with their enthusiasm and even a spontaneous conga line or two.

I’m a software engineer with a longtime personal interest in LEGO robotics and, even more, in getting kids excited about doing science and technology. When fellow Google engineer Albert Bodenhamar and I heard about the tournament awhile back, we put together a team of volunteers at Google, got in touch with the FLL regional coordinators—the nonprofit group Playing at Learning—and held our first tournament. Now we host the event every year, with a cadre of 25-30 Googlers, spouses and friends who spend the day volunteering as judges and referees and help with all of the set-up and logistics.

The center of the action during tournament day was the two ping pong-sized tables where these homegrown robots raced against the clock to complete various physical tasks, all related to the tournament theme of food safety. The tables were covered with small “props” the robots would need. For example, at one point, the robots had to scoop up, carry and then empty dispensers of little plastic "bacteria" into a miniature plastic sink at the opposite end of the table. Referees in black-and-white striped shirts started and stopped the clock and kept their eyes out for penalties while the MC gave play-by-plays of the action. Meanwhile, parents and coaches crowded around, cheering and taking photographs, and the action was broadcast on a jumbo screen for all to see.

When not competing at the tables, teams met with three different sets of judges. One panel of judges asked students about their robot (how they designed it, how it worked), while another set asked about core values (how they worked together as a team, the learning process, camaraderie). In front of the third set of judges, the teams presented their research projects and answered questions. The research project, while unrelated to robotics, aims to incorporate research and problem-solving—keys to the success of any real-world engineering team—into the competition.

At the end of the day, we announced awards. The team Nibbles & Bytes took home the Core Values award, Decon Droids won the award for best Research Project, Xtreme Creators won for Robot Design and the Flying Cougar Cyborgs won for Robot Performance. The LegoNauts took home the Champion’s award. Seven teams advanced to the district championship, which will take place in Redwood City, Calif. in January. Eventually, the tournament reaches the national, and then international, level.



It’s important, not to mention fun, to support creative outlets for young people to get involved in computer science and technology. Competitions like FLL introduce a whole new generation to the world of technology and engineering, and it’s always a blast to support the students who are participating—even if I am a bit exhausted after that conga line.

If you want to get involved with FLL, you can check the website to find out if a team exists in your area, or register a new one.

Posted by Glenn Trewitt, software engineer and FLL tournament director

More spring cleaning out of season

This is our third blog post in our off-season spring cleaning series. To recap, we’re in the process of shutting a number of products which haven’t had the impact we’d hoped for, integrating others as features into our broader product efforts, and ending several which have shown us a different path forward. Overall, our aim is to build a simpler, more intuitive, truly beautiful Google user experience. In terms of the details, here is the latest update:

• Google Bookmarks Lists—This is an experimental feature for sharing bookmarks and collaborating with friends, which we’re going to end on December 19, 2011. All bookmarks within Lists will be retained and labeled for easier identification, while the rest of Google Bookmarks will function as usual. As Lists was an English-only feature, non-English languages will be unaffected.
• Google Friend Connect—Friend Connect allows webmasters to add social features to their sites by embedding a few snippets of code. We're retiring the service for all non-Blogger sites on March 1, 2012. We encourage affected sites to create a Google+ page and place a Google+ badge on their site so they can bring their community of followers to Google+ and use new features like Circles and Hangouts to keep in touch.
• Google Gears—In March we said goodbye to the Gears browser extension for creating offline web applications and stopped supporting new browsers. On December 1, 2011, Gears-based Gmail and Calendar offline will stop working across all browsers, and later in December Gears will no longer be available for download. This is part of our effort to help incorporate offline capabilities into HTML5, and we’ve made a lot of progress. For example, you can access Gmail, Calendar and Docs offline in Chrome.
• Google Search Timeline—We’re removing this graph of historical results for a query. Users will be able to restrict any search to particular time periods using the refinement tools on the left-hand side of the search page. Additionally, users who wish to see graphs with historical trends for a web search can use google.com/trends or google.com/insights/search/ for data since 2004. For more historical data, the "ngram viewer" in Google Books offers similar information.
• Google Wave—We announced that we’d stopped development on Google Wave over a year ago. But as of January 31, 2012, Wave will become read-only and you won’t be able to create new ones. On April 30 we will turn it off completely. You’ll be able to continue exporting individual waves using the existing PDF export feature until the Google Wave service is turned off. If you’d like to continue using this technology, there are a number of open-source projects, including Apache Wave and Walkaround.
• Knol—We launched Knol in 2007 to help improve web content by enabling experts to collaborate on in-depth articles. In order to continue this work, we’ve been working with Solvitor and Crowd Favorite to create Annotum, an open-source scholarly authoring and publishing platform based on WordPress. Knol will work as usual until April 30, 2012, and you can download your knols to a file and/or migrate them to WordPress.com. From May 1 through October 1, 2012, knols will no longer be viewable, but can be downloaded and exported. After that time, Knol content will no longer be accessible.
• Renewable Energy Cheaper than Coal (RE<C)—This initiative was developed as an effort to drive down the cost of renewable energy, with an RE<C engineering team focused on researching improvements to solar power technology. At this point, other institutions are better positioned than Google to take this research to the next level. So we’ve published our results to help others in the field continue to advance the state of power tower technology, and we’ve closed our efforts. We will continue our work to generate cleaner, more efficient energy—including our on-campus efforts, procuring renewable energy for our data centers, making our data centers even more efficient and investing more than $850 million in renewable energy technologies.

Posted by Urs Hölzle, Senior Vice President, Operations & Google Fellow

Best Web Hosting Plans for Blogs

Hosting a blog on your own custom domain is essential and it's important to find a reliable and affordable web host. Having the right web host that you can trust is key for any website or blog. So I've come up with an updated list of the best web hosts for blogs. Please feel free to ask any questions because I am happy to help!

1) HostGator

HostGator is trusted by over 5,000,000 sites to suit their web hosting needs. I personally host several sites on HostGator and I strongly reccommend them. If you have any questions, please feel free to ask!

2) iPage

iPage provides web hosting at an affordable and competitive price and promises its clients reliable servers and great customer support.

3) JustHost

JustHost is committed to providing their clients with low cost blog hosting along with a promise of excellent customer support.

4) FatCow

FatCow is dedicated to delivering first class customer service to the small business owner in particular.

5) BlueHost

BlueHost has been offering exceptional web hosting solutions to thousands of personal and business sites since the year of 1996.

6) InMotion

InMotion guarantees reliable, affordable, and fast web hosting. This web hosting company promises 100% satisfaction guarantee.

7) DreamHost

DreamHost is a great web hosting company which offers reliable web servers and excellent customer service.

8) HostMonster

HostMonster is a solid company which has been offering web hosting solutions to thousands of personal and business web sites since 1996.

9) GoDaddy

GoDaddy is a secure and reliable web hosting provider which is very well known.