How to Sign-up for Google Apps for Free – Video Tutorial

Google Apps is no longer free. If you wish to have a branded email address that reads like myname@mydomain.com instead of myname@gmail.com, you will have to subscribe to the Business edition of Google Apps and that will cost you at least $50 per year.
You have options though. You can either configure your web domain with Outlook.com (for personalized email addresses) or, if you prefer the Gmail interface over Outlook, you can use the Mail Fetcher option inside Gmail to manage your Outlook emails from within Gmail.

How to Get the Free Edition of Google Apps

Alternatively, here’s a quick and simple workaround that will still let you sign-up for the free edition of Google Apps even though Google has officially retired the free edition – all you need is a free Gmail or Google account.

1. Go to appengine.google.com, sign-in with your Google Account and create a new Application. You may fill in any dummy date and click the “Create Application” button.
2. Open the “Dashboard” and on the next screen, click the link that says “Application Settings.”
3. Scroll down a little (refer to the video tutorial) and choose “Add Domain” to associate a domain with your App Engine application.
4. That’s it. Now you should see a special link* to sign-up for the free edition of Google Apps. You may either use your existing domain or buy one through Google Apps.

[*] You have to access this link through App Engine as Google Apps checks the HTTP Referrer information before serving up the sign-up page for the free edition of Google Apps.Related reading: Register Web Domains with Google Apps
Also, the Google App Engine website says that you only get a single-user Google Apps account when you sign-up through App Engine but in my testing, I could create additional users as well inside Google Apps.

Video Tutorial – Sign-up for Google Apps

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How to Download your Google App Engine Files

 Google App Engine (GAE), an Amazon Web Services like platform that lets you host and run web applications in the cloud, has come a long way in the last three years. The App Engine now hosts more than 200,000 apps that serve over 1.5 billion views daily. Even the Royal Wedding site was hosted on App Engine.

At the ongoing Google IO event, Google introduced App Engine 1.5.0 that, among several other enhancements, lets project owners download the source code of applications that they have previously deployed on Google App Engine.
This is good news because earlier, if you lost the local copy of your application’s source code – say because of an hard disk crash or because the developer had left the company – you had to rewrite the whole application from scratch even for making minor changes.

Downloading the Source Code from App Engine

Here’s how you may download the source code of any of your App Engine apps using the command line tool:
Step 1. Create a new directory for storing the downloaded files. The App Engine runtime requires that the directory be empty before it can download the files to that directory.
Step 2. Switch to the directory where App Engine is installed on your computer. It is usually under the following path:

C:\Program Files\Google\google_appengine

Step 3. Execute the following command to download the project. Remember to replace MyAppName with the ID of your own App Engine project.

appcfg.py download_app  – A MyAppName -V 1 c:\AppEngine\SourceCode

It’ll ask for your Google Account credentials and once authenticated, all the source code files will instantly download to the specified directory. Obviously, you can only download the source code of your own applications from App Engine.
Here’s a screencast demonstrating the download process (sorry for the video quality).

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How to Host your Website on Google for Free

How to Host your Website on Google for Free

by vamsi pandranki

The Royal Family of UK has selected Google as the web hosting provider for Prince William’s official wedding website. The site, available at officialroyalwedding2011.org, contains news updates, photo galleries and videos and everything is hosted on Google App Engine.

What’s new here? Web developers have long used Google App Engine to host web apps in the cloud – see Sleeping Time and Tall Tweets for example – but this is probably the first time that Google’s infrastructure is being used to host a ‘static website’ of an event that will get plenty of press attention and web traffic in the coming days.

Host your own website on Google App Engine

There are quite a few advantages with hosting websites on Google App Engine. First, it should be more reliable since your site will get served through Google’s own data centers.

Second, if you have a low traffic website, it is highly likely that you won’t have to spend a penny for web hosting. You get 1 GB of free storage space for hosting your images, HTML web pages and other files and 1 GB of bandwidth per day. If you exceed that quota, you pay-per-use similar to Amazon S3.

Ready to jump?

With a regular web hosting company, you rend some storage space on their server, you then transfer your HTML and other files to that server using FTP or cPanel and your website is ready to serve. Google App Engine works in similar manner except that the file transfer mechanism is a bit different.

Step 1: Go to appengine.google.com and create a new application. If you have never used App Engine before, you might be asked to verify your mobile phone number before you can create a new app.

Step 2: Give your application a name – it should be unique and may only include lowercase alphabets and digits. For this example, our app identifier is “thisismyawesomewebsite”.

Step 3: The next two sub-steps may scare some of you but trust me, they simply require you download and run two installers in the given sequence.

3a. Download and install Python from python.org.

3b. Download and install App Engine SDK from this code.google.com.

Step 4: Download and unzip this file – website.zip – somewhere on your desktop. It contains a basic website with some HTML pages, images and CSS that we’ll try to host with Google App Engine.

Step 5: Open the app.yaml file with notepad and replace the word ‘labnol’ with the application identifier that you created in Step 2 above. Save the changes.

Step 6: Finally it’s time to deploy /upload our website to Google App Engine. Open the Google App Engine Launcher program from the Start Menu, choose File – > Add Existing Application and browse to the folder where you unzipped the website.

Hit the deploy button, input your Google Account credentials and within seconds, your website should become available online at abc.appspot.com where abc is your unique app identifier. Later, if you add or modify any web page, press Deploy again and your new /edited files will get uploaded to App Engine.

Video Tutorial: Hosting your Website with Google

Your website will be hosted as a sub-domain of appspot.com but you can register a web domain with Google Apps and map the App Engine website to your own domain.

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How to Setup your own Proxy Server for Free

by vamsi pandranki

Do a simple Google search like “proxy servers” and you’ll find dozens of PHP proxy scripts on the Internet that will help you create proxy servers in minutes for free. The only limitation with PHP based proxies is that you require a web server to host the proxy scripts and second, you also need a domain name to act as an address for your proxy site.
If you don’t own a domain or server space, you can still create a personal proxy server for free and that too without requiring any technical knowledge.

Create a Free Proxy Server with Google App Engine

Here’s one such proxy site that you can build for your friends in China or even for your personal use (say for accessing blocked sites from office). This is created using Google App Engine and, contrary to what you may think, the setup is quite simple.

Step 1: Go to appengine.google.com and sign-in using your Google Account.

Step 2: Click the “Create an Application” button. Since this is your first time, Google will send a verification code via SMS to your mobile phone number. Type the code and you’re all set to create apps with Google App Engine.

Step 3: Choose a sub-domain* that will host your proxy server. Make sure the domain is available, agree to the Google Terms and click save. The sub-domain is also your App ID that will uniquely identify your proxy application.

For this example, we’ll use labnol-proxy-server as the App ID though you are free to choose any other unique name.

Step 4: OK, now that we have reserved the ID, it’s time to create and upload the proxy server application to Google App Engine. Go to python.org, download the 2.6.4 MSI Installer and install Python.

Step 5: Once Python is installed, go to code.google.com, download the Google App Engine SDK for Python and install it.

Step 6: Download this zip file and extract it to some folder on your desktop. The zip file, for the curious, contains a couple of text files (written in HTML and Python) that you can read with notepad.

Step 7: Start the Google App Engine Launcher program from the desktop and set the right values under Edit – > Preferences (see screenshot above).

Step 8. Click File – > Add Existing Application under the Google App Launcher program and browse to the directory that you created in Step 6. Click the Edit button and replace “YOUR_APP_ID” with the ID (sub-domain) that you reserved in Step 3.

Step 9: Click Deploy and your online proxy server is now ready for use.

Visual Tour – Setting up a Free Proxy with Google

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

You can edit the main.html file to change the appearance of your proxy server and you can even add Analytics and AdSense code to your proxy server in case it gets popular on the web.

The application is currently open to all users but you can add a layer of authentication so that only users who are logged-in into their Google Accounts can use your web proxy server.

If you have made any changes to your HTML files, you can upload the latest version to Google App Engine either by clicking the “Deploy” button again or use the following command – appcfg.py update <app-directory>

Credits: The proxy server uses code from Mirrorr, an open-source web caching project by Brett Slatkin. Thanks Pratham for your help!

Update: To answer some of your questions:

• This proxy works with Flash videos (like YouTube and ABC News) though not with Hulu.
• If you are getting the “quota exceed” error, try this mirrorsite. Update: This has been removed since the App Engine TOS does not allow you to split your app across multiple accounts to make use of the free quotas. So technically, the mirror of the proxy is in violation of the TOS.
• As some of you have suggestions, domain with the word “proxy” or “proxies” are banned at workplaces so you may include them in your proxy address.
• Though there exist proxy servers for accessing secure sites, this is a basic proxy server that won’t work with sites that require logins (eg, Gmail or Hotmail).

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is Google App Engine really a better choice ?

  



Is  Google App Engine really a better choice ?
BY VAMSI PANDRANKI


                         Hi, friends who are very intended to work with Google app engine ,i want to share my feeling to you on this.that is why you need to chose this and what are the other sides of Google app engine.i recently created a web application GAE ,it really simple to build,i have made it to show the latest news upadates and most popular video
on youtube by rss feed ,tht is  "toptrends.asia".
                       
                          first i wanna start with better things in Google app engine,very first you need know about" what is Google app engine ?". 

what is Google app engine ? :
                       if you want build a web application .you need a place a put it ,that is exactly what Google have done with Google app engine .so you don't need to bother about infrastructure , because "Google App Engine lets you run web applications on Google's infrastructure",it is cloud solution

runtime environments:                     
                        after getting infrastructure you need better runtime .google app engine provides a three runtime environments, you can easily work on that ,you have better thing if you go with python and java,

database on GAE:        
                       and you need a database for your application ,they providing a google
styled database for you ,that is datastore .it is non relational database (google query language).so you can store your application on big tables 
                       
integrating an app with Google Accounts  :              
                       it integrates your app with your account for authentication ,Using Google Accounts lets the user start using your application faster, because the user may not need to create a new account. It also saves you the effort of implementing a user account system just for your application

it is better if you go with google services:
                     google provides  Supercharged APIs: Supercharge your app with services such as Task Queue, XMPP, and Cloud SQL, all powered by the same infrastructure that powers the Google services you use every day. 


it is demo for google app engine ,
you can contact me at info@toptrends.asia ,

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