Needed a host page for the MockingBird code base, so here it is. I unearthed it looking for material to show to the fine folks at Code for America. I don't think I have much of a shot there this year, but hey, you never know. It certainly can't hurt to get used to the application process.

MockingBird is a Google Wave bot that I wrote in the early days of the Wave bonanza, back before I forgot I had a Wave account for like 8 months and the world at large sort of gave up trying to use it. The bot still works, and it was kind of funny to see it in action again. Its basic programming is relatively dumb and innocuous, but the idea is you could dial it up to inject a blue streak of utter dadaism into your Wave. It's named in honor of Yelling Bird, a potty-mouthed antagonist from the works of Jeph Jaques who never has anything nice to say.

I solved an interesting puzzle recently. I thought I might share that solution with someone(s) at some point. If I seem to be vague, it's because I'd hate to search-optimize the discovery of potential spoiler material. Suffice it to say that it's a Java algorithm that is cruelly capable at playing a particular children's word game.

1. If you can avoid it, Don't use Apps for Domain with domains that can't be registered directly by Google in the signup process. I used Godaddy as my registrar because I have an account there, was interested in a .US domain and wanted to see how the setup process differed from when you let Google register and manage the domain for you. It turns out, Google saves you a lot of pain when they act as registrar.

There's some sense to this. Apps for Domain is designed to be superimposable on top of an existing domain, without completely overriding the location. You can choose to host only specific subdomains - typically mail, docs, calendar and sites - while other Internet services continue to run off your network or regular hosting provider. But the flexibility comes at a price. It means you're responsible for changing the DNS CNAME records for these subdomains, the MX records for existing e-mail accounts you want to transfer, and potentially the A records and forwarding if you want to relocate the naked domain.

I hold a bachelor's in engineering focused on the study of computing, and have been doing web development in the field for almost two years now. And even I found this process confusing.

2. If you must, the Apps DNS help pages and these two knol articles (both by Larry H) can help with the most difficult elements of the process, but I can't imagine doing this without some basic understanding of what DNS is. And once you've correctly made all the adjustments, you get to wait half an hour or more for some of them to take effect and be testable, all of which needs to be accomplished before Google will validate your site and activate mail service.

3. By contrast, if you buy your .com, .org, .net or .biz directly through Google, you will never be confronted with these harsh realities unless you really want them, in which case you have the option to expose the advanced DNS control panel. Instead you get to use the main apps control panel to assign web services to the various subdomains. I cannot recommend this enough.

Next we can talk about the wonderment that is sites! Yay.