Publishing your Femtoo tracker for Google Docs integration

Previously I talked about the ease in which dynamic web content can be imported into a Google Docs spreadsheet using Femtoo - this simple technique adds a new and powerful dimension to a standard spreadsheet. If you haven't read this, you can do so here: http://blog.femtoo.com/2011/07/build-dynamic-speadsheet-with-google.html.

However, in this blog I will talk about how you can 'publish' your Femtoo trackers for integration with the Google Docs speadsheet or any other application that supports the ability to read data from a URL or web link.

Publishing a tracker and obtaining its unique and public URL is really simple:

1. Login to your Femtoo account (Femtoo.com)
2. Create a tracker (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q2EaN8aLhLY)
3. Once created, click the pink 'P' button to open the Publisher dialog box
4. Click 'next' to view the 'FURTHERMORE' tab
5. Here you will see the unique and public URL/link for the tracker. This is the URL you can use for the Google Docs spreadsheet integration - or simply as a bookmark for easy access to the tracker content.

 You can test the link by copying and pasting it into a web browser window. You should see your tracker content clearly displayed with no styling or formatting - perfect for integration with other applications or maybe to email to a friend or add as a bookmark for quick access...


This stuff is really cool and shows how Femtoo can be used in lots of innovative ways, although I should point out that at the moment the Publishing feature is only available to SOLO or PREMIUM accounts, which start from only €1.20 ($1.60) per month.

Build a dynamic speadsheet with Google Docs and Femtoo

I have just stumbled across a really neat use of the Femtoo tracker API. The Google Docs speadsheet contains an 'importData' function which loads the contents of a URL into a cell.

So we can take a url like this one: http://api.femtoo.com/trackers/content/?trackerKey=f24b571b7aba172 - which is a Femtoo API URL pointing to the latest BBC news headline - click on it and see...

The next step is to simply use the 'importData' function with the above URL and we would have imported the latest BBC news headline into our spreadsheet. Here are the steps to get live content into your Google Docs spreadsheet:

1. Open Google Docs and create a new Spreadsheet.
2. Click on an empty cell and enter: =importData("http://api.femtoo.com/trackers/content/?trackerKey=f24b571b7aba172")
3. The cell should refresh and become populated with the latest BBC news headline

Pretty cool, eh?

So now everything you can track with Femtoo, you can manipulate in a spreadsheet - product prices, stock prices, exchange rates, number of twitter followers, new software versions, weather reports...

The only downside is that the spreadsheet is not 'live', so although the real Internet values continuously change, the Spreadsheet value is only imported once...but this is something I am currently working on fixing...

If you do not already have a Femtoo account, you can sign-up for free and start creating your own trackers...