More astronomy on your Google homepage

After yesterday's play with Google's new homepage extension API I've decided to have another play. This time I've written a little module to display the latest image of the Sun as found on SpaceWeather.

It works — after a fashion. Because SpaceWeather don't provide a "today's image" image that gets updated each day I've had to write some code to construct the URL for the image for today. The main problem with this is that I'm quite a few hours ahead of the SpaceWeather people so, for part of my day, I don't have an image to view (and, of course, the same problem happens if they don't have an image for a given day).

I did have a play with some code that would try and figure out what the latest image is (by looking for an image for today, then yesterday, then the day before that, etc...) but my knowledge of javascript and all the related tools isn't that good so it's defeated me. I won't bore you with the details but it all seems to come down to security and now allowing code-based access to sites other than the host site for the code. Security's nice but, sometimes, it gets in the way.

File Under: Google Homepage, Google Homepage Developer API, Google Astronomy Hacks, SpaceWeather, Solar Image.