Google recently debuted a new web service called the Font API.  Google’s Font API provides developers a means by which they may quickly and painlessly add custom fonts to their website.  Let’s take a quick look at the ways by which the Google Font API can be used.

Font Request Format

Many of the fonts within Google’s font archive are available not only in standard format but also in Italic, Bold, and Italic Bold.  The format for requesting a given font variant is:

{font}:{variant1},{variant2}

Here are a few examples of requesting each variant:

Anyone that knows me knows I’m a complete soccer hooligan. The upcoming World Cup has me more excited than a 4 year old at Disneyland. That’s why I was so pleasantly happy to see Google do something really creative when you search for “World Cup”:

Clearly Google knows the importance of the World Cup. And for that…I will always use Google.

I generally try to listen to JavaScript/development podcasts and videos when I’m working.  It’s a great way to continue to learn and get ideas while doing the ho hum programming busywork that’s unavoidable.  Here’s a great Google Talks presentation that was given last summer about JavaScript and speed.

After you watch some of it, let me know what you think.  Oh, and trust me, I’ve seen your JS — you need this.

Google recently introduced an interesting effect to their homepage: the top left and top right navigation items don’t display until you move your mouse or leave the search term box. Why? I can only speculate that they want their homepage as simple as possible; after all, the search box is given focus immediately and at least half of their users probably just type their term and hit enter — no need for more clutter. Here’s how you can implement a similar system with MooTools or jQuery.

It seems like every website these days uses Google Analytics. And why not? It’s an outstanding tool that gives you any and every statistic you could ever want. The problem with Google Analytics is that it’s been, well, slow loading at times. That’s why I was so pumped when I saw Google was releasing an async version of their script.