Increase your Google App Engine quotas for free

Google App Engine provides generous free quotas for your app and additional paid quotas.
I always enable billing for my GAE apps even though I rarely exhaust the free quotas. Enabling billing and setting paid quotas does not mean you have to pay anything and in fact increases what you get for free.

Here is a screenshot of the billing panel:

GAE lets you allocate a daily budget to the various resources, with the minimum permitted budget being USD $1. When you exhaust a free quota you will only be charged for the budget allocated to it. In the above screenshot I have allocated all my budget to emailing, but since my app does use the Mail API I can be confident this free quota will never be exhausted and I will never pay a cent. For another app that does use Mail I have allocated all the budget to Bandwidth Out instead.

Now with billing enabled my app:

• can access the Blobstore API to store larger amounts of data
• enjoys much higher free limits for the Mail, Task Queue, and UrlFetch API's - for example by default an app can make 7000 Mail API calls but with billing enabled this limit jumps to 1,700,000 calls
• has a higher per minute CPU limit, which I find particularly useful when uploading a mass of records to the Datastore

So in summary you can enable billing to extend your free quotas without risk of paying.

Extracting article summaries

I made my own version of this technique to extract article summaries.
Source code can be found here.

The idea is simple - extract the biggest text block - but performs well.
Here are some test results:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/23/technology/23google.html?_r=1

The decision to shut down google.cn will have a limited financial impact on Google, which is based in Mountain View, Calif. China accounted for a small fraction of Google’s $23.6 billion in global revenue last year. Ads that once appeared on google.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/09/29/novell_suse_appliance_1_1/

Being able to spin up appliance images for EC2 and spit them out onto the Amazon cloud meshes with Novell's EC2-based SUSE Linux licensing, which was announced back in August. Novell is only selling priority-level (24x7) support contract for SUSE Linux li

http://blog.sitescraper.net/2010/08/best-website-for-freelancers.html

However with Elance there is a high barrier to entry: you have to pass a test, receive a phone call to confirm your identity, and pay money for each job you bid on. Often I see jobs on Elance with no bids because it requires obscure experience - people we