So you’ve got a list of websites you want to illustrate with thumbnail images - a bit like those Alexa or SnapPreviews you see on some sites.
Try Thumbshots - the free, pretty good* alternative to the premium options like Alexa.
With Thumbshots, you just specify your image source URLs in the following format, where for example www.apple.com is the thumbnail you want to display:
I’ve used it liberally as part of the Digitalgovuk bookmarklist, to show what each bookmarked site looks like.
* I say ‘pretty good’ as it only seems to have homepage thumbnails for domains, not subdomains or subfolders (so all Twitter or Facebook page thumbnails look the same, and ditto for Wordpress.com blogs I think); and its coverage isn’t universal.
Here’s a scenario: you want to show a list of recent tweets, blog posts, news items, or anything else with an RSS feed on your website. But your CMS won’t let you, or your templates can’t easily let you slip in a suitable widget.
Enter Feed2JS. This service lets you specify an RSS feed, and customise a piece of javascript to control how it is displayed - the number of items, whether to show titles, descriptions or both, date published - all the usual stuff (but more control than the normal Wordpress widget gives you, for example).
You can preview your script as you go, and then when you’re ready, just cut and paste it into your site (you’re allowed to paste Javascript into pages on your CMS, right?). You can style up the content of course, so it fits in seamlessly.
It’s a life saver for those little jobs where it’s nice to feature some dynamically-changing content but you’re working to some technical and time constraints. Hurrah for Feed2JS.
A couple of months ago, I did a talk at Tim Davies’ Connected Generation unconference held at BIS’ offices, aimed at youth workers and others with an interest but not much background in using social media tools for digital engagement. Here are the slides:
Screenshots are great, for illustrating slides or blog posts, telling the story and as an archive. It’s a shame then that as most websites have interesting content below the fold, a regular screenshot on either a Mac or PC will only show you what’s currently visible.
Pearl Crescent’s Page Saver is a plugin for Firefox on Mac or PC which gives you a contextual (right-click) menu option to save the whole page or just the visible part, minus browser chrome, to a PNG file which uses the page’s title as the filename.Much better than having to stitch together Picture 1, Picture 2, Picture 3 and so on.
On my iPhone, I use Google Reader (mobile edition) and Tweetie to follow RSS feeds and Twitter respectively. I star items which look interesting, to save for later reading.
A little Yahoo Pipe combines the RSS feeds of these two sets of starred items, and I’ve put together a little script (using SimplePie) optimised for the iPhone layout to:
Display the combined list of the latest starred items
Highlight Twitter content (with a blue background) to distinguish from blogs
Use CSS to highlight items I’ve read
Simple as that. Let’s see if it improves the ‘starred items’ reading experience on the train journey…
A support forum for Wikipedia platform Mediawiki unearths a deep truth about the world:
“The creator of the wiki is given both bureaucrat and sysop rights by default. They could, potentially, remove themselves from the sysop group to then have less rights than other normal sysops, but they could easily add the group back to themselves.
Consider this analogy: Groups in MediaWiki are like clubs. Say that the “sysop” club gives you free pizza and soda, and the “bureaucrat” club gives you free paper plates. When you belong to both clubs, you get the plates, pizza, and soda. However, if you quit the sysop club and are only in the bureaucrat club, all you get are the plates with no pizza and soda to go along with it. Yes, that isn’t the best analogy, but it does help to illustrate the point that groups are kept separate from one another and as such it is pointless to be a bureaucrat without also being a sysop
I’ve used Flickr and an RSS reader for years. But until tonight, I couldn’t figure out how to subscribe to a feed of comments left by my Flickr contacts on my photos (as opposed to the feed of actual images in my photostream, which Flickr makes quite easy to get).
There must be an easier way than this, but it works:
1. Use idGettr to help convert your friendly Flickr profile name (I’m lesteph) into the numeric ID Flickr uses behind the scenes to manage your account.
2. Grab the URL for the Atom feed of activity (i.e. comments) on your photostream, as per the Flickr API docs.
3. Add your numeric Flickr user id to the API URI:
If you want any kind of newsletter functionality for your site, go to Campaign Monitor. Use my computer. Just go.
I’ve built my own newsletter modules in the past, and while it’s interesting and satisfying, you’re just never going to do it as well as guys who spend all day long trying to make emails get through spam filters and display OK in the fifty different email clients in regular use (you thought browser compatibility for web was a challenge? Try email).
There’s both a templated version (you define the template, and get a client to enter their content into predefined fields) or a version where you upload the fully-finished HTML document. It can extract the plain text version for you, manage your subscribers - including a handy Javascript-based subscribe/unsubscribe form - and best of all, add tracking to every link in your email, so you can see reports of who clicked on what, and which bits of your newsletter really got people interested.
The basic pricing is $5USD per mailling plus 1 cent per mail sent, which you can mark up if reselling the service to clients.
I’ve been looking at new ways to monitor online debates. My technical requirements are:
Return examples where people have been talking about keywords X, Y or Z in blog posts, forums, comments, Tweets, news and ideally videos/podcasts/general web page content too
Filter out duplicates
Filter out spam blogs
Filter out stuff that I/we put out there ourselves on our own site(s)
Sort the combined list in date order, and return an RSS feed I can use in my reader or in a Netvibes widget
The heart of my system is Yahoo Pipes (which I’ll describe here later) which handles the merging and filtering of RSS feeds beautifully. But relevancy is still a problem.
Backtype helps you track comments across the web. You can use it to generate a neat RSS feed of all the comments you leave on other blogs, and perhaps pipe this into a sidebar widget on your own (I currently do this with a manually-bookmarked tag via Delicious but may switch over to Backtype in due course). You can also use it to search more generally for mentions of keywords and individuals, and it looks to be fast and pretty wide-ranging, and looks lovely too.
Most of the tools here are somewhat niche - if you need to bash sprockets of type X, then they’ll help.
But there’s a tool which pretty much everyone even tangentially involved in working on web projects should install and that’s web developer toolbars.
The Firefox Web Developer Toolbar adds a massively useful set of tools to your browser, including the ability to turn stylesheets and images on and off easily to simulate the experience of different visitors, disable your cache, disable Javascript, measure parts of your design using a pixel ruler, view the generated source (after all the scripts have run), and check the design at different screen resolutions. Most useful of all, it lets you hover over different elements of the page, highlighting them in red outline, and understand which elements, IDs and classes affect them - something that makes CSS debugging much easier.
It’s also worth installing the IE Developer Toolbar which adds similar (but not quite so sophisticated) tools to the notoriously fickle Interner Explorer.
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