January 2010
1 post
4 tags
Thumbshots: free website previews
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:
...
November 2009
3 posts
2 tags
Magically displaying an RSS feed
Well, maybe not magic. Javascript.
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...
5 tags
The Magnificent Seven: my favourite tools for...
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:
ConnectedGeneration: Social Media Tools
View more presentations from Steph Gray.
2 tags
Whole page screenshots in Firefox: Pearl Crescent...
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...
March 2009
3 posts
5 tags
Easier feedreading on an iPhone
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...
Of SysOps and Bureaucrats
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...
1 tag
Tracking comments on your Flickr photos by RSS
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...
January 2009
2 posts
Campaign Monitor →
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...
5 tags
Backtype →
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...
December 2008
1 post
Web developer toolbars
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...
November 2008
4 posts
2 tags
Flash video without YouTube
I’ve mentioned recently using the JW Flash Media Player and the associated Wordpress plugin to enable easy embedding of Flash videos in Wordpress.
Our corporate network is - ahem - somewhat antiquated, and I was having problems getting the JW Flash Media Player to work properly on our machines. Turns out that we’re on and older version of Flash (7, rather than 8 or 9) and this seemed...
4 tags
Retaining blog readers with email: Subscribe2 and...
If you do stuff with WordPress, then there are two plug-ins you should definitely include in your toolkit: Subscribe2 and Subscribe-to-comments. The bottom line is: despite the advantages, few people use RSS, and few people remember to revisit your site to monitor comment threads and new postings. Email is still king.
Subscribe2 is a pretty fully-featured email subscription tool. You drop a...
WP-FLV: flash video in Wordpress
I was looking for a nice way to embed videos for an internal Wordpress blog. So hosting videos on YouTube wasn’t an option.
The WP-FLV plug-in is a single file plug-in for Wordpress which lets you add a <flv> tag into your posts referencing the video you want to embed. This then calls the JW Flash Media Player and presents a nice embedded player.
Tip: Wordpress is pretty strict...
2 tags
Sphider: PHP site search
I was looking for a site search tool to run on PHP and MySQL, and didn’t just want to use Google Custom Search.
Sphider is nice: crawls your site (clean, uncluttered admin interface is a bit like a Google Mini), and has a simple, customisable template for results, and works fast. It also has ‘Did you mean?’ suggestions to help correct typos in users’ queries.
You can set...
October 2008
2 posts
Dapper: make RSS feeds from listing pages
It’s frustrating to find a site you really want to follow but which doesn’t publish its listing of news etc as an RSS feed. That’s a problem Dapper.net is really good at solving. Sign up online for free, give it one or more web page URLs, and identify which repeating bits of the page are the title, date, and description fields you want in your RSS. It’s all point and click...
7 tags
SimplePie: do stuff with RSS feeds
SimplePie is a PHP class which makes it easy to grab and use the RSS feed from services like Delicious, Flickr or Twitter. So you could take the feed of results of pages mentioning your product of brand from Google Blogsearch, and make them appear on your blog sidebar.
Of course, there are other ways of doing this: for simple feeds, there may be widgets that do it more easily. And PHP5’s...