A Load of Cobblers

Thumbshots: free website previews

Sun, 10 Jan 2010 16:36:00 +0000

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:

http://open.thumbshots.org/image.aspx?url=http://www.apple.com

Which will give you:

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.

Magically displaying an RSS feed

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 18:25:00 +0000

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 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.

You can see this in action over here (see the latest updates box, which runs off an RSS feed of posts in a specific Wordpress category).

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.

The Magnificent Seven: my favourite tools for digital engagement

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 21:09:00 +0000

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.

Whole page screenshots in Firefox: Pearl Crescent Page Saver

Sun, 22 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Easier feedreading on an iPhone

Tue, 31 Mar 2009 00:40:00 +0100

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…

Of SysOps and Bureaucrats

Sun, 29 Mar 2009 22:39:00 +0100

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

—Skizzerz”

Source: http://www.mwusers.com/forums/showthread.php?t=8951

Tracking comments on your Flickr photos by RSS

Sat, 07 Mar 2009 22:19:00 +0000

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:

http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/activity.gne?user_id=XXXXXXXXX@XXX

Et voila. Try out the feed, and subscribe to it in your reader.

Campaign Monitor

Sun, 18 Jan 2009 09:33:00 +0000

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 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.

Backtype

Sat, 10 Jan 2009 23:30:47 +0000

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 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.

Web developer toolbars

Wed, 10 Dec 2008 00:01:17 +0000

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.

Flash video without YouTube

Sat, 29 Nov 2008 18:14:15 +0000

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 to be the root of the problem.

After a bit of searching, I found the Mini Flash Video Player by RichNetApps. This is a really simple, slightly bare-bones video player which works nicely even with ancient Flash versions.

Just drop the player files into your web directory, and add the code to your HTML. Here’s mine as an example:

For small projects, there’s a lot to be said for self-hosting the video - aside from the Flash version quirks of our network, it’s not the headache I expected it to be.

Retaining blog readers with email: Subscribe2 and Subscribe-to-comments

Thu, 20 Nov 2008 23:08:00 +0000

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 special comment into a post or paste the subscription form into a template and voila: your readers can sign up to receive notifications by email whenever you post something new.

Subscribe-to-comments (confusingly similarly-named) does a different job: it adds a checkbox to your comments form for commenters to receive an email notification when a new comment is added to the thread. Keeping track of the conversation in a comment thread is a bit hit-and-miss: with this plug-in, it’s easier for your readers to monitor and rejoin the thread if they want to.

WP-FLV: flash video in Wordpress

Sun, 16 Nov 2008 12:38:00 +0000

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 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 about stripping out what it sees as dodgy code from the WYSIWYG editor. So if you want to allow the page/post to remain editable but don’t want to have the suspicious-looking element stripped out, change the following line in wp-flv.php:

preg_match_all (‘!]*)[ ]*[/]*>!i’, $content, $matches);

to:

preg_match_all (‘!\[flv([^>]*)[ ]*[/]*\]!i’, $content, $matches);

and instead of:

use the following snippet in your post:

[flv href=’link/to/vid.flv’ autostart=’true’ /]

Sphider: PHP site search

Mon, 10 Nov 2008 00:00:00 +0000

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 up a cron job to call the spider to recrawl your site nightly.

See it in action: http://www.thebigopportunity.org.uk/

Dapper: make RSS feeds from listing pages

Fri, 31 Oct 2008 23:44:00 +0000

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 stuff, and you can publish the resulting feed in all kinds of formats, and with a friendly URL.

So for example this:

http://www.civilservicenetwork.com/index.php?id=152

becomes:

http://www.dapper.net/services/whitehallwestminsterworld

SimplePie: do stuff with RSS feeds

Sun, 26 Oct 2008 17:51:00 +0000

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 SimpleXML functions are pretty good. But SimplePie can handle a bigger range of feeds, more intelligently and enable you to do clever stuff like filtering without getting too bogged down in the XML itself.

See it in action (powering the search results from Hansard and Delicious links) at: http://interactive.dius.gov.uk/scienceandsociety/site/debate/