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Updates

  • in Tools
  • 1 min read

How does Google see your site? Their Webmaster Tools will tell you.

I just discovered Google’s Webmaster Tools, which is a nice addition to Google Analytics: add your site (or sites), and Google will give you insight in how it sees your pages:

  • See when Googlebot last indexed your home page, and how many pages per day it crawls.
  • Analyse your robots.txt, add a sitemap to help Google index your content.
  • Find out in what queries pages from your site were returned (and in what position), and which links people clicked on.
  • Check out how the PageRank of your pages is performing.
  • Learn about all the trouble Googlebot had with your content: HTTP errors, links not found, URLs timing out or unreachable, restrictions by your robot.txt.

An interesting toolbox for webmasters, to help you optimise your site, and get an idea of how you’re performing.

  • in News
  • 2 min read

FLOSSmanuals is go

Last Friday, Adam Hyde pressed the big green “go” button for flossmanuals.net: a place to read, write, and remix free manuals for free software. The Netherlands Media Art Institute provided the place and time as part of the opening of the Video Vortex exhibition (they call it their response to Web 2.0). Part of the exhibition is a workshop space for projects, available for a week, and flossmanuals.net is the first one there. Adam also announced a good Board of Advisors that’s just established, and a grant from the Digital Pioneers fund.

What’s the link between art, free software and free manuals? Many art schools still teach new media based on proprietary software. But as an autonomous artist, you’re basically forced to hand in your tools upon graduation: the educational licenses on your software expire, and you usually don’t have the money to buy an official license.
So you either continue to work with “illegal software” (kein software ist illegal?) or you have to rebuild your studio with open source and free software, and learn to work with the new tools.

Programmers are working on the software, but it’s often hard to make it work. On the other hand, many artists make (part of) their living by teaching, and so the ones involved in the software development are already used to explaining things to newbies. And they’re keen to introduce these tools into the art schools they teach at, so that you can graduate there with a toolbox you can continue working with.

flossmanuals.net is offering a place to jointly write the manuals. And to remix that content in whatever way suits your needs: pick and choose the chapters you need. And, for instance, integrate it in your own website through AJAX: always up to date.

It will be interesting to see if the remixed manuals become available on the site too. And to place the remixed manuals next to toolboxes on Social Source Commons: just download your “Toolbox in a Box” including manuals. Stephany Hankey of Tactical Tech and their NGO-in-a-Box is on the Board of Advisors, and they’re experimenting with it in the Citizen Journalism Toolkit.

I also learned that the Netherlands Media Art Institute is walking the talk, and has moved to open source IT themselves (you can read the Dutch description at Toltech’s website). Nice!

  • in News
  • 1 min read

Your neighbor in Amsterdam

I feel privileged to enjoy another NetSquared rollercoaster ride of fun for good! I'm joining Siegfried Woldhek of NABUUR, and together with our champions and cheerleaders Kristine Mucher and Michael Brown, we're looking forward to see you join the global neighbor network: a little bit of your time and talents can help change the lifes of many people!

And since the network is the message in this day and age… I'll be in San Francisco for a few more days (until the weekend), and to cite another source of inspiration, I'd love to meet friends I know and friends I haven't met yet. Saturday night is the designated party time… get in touch, 'cause I'm not sure yet where 🙂 (hey, you could get a free stay in the kewlest part of Amsterdam)

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  • in News
  • 1 min read

Facilitate or help?

I’ve tried to find projects that truely put the “local agenda” of the end user at the heart of their work. “Facilitator projects” that are not becoming a stakeholder, but a means to a (local) end. Giving people tools to improve their own situation in their own way, extra opportunities to be effective with their energy and ambitions.

Some of my favourites:

  • Nabuur.com: realising concrete local results with global neighbours

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  • in News
  • 1 min read

Track your MP (UK)

An interesting set of sites in the UK, volunteer-run, to keep track of Parliament. TheyWorkForYou lets you check who your MP is, based on postcode: voting record, topics they’re interested in, and "performance" like participation in debates, recent appearances, responsiveness…

NetSquared Online Sessions

I am in San Jose now, just a few hours away from the opening reception of NetSquared, probably the biggest "Web 2.0" conference I will be attending for a while, with some 350 participants expected. Many many interesting talks and sessions proposed, including a parallel online event, with two important items.

Tuesday 30th May, 11AM PST (which is 8PM Western Europe, 7PM UK, 6PM UTC) I will have an hour session on our Custard Melt project, and especially on what our ambitions and expectations are. I hope that many people will join to explore how we can make the online platform help in galvanising offline action.

At 4PM PST, 1AM Western Europe, midnight UK, 11PM UTC, Micki Krimmel of Participant Productions will be online for a session on "Media that Mobilizes: An Inconvenient Truth, ClimateCrisis and more tales from Participate.net". Of course, as the producers behind Al Gore’s movie about climate change, this is of particular interest to us.

  • in News
  • 1 min read

Conference schedule as Google Calendar

Following the example of Michael Heilemann for Reboot8, I created a public Google calendar based on the schedule of the website. Available as XML and as iCAL.

Some more work is needed: the parallel online conference, descriptions, keeping it up to date. Let me know if you want to contribute, and I'll add you as manager for the calendar!

  • in Tools
  • 1 min read

More Firefox

With the version 1.0PR of Firefox, two more noteworthy extensions have popped up!

ColorZilla

Sits quietly in the status bar, and offers an "eye dropper" style colour picker, with the option to copy the selected colour to the clipboard, ready to be pasted into a stylesheet. It also offers a better zoom function. Facilitates re-creating a site look and feel!

QuickNote

Available for Firefox and Thunderbird, adds a simple notepad and an easy way to copy selected text to it. The notepads are just text files. Especially with the option to add the current URL at the end, it makes it very easy to read and "take notes", and be able to find the source again afterwards when processing the text.

  • in Tools
  • 2 min read

Firefox essential extensions

After using Firefox for a while, it’s hard to imagine still how "normal people" surf the web. By now, I tweaked my Firefox behaviour with several extensions.

Webdeveloper toolbar
Essential for developing web pages! The toolbar offers too many options to list all, but to name a few that I would not live without anymore:

  • CSS tools: edit the style sheet of a page on the spot, great for testing and debugging. Mark links as visited or unvisited to test styles here too.
  • Clear HTTP authentication or session cookies: means not having to restart the complete browser to test the start of sessions and such.
  • Resize the window to any format, to see how things look at good ol’ 800×600.

Tabbrowser Extensions
The Tabbrowser Extensions by Shimoda Hiroshi are an important tool to make Firefox really work completely in a single window, with all browser tabs neatly organised. The extension offers a lot of finetuning to open new tabs for links to other sites, search queries, and so on.

Linkification
Listed with other extensions, this one looks at your page after loading, and "fixes" the web and email addresses that are not yet clickable links. Too often, someone refers to an interesting resource but without linking to it.

BugMeNot
In the same list: getting tired of registration forms just to see a single item that is free anyway? Reclaim your privacy. Install this extension, and with a simple right-click it’s possible to query the BugMeNot database for an account someone else already made. Maybe it doesn’t work, try again for a different account. Maybe there is none available, then you still have to create an account (and add it to BugMeNot, to perhaps save someone else the trouble).

Browser compatibility testing

While trying to find good resources for browser compatibility, I came across some interesting services to check the output of a web page on different platforms and browsers.

  • Browser Photo delivers pictures of a page in different screen sizes on WebTV, iMac, and PC (Windows 2000), for IE and NS mainly (no Mozilla…). $150 for a year unlimited checking.
  • ScreenShotService offers a very similar service, and includes Linux and Mozilla, but only IE from version 5 on. €480 euro for a year. It’s in German.
  • BrowserCam is more sophisticated, and also offers VNC to check mouse-overs, forms, and so on, with more browsers, different Windows versions, Linux, etc. $480 for a year unlimited checking.
  • ieCapture is an attempt to create snapshots of a site in several iMac browsers. It’s very alpha still, and not always available.

Related resources:

  • AnyBrowser offers a SiteViewer for browser compatibility testing. They created an HTML specification that represents the lowest common denominator across browsers, so the idea is that if it shows up ok in the SiteViewer, it shows up ok in any browser. They also promise to have a desktop version available again.
  • Download older versions of browsers from the browser archive. And find out how many browsers there are 🙂 Another site offers stand-alone versions of IE to be able to have more IE versions on one machine. And at Deja Vu you can read more about browser history.