Over the last few weeks I have been working on working on a blog about broadband telecommunications for the Blandin Foundation (www.blandinonbroadband.org). Griff Wigley of Wigley Associates (http://wigleyandassociates.com) has been helping; he’s a blog coach. It’s been a fun project.
In the process I have learned about a very cool tool – Feedburner (www.feedburner.com), a service that can supercharge your RSS feed, which helps you to distribute your content and analyze subscribers.
Here’s a mini-refresher: an RSS feed is like a ticker tape that gives you the headlines or highlights of your favorite web sites. If you have a web site it’s nice to offer people the option of subscribing to a feed to get your updates. If you have a blog with a service such as Blogger (www.blogger.com) or WordPress (www.wordpress.com) you can easily offer an RSS feed. Feedburner can make that feed better.
My favorite thing about Feedburner is that they offer you the option to publish your RSS feed via email. So when you post a new article to your blog anyone who has signed up to receive email notification will get a message with the title of your blog and will be able to easily click through to your site for more information.
A couple of weeks ago I sent Byte of personal homepages. Bill in St. Paul sent me another great personal homepage tool (http://www.protopage.com). Visit the site for a great example of a web site that broadcasts RSS feeds from other web sites, which is another good use of RSS feeds. You can learn more here: http://www.feedburner.com/fb/a/publishers/fbemail
Finally I want to welcome my new friends from Walker Minnesota! And I hope that those of us in Minnesota make it through the next snow storm. For those outside MN, we got about a foot of snow last weekend and they are predicting the same or more over the next few days.
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Today’s Byte is short and sweet. It’s a very cool, one-purpose tool.
Doodle http://www.doodle.ch/index.php.en
It’s a simple tool that helps you schedule meetings or dates with a small group of people. 1) Go to Doodle. 2) Create a poll that lists possible times to meet. 3) A web site will be created for you. 4) Send the web site address to your friends or colleagues. When your friends visit the site they will see if anyone has already responded with their available times and they will have an opportunity to post their available times.
That’s it. As I said it’s one purpose – it just makes it easier to find a time to get folks together. But it can save a lot of hassles of tracking times by phone or even email.
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I have a few web sites with simple forms to collect information from visitors. Sometimes we get spam through the forms, where a computer (or bot) has clearly read the form and filled it out as best as it could. It can be a hassle but for many forms it happens so infrequently that I have ignored it. Well, I have a new site that seems to attract the bots like crazy. So, I had to find a cure, which I thought I’d share.
A Captcha is a barrier that you can put on your site to separate the human users from the computer bots. You have probably seen them – they ask you to re-type squiggly letters that are often hard to read. They can be a pain – but most bots cannot read them. So, they reduce spam from forms by quite a bit.
CAPTCHA stands for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart”.
I found a fantastic web site that will walk you through the process of adding a captcha to an existing form easily – and without any knowledge of php (or really html). How to use captcha: http://www.captcha.biz/index.html. If the whole idea is new to you or you like to read a lot you can start at the beginning. If you’re kind of impatient and moderately knowledgeable (not in php) you can start here: http://www.captcha.biz/captcha-solution.html.
It took me about 15 minutes to go through the site and add the captcha to my form.
After last week’s Byte of PDF converters two Byte readers offered more tool recommendations:
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Last week someone asked me for a free tool to turn Word documents into PDFs. Here are the tools I suggested to her:
- pdf995: http://www.pdf995.com/
I used to use this all of the time. Each time you use it you get an ad, but I figured that was fair enough. You download this software and then activate it by printing your document and choosing pdf995 as your printer.
- CutePDF http://www.cutepdf.com/Products/CutePDF/Writer.asp
This is another free PDF tool. I haven’t used it but I’ve heard good things about it.
This week I learned about FlashPaper (http://www.adobe.com/products/flashpaper/). It is a (not free) tool that converts any printable file into a Flash document (or PDF). A Flash document is similar to a PDF except that it downloads more quickly using FlashPlayer. Flash Paper documents can be embedded into a web page so the experience of downloading a Flash Paper document is more seamless to a visitor. I haven’t checked it out myself but I thought it was interesting to learn about regardless.
A final quick note on a related topic: The latest Adobe Reader (http://www.adobe.com/products/reader) has some great new features. (Adobe Reader allows you to read PDF files and is free.) You can copy text and images from PDFs with the latest version. I have been using this for a while. There are some other great features that I don’t use – but being able to copy and use text and graphics has been a real boon.
To prepare you for Valentine’s Day next week, here a web site that will tell you how to say I love you in dozens of languages: http://theholidayspot.com/valentine/wish101languages.htm
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