Archive for the 'Blog' category

When you follow a broken link in this web site, you will fall onto an error page. Of course, this does not happen very often (Ed.: I hope so!); I decided to give you a direct list of the error pages to answer to the standard erorr code 404 page not found.

• 404 page not found
• 404 page not found
• 404 page not found
• 404 page not found
• 404 page not found
• 404 page not found
• 404 page not found
• 404 page not found
• 404 page not found
• 404 page not found
• 404 page not found
• 404 page not found
• 404 page not found
• 404 page not found
• 404 page not found
• 404 page not found
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• 404 page not found
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• 404 page not found

I am in love with the Opera web browser. I use it for 99% of my web browsing, so it is also the tool I use when writing posts for the roumazeilles.net web site. The only thing that I did not have right out-of-the-box after download was the ability of checking my spelling (and several people noticed a few typos in my posts along with some of my bad English).

So I decided to add a spell checker to Opera (a plug-in to limit the risks of my own typos). I found a pretty simple one: Aspell for Windows that Opera will automatically recognize when it is installed. It has dictionaries for many languages (it is easy to create one from a mere word list in your own language if you need to). It supports several languages at the same time.

The only drawback is that it is not working in real-time, but you have to call it from a right-click on the mouse into the post box. I would have preferred an active underlining of wrongly-spelled words (like in Word or OpenOffice-Write).

May be you know a better one that you would like to share…

Note for new bloggers: Even if I have been waiting long for this, typos in your posts just pushes forward a bad image for your own web site. Go and correct this now.

Source: http://www.opera.com/support/tutorials/opera/spell check/.

You have a web site, you want to see its traffic growth (it appears that this is the number one way web site creators spend their time: They track each and every little traffic change with stat tools). I offer you here a frighteningly long list of ways to satisfy your worst statistical perversions.

Ok! This is useless for myriads of Internet users except the web site designer that wants (needs?) to test a page under different versions of Internet Explorer, but the installer built by Yousif ontains IE3, IE4.01, IE5, IE5.5 and IE6. Not bad!

Install multiple versions of IE on your PC

There are two ways to read this post, one is to go to the web site and to look at the pages; The other is to check the RSS news feed ().

If the number of visits is the judge, there are only very slim chances that you know about the mere existence of the RSS thread . This is why, I’ll try to speak a little about it and give you some tips about it.

The central idea is to ease the reading og articles from a web site by grouping them in a simpler form. You need a separated reader but, you may not know it, you already have one included in most modern web browsers. Instead of going to the site to check if there are news, your browser will receive updates any time there is something new. You’ll know if it is worth coming to the original web site.

Here are some informations as they were grouped by Codesqueeze.

Beginners

Veterans

Advice to bloggers

Now, if you blog or if you have a web site, it is strongly advised to include your own RSS version of the news and posts that you produce. It is favoring the most experienced readers who happen to also be the ones most able to extend the buzz around your activity or web site.

For the users of WordPress blogging software and WordPress.com sites, it’s just a matter of using the feature already included in your web site. You just have to make sure that the template you use is properly showing the existence of the RSS thread.

All WordPress users should know that their prefered tool for creating a web site has just been upgraded. WordPress 2.3 is now ready and rolled into the public.

Want the top news you’re interested in without opening up a browser? There is a way to do it in just six steps if you are willing to exploit the RSS feeds made available by most news web sites.

Instructibles (via Download Squad).

WordPress is currently preparing a new version 2.3 that will bring new possibilities to work together (multi-author blogs and web sites) and to enrich the articles/posts.

We should see the final 2.3 version on September 20th.

You may remark (or may not) the appearance of a new feature on this web site: on each individual post page, there is now a little list of similar articles. It is intended to help you discover new articles that you may not know but are related to the post your are reading at this time.

Have fun!

For the interested WordPress users, I can tell that to get this feature I used the “related_posts” plugin of Wasabi.

The first National Punctuation Day was on September 24, 2006. OK. It seems that it was a hit in many different medias and among the US English teachers.

This is now time to prepare the next one: Only one month left to collect the examples of the worse punctuation and to find ways to improve the situation.

Sony wanted to react to the (too?) many comments following their (simplistic) presentation of the new products of the SLR market (including objectives) at the recent PMA. For this they decided to include the photo issue in the Sony Electronics Products blog in order to better sequence the information that will be needed at the time of starting the new Alpha 200 in the middle of the other expected announcements by Canon and Nikon.

It is becoming more and more critical to lure the public into company information to avoid the impact of rumours and grey-market information. We’ll see if Sony learns to handle this kind of communication.

As the most attentive of the readers will have noticed, there was a minor change to the layout of the web site. It should improve slightly the overal performance and it will allow further evolutions that may be appreciated later.

If you find some technical difficulties with your browser (it shouldn’t be the case, of course), please, feel free to comment about it.

For those most technologically inclined, let’s just say that without seriously changing the appearance, we went from template a fully based upon HTML tables to a CSS-based template. Many of the layout elements are now moved into the CSS sheet and this explains the performance gain.

Authors of a web site sometimes (more and more often) find themselves in the difficult situation where the content of their site is “borrowed” by someone else. I just found a very helpful and detailled post by Lorelle (”What Do You Do When Someone Steals Your Content“) that explains what to do and how to react. My best recommendation to any blog writer.

To all the readers that are interested in keeping in touch with us without even the effort to visit us every day, there are two options that you should keep in mind:

1. Using the RSS feed for the web site. You need to have an RSS reader (one is included in recent versions of Safari, FireFox, Opera and Internet Explorer; Several autonomous specialized software programs exist; BlogLines, Google, AOL and others offer such services -See the Add-To category in the let-hand-side column). It has the advantage of using a now-common interface symbolized by the logo: You can keep in touch with several web sites at the same time and you are informed any time something new is published.
2. If you prefer to receive an email each time some new article is posted, you can use the RSSFWD tool. it reads the RSS feed and sends you an email to inform you. Just go to http://www.rssfwd.com/ and give the following feed URL: http://www.roumazeilles.net/news/en/wordpress/feed/, the service will work in a matter of seconds.

While I’m on the subject of RSS feeds, let me offer a link to the RSS toolbox of Mashable. It gives information about 120+ ressources (readers and utilities) useful to RSS lovers.

Some people have been wondering how I did the random selection of 404 page not found messages that are used on this web site.

So, here is the nice little PHP script that I use here to redirect randomly to one of the right pages:

You can re-use it on your own web site if you want to. It’s free.

It is well known that the human brain has pattern matching capabilities much further advanced than those of the best equivalent software programs. This explains that failure rates of OCR (Optical Character Recognition) program may be as high as 1% (or even 2%) of errors, which is requiring later human proof-reading to ensure a reasonable quality for document scans. But when the document is old, badly printed, or degraded, error rates may climb further into the unusable (even more so when we address the scan of thousands of documents like is done by libraries and cultural institutions all over the world).

On another issue, the SPAM problem on the Internet became a major problem: Prorams try to make believe that they are human beings in order to insert advertisment anywhere a user can write (in the messages of a forum, in the comments of a blog, etc). For some time now, it became common that human users must identify themselves by their capacity to recognize a badly written word. Theoretically, this is a very efficient Turing test allowing to differentiate a human from a machine only by the results of their actions. Practically, the abilities of software programs have become so impressive that SPAM is slowly coming back again through those filters named CAPTCHAs (those images that you must read and copy back in order to be identified and approved for a specific action).

The problem appears to be: create CAPTCHA tremendously difficult for the automated software and, simultaneously, bring human beings to the task of checking scans of documents difficult to read by program.

The solution: reCAPTCHA.

The idea is to provide a CAPTCHA service to thousands of bloggers and forum administrators (WordPress, phpBB, etc.) Users are invited to recognize two words specifically difficult to read (profesional OCR programs failed during scans done by Carnegie Mellon University). The user must recognize them both. One is used to check that this is a human being, the other will fill a database of OCR translations that will be used to deliver even more CAPTCHAs and to improve the quality of a document scanned by Carnegie Mellon. Dual core technology: efficiently fight spammers and deliver millions of human users to improve the scan quality of thousands of ancient documents (without using slave labor).

Example of a difficult to read/scan document:

One of the key advantages is that most pro OCR programs can tell when they fail to recognize a character or a word (when they are not confident enough).

Being propulsed to the home page of a famous web site like SlashDot or Digg is intensely satisfying for the author of a blog, but it usually results in an intense traffic storm for your server that may not survive to the typhoon even if it comes from friends.

DownloadSquad grouped some ideas on how to optimise your WordPress site around this risk or when you fall under that kind of pressure.