Archive for the 'New web site' category

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.

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).

Print on Demand (POD) has become a very affordable solution for people willing to publish their own books. Previously, you had to convince a publisher to invest in printing hundreds if not thousands of copies of your book; then, you hoped for success and -usually- failed.

With Print of Demand, the cost becomes so low that you can actually print one copy for you and one for your mother. Then, you print whenever you find a customer. This is still affordable and it works.

In this context, I wanted to help a friend interested in this and I started looking for a good solution. So, here are my rants and raves about publishing solutions I could find.

Best Print-on-Demand solutions

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