One day, I’ll miss this (Taken with instagram)
A Load of Cobblers
Social software services and open source tools have transformed us into a load of cobblers.
Here's where I share the tools I use and how I cobble them together.
-- Steph
Here's where I share the tools I use and how I cobble them together.
-- Steph
I’ve been waiting for technology to solve the business card problem. You know, the one where you collect business cards at an event, file them carefully in a special yellow folder, and then, hey presto… you’ve got a special yellow folder full of business cards.
I told myself I’d sit down one day and type them into Address Book. I even looked online to see if there was a consumer-grade service where you could ship a batch to India or China and have them entered for you. And a little while ago I downloaded something from the App Store to my iPhone called ScanBizCards which I’ve used once or twice, but never really systematically. It looks a bit inelegant, frankly, alongside other apps.
So I was actually mildly interested when the people behind WorldCard Mobile got in touch through the blog with a free download of their app (£3.49 from the App Store) designed for iOS4 and the better cameras in iPhone 4s. I installed it today, and snapped a couple of cards.
You can see the basic approach in the screenshots. Snap a picture (actually, hold the phone about 6 inches above the card and hold very, very still) then the app tries to OCR the card, and shows you what it thinks the various fields map to. To be fair, that’s a tough job, given the variety of business card styles and fields, and it makes a good fist of it. You can tidy up its mistakes manually, and then click Export, where it saves it to your phone’s Contacts (and from there, hopefully, syncs to your computer and MobileMe). There’s a nice little trick which lets you copy an email signature on the phone, and have that parsed in the same way as a business card, letting you add it to your Contacts easily.
I’m not sure it’s the kind of app to really blow you away, but it’s nippy, works quite well (as long as you can hold the phone still) and feels like reasonable value. But more importantly, it will hopefully let me bin those bits of card collected so dutifully and filed so carefully and actually communicate with some of those people.
Thumbshots: free website previews
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
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
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
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
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
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”
Tracking comments on your Flickr photos by RSS
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.
