January 31, 2008 • 8:32 am 0
Registration for the Plugg Start-Up of the Year Award 2008 closes on Friday the 8th of February. If you’ve recently started a European web venture, you’ve got one week left to enter.
So get your skates on.
As if you don’t already have enough on your plate starting up a new venture!
Full details of the awards and the conference can be found at plugg.eu/start-ups-rally.
Filed under: Benelux, Promoting Your Website and Organisation , awards, belgian web, brussels, european web, plugg, start-ups
January 30, 2008 • 9:45 am 0
Safari 3 has recently become a first class citizen in the world of WYSIWYG Rich Text Editors. Until recently, the majority of Rich Text Editors didn’t support Safari so if you were using a content management system or blogging software to edit your content online then Safari would usually default to a plain old text area.
But in the past few months a couple of most popular Rich Text Editors have begun to support Safari.
As of version 2.5, FCKEditor now supports Safari 3. Their free editor can be integrated into most development environments and has plug-ins for dealing with file browsing and photo management.
TinyMCE (the editor used on WordPress) also supports Safari, but with the caveat that it’s still experimental.
CuteEditor is a paid for product and has supported Safari for some time now.
Now all that we need is for site owners and CMS developers to replace the older versions of these editors to the newer versions which support Safari.
Filed under: Apple, Free Software, How To Manage A Website, Safari, Web Browsers, Web Standards, Accessibility and Best Practice , rich text editors, rte, Safari, safari 3, WYSIWYG
January 29, 2008 • 6:37 pm 0
When you run a blog, people often steal your content and republish it on their own site so that they have more content to help create advertising revenue. A lot of this process is automated so the thieves never actually read the content. The great irony is that this article may well be “lifted” for use by someone else and will be appear on some other blog’s home page in a few hours. So if it doesn’t say BlueClock on the banner above then this is probably a stolen story.
But that’s another story….
There are a couple of useful tools out there that can help you keep tabs on who’s doing what with your web content. These methods help you see where you are legitimately mentioned, ripped off or have had your content re-worked into something that closely resembles your work.
Google have a service that will send you an email whenever new content matching your criteria has been indexed.
For some blogs (including this one) that can be a matter of minutes after being published. I therefore usually create an alert for the title of the article and then receive emails on a daily basis. If you are entering a complete sentence such as an article title, then you need to put it in quotes.
Alerts can be set up at www.google.com/alerts and you can choose to receive emails on each individual alert on a daily, weekly or as it happens basis.
You can also use Google Alerts to monitor topics that you are interested in generally.
Copyscape is a paid for service, but they allow you to check a few pages per day for free. Copyscape works on a different basis to Google Alerts in that you supply it with a page on your website or blog and it will hunt for pages which have a high similarity. It will find duplicate pages and copies of your article which have been rewritten in an attempt to disguise them.
So if you see your own work on the web from time to time hopefully these two tools will help you track it and do something about it.
Filed under: How To Manage A Website, Online Advertising , blogging, copyright, duplicate content, theft
• 6:17 pm 0
The last Free Friday article was delayed, but it’s now live and you can read it here.
blueclock.wordpress.com/2008/01/25/top-6-thunderbird-extensions-free-fridays-10/
I’ve also recently changed the theme on this blog. The reason? Better legibility.
Filed under: Free Fridays , themes
January 28, 2008 • 9:01 am 5
I have some dedicated servers that I use for hosting clients web sites, but have been following the relatively new hosting company, Mosso with some interest. I am very impressed with the idea of Mosso, but is it too good to be true?
They host on a grid and you can develop in ASP, .NET, PHP and Ruby all on one account. A single domain can use a mixture of the technologies which could be a bonus when migrating sites.
I’ve been keeping an eye on their service status feed to see how quickly they respond to problems, but that kind of thing is only as good as the information the company declare.
Does anyone have any first hand experience of hosting with Mosso or know of any good (reliable and recent) reviews?
Filed under: How To Manage A Website, Reviews , .net, asp, hosting, mosso, php, ruby, web hosting
January 26, 2008 • 9:57 am 1
I’ve written a few posts about various problems with the Windows version of Safari 3. As a result, a surprisingly large number of the search engine generated visits to this site come from people using terms like “text seems bold in safari” or “safari text problem“.
There seems to be some confusion over the fact that Safari renders fonts differently on screen to other Windows browsers. The appearance of text is different in all browsers and on all platforms, but Safari’s method seems to be so noticeably different that people see it as a problem.
Personally, I like the richer rounder feel that Safari gives to fonts, but if you don’t, here’s how to change it to someting a little more to your taste.
The drop-down menu for Font smoothing, indicated by the red arrow in my screenshot will let you set the font smoothing to light, medium or heavy.
The nice thing about it is the changes to the font weight happen as soon as you select an option making it easier to choose which setting you prefer.
Filed under: Apple, Free Software, Safari, Support Articles, Web Browsers , font weights, Safari, safari 3, Safari For Windows
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