Humanitarian News moved to a new server

Those of you following my different blogs, will have noticed I have been struggling with GoDaddy, the hosting service for some sites since the longest time.

After months of virus infections on some sites, security failures, lack of performance and repeated downtime, I decided to move some of my blogs to another host.

The first, and most complex of all sites, Humanitarian News, was the first one to move. Since I started Humanitarian News, the site had completely outgrown its server: We have now collected and indexed close to 300,000 news articles and blogs on nonprofit topics. The site now gets 20,000 visitors per month, with sometimes over 40 simultaneous users.

With the help of Fabio and Andrea, two Linux/PHP/MySQL/CSS/Drupal gurus, we move Humanitarian News to its new server over the weekend. Something I wanted to do since months, but never had the time, and certainly didn't have the knowledge. So now, the deed is done: Humanitarian News has moved, and is purring on the new server, happy like a cat next to a stove. The response time is much better than ever before.

While moving, we implemented a new search engine (called "SOLR", for the nerds amongst you), which indexes all posts much faster, and generates search results in a flash.

What is even more important: we enable the customized RSS feeds once again. This is a powerful feature which allows visitors to create their own RSS feed, out of any search criteria.
For instance, if you are interested in the latest on the Pakistan floods, the search will give you these results. Clicking on the RSS icon next to the search bar will generate this feed.

Once you generated a feed, you can import it in your RSS reader, display it on a widget on your blog, or even generate a daily email with the latest articles on that topic.

As Humanitarian News monitors and collects articles from 1,000+ different websites, the customized RSS feeds give you an instantaneous overview of the latest articles on your favourite topics, from pretty much the "cream" of all nonprofit news/blog sources.

Next steps will be to move Have Impact and BlogTips to the new server.

Enjoy!

Read the full post...

New aidworker blogs

The list of blogging aidworkers grows. Here are my latest additions:

• After Africa: Long time blogger and cyberfriend Pernille faces her new challenge: after years in Bosnia, Uganda and Tanzania, she now works an NGO back home in Denmark.
• Underwater Desert blogging, by Casey in the US, about Somalia. Or is it the other way round?
• Chhaya Path, is Nisha's blog, who shuttles between India and Kenya
• Shotgunshack blogs from different parts of the world, inspired by a video from the Talking Heads.
• Rachel in Erbil (Iraq), after "Rachel in Kitgum" (Uganda) and "Rachel in Goma" (DRC)...

Remember, I aggregate the latest posts of all aidworkers' blogs on AidBlogs, twittered via @AidBlogs.

Picture courtesy of Pernille

Read the full post...

The comprehensive state of the world - Part 3

While being 'out' for 6 weeks, plenty of stuff has happened on my blogs and its related projects. So without further ado, here is Part 3 of my 'catching up' exercise.

The most important stuff first: Change Starts Here, the social project we started on The Road almost 2 years ago, keeps on flying high. I just posted the details for our latest batch totalling $1,000 in loans.
Our Kiva team now counts 82 members, who issued a total of US$35,325 in 894 different microfinance loans. Ieehaa!
Check out the project scorecard and join our Kiva team!

Lemme see, what else happened?
Oh, we passed our 500,000th visitor on The Road! Iehaaa once more!

During the month of July, I had serious problems with the hosting of several of my blogs. Humanitarian News and BlogTips went offline for days in a row. I described my battle to get the sites back up in this post. I am now working on moving the hosting to a more reliable provider.

Still, that did not stop Humanitarian News from doing its job. In July, we collected 25,600 articles from 1,012 different sources and now store a total of 244,770 articles. On a downside, the poor performance of the servers forced me to shutdown the customized search and user-defined RSS feeds, though. Hopefully these can be revived after we moved Humanitarian News to its new host.

Meanwhile, my Twitter network kept on growing by itself. @aidnews now has close to 7,500 followers, @humanitynews approaches 3,000 followers. @newsongreen, @NonProfitBlogs have both well over 1,000 followers. @ChangeThruInfo and @AidBlogs are progressing more slowly, but steadily...

I get more and more requests from nonprofits to publish their press releases, which increased the traffic by 200% on my newest blogs The NonProfit Press. Shot from the Hip, a site close to my heart where I post sound, video and picture snippets straight from my mobile phone, has now well over 1,000 visits a month.

Several readers sent me lists of nonprofit blogs to add to my list, which totals almost 800 blogs at this moment. I made an analysis of the most common issues I found in these blogs in this post. The latest posts from each of these blogs are neatly aggregated (even though I say so myself) on The NonProfit Blogs and its dedicated section on Humanitarian News.

In the coming month, I will pick up quite a bit on BlogTips where I have a lot of pending posts, and expand the functionality in some of the other blogs e.g. putting in search boxes and finetuning the search engine optimization. So plenty of stuff to do.

Read the full post...

Humanitarian News and BlogTips update

BlogTips, my blog for tips on social media and blogging for nonprofit causes, got a new look. Much more plain vanilla than the previous look, so it puts more emphasize on the content.
I am still putting in some extra "schpank" in it (a proper logo and a favicon), but am already happy as it is now

Meanwhile, Humanitarian News continues to grow, so the site became slower and slower. That should be solved now (for the nerds: more aggressive caching was enabled on the site, and I avoided multiple DNS-lookups).
This evening, I also solved a nasty bug in the "search" function: since about a month, the search no longer showed the most recent articles first. Consequently, all the RSS feeds on the searches no longer worked properly (you remember that one of the main features of Humanitarian News was the ability to make customized RSS feeds based on your searches, right?)

Last month, we retrieved a record of 31,050 articles from 890 different sources on Humanitarian News...

Read the full post...

Blogging: source crowded knowledge management

You know what I like about blogging? You can leave a trace for others. It is really like "crowdsourced knowledge management". You can write something, and others can find what you write about, simply by googling the topic.

Meaning: once you blog about something, it remains there, in the public domain, for years to come. For others to find... Crowdsourcing: information fed by the masses. Or call it "Power to the People" if you like.

I will take two examples. Two things that made my life miserable in the past months.

1. I have a X60 Lenovo computer which kept on shutting down due to overheating.
   A problem because for the past months, I worked in an environment where the ambient temperature would easily get over 25 dgrs C. My laptop would barely startup, then detect it got too hot, and subsequently shut down. Annoying to say the least. I searched the web, but did not find a solution.
2. Since I installed Microsoft Office Outlook 2007, I had a weird problem: every 30 minutes or so, my harddisk would get full, even though I had 3 Gbyte of free space when I started up my computer. I googled like nuts, the ICT helpdesk too, but it was only when I googled in different languages, that I found a trace of someone with the same problem, who posted it in an Italian discussion forum. And it gave me the solution. If it was not for that obscure post in an obscure discussion forum, I would never have found the solution. And my life would still have been miserable

So I will contribute to humanity here. I will blog about the solutions to the two earth shattering problems. And Google will do the rest. Maybe, I will solve someone's problem too. (and I trick Google by putting the subjects as <h2> headers, so it increases the probability of people finding it through search results)

Your laptop shuts down because of heating problems? Two solutions!

1. Use SpeedFan:
   Speedfan is a free utility that monitors the temperature of core elements in your computer and forces your computer fan to remain on, all the time.
2. Open your laptop (disassemble it) and spray all inner parts with pressurized air:
   Speedfan by itself, did not do the trick for me. Every year or so, especially when working in dusty environments, dirt particles would settle on my motherboard and on my fan fins. The only thing that helps is disassembling the laptop (taking the cover off the harddisk, keyboard and motherboard) and spraying off the dirt with a can of pressurized air.
   PS: disassembling a laptop is not for the faint of heart. Ask your computer shop to do it for you. But the trouble is worth it: spraying off the dirt is the only thing that solves my laptop's heating problem.

The problem with AdAxxx.tmp files filling up your harddisk

I diagnosed the problem of my harddisk filling up, with the free cleanup utility called CCleaner. CCleaner not only cleans up all temporary files, but also cleans up your system registry of orphaned traces of de-installed programs.
CCleaner showed I had thousands of files in my /Temp directory, all labeled AdAxxxx.tmp (where xxxx was a sequential number).
The problem was simple: a conflict between Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 and AdAware, a free utility to protect against malware hidden in websites.
Installing AdAware automatically also enabled an add-in in Outlook to scan for malware.
My earth shattering problem for AdA.tmp files filling up my harddisk was solved by disabling the AdAware add-in:
Go to : Tools > Trust Center > Add-ins and disable the AdAware plug in.

Voila, those were the two contributions to humanity I had today. Google: go and do your thing now!

If you come across this post, through Google, and it solves one of those two problems you had, leave a comment. It will be nice to see I was right about crowdsourcing and blogging. ;-)

Update:
You might think I am kidding, but I assure you, I am not. Here is the proof: One hour after I published this blogpost, guess what appeared on the top of the Google search list for "adaxxx.tmp problem":




Picture courtesy Starts with a Bang

Read the full post...

Snapped: My favorite blogging position

My favorite blogging position. Outside, legs up, with a view on the world. This one is snapped in Tuscany, this summer.
(bad for your back, though... The blogging position, not Tuscany that is)

More in this Snapped series.

Read the full post...

The Road is re-asphalted

I spent the past 24 hours doing what I wanted to do for a long time: give The Road to the Horizon a facelift.

As many bloggers, I started with a standard Blogger template (or layout), tweaked it a bit here and there as the months and years went by.

32 months ago, The Road looked more or less like this:



Late 2007, The Road was more customized, with its own picture banner:



And bit by bit, it grew in what we had up to yesterday:



I got rather tired of the narrow width, limiting what I could put in the side columns, so a new template it should be.

Migrating templates is something of a blogger's nightmare... Blogger, the software and host I use, is not flexible at all in migrating from one template to another. They don't move over all widgets and customizations automatically, and each template has its own oddities. So I had to create a backup site, prepare and test everything there, and move the lot manually to The Road...

But we're there... All tested in Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari, Chrome and Opera.. I think all is working. Let me know what you think of the new layout, and even more importantly, let me know if there is anything not working (don't forget to let me know which browser you are using)...

Some fine tuning is left to be done before I can start working on new features. Will we ever be at a point where we want to be? Nope... don't think so.. After all, The Road to the Horizon is all about the joy of experiencing things NOW, rather than reaching the destination... And the Horizon can never be reached, can it? ;-)

Read the full post...

I proudly present our two new blogs

This past month has been a very productive time. I used our holiday time to start two new blogs:



Have Impact! is a blog about making a positive difference in the world. It started all back in November, with our Change Starts Here project.

Despite the work I do as an aidworker, I wanted to have more of an impact in the world. Micro financing seemed like the way to go, and I kicked off a project which has now funded projects in the developing world for the total value of $12,000. 19 other colleagues, friends and readers from The Road joined our Kiva Lenders' team.
It was time to give this project its own space, outside of The Road, and Have Impact! was born.

On this new blog, I post updates on our loans and report on the progress of our project.



BlogTips is our second new blog. As I worked through the hurdles of finding out the ins and outs of blogging, I learned many things the hard way.
On BlogTips, I try to share some of the experience, specifically for non-profit bloggers and non-profit organisations.

In the meantime, I reshuffled some of the domains on our meta-blogs (I told you, this holiday was productive!):
- The Signs Along the Road contains my Internet clips.
- AidBlogs with the latest posts from the aidworker blogs I feature in the side column, moved to its new domain.
- AidNews moved to its own domain too, featuring the headlines of the latest aid news.
- Change Thru Information is the 4th new domain, with the latest headlines of over 300 non-profit blogs and sites.

Read the full post...

Google: the new Microsoft?

I am writing quite a bit for BlogTips, my new blog about "Blogging for Non-Profit", where I share some of my past 30 months of blogging experiences.

I am now working on a post helping non-profit organisations decide what blog software to choose.

When I started The Road over two years ago, I compared Wordpress and Blogger, and found them pretty equal in user interface, functionality, features. I choose for Blogger, because of its flexibility. But that was then...

I re-looked at both when starting BlogTips and was taken by the progress Wordpress made over the past two years. Blogger, on the contrary, just did not evolve. A few features were added, but that's it. Wordpress was overhauled several times, and a ton of new features, plug-ins and themes were added. Wordpress' user interface now stands head and shoulder above Blogger's clumsy stuff.

It made me think... I use Google affiliated software (Blogger, Google Apps, Picasa, Feedburner,...) a lot. They all have one thing in common: no technical support (all support is concentrated in user forums), and little effort is made to have the software evolve. (here is ProBlogger complaining about Feedburner)

It feels like "What you see is what you get", nothing more, nothing less. The only thing they are interested in, is content. Could not care less about their users.

Makes me wonder if Google has become the new Microsoft?

Picture courtesy HubPages

Read the full post...

Google thinks I have more important things to say than Obama and Oprah combined

Google scans billion webpages several times per day. They give a numerical value to each webpage called "Pagerank", or "PR" for short.

The Pagerank is a sophisticated algorithm which indicates how 'valuable', or 'important' a webpage is. A PR varies from 0 to 10. The higher a PR, the more relevant a webpage is. There are millions of pages of a PR0, while there are just a handful with a PR10.

I just discovered Google valued my low key Twitter microblog much higher than the official Twitter blogs from Oprah and Barack Obama combined.

Source: PRchecker.info

My Twitter blog was pageranked 5, while Oprah's was 3 and poor Barack's Twitter blog got a PR0 (Yep, that is '0' like 'zero', 'nothing', 'ziltch'). Each of them have over a million of people reading their Twitter updates. I only have 419 'followers'.

Actually, I rated higher than the world's most popular Twitter blogs. Here are the most popular Twitter accounts:


Source: Twitterholic
You might ask yourself why Google rated me higher than the star of the world' most popular show (that is Oprah, not Obama), and the US president? Is it because I mostly write about humanitarian issues?

So would it be fair to say that for Obama and Oprah would start increasing their Twitter relevance if they'd emphasize humanitarian issues?

Now that's a thought!

Read the full post...

How do people read the news?

I have been dealing quite a bit with aggregating and distributing news lately, so I got curious as to how people actually read the news.

So I did a quick poll yesterday. I posted the poll on my blog and Reddit and twitter-ed the links.

On the question "What is the best way for you to follow the news?", 41 people answered. Not that 41 people is anywhere close to being representative to the population who has web access, grossomodo the results were evenly distributed between via a website, Twitter, feed aggregators and an RSS reader.

If you combine the fact that most news distributed via Twitter, Email and news aggregators is generated by RSS feeds, it is clear how important RSS has become as a way to syndicate content.

Read the full post...

Almost lost my blog, compliments of Blogger

Just received an friendly email from Blogger (my blogprovider)

Hello,

Your blog at: http://www.theroadtothehorizon.org/ has been identified as a potential spam blog. To correct this, please request a review by filling out the form at [blabla]

Your blog will be deleted in 20 days if it isn't reviewed, and your readers will see a warning page during this time. After we receive your request, we'll review your blog and unlock it within two business days. Once we have reviewed and determined your blog is not spam, the blog will be unlocked and the message in your Blogger dashboard will no longer be displayed. (...)

We find spam by using an automated classifier. Automatic spam detection is inherently fuzzy, and occasionally a blog like yours is flagged incorrectly. We sincerely apologize for this error. By using this kind of system, however, we can dedicate more storage, bandwidth, and engineering resources to bloggers like you instead of to spammers.

Now let me get this straight, dear Blogger. Just because you "suspect" my blog to be spam (which is not difficult to check), if I would not be online for 20 days (which happens when I am travelling), you would just d-e-l-e-t-e this blog? Two years of work, gone? Just like that? On suspicion of being spam?

Well, now I know what your logo reminds me of:

Read the full post...

Tips & Tricks: The network diagram of a blog

For the bloggers and nerds amongst you...

In this post I explained in laymen's terms what RSS feeds are, and what they can do for you as a reader, and as a blogger.

In a more technical post, I explained some of the technical tools I use to "transform" RSS feeds to different platforms.

As with over 20 blogs and aggregation sites, 40+ bookmarking sites and link collectors, it was time to map it all out -- click on it for a high res view.

The interesting part, is that there are only just a few data entry points (marked with a typewriter icon), where I post blogs, or paste and comment on links. In some of them, it is even optional, as they are also automatically fed or cross posted...

My blogging tip of the week for you: RSS can make your blog more appealing, and your content more relevant for your users. The better you filter the RSS contents and the more selective you are in what RSS feeds to use, the better the output will be (the old "junk in, junk out" principle).

Two warnings:
- do keep track of all the links, and map them out as I did in this diagram, certainly if you start cross posting. It is easy to make a mistake and double post or make a cross posting loop. This will chase your audience away, as it looks sloppy.
- Be aware that any RSS feed (or any widget for that matter) you put on your blog, will make your site load slower. Keep the download speed up as much as possible. Tips on how to do that, you can read in this post.


More posts on The Road about blogging tips, technology, ICT or blogging in general.

Read the full post...

Picture of the Day: Blackboard Blogger in Liberia

Alfred Sirleaf is an analog blogger. He runs the “Daily News”, a news hut by the side of a major road in the middle of Monrovia. He started it a number of years ago, stating that he wanted to get news into the hands of those who couldn’t afford newspapers, in the language that they could understand.

This picture, I found on Afrigadget, a blog about low tech solutions for every day challenges in Africa. A blog that always gives me hope.

More Pictures of the Day on The Road.

Read the full post...

Tips & Tricks: What is an RSS feed and what can I do with it?

There are a number of ways that you can subscribe to or get automatic updates from "The Road". The main one that our readers use is our RSS feed. What is it, and what can it do for you, as a reader or as a blogger?


1. What is RSS?

RSS or "Really Simple Syndication" is a technology used by millions of web users around the world to keep track of their favorite websites. RSS is best described as a "news feed" one subscribes to. These days it is rare to find a website not offering RSS feeds.

In the "old days", the only way to keep track track of updates on a website, you had to visit the site regularly. You could to "bookmark" your favourite websites in your browser and manually return to them on a regular basis to see what had been added.

The problems with bookmarking is that it can get cumbersome when you are trying to track many websites at once, you might miss information when you don't check regularly and you do a lot of work in vain as the site might not have any new posts when you check it.


2. And then there was RSS

What if you could tell a website to let you know every time that they update? This is what RSS does for you.

RSS gets you the most up to date information so you can read it in your own time. It saves you time and helps you to get the information you want quickly after it was published.

It’s like subscribing to a magazine delivered to you periodically but instead of it coming in your physical mail box each month when the magazine is published, it is delivered to your "RSS Reader" every time your favorite website publishes updates.


3. How to Use RSS - Step 1: Get an RSS Reader

The first thing you’ll want to do if you’re getting into reading sites via RSS is to hook yourself up with an RSS Feed Reader.

There are many feed readers available. A couple are free, and are web based ones like Google Reader and Bloglines.

Both of these feed readers work a little like email. As you subscribe to feeds you’ll see that unread entries from the sites you’re tracking will be marked as bold. As you click on them you’ll see the latest update and can read it right there in the feed reader. You are given the option to click through to the actual site or move onto the next unread item - marking the last one as "read".

If you are more adventurous, you can also use more customizable readers like MyYahoo, MyGoogle, MyMSN, Netvibes, Pageflakes or Newsgator.


4. How to Use RSS - Step 2: Find the RSS feed on your favourite sites

There are two places to look for a site’s feed on the website and in your browser.

For On-Site subscription, you need to look for some of the small buttons and widgets published on your favorite sites and blogs. Little orange buttons, "counters" with how many "readers a blog has", links called RSS, XML, ATOM and many more. They come in all shapes and sizes. Here are a few you might have seen:

In most cases it’s as simple as either copying and pasting the link associated with the button into your RSS Reader or clicking the button and following the instructions to subscribe using the feed reader of your choice.

On The Road, I stored the most popular RSS newsfeed subscriptions all on one page.

But nowadays most browsers make it easy for you to subscribe. When you surf a site you can see if it has an RSS feed by looking in the right hand side of your browser's address bar (where you type in the site’s URL):




To quickly and easily subscribe to a site, simply click on these icons. You will have to to set up your browser for your favourite news reader, such as "Google Reader" or "Bloglines", though!

Once you’ve done this and have subscribed to a few feeds you’ll begin to see unread items in your Feed Reader and you can start reading.


5. Don’t want to use an RSS Reader? Try updates via Email!

If the above explanation all just seems a little too complicated, or if you want to read your site's updates offline, subscribe to RSS feeds via Email.
On The Road, check the subscription widget in the side column, or you can subscribe to Emailed updates right here:

Enter your email address

You can unsubscribe at any time, your email will be kept private and not used for any other purposes than to send these daily updates. No spam, guaranteed! Here is a sample of an Email update.


6. RSS In Plain English

A video summarizing this post, from the famous series "In Plain English"




7. If you are a blogger, what does RSS mean to you?

Apart from your own RSS feed, which allows your readers to keep more easily up to date about your site, you can also re-use feeds from other sites.

Why would you do that? Well, it does spice up your blog. Look in the side column of The Road, there are quite a few RSS feeds I use. One is for the most recent comments people left on The Road (the comments are an RSS feed), my most recent Tweets, and the latest humanitarian news articles.

On my other sites like The Other World News, AidNews or NewsFeeds, I use RSS feeds extensively. In this post, I explain the technical background of how I manipulate and tweak feeds before I.. well... "feed" them into a blog.

Have fun!

More Blogging Tips & Tricks on The Road.

This post was inspired by ProBlogger, an endless resource for the serious blogger.

Read the full post...

Life of a blogger

This is sometimes how I feel ;-)

Picture courtesy XKCD

Read the full post...

To Collapse or Not to Collapse

I experimented collapsing posts on The Road so people get a faster overview of the different posts, while one could still read the post clicking the "Full Post +/-" button.
I ran a poll in the side column for a while, asking for feedback.

3 answered they wanted to see the full post straight away
8 liked the collapse feature
5 had no preference.

Taking into account also the feedback I received on this topic on The Road's discussion forum, I decided to implement this feature "in production".

I am still experimenting a bit with the layout of the button, but we're almost there.

Thanks all for the feedback!

Picture courtesy my brother Kris.

Read the full post...

The Road to the Horizon, two years later.

To the date, two years ago I published my first post on this blog. "How did we get here, where are we going to?", I ask.

Mid 2006, I took a 13 months' sabbatical. I needed a break from work, re-evaluate where I stood, reconnect with my family, sail the Atlantic, and write down the stories in my mind. Stories of people I had met and situations I had lived through.

As I was writing, I missed something. Without anyone reading the stories, it felt pointless.
I did not want to go through the agony of publishing them on paper neither so I thought of the Internet.

I had never published anything on the Internet. Did not know where to start. I downloaded a copy of Dreamweaver and tried to design my own webpage. It was too cumbersome.
By coincidence, I discovered something called "blogs". So I tried it out. It took a few days to figure out this was probably the right way "to give access" to the stories.

Several weeks later, all stories were online.

While I was at it, I took a book I wrote years ago, about my past expeditions to the Antarctic and the Pacific, and published it on Verslaafd aan de Horizon (Addicted to the Horizon).

As I got familiar with the blogplatform, one fine day, I realized I could continue writing and publishing on this blog. That day, The Road transformed from a static eBook, to a dynamic blog.

I started writing about stuff I experienced around me, in daily life. I started to publish news I found interesting. Pictures, videos and sites I discovered.. Before I knew it, the blog started to create an audience.

The look and feel of The Road started with a very simple blog template. Learning about HTML and all that stuff, as I went along, I tweaked it bit by bit, and for almost a year, this is what The Road looked like:



Many tweaks later, with a lot of blood and tears in trying to understand "webstuff" and Internet publishing, what you have today is the result of "a road" of two years.

So, today The Road celebrates its second birthday. A cake with 955 candles on it, one for every post published.

222,000 people from 208 countries visited The Road in the past two years. 23,000 came back at least twice. 6,000 of you came to read updates at least 100 times. About 100 of you drop by at least once every two days. About 150-200 of you subscribe to daily updates via email or RSS feeds.

Apart from ego-tripping on how proud that makes me feel, what do I want to do with all this?

Well, it seems gradually we form a community around this blog. A loosely knitted connection of people either interested in travel, adventure, or the humanitarian issues. I would like to take this community a step further..

That is what I tried with Change Starts Here, the blog's social project, where we raised over US$4,000 for micro-financing projects. I'm happy with the results. It is feasible to start some "action" with you all.

That's also why I started The Road's discussion forum, to start more interactivity in 'our community'.

Summarizing, these are my goals for this blog:
- continue inspiring people
- have the community gathered loosely around The Road, to make a small change in the world. For the better.

And that is my wish as we're blowing out the candles on The Road's birthday cake.



Thank you for walking The Road with me in the past two years. We still have a long way to go before we reach The Horizon, but let's enjoy what we experience while walking along this road, this path of life. And do good for those around us, as we discover the world on our path.

Pictures courtesy Sleepishly (birthday cake) and my brother Kris (winter beauty).

Read the full post...

Tips & Tricks: You might not recognize your blog

When I started this blog, I was naive. I thought I knew. I believed in technology. I thought the way I saw my blog was how everyone saw it.

A bit like when I was a kid. Then I thought when I would keep my hands over my eyes, nobody else in the world could see, because I could not see.

Same with my blog. I thought what I published, all of you would see the posts I would see it.

Now I know better. Now I know one thing: "I know nothing". And maybe that I will never know. And the fact that for the user, IT technology sucks.

What am I talking about? Internet browser compatibility!

Two years ago, I only used Internet Explorer. Until a friend told me that some of my posts looked weird on his computer. Text formatting around pictures was screwed up. Some widgets did not show correctly. Some stuff clearly ran outside of the main column. He showed it to me and "Yak!", he was not kidding.

He used Firefox. I had never heard of Firefox before (I told you I knew nothing!). I looked at my web statistics and found out quite a lot of visitors used Firefox. So a lot of people saw my blog differently than how I saw it.

So I downloaded Firefox, and from then on, I checked my blog both on Firefox and Internet Explorer.

Until another friend told me some of the stuff on my blog looked weird. I checked, and it did look weird. He used Safari on a Mac. I downloaded Safari.

Just in the last couple of months, I changed the layout of this blog significantly. Added drop-down menus, collapse/expand features, changed fonts, colours, template layouts,... And I tell you, it would take me typically a couple of hours to make the change, but two days to ensure it looks right on different browsers.

I can now understand the agony professional web developers have to go through during the final browser-compatibility testing. At work, we are developing a big portal website. And the developers are running past their delivery deadline. Why? Browser compatibility problems. Drives them nuts. And me too.

So nowadays, I check everything I publish on my blog in Internet Explorer 7, Internet Explorer 8, Firefox, Chrome, Opera and Safari. Why? Because The Road's web statistics from the past few months show me this is what you use:



The worst is Internet Explorer. The worst of worst is Internet Explorer 6. I don't even check it anymore. It is hopeless. The only hope I have is that my visitors as sensible enough to either upgrade to Explorer 7, or to use a decent browser.
Besides formatting problems, Internet Explorer is slow (as I showed in the past) and often seems to get stuck while waiting for a page to load. Bleh!

So my tip for the serious blogger: Download the most popular browsers and test your site. The more features you add, and the more advanced those features are, the more thorough you have to test in different browsers.

Oh, and tip of the week: Try BrowserShots, a website that generates a screenshots of how your site looks like on dozens of different browsers, and on the different operating platforms (Windows, Linus, Mac).

Have fun, and I hope you don't get too many nasty surprises.

PS: If any of you experience problems viewing The Road, just comment on any post! As I said: "I know nothing!", so comments more than welcome! You can also help me with feedback on two different collapse/expand features, see also this post on The Road's discussion forum


More blogging tips and tricks on The Road.

Cartoon courtesy MediaWatch India

Read the full post...

Tips & Tricks: Changing the favicon on your blog

A favicon is the web nerd's name for the small icon shown next to URL in your browser's address bar, tabs or bookmarks. For example:

Favicons are a way to customize your blog, and make it stand out from 'the next one'.

Interested? There are three steps to take to change the favicon for your blog:
- Create the favicon itself
- Host the favicon on an external image hosting service
- Change the <head> section of your blog


1. Create the favicon

Favicons are "icons", small images with a specific file format, different from .jpg, .png or .gif. They have the ".ico" file extension, e.g. "theroad.ico".

There are several online tools available to convert an image from the most popular image formats to an icon. I use the one from DynamicDrive.

You achieve the best results by using a square picture without too many details or colours as it will be reshaped to a 16x16 pixel format.

As a favicon is a "public relations" tool for your blog, use an image that somewhere typifies or represents your blog.

After uploading your original to DynamicDrive, click on "Create Icon" and you will see in the preview how your favicon will look like after you have done the next steps.

First, click 'Download Favicon" to store it on your computer. On DynamicDrive, the file will always have the format "favicon.ico" or (if one already exists) "favicon(1).ico" etc..


2. Host the favicon on an external image hosting service

The favicon needs to have the ".ico" extension. Most of popular image hosting services do not support images of the ".ico" format, so you won't have any joy using Flickr, ImageShack, XS.to, TinyPic etc.. But here are a few free image hosting services that do support ".ico" files: Oogletoogle, PicPanda, ImageBoo and CDMazika.

After you upload your favicon, the hosting service will give you a URL, refering to your picture, e.g. http://images.cdmazika.com/images/2f2stqn1k1p7diu5y6qs.ico

Make sure you don't loose that URL!


3. Changing the <head> section of your blog.

This is a bit tricky, as it changes slightly from blogplatform to blogplatform.
Bottomline is: you need to edit the HTML template of your blog to either change or add a line.

How you get to the HTML template of your blog, depends on your blogplatform.
On Blogger, you go to Layout>Edit HTML> and click on 'Expand Widget Templates'
On Tumblr, go to the Dashboard>'Customize'>Theme

Before you do anything else, PLEASE take a backup of your template. A corrupted template is one of the worst thing that can happen to a blogger.
Blogger lets you download your template, but in Tumblr e.g. you will need to copy/paste it into Notepad.

Anywhere between the <head> and </head> codes, look for something that defines your current favicon. It will look like this:

<link rel="shortcut icon" href="/directory/faviconame.ico"/>

("faviconame.ico" might have another name (ending in ".ico"), or contain a variable.

In Tumblr, the HTML line looks like this:

<link rel="shortcut icon" href="{Favicon}"/>

Blogger, on the contrary, does not store the favicon in the HTML code (as they always use the standard blogger favicon).

Now you need to either change that line of code (if it exists) or add one (if the favicon is not defined in your HTML template).

In Tumblr:

<link rel="shortcut icon" href="http://images.cdmazika.com/images/2f2stqn1k1p7diu5y6qs.ico"/>

In Blogger (mind the SINGLE quotes) add this line:

<link rel='shortcut icon' href='http://images.cdmazika.com/images/2f2stqn1k1p7diu5y6qs.ico'/>

Make sure you use the URL given for your .ico file.

Save the template and "Klaar is Kees". You are ready...


Pretty amazing stuff, no? :-)

Note you might need to restart your browser or empty your browser cache before you see the favicon (Internet Explorer is particularly bad at refreshing the favicon).

More blogging tips on The Road.

Read the full post...