A Blog About Accessibility, Digital, Marketing, and AI
Stan is a seasoned digital strategist professional with broad Fortune 1000 and financial services sector experience. His specializations include accessibility, digital strategy and product roadmaps, large-scale digital projects, complex web redesigns, and enterprise website governance. Stan is also a published author and active innovator.
With this software package called ARSC (Really Simple Chat) you can add chat features to your Web site. Runs on PHP and MySQL, relatively easy to set up -- what's not to like?
Once installed on your webserver, ARSC provides a chat interface to the visitors of your site. Your visitors need no special plugins or additional software to chat, only their webbrowser.
Read more: ARSC Really Simple Chat
A Favicon is that little icon that shows up in the address bar of your Web browser. Most good Web sites have them. While they’re fairly easy to create (all you need is a 16x16 graphic) they’ve just got a bit easier.
Favicon from Pics is a Web site where you can upload your own image and it’ll turn it into a favicon for you. You’re best starting with an image that is close to to 16x16 as you can get, but it does a pretty good job on things are aren’t huge.
Simply select a picture, logo or other graphic (of any size/resolution) for the "Source Image" and click "Generate FavIcon.ico"
On a related note -- you can add custom favicons to your FireFox toolbar to spiff up your 'Favorites' links using this FireFox plugin. (Note: Use the 0.2.5 for FireFox 1.0.x browsers, and the 0.3 beta for FireFox 1.5 beta or above).
Opera Software today permanently removed the ad banner and licensing fee from its award-winning Web browser. The ad-free, full-featured Opera browser is now available for download - completely free of charge – at http://www.opera.com.
"Today we invite the entire Internet community to use Opera and experience Web browsing as it should be," said Jon S. von Tetzchner, CEO, Opera Software. "Removing the ad banner and licensing fee will encourage many new users to discover the speed, security and unmatched usability of the Opera browser."
Opera was previously available free of charge with an ad banner. Users had the option of paying a licensing fee to remove the ad banner and receive premium support.
Opera also includes a mail client that is worth taking for a spin.
Want a universal way in OS X to strip formatting from text in the clipboard? It's as simple as creating an Applescript with the following line:
set the clipboard to (get the clipboard as text)
Read full instructions on doing this at Lifehacker
WP plugin: Secure Files Allows you to safely upload and download documents stored outside of your web document root for security purposes.
This is great for people using plugins like Registered Only that secure your WordPress blog (Posts, Pages, etc). The problem with these plugins is that your loose files aren’t protected - only the contents of your WordPress database. So, any images or other documents you’ve uploaded are easily accessible to those who aren’t authenticated via a plugin like Registered Only. This plugin aims to solve this problem.
Read full article: Secure Files at almost effortless
Web Content Management (WCM) is growing by leaps and bounds:
It's that promise that's driving growing interest in WCM. Gartner Latest News about Gartner estimates the market for the software will move past $2.5 billion by next year. Other analysts say linking other enterprise content management (ECM) with Web-facing solutions is the key to unlocking more investment in WCM, with Forrester predicting that overall ECM demand will far outstrip overall growth in the software market, growing 19 percent per year to reach $4 billion by 2008.
Read full article: Web Content Management Tools Help Close the Deal
It can be helpful to have a suite of 'cheat sheets' on hand if you do web design or programming. Some cheat sheets available on the web include:
If you can't find what you are looking for here, then check out these other pages full of cheat sheets:
A very nice article on using Google to the Max:
Whenever you search for more than one keyword at a time, a search engine has a default method of how to handle that keyword. Will the engine search for both keywords or for either keyword? The answer is called a Boolean default; search engines can default to Boolean AND (it'll search for both keywords) or Boolean OR (it'll search for either keyword). Of course, even if a search engine defaults to searching for both keywords (AND) you can usually give it a special command to instruct it to search for either keyword (OR). Google's Boolean default is AND; that means if you enter query words without modifiers, Google will search for all of them. If you search for:
XML Java "web Services"
Google will search for all the words. If you want to specify that either word is acceptable, you put an OR between each item:
XML OR Java OR "Web Services"
If you want to have definitely one term and one of two or more other terms, you group them with parentheses, like this:
XML (Java OR "Web Services")
This query searches for the word "Java" or phrase "Web Services" along with the word "XML." A stand-in for OR borrowed from the computer programming realm is the | (pipe) character, as in:
XML (Java | "Web Services")
If you want to specify that a query item must not appear in your results, use a -.(minus sign or dash).
XML Java -"Web Services"
Read full article: Google MyWay - How to search Google efficiently
An excellent discussion of how to make your web site 'printer friendly' at A List Apart.
For robust content management, my favorite product is Expressions Engine (for complex web sites such as news sites) and WordPress (yeah, it's a blog, but it's easy and does all the content management most simple sites need). Both are PHP/MySQL based, and easily extensible by plugins, custom code, API tags, or simply hacking the PHP source code. Drupal is also a contender that sits somewhere between Expressions Engine and WordPress in functionality.
Willing to go beyond PHP? Here are three alternative open-source CMS's worth taking for a spin:
Willing to spend some money? Check out these commercial tools: