Archive for the ‘Tutorials’ Category

Spanning Sync public beta

February 1st, 2007

I posted about a new application called Spanning Sync that will enable Mac users to synchronise their calendars in iCal with Google Calendar a little while ago. Well, the public beta was released just a few days ago and then promptly closed because of a tremendous spike in traffic. According to the blog:

I hate to do this, but we’ve closed the public beta temporarily until we can upgrade our hardware to handle the load. If you were one of the thousands of people who used Spanning Sync in the last few hours, you’ll still be able to sync. But if you haven’t yet used the system, I’m going to have to ask you to wait just a bit longer.

We’re thrilled (and a little freaked out) by the literally overwhelming response, but we want to make sure all of our users have the best experience possible. With any luck, the public beta will open again tomorrow, with a lot more capacity to handle the load. Thank you for your patience.

This application is gold for people like me who have most of their calendars on Google Calendar and rely on calendar subscriptions in iCal to keep up to date. The problem is that subscribing to calendars in Google Calendar gives you a locked calendar in iCal. You can’t edit it in iCal and you don’t have event notifications. In fact I noticed that I only receive event notifications from Google Calendar for my primary calendar and not the others that I created (I have a calendar for each major activity so I can properly allocate my events and turn whole categories of events off if I am no longer involved in them).

Hopefully the public beta will open again very soon. I am pretty excited about this product. There is a screencast here which shows what you can do with Spanning Sync. It is very easy to use and does exactly what I need it to do. I would like to see the synchronisation happening in iSync so there is one place to go to synchronise everything. On the other hand, Spanning Sync allows for regular and automatic synchronisations so there probably isn’t a really big need for integration into iSync.

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Lessons learnt from an installation

January 30th, 2007

I have just completed a manual installation of drupal 5 on my personal server. I decided to blog about it as I went through the process - as my own personal mission - with the aim of providing some guidelines to anyone else wanting to manually install drupal themselves.

i am a geek on a mission[1]. mission drupal 5 to be exact.

the tactic:

  • read INSTALL.txt word for word.
  • try to understand it.
  • you will do well young one.

the frontline operation:

  • download, extract, and copy the resultant drupal 5 folder into a directory within your root directory. check - using ftp program.
  • create the drupal database. umm. where? how? oh… i finally found it on cpanel’s MySQL account maintenance, no need to delve into phpMyAdmin.
  • create the drupal user. check - easy once you know where to look, similar to creating the db.
  • link the user to the db. check! now the db configuration looks like the configurations for the other db’s i already have installed.
  • run the install script. install script? i must run it? but when i point to the folder it doesn’t do anything. it gives me an access denied. *help* go back to the beginning…

    • “move the contents of the directory”. hmm. maybe i shouldn’t have moved the whole directory, but only it’s contents.
    • ha! it works! but now to give access to the settings.php file. also helps if you take note of the location of the settings file ;)
    • voila! see how it runs!
    • remember to restore the access permissions on the settings.php file
  • configure drupal. *tears fill my eyes*… it worked! i can see the config screen.

the outcome:

  • i win!
  • drupal 5’s so pretty!


[1]actually, the use of the word geek when referring to me is very liberal. considering i haven’t done much *real* programming in yonks… i am an enthusiast…

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Interview with Heather Ford of iCommons

December 4th, 2006

I recently conducted an email interview with Heather Ford, the Executive Director of iCommons (I mentioned this previously). I asked Heather a couple questions which she graciously answered at length:

What is iCommons?

iCommons is an organisation, incubated by Creative Commons, that aims to bring together the free culture, free software, open access, and open science communities around the world to debate and contribute towards a global ‘commons’ of knowledge and creativity.

What is the relationship between iCommons and Creative Commons?

Well, we’re currently a subsidiary of Creative Commons which means that CC has been really critical in getting us up and running and supporting us in the initial phase of our development. That means that we are part of the CC team and make use of their infrastructure and support.

What do you see as iCommons’ role here in South Africa?

From the very beginning I was determined that, even though the organisation is registered in the UK, that we build our headquarters in the South. Our mandate is to serve the global commons community - but because we’re in South Africa and are reporting on local projects and issues, we have quite a keen focus on the local commons environment and we’re seeing some really great benefits to the South African commons by our presence here. I suppose its due to the fact that we just have more people working on these issues through the iCommons office which means that we have greater capacity to give advice more regularly and speak at conferences and events. South Africa is a great place to be leading this movement - I think we will show some important leadership on these issues in the very near future.

What are some of the more exciting projects you/iCommons are/is involved in here in South Africa?

We’ve just completed a competition on www.ccmixter.co.za to encourage young musicians in South Africa to produce remixes out of ‘traditional’ sounds from instruments like the mbira, the Mutumba drums and the Umrhube mouth bow. It’s been an awesome competition because we’ve been able to work with community and commercial radio stations, audio heritage archives, and with members of the local internet community. We received some amazing remixes and are thinking of producing a CD of the best ones in the new year.

What do you see as Creative Commons’ role in the protection of content creators’ rights in and to their content?

Creative Commons is centered around the creator making their own decisions about how they wish to share and enable others to experience their creativity. CC provides creators with free tools and also shares stories of people who have used the tools to empower themselves and their communities through what CC CEO, Lawrence Lessig calls a ’sharing culture’. Protection or enforcement is not part of CC’s mandate - it would obviously be pretty difficult to provide legal support to every person in the world who uses the licences (we’re up to 145 million linkbacks to the licences and its growing every day!) but, with 70 + countries, joining CC legal teams around the world, there has always been great support for those who have defended the licence in courts.

What do you see as the most pressing challenges for local content creators and how could Creative Commons help address those challenges?

I think that the most pressing challenge for local - and indeed *all* content creators - is to find new ways of empowering themselves through the use of new technologies. We’re living in an exciting new world - the Internet offers incredible possibilities for creators to find new business models and new ways of working that enable them to determine the future of their creativity in a way that is very far from the way that culture has been undermined by media monopolies in the past. The challenge is to recognise how to integrate a sharing culture into new ways of working and, in so doing, to develop a brand that is intimately connected to a creator’s community. Creative Commons tries to solve one of those problems - it has developed a set of tools that enable creators to mark the kind of relationship that they want to have with their users. But there are many other problems that we need to solve. This is where iCommons comes in. We’re trying to learn from the free software community to work out how to develop open content using peer-production methods - we’re looking at how to develop multi-dimensional projects that deal with infrastructure and access to the internet, as well as the code to support open creativity - we’re building a more holistic understanding of how different the challenges to creativity are around the world.

How do you see Creative Commons and Copyright co-existing?

Creative Commons relies on copyright for its existence. When people use the licence, they retain their copyright but merely ‘carve out’ certain uses - such as enabling people to make derivatives or to copy as long as it is for non-commercial use. CC is just a ’some rights reserved’ rather than an ‘all rights reserved’ approach to copyright.

Is Creative Commons an effective licensing scheme or is it open to more abuse without a statute behind it?

Interestingly, there is very little real abuse of the licences - other than one or two cases that have been successfully defended in Europe. The licences don’t require a statute because they rely on copyright law for their enforcement - but to think of enforcement as the measure of the licence’s success is to miss the point of the movement. What we’ve seen is that, on the internet it makes sense to make your creativity or information more accessible, and to build your business model, not around the enforcement of copyright, but by moving the value to another part of the chain - like giving away CDs of your music and selling tickets to see live shows etc.

Do you see governments, particularly our government, enacting laws to entrench Creative Commons as an alternative to traditional copyright?

No, I think that’s the beauty of the licences - you don’t really need to enact new laws. What the government will need to do, however, is to look at using Creative Commons licences (or similar open content licences) to make publicly funded information more accessible, and to investigate how they can support CC textbooks and cultural heritage licenced under CC more effectively. In Brazil, there was a directive by the government that all software produced by the government would be licenced under the CC-GPL - this is something that I think all governments should follow.

Is there a movement to have Creative Commons entrenched in the statute books worldwide?

No. But there is a movement to develop local jurisdiction-specific licences by volunteer lawyers and activists in over 70 countries around the world.

Do you find local content creators to be receptive to Creative Commons? What about organisations like SAMA and RISA?

Local creators who understand the power of the Internet understand and react really well to Creative Commons. They understand how they can use the licences to benefit their art and creativity. RISA representatives attended the workshops in 2004 when we developed the licences using a peer-production methodology - and we hope that we will be able to work with both RISA and SAMA in the future to harmonise the work by artists wishing to use CC licences for at least some of their work.

I would like to thank Heather for taking the time to participate in this interview and look forward to any comments you may have.

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Protecting your content … part 2 is available

November 28th, 2006

This is just a quick post to let you know that I have published part 2 in my series of posts on protecting your content. The second post is now available on my Jacobson Attorneys blog and it focuses on Creative Commons licenses.

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Explaining this Web 2.0 thing

November 28th, 2006

You’ve seen the term “Web 2.0″ used rather liberally in the last couple years and already there is talk of Web 3.0. But do you know what Web 2.0 is? Do you know what the phenomenon is supposed to represent? There are two videos on YouTube which could really help you sort through all the hype and get a little closer to what this is whole thing is all about:

This first video is a ZDNet video that looks behind all the jargon:

This next video features the thoughts of a number of executives of IT companies on what Web 2.0 means to them. The panel is hosted by Mike Arrington, the author of TechCrunch:

(Source: Cowboys and Engines)

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RSS = Ready for Some Stories (aka Introduction to Feeds part two)

November 6th, 2006

We introduced some of our readers to RSS feeds a little while ago and have been talking about feeds on and off since then. Stephanie Quilao has a great post that really helps to explain feeds "the Oprah way" so if you still feel a little intimidated by all the geek speak that tends to accompany any discussion of feeds, then this is a post for you. Feeds really are important to get to know and can make a huge difference in how you consume all that tasty content out there.

Here is a taste of Stephanie’s great post:

Today, Im going to explain how RSS can help you live your best life online.

We all have busy lives with very little time. Web surfing is fun but can take hours going to visit every single website and blog you enjoy. Wouldnt it be fabulous if you could just get all the headlines of the most current stories from all your favorite websites and blogs in one place?

Well now you can, and it is called RSS feed.

The Oprah definition
The technical acronym for RSS is Really Simple Syndication?, an XML format that was created to syndicate news, and be a means to share content on the web. Now, to geeks and techies that means something special, but to everyday folks like you and me, what comes to mind is, Uh, I dont get it??

So, to make RSS much easier to understand, in Oprah speak, RSS stands for: Im Ready for Some Stories?. It is a way online for you to get a quick list of the latest story headlines from all your favorite websites and blogs all in one place. How cool is that?

Let us know what you think about feeds once you have had a chance to read this post. Do you see how feeds can really benefit you or are feeds still a somewhat geeky technology that you don’t see yourself using?

(Source: Lexblog blog)

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The tremendous value of Technorati

October 16th, 2006

I have mentioned Technorati a couple times before. It is a site that every person with an Internet presence should bookmark and use daily. Steve Rubel over at Micro Persuasion has a post in which he takes a look at how you can get the most out of Technorati feeds.

As I mentioned in a prior post, Technorati has integrated RSS feeds throughout the system. I can’t underscore how invaluable this is. It’s making me smarter about the topics I care about. Here’s a bunch of tips that you might find helpful. (Technorati is an Edelman partner.)

I agree with Rubel that you just can not understate the importance of Technorati in today’s Web. Technorati basically tracks blogs and what they are saying about other blogs and sites. This is something that should be important to you irrespective of whether you actually blog or not. If you care what people are saying about your company, you will use Technorati. Consider for a moment what Technorati has to say about this humble blog. Here is a sample:

If you want to see what people have been saying about you (and in a word of mouth network of around 55 million blogs, word can travel pretty fast and news of your exploits could really come back to bite you) then a good way to find out is to run a search for posts about your site. Here is a sample of what people have been saying about chilibean:

One of the big features in Technorati is its widespread use of cutomisable feeds for a range of search results and options. It is easy to create watchlists comprising a variety of search terms which you can then subscribe to so when posts are published that match your search criteria, your feed will be updated. You can also run searches for what people are saying about various topics and limit those search results to what the more authoritative blogs are saying and, in the process find out what some of the more significant views are.

The bottom line is that this is the service to use if you want to find out what is going on out there. Take a look at Rubel’s post for more ways you can use Technorati to great effect.

(Source: Lifehacker)

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Its a Google Life … part 2

October 13th, 2006

In my first post titled "Its a Google Life .. part 1", I took a look at Gmail, Google Reader and Google Talk and presented some of my thoughts and experiences using those tools.

Google Docs and Spreadsheets (formerly known as Writely and Google Spreadsheets)
My plan for this post involved a bit of a discussion about Writely and Google Spreadsheets only I discovered that these two tools have recently been integrated into one main site called Google Docs and Spreadsheets. Google Docs and Spreadsheets ("GDS" because typing Google Docs and Spreadsheets all the time is cramping my fingers) is Google’s web-based word-procesing and spreadsheet application and quite possibly the beginning of an attack on more traditional, desktop based office applications like the market leader, Microsoft Office and the open source upstart, OpenOffice. Now it may come to pass that GDS will compete directly with its competitors but that day has not yet come to pass. At present GDS is a pretty impressive platform but it is limited.

There is a fair amount of interoperability with Word/Excel and OpenOffice’s applications through the ability to upload Office and OpenOffice documents into GDS and then to save edited documents as Word/Excel and OpenOffice docs (as well as pdfs) but the applications themselves don’t compare with their desktop cousins when it comes to raw functionality. I imported a Word document with tables and GDS went "ergh!" and vomited a mess of table gridlines and text. But that is the negative stuff. On the plus side GDS allows for people to collaborate together on documents by inviting each other to do so. In this way GDS begins to resemble wiki tools like JotSpot. You even have the ability to track versions and revert to earlier document versions. I had a query about the security that is built in to GDS and found the following:

If you want your documents or spreadsheet to be private, they will be. We use a secure authentication method, the Google Account username, to control access to any document or spreadsheet. From here users grant access to whomever they want. Your documents and spreadsheets are private by default. Unless you share the published or shared URL with other people, only those that you invite will see your files.

Another useful application of GDS is as a blog publishing tool. GDS supports a couple hosted blogging services out of the box and appears to also support platforms you may host yourself. haven’t tested how well GDS rates as a blog publishing tool. Perhaps take a look at this post on TechCrunch or on Google generally. There is also a pretty comrehensive review on CNet’s Web 2.0 blog.

It seems that GDS is part of a growing phenomenon called Office 2.0 and includes such other luminaries as Freshbooks, an awesome online billing solution. Whatever you call it, GDS is a pretty useful service if you are looking to generate basic documents on the go or which you want to share with other people. GDS features tagging and RSS feeds for public documents. One of the comments to my first post in this series was that Google’s products enable you to acces your office wherever you are. I think that really depends on what your office needs are but GDS is certainly a big step in that direction. I’d like to see things like document templates and better handling of things like tables and even integration into Gmail before I see it as a real alternative.

Google Groups
Google Groups started out as a skinny newsgroups (remember those?) interface in a time when people were moving across to groups where people could discuss things and post their media for others to see. A good example of this sort of service has been Yahoo! Groups which has evolved into a great platform.

Google Groups was recently revamped and a beta version released which made it more of a group that a newsgroup interface complete with new media sharing capabilities and more.

One of the cool features is the addition of a conversation view for the posts in the discussion threads. This pretty much makes the experience of posting to the group very similar to using Gmail.

To add to this the new beta site allows you to create rich content pages (introducing a Pages-like functionality to Google Groups) and upload 100MB worth of files and media to the group to be shared with other members.

Google Calendar
Wrapping up my overview of Google’s tools to collaborate and organise your life brings me to Google Calendar.

This service did the rounds in the rumour mill till it was finally released a little while ago. It made sense to add a calendaring application to Gmail and make it possible for people to organise their lives even better using the tools Google gave us.

Google Calendar runs on something that either is AJAX or works like it. Adding events and manipulating them is as easy as clicking and typing and there is even a fair degree of intelligence built into the software so if you click on a time slot and type "Meeting at Joe", the event created will identify the subject as a meeting and the venue as "Joe". If you would like to migrate from Outlook or iCal to Google Calendar, you can import those calendars and then subscribe via RSS to the Google Calendar version (you can certainly do this with iCal, I’m not sure about Outlook) and use the online version as your primary calendar. This would make a lot of sense if Google Calendars worked the same way as the local versions but it doesn’t.

I have a few gripes which dissuade me from moving to Google Calendar wholesale, despite the value of having calendars I can access wherever I am. For starters, event notifications don’t appear to be embedded into the events themselves and are rather handled at a system level so events that are downloaded into a local calendar via RSS lack notifications which I rely on to remind me of events. You can have notifications sent to you by sms but this feature doesn’t seem to work in South Africa. I believe Google is working on this though. They responded to a fault report I submitted and indicated they are aware of this bug and are working on it.

I would like to be able to maintain a task list on Google Calendar as well as be able to publish local calendars to my Google calendars but the Google calendars don’t appear to be writable. My last gripe is that while Google Calendar advertises that event invitations are automatically recognised and integrated into Google Calendar (depending on your preferences), this only seems to apply to invitations sent from other Gmail users. Invitations sent from iCal and Outlook appear as invitations you must download first or add manually. Better integration with popular calendar applications like iCal and Outlook will really improve adoption of Google Calendar.

Despite my gripes, I really enjoy using Google Calendar and look forward to further updates in time.

In the last exciting installment of this series "Its a Google Life", I’ll take a look at Google Analytics, Google Earth and one or two other useful things to make your Google life much more fulfilling so watch this space and have a Google day!

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Its a Google life … part 1

October 11th, 2006

Given recent events, this post seems appropriate. I have been using several Google apps lately and I thought I would do a post on how you can make use of many Google services and applications in your daily life and business with a fair degree of effectiveness. At the risk of sounding like a complete Google fanboy, Google services and applications can be viable alternatives to equivalents which are installed locally on your computer or on your network.

To start, I must point out that I have not tested every application or service on offer and I probably wouldn’t use some of the applications Google has on offer. Here is a list of what have been using lately (and hence what I am going to discuss):

Believe it or not, there are quite a few more applications and services available than are listed above. I am going to split this list into a few parts and discuss my experiences and thoughts on these various applications and services in this post and the other items in follow up posts in the series titled "Its a Google life".

Gmail
Gmail is a web-based email application that Google has been running in beta since its launch a couple years ago (for those who don’t know, Google has a tendency to keep its services running in beta for quite a while). I was using Yahoo! Mail when Gmail launched. At the time I paid to increase my mailbox on Yahoo! Mail to 2GB which seemed like a heck of a lot of space for my personal mail. When Gmail launched it offered 1GB, if I remember correctly, and that soon grew to 2GB and beyond. The mailbox sizes grow incrementally and are now sitting at about 2.7GB. Given that Gmail is still in beta, it doesn’t seem possible to simply open an account. To open a Gmail account you either need an invitation from a Gmail user (I have plenty available so mail me if you would one … or 10) or it seems you can open an account by sms, where supported.

The appeal of Gmail, aside from its huge mailbox size, can be found in the integration of Google’s search functionality into Gmail, conversation views and the integration of chat features, to name three features.

When you start filling up all that space with your email you may be excused for thinking that it could prove pretty difficult to locate something, especially considering there are no folders to file your emails away. It would be difficult were it not for Gmail’s pretty advanced search functionality which enables you to search for a mail item using attributes (sender details etc), keywords and tags.

One feature I find extremely helpful is the conversation view that comes standard in Gmail. I subscribe to a couple discussion fora and receive emails constantly, many of which track conversations that take place in those fora. Gmail’s conversation view makes it so much easier to keep track of those conversations as well as the conversations you have when you correspond with people by email. These emails are arranged in chronological order almost like index cards. This makes it really easy to go back into a conversation and follow it through from point to point without opening multiple emails.

Another handy feature is the integration of a chat feature into Gmail directly. This converts Gmail into a communications hub where you can both email and instant message. In practice what happens is you sign into chat and you will be able to see who else in your ‘buddy list’ is online and available to chat. This only really applies to other people who are also logged in on their Gmail page or who are using Google Talk. Although it can be a little unreliable, it is really helpful if, for some reason, you can’t download and install Google Talk on your computer.

Google Talk is Google’s answer to instant message clients like Yahoo! Messenger and Windows Live Messenger (formerly MSN Messenger) and perhaps even to VOIP clients like Skype.

The interface is pretty straighforward and, like many Google products, uncluttered. Google Talk runs on the more open Jabber platform and is free. It can be used to exchange instant messages, transfer files and for voice chat. It ties in with Gmail and notifies you when you receive mail. It is also in beta and at the same time is an excellent product that rounds off the Google experience.

Google Reader
On the topic of messages and communications, Google Reader is worth a look. Recently revamped, Google Reader is a feed aggregation application that has been favourably compared to Bloglines and even the famed NetNewsWire (a wildly popular Mac OS feed reader).

The updated version of Google Reader is pretty quick and easy to navigate (although I found it a little slow using an old Celeron PC on a 512kbps ADSL line). It is also really easy to import your opml subscriptions from your existing feed reader and sort your feeds into folders.

But wait, there’s more. With Google Reader, you can also share your feeds with others and even mark those special posts you may want to store or just folow up on using stars. Take a look at the official Google Reader blog for updates as the service develops or, better yet, subscribe to the feed!

In my next post in this series, I’ll take a look at the new beta version of Google Groups, Google Calendar and more so watch this space and have a Google day!

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A start page with the most

October 1st, 2006

What is your start page when you open your web browser? Do you find yourself longing for a start page that has all the content you’d like to review briefly before you head off into the wilds of the Web? There are a couple options which could do the trick for you.

One option is to use an extension of the Google home page as your start page. I have Google set as my start page so when I start up my browser I see this:

If you also use Google and would prefer to see Google when you start up your browser and, at the same time, more information about, for example, the weather and some news feeds then click on the "Personalized Home" link on the top right and you could wind up with a start page like this:

There is a fortune of content you can add to your personalised start page through the link "Add more to this page" and it is really easy to move content around to suit your preferences. All you do is click and drag.

If, on the other hand, Google doesn’t float your boat but you still want the wealth of content when you start up your browser, then give Netvibes a try. It takes about 5 minutes to create a personalised Netvibes page and with a recent upgrade to Netvibes, your customisation options are that much more appealing. Here is what my Netvibes start page looks like:

The nice thing about Netvibes is that you can change the theme of your page pretty easily. Both services enable you to add tabs to your start page so there is no need to cram everything on to one page. You can have a tab for different categories of information and probably rarely move away from that start page. As an example, you could have your basic information about the weather, email, calendar and web search on your front page and all your news feeds on a separate tab. The customisation options alone could keep you busy for a while. Try not to get too bogged down in getting the perfect layouts, this is meant to save you time after all!

Happy surfing and come back once you have had a chance to play and share your experiences by commenting to the post or emailing us.

(Source for Netvibes upgrade: TechCrunch)

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