Collaborative Document Creation
This is a bit of a different post, it was created collaboratively with Nicholas Rayner (@aussienick) using 4 different online collaboration tools to see if we could find which is the best collaboration tool for document creation. Nicholas is a bit of a Microsoft fan and I’m very much a Google fan so we both came into this process with a bit of our own biases. So we tried two Google products and two Microsoft Products:
- Office Web Apps Online Editing
- Word 2010 with the document saved on Office Web Apps
- Google Docs
- Google Wave (just because of my previous post saying how good Google Wave was now).
In each product we created the document, shared it, and edited the section about the experiences working with that product. Each section has then been copied and pasted into this post.
Here is Nicholas’ version of the post.
Word Web App with the file shared on Skydrive.
How it works
- Create the document from within Office Web Apps (http://office.live.com) or create it in Word and save it to the Web.
- Open with the Word Web App and start typing.
Pros
- Slick Word-like interface.
- Nice editing environment.
Cons
- A bit fiddly to set up and share the document.
- Not actually live collaboration, you get an error message that there is someone editing the document if you try to open it.
- Limited features of Word – eg no Find and Replace.
- Only works in IE (we tried it in Chrome and it works to edit, but then you don’t have the seamless switch to editing in Word).
End Result
- Gave up on it as we are looking for a true collaborative authoring experience. It’s not collaboration, it’s document sharing, which it does well.
Word 2010 with document saved on Skydrive.
How it works
- Create a new document and save it to the web. (There is a save to web option in the save menu).
- Share the document with the other user – you can do this from within office.live.com or when you are saving it from within word.
- Start typing just like any other Office document.
- You will see when the other person comes on line to start editing the document – it pops up at the bottom of the screen.
- You will see the paragraphs that the other person is editing – those paragraphs are then locked to you for editing, and it tells you a nice message that you should wait for the other person to finish editing this paragraph.
- Everytime you save, the other user gets notified that they can refresh that paragraph to see the changes you have made.
- When both people save, the document gets updated in both places.
Pros
- Seems to work well after we got the sharing and document open in outlook.
- Cool popup down the bottom of the screen showing who is editing and gives their live messenger status so you can chat to them whilst editing.
- You can see that the other person has locked the paragraph that they are editing.
- NR: Made by Microsoft, everything they make is Awesome! JM: HEY, there will be NO ZEALOTRY HERE!
- Full Word functionality.
- It’s free!
- Familiar Ribbon interface in Browser.
Cons
- Requires Office 2010.
- No Live Collaboration from Web Browser.
- Can be slow in creating and accessing files through a Web Browser (probably due to being in Beta).
End Result
JM: I’m quite impressed with it. It works well. It does what they say it does. It’s free and it’s quite useable. I would use it again, no questions asked.
NR: Very impressive for a beta of a version 1 product from Microsoft. Really impressed with the Live Collaboration when editing in a client, just like with Office Web Apps for SharePoint but this is FREE and available now at office.live.com!
Google Docs
How it works
- Go to google docs – http://docs.google.com or from the documents link in Gmail.
- Create a new document.
- Share it with another user – either enter an email address or choose from your Contact List.
- They open the document and start typing.
- You will be notified in the top right hand corner that they are editing the document too.
- After a bit you will automatically see the changes the other person has done, right in your document.
Pros
- Linked to your Google Account to easily share with contacts and integrate with GMail etc.
- Nice environment to work in for straight text editing, eg for a draft document.
- It won’t tell you where the other person is editing, but it will tell you there are conflicts and will let you copy your text if it won’t save it due to a conflict.
Cons
- NR: Formatting is..well..crap.
- JM: Formatting documents in Google docs is difficult as it is missing all the quick and easy shortcut keys for headings, bullets etc.
- NR: Slow in syncing changes between the two users.
- NR: No inline spell checker – JM: It works in Chrome – sort of – it only highlights that the word is misspelt, it won’t actually allow you to correct the spelling by right clicking on the word, so it is kinda annoying, If you want the word suggestion you have to use the spell check feature in the toolbar.
- There is a really really cool chat feature inside the document if you are doing a Google Spreadsheet or Presentation, but it is completely missing when doing a document. This feature is sorely missing from this collaboration experience.
- UPDATE 14/7/10: Not sure if we completely missed this, or it’s new today, but the chat panel and an indicator showing where the other user is typing is now showing up in Google Docs. It makes it a much better collaborative editing environment.
End Result
NR: Google Docs is good for basic document authoring and editing, the formatting has some issues, but overall it is a good product. I’d like to see the chat feature from the spreadsheet and presentation tools added to the Document authoring tool.
JM: I love Google Docs for quickly whipping up a new document, but for anything that requires formatting or printing, I will always go to back to Word or Excel.
Google Wave
How it works
- Open up Google Wave.
- Create a New Wave.
- Add a person to collaborate with.
- Start Typing.
- When the other person starts typing, you will see exactly where they are typing and what they are typing letter by letter.
- The name user who is typing is shown on the other user’s screen right where they are typing and you see the changes they make to the wave letter by letter.
Pros
- Great collaborative editing experience.
- Simple and easy to start and collaborate.
- Can export to Google Docs when done by using the Ferry extension.
- As well as typing the document, you can have a discussion below or even within the – eg chatting over the particular wording of one sentence.
- Good Spell Check in both Chrome and Firefox.
Cons
- Can get a little crowded and mixed up if you are typing in the same sentence or the same word as the other person.
- Formatting still an issue – similar formatting issues to Google Docs and no keyboard shortcuts for headings and bullets.
- Does not work in IE (but will in IE9).
End Result
- JM: I actually like this better than google docs for simple text editing and thinking up an idea – but I would still go back to Word for final editing.
- NR: I too prefer this over Google Docs. This would be great for small project teams and a group of people collaborating over a range of different things. I’ll definitely be using Google Wave going forward!
Conclusion
Well I was kind of surprised at what a good experience using Word 2010 was in a collaborative editing experience. If I was working on a proper document where the end result was a PDF or printed document, I would not hesitate to use Word for collaboration.
Even though I love Google Docs, after using Word, I wish it was a little better and had the visual indicator of where people are working. The chat window, which works great in a Google spreadsheet, is also sorely missing in Google Docs. So right now, for quick collaborative editing I would go with Wave, it is such a good collaborative experience for quick drafts or documents that will continue to exist in Wave.
Well done to Microsoft for producing such a great collaborative editing experience, and particularly that it is free and easy enough for anyone with Office 2010 and a live account to access. I recommend you give Word 2010 and / or Google Wave a go the next time you need to work together with one or more people on a document.
Google Wave – One Year On
Other great new features are:
- Email notifications, so you know when a wave is updated.
- Templates – Start a wave with some content – great idea, but you can’t build your own templates just yet – hopefully this is coming soon.
- Remove participant from the wave – removed people get access to everything they had up until they were removed from the wave – excellent!
- Add participant by Email – reduces the barrier to getting new people onto the wave.
- The wave now tells you how many unread blips there are in the Wave and it will step you through each of the blips so you can see exactly how the conversation has unfolded – fantastic! It means you can just drop in and out of the Wave and still keep up with what is happening.
- Private Replies
- Link to individual Blips
- Copy to new Wave
- Mark a Wave as Spam.
The Gadgets and Robots are collectively known as Extensions. The ones that are available now a great, and there is now an extensions gallery to easily discover the new extensions right from within wave. And you can either install the extension or “Try it Now”, which is great. – there are so many that are very useful. Some of the great ones are:
- MindMaps – MindWave by ConceptDraw or Mindmeister
- BrainStormer
- Shopping List – a fully collaborative shopping list – now if only it was mobile (currently you have to print it to take it shopping).
- Tasky – Task List
- Diagram Editor – create UML diagrams
- Ferry – Export Waves to Google Docs or other formats
- WaveTube – who is watching the YouTube video – great for training – knowing people that are watching, or watching and discussing together.
- Unawave for Project Management – create a group, create a project, and track tasks and milestones and other deliverables for the project. Realtime status reportsee http://www.unawave.com/
- Robots can be anywhere now. They don’t have to be hosted in Google App Engine.
- Wave Data API’s – Read or Write on behalf of a user – many ideas forming there.
- Attachment and Media API’s – read and write attachments – again lots of ideas there.
- There has been a new release of the Robots API which means that they can be more useful. Not only can they respond to user actions, but they can now update the wave on their own – cool!
- Embed’s are now public – Everyone can see them (if you want). You don’t have to be logged in to Wave to see the wave – this is a huge opportunity to get your Wave’s out into the wild. Also, embed the wave in multiple places. Imagine this for live blogging an event – not just one person, but multiple people updating the wave live (and then play that back later with the video or slides – wow!).
- Embed a wave in Salesforce CRM! See the video here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oRQQf590ceY
Wave almost works on my Android phone but is not quite there yet. There is no iPhone app (you can use it in mobile safari), but there are some people working on WaveLite which will help Wave’s look and perform better in a mobile web browser. Wave still does not work in IE without ChromeFrame. (Will IE 9 change this? I hope).
There was a great talk about Wave for the Enterprise (Slides Here). The talk had some great ideas and examples for the use of Wave in the Enterprise. Here are just a few of the points:
- Wave is equal parts document and conversation – so that’s why it is a difficult paradigm shift for most people. And why the Wave author needs to set some rules or guidelines on how to structure the Wave.
- Using Wave, people feel like they are actually working together. Multiple people can be “speaking” at the same time
- Wave works best for a combination of structured and unstructured processes – semi-structured. Some structured / automated process, and then conversation around that, eg Notation of the exceptions.
- An idea is to generate reporting waves that people can analyse and notate. A combination of people and robots working together on the process.
- Automating the Wave (eg a robot that links back to the data on the intranet or other LOB systems).
- Waves that act as an index to other Waves… (Like the DevFest Wave for this event http://bit.ly/devfestau-wave – just a simple way to get some order into your Waves).
Overall, I do really think that Wave has come into it’s own and is now ready for prime time collaborations, within the enterprise, or for organising a community group, or just arranging dinner with friends.
Why I’m not quitting Facebook… Yet
Today, May 31, is Quit Facebook Day. There are over 26,000 people signed up to commit to delete their Facebook accounts today. Whilst it is a very tiny drop in the ocean compared to the 500million or so Facebook users, it is a significant number.
As shown by the numerous links in my previous post on Facebook Privacy, there has been a public outcry over the current state of Facebook privacy. Thankfully, Facebook has responded and said they will simplify their privacy settings. Whether this about-face is due to the outcry or to the Quit Facebook campaign we won’t know for sure, but it is encouraging at least.
There have been some excellent posts today from people saying why they are quitting Facebook today. Some excerpts:
Facebook itself has changed, from being a private network between friends to being a commercial experience, where your supposed “relationship” with brands and TV shows are intermingled with your relationships with people. This is perverse. But this, and other changes have made Facebook, for me, a place I no longer wish to inhabit.
The other reason I’m quitting Facebook is to recover some balance in my relationships. The siren call of Facebook is that you can maintain “relationships” with people in your life merely by dipping your toe into the stream of bon mots that flow past. I don’t think is true.
Jason Langenauer @jasonlangenauer
…when I look at Facebook, I see a goldmine. I can see millions of people logging on, interacting, sharing their interests, their behaviours, their likes and dislikes not just with their “networks” but also with Facebook. And maybe even with Facebook’s partners. It is this latter form of sharing that concerns me.
For most of us, joining Facebook meant entering a social compact – we’d share the content, context and contacts of our lives – and we’d do so using Facebook’s social networking platform. We’d be able to control who had access to what we share and Facebook could monetize this in ways that worked in good faith…
Changing this compact now is difficult – and has not been communicated well. Rather than being transparent about their intentions, Facebook have opted to spin the changes, suggesting that the world has changed and that Facebook is moving to accommodate this.
Gavin Heaton @servantofchaos
No, Facebook, if I delete my account everyone will still be able to contact me. Any time they like. Don’t lie to me.
Stillgherian @stillgherian
Over the last several months I have become increasingly aware I didn’t like the organisation behind it and I’m not comfortable with it.
Mark Pesce, @mpesce, as quoted in the Australian
One of the themes through these articles is that Facebook has become less about connecting with people and more about mining your data. I understand that, and I’m willing to work with that for now, as I still get enough benefit from the connections I have with friends and family on Facebook.
What I have done, however is lock Facebook down to private settings around posts and photos (I actually have only ever uploaded 2 pics to Facebook). I have also deleted almost all 3rd party apps, and almost all of my “likes”. I will probably further reduce these over the coming weeks.
I will ensure that I do not use Facebook Connect or “like” any page from within or external to Facebook without a very good reason. Hopefully that will reduce the commercial tracking of my information.
I may be in denial and heading down the wrong path, but I will be vigilant over the coming months and re-assess if I feel further erosion of my privacy, or seemingly bad deeds by advertisers and the like.
Yes, I tweet, and all those tweets are public, and yes I get the occasional business type spam of someone trying to sell me stuff but that is quickly dealt with via the block button. Someone may be scraping all my tweets to see what I’m interested in, but at the moment there is no easy way for advertisers to target me with that information.
So it’s time to be “Alert, but not Alarmed” and just be more careful and judicious with my Facebook usage over the coming months.
Yet Another Post About Facebook Privacy
There has been so many posts about Facebook Privacy on the Web over the past few weeks. This post is just a summary of the few great ones that I have seen, and is for a quick presentation at SBTUG. So rather than go through a heap of information in the presentation, I will just refer to the links in this post.
I have tried to find links that talk about the new Facebook privacy issues in simple to understand terms, not developer-speak. So I would encourage you to read some of the links, have a look at your Facebook settings, and most importantly talk to all your non-geek friends, your Mum, your Kids, your Neighbours etc – all those people who probably have no clue about what happens when they post something on Facebook, or click a Like button on a website.
- Why is Facebook Privacy now an issue? Have a look at the diagram on this site to see at a glance why this is something to be concerned about now: http://www.allfacebook.com/2010/05/infographic-the-history-of-facebooks-default-privacy-settings (ht @pricillascala) . And basically the above information as text: http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/04/facebook-timeline/ (ht @hollingsworth).
- Why is it so difficult to know how to change your settings? A really good overview of why the Facebook settings are so difficult for mere mortals to understand: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/05/12/business/facebook-privacy.html (ht @trib).
- Where do my wall posts show up? Did you know that your wall posts with specific key words show up on other pages? http://searchengineland.com/facebooks-posts-by-everyone-feature-do-people-realize-theyre-sharing-to-the-world-41525
- What happens when you click the Like button on a website? All your “Like’s” are now public by default. This is also true when you click on a Like button from another website. Also by clicking on the Like, the website may send you updates to your profile. There is no option to “Like” but not have them send updates if they want to. More info here (but it is a little hard to understand).
- How to fix your profile in 2 mins – Video. Not quite detailed enough for my liking, but it is a start – if you at least do this, you will be aware of some of the settings: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/05/13/facebook-privacy-settings_n_575732.html (ht @evilsue).
- 5 essential Facebook Privacy Tips. This link is from Mashable and has some good tips: http://mashable.com/2010/05/18/facebook-privacy-tips/
- Don’t let advertisers use you to advertise for them: Go to Facebook -> Account Settings -> Facebook Adverts and select “No One” (ht @mpesce).
For a more in-depth look at the whole Facebook privacy issue, Time magazine has it as their cover story this week. I think the article is easy to read and not too techy.
For the more geeky amongst us there are a few more links you may want to have a look at:
- What Does Facebook Know About You? This link shows all the information about you that is publicly available: http://zesty.ca/facebook/ (ht @servantofchaos). There is also www.reclaimprivacy.org that will scan your settings for anything that is visible to the entire internet (ht @silkcharm).
- Wall Posts are now Public by default: http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/12/facebook-privacy-update/
- Taking it to the extreme – a link to a quite involved how-to for locking down your facebook profile almost completely, including removing most of your friends an making a fan page for them – I think this is going a bit too far. http://www.zdnet.com/blog/perlow/lockdown-or-death-for-your-facebook-profile-an-advanced-user-guide-to-social-networking-privacy.
- How to opt out of Personalization – “if you opt out, your friends may still share public Facebook information about you to personalize their experience on these partner sites unless you block the application”: http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/04/how-opt-out-facebook-s-instant-personalization (ht @trib).
- 10 New Privacy Settings – a good overview of all important privacy settings: http://www.allfacebook.com/2009/12/facebook-privacy-new/ (ht @trib).
- Deceiving users with the ‘Like’ button – I’m not sure about the complete accuracy of this but if it’s true – OUCH! http://arnab.org/blog/deceiving-users-facebook-button
- Top 10 Reasons to Quit Facebook – I’m not at that point yet – I still get value from Facebook, especially for events and keeping in touch with Family. I believe it is possible to use it without showing everything to the world: http://www.rocket.ly/home/2010/4/26/top-ten-reasons-you-should-quit-facebook.html
Email for Community Groups
This is the third in a series of posts for Creating a Web Presence for your Community Group. In this post I will take a look at Email for your Community Group. This is a bit of a long post and has a lot of technical details and involved steps, but the good news is that you only ever need to do it once!
Most community groups have a President, a Treasurer and various other committee positions. The main feature of community groups is that the people in these roles change regularly – at least once per year. If you are dealing with suppliers or members of the public, the email communications may get lost when things transfer from the outgoing President to the incoming President. You usually remember to transfer hard copy files, and even maybe soft copy documents, but what about the email history of the group, that is harder.
This is where I will suggest one option only – Google Apps for Your Domain – because it is great, it’s FREE and it works so well for community groups and small businesses (See my previous post on Google Aps for Your Domain for small business).
The Set Up
Here are the steps to getting up and running with GAFYD Email for your community group:
- Sign up for Google Apps by choosing the Standard Edition of Google Apps for Your Domain – this is the FREE version.
- Enter your domain name and follow the prompts through the setup process. It is quite straightforward. There is a great step by step guide for the whole process.
- Now you need to verify that you own the domain you said you did. For this you go back to your WordPress.com site you previously set up (if you chose not to set up a WordPress.com site see the instructions here).
- You will be given a verification code from Google Apps – it starts with google and has a long string of numbers and letters after it.
- In WordPress go to Settings, then Domains then click on Edit DNS. Halfway down the page enter your verification code, click on Generate DNS which enters the correct DNS records into the box at the top. Now click the Save DNS Records button.
- Now go back into your Google Apps account and click the Verify button to finish the process in the Google Apps control panel. You’ll know when verification is complete by checking the status of your services. Next to Calendar, for example, it will say Active instead of Updating.
Note that it could take up to 48 hours for the verification to apply because it can take that long for the DNS servers to update.
You should now be able to send and receive email from your Google Apps account, with the initial account you set up.
Create the Users
The next step is then to create an email address for each member of your community group. Create generic email addresses such as president@yourdomain.com.au, treasurer@yourdomain.com.au and info@yourdomain.com.au. There is a step by step guide on how to create users in Google Apps. Assign each user a generic, easy to remember password for now.
It will be annoying for your users to keep checking their email from your community group domain, so now you want to forward your email to the individual’s own existing email address. They can do this themselves, or you can do it for them before you let them know about the account you have just created for them. Here’s how to do it:
- Log out of the admin of the domain and in to the newly created president@yourdomain.com.au email account. Use the URL of http://mail.google.com/a/yourdomain.com.au to get to the email.
- Follow these steps to set up the forwarding.
- Log out of that user, and into the account of the other users and do the same thing.
You may also want to set up a group email called committee@yourdomain.com.au. That way, to email the whole committee, people just need to use the one email address. Follow these steps for setting up groups in your domain.
Sub Domains
The URL of http://mail.google.com/a/yourdomain.com.au is a pretty long URL to remember and may not be so easy for your committee members. So in this step you will set up some sub domains for each of the Google Apps, apps (Mail, Calendar, Contacts, Docs etc). We have not delved into the other apps other than Mail – that will be covered in one of the next posts in the series.
The subdomain for mail will be http://mail.yourdomain.com.au
This is the steps to set up the sub domains.
- Log back into WordPress.com and go to Settings then Domains and click on Edit DNS.
- In the DNS box enter the following CNAME entries.
- Click on the Save DNS Records button.
- Now come back into your Google Apps admin, go to Service Settings, and follow these steps to set up the mappings for the sub domains for each app. However, when you are in the page to change the url for Mail, there is a link to “Change URLs for all domain services”. If you click on that link you can do all the sub domain URL’s in one hit.
- Now log out of the Admin and test your new subdomain by going to http://mail.yourdomain.com.au (as with other DNS changes it may take up to 48 hours for it to work).
CNAME mail ghs.google.com. CNAME docs ghs.google.com. CNAME sites ghs.google.com. CNAME calendar ghs.google.com. CNAME contacts ghs.google.com.
Spread the Word
Now email your committee members and let them know the following:
- The new email address for their committee position
- The fact that the emails sent to that address will be coming directly to their own inbox.
- The general committee email address for sending emails to the whole committee.
- The URL http://mail.yourdomain.com.au to log into the email
- The password that you created originally (tell them to change it right away by following these steps).
I would suggest the following rules for using the president, treasurer etc emails. If they are replying to an email sent to president@yourdomaincom.au it is fine to come from their own email address (if you are particular about keeping a full audit trail of communications both ways, then ask them to cc or bcc the president email address in all replies). If they are sending an “official” email on behalf of the group then they should log into the mail account to send the email from there (eg an email out to all members).
Or, if they already use Gmail for their own personal mail, they can use this trick to send your group’s email right from within their own Gmail account and have it come from their yourdomain.com.au email address.
In the next post I will talk about options for managing your members, and communicating with your members.
Some Thoughts on SharePoint 2010
This week I attended the launch of Office 2010 which included the launch of SharePoint 2010 and the other Office programs such as Project 2010 and Visio 2010. There is much to love about the new range of Microsoft products, and much to be wary of also, so I thought I’d share some of my thoughts about it.
The SharePoint Conference is coming up in Sydney on June 16 and 17. It is a community run conference (so not an official Microsoft event), but there is a number of great speakers. They will cover a lot of the new stuff in SharePoint 2010 and will cover SharePoint 2007 versions also. Part of the idea for writing this post is a great competition that SBTUG and SWUG are running to give away a ticket to the conference, which I would very much like to win.
There is so much that I want to learn about SharePoint 2010, and so many great new features – but I am uncertain about diving in right now. I just don’t think that it’s going to have the level of adoption in the next few years to warrant learning all about it right now. I think SharePoint 2007 (MOSS) is here to stay for another few years yet, until organisations are willing to tackle the upgrade.
The issue is, that to get the benefit out of SharePoint 2010, you need to upgrade a huge amount of software and hardware. You will need:
- One (or more) 64bit server(s) running Windows Server 2008 (and preferably Windows Server 2008 R2 to get the most out of some of the new features).
- Office 2010 for all staff that want to use documents stored on SharePoint (which is probably ALL staff), as the cool new features such as multiple document authors and some of the really cool new OneNote features.
- Windows 7 because Office 2010 runs so much better on Windows 7 and the cool new features in Server 2008 R2 such as Branch Caching work only with Windows 7
- Exchange Server 2o1o because there are some great features in Outlook 2010 that only work with Exchange 2010, and I’m sure there are some SharePoint features that only work with the new Exchange also.
- Viso 2010 because the new Workflow features in SharePoint integrate so well with Visio 2010 – and not just any Visio – it has to be the Premium version of Viso. Also, the new data driven diagrams and diagrams that can be published directly to a SharePoint site make it a must-have for the power users in the organisation.
- You probably want to also invest in Visual Studio 2010, only because if all the end users are going 2010 then the developers are going to want to too, but also because it also integrates very nicely with the new Workflow features in SharePoint 2010.
- Probably SQL Server 2008 R2, especially if the organisation deals in very large files – because there is a great new feature in SharePoint 2010 called Remote Blob Storage which allows you to store large files on the file server, rather than inside the SharePoint database. (Yes, it only requires SQL server 2008, but as you will be building this new infrastructure now, you will get R2).
- And if you are going to go this far, you may as well go the whole hog and get the new version of Office Communicator (not quite out yet) and Project Server 2010 as it integrates with SharePoint nicely too.
So after you have spent all that money, you may think, well SharePoint 2010 is free with Server 2008 so I don’t have to worry about that – well start worrying. To get many of the really cool new features of SharePoint, you really need the Enterprise Edition of SharePoint 2010 – this gives you Excel Services, Performance Point Services, InfoPath Forms Services, Visio Services, and the advanced features of the new FAST Search. And then why not integrate your external website with the Intranet and run SharePoint as an externally facing website. Thankfully the licencing for this has come down a bit in price (due to the External Connector Standard Licence), but it’s still a hefty amount in anyone’s language.
But Wow! If you did do all of these upgrades and got it all humming, that would really be a nice set of tools to work with, and you can call me to come and work with you 
.
So after saying all this about SharePoint 2010, why would I want to go to the SharePoint conference and learn much more about SharePoint 2010? Because it rocks! There are so many cool new features in the whole 2010 suite of products, that it is like the Office suite has grown up – they were previously just playing around, and now they’ve gotten serious. And for large organisation that wants a really fantastic integrated suite of products, they will just have to get 2010!
Some of the really cool features that I want to learn more about are:
- Integration with Office Web Apps
- The whole range of new Business Intelligence features with Performance Point Services, Excel Power Pivot and the new Business Data Connectivity features (formerly the BDC).
- The Services (eg Excel, Word, Access, InfoPath, PerformancePoint, Viso Services) and how to use them – eg automating the creation of Word documents behind the scenes with Word Services.
- All the new Social Networking features – I’m not sure they will be a “facebook for the office” but they will be a start into social apps for the enterprise.
- The new accessibility features, which I don’t think are 100% accessible yet, but they are built in – not an afterthought like SharePoint 2007.
- All the new design tools and theming of SharePoint, including XSLT styling of lits and being able to import themes from Powerpoint.
- Integrating Silverlight into SharePoint – it will be very interesting to see what’s possible with that in the future.
- The new workflows engine and the integration with Visio and Visual Studio.
- The FAST search and what is possible now for full enterprise wide search with SharePoint.
So I think that there is enough really cool new things to keep me busy for two days at the SharePoint Conference, and I really hope that I can get to play with these new tools in a real live environment sooner, rather than later.
Note: There is not a lot of hyperlinks to the Office 2010 stuff as the new Office site was not live at the time of this post (even though it was a few days after the official launch), and the SharePoint 2010 site is still lacking a lot of detail around specific features.
Google Apps gets Apps
Google Apps For Your Domain (GAFYD) now has the Google Apps Marketplace. In my last post on GAFYD, I listed out some of the benefits for using GAFYD in a small business, team or even if you just have your own domain. The Apps Marketplace is yet another compelling reason for small (and even larger) businesses to use GAFYD.
There is an amazing array of Apps to choose from, and so many competing apps, that it actually makes it quite hard to choose – see Project Management Apps for an example. But if there are apps that your businesses has been currently using, you may now be able to integrate them with your GAFYD account. For example, TripIt is one of my favourite online apps (and one of the few that I pay for the premium version of) – it allows me to track and share all my travel details online. With TripIt for GAFYD you can now arrange and share trip information for all members of the team – all with your regular GAFYD login.
The apps in the Apps Marketplace can integrate with GAFYD by having a Single Sign On, Gmail integration, Calendar integration, Docs integration or a combination all of these. Interestingly however, at the time of writing this post, there is only one App that has Gmail integration and that is Jira Studio by Atlassian, and it only has read only Gmail integration, so there must be some difficulty for the apps developers to integrate fully with Gmail.
The easiest way to find apps in the marketplace is to click on the “Search Marketplace” button with no search criteria. Then you can use the search filters to refine the search from there. Alternatively refine the search first by clicking on one of the categories from the home page and then use the refine search criteria to limit the display within that category.
There are many free apps, but mostly they are paid SAAS apps that now just integrate with GAFYD. There is also a very confusing array of ”professional services” which is people trying to sell you support hours for Google Apps and Enterprise Search Apps that are only for large enterprises. I would really like to see the enterprise and service offerings more separate from the Apps and a way of filtering for only the Free apps.
Where the Google Apps Marketplace will be very useful is for small business to integrate some of their other Line of Business apps into GAFYD. Apps like CRM, project management, time tracking, expense reporting and even Accounting (although Saasu is a notable exception at the moment, but they have said they are looking into it).
As more and more apps come into the marketplace it is going to be great for anyone using GAFYD as their business platform.
Google Apps for Small Business
If you have read my blog before you may know that I love Google Apps for Your Domain (GAFYD). GAFYD comes in two flavours Premier and Standard. Premier costs US$50 per person per year and Standard is FREE!. At this stage, for a very small business, I see no compelling reason to pay for GAFYD – just stick with the Standard version. The main things you get with Premium over and above the Standard is additional support, more storage space, the ability to turn off ads in Gmail, Outlook syncing, resource scheduling in Calendar and Google Video.
GAFYD is aimed squarely at businesses currently using Microsoft Outlook and Exchange – they even have a Migration Guide for Exchange administrators. Recently, Google made Gmail a fully fledged Exchange account to enable syncing of Gmail, Google Contacts and Google Calendar to your mobile device very straightforward. For small business, GAFYD is now a compelling choice as an Exchange replacement. There is a great article showing Outlook users how to work with Gmail, as getting used to the threaded conversations can be challenging for some people (but since Outlook 2010 now has threaded conversations, it definitely looks like it is the way to go.
But it does not stop there – the A in GAFYD is Apps. Currently the Google “Apps” are Gmail, Contacts, Chat, Calendar, Docs and Sites. But soon GAFYD users will get other Google Apps such as Reader, Blogger, Picasa and hopefully even more (No sign of Wave or Google Voice yet for GAFYD – or no sign of Google Voice in Aus yet either). The addition of Blogger and Picasa will be very helpful for small teams as it will enable them to share pictures and have multiple people blog from the one account.
The benefit of Google Docs for most small businesses or teams does not need a lot of explaining – documents backed up, central location, real time collaboration and editing of documents, instant sharing etc. Now you can upload any files, not just documents to Google Docs, and there are a heap of new features that make it really very useful.
For me, I struggle to use Google Docs for absolutely everything – especially spreadsheets and printed documents. As an Excel expert, there are some limitations with Google Spreadsheet that just make it too hard to use, and whilst I will happily create a draft document or collaborate on a draft in Google Docs, if I want to print it, I will use Word – just to get the fine grained control. There is a product called OffiSync that allows you to open documents on Google Docs with Office, but I have not tried it yet.
The benefit of using Google Sites for small business and teams is probably not that apparent yet, and frankly it has quite a long way to go to be really a fantastic product for day to day office productivity. Google Sites came out of the purchase of a great product called JotSpot, which was then weakened down to what we now have in Sites. It’s meant to be a bit of everything. It can be an externally facing website, an internally facing Intranet, a Wiki, a Blog and a collaboration platform. There is a good overview video of it’s functionality.
As I loved the old Google Pages, Google Sites is a really poor cousin and I would not recommend it for an externally facing website, but it could be good as an Intranet or small internal Wiki.
So overall GAFYD is a must for small businesses, and even just one person with a domain, like me – yes jodiem.com.au runs GAFYD! Hopefully soon, I will be able to ditch my Gmail account as my primary account and be able to use my GAFYD account to use for all Google services.
Websites for Community Groups
This is the second in a series of posts for Creating a Web Presence for your Community Group. In this post I will take a look at the Web Site itself.
Web Content
- About the group
- History of the group
- The Committee
- Rules of the group
- Any legal obligations (eg if you are an incorporated association)
- Minutes
- News
- Contact details
- Locations of events, clubs or meetings
- Photos and details of past events
This content can be broken up into Static and Temporal content. The static content is the information about the club itself, the committee and location and contact details. This information doesn’t change that often and is updated only when it needs to be. The temporal content is the information that is applicable to a particular point in time only. This is news, details of events, minutes etc. If people want to look back at old content that is fine, but only the most recent and relevant content should be the most visible on the site. I will put Upcoming Events into another category because that is going to be a separate post.
One thing to be aware of is the privacy of the individuals in your group. Have a discussion in your group about what your web privacy policy will be and make it known to the group (via the minutes or some formal communication). Allow people to opt out if they don’t want their names, photos and details online. See the post on Email for some more ideas about how to preserve people’s privacy.
WordPress
This is where I’m going to delve right in and say use WordPress for your site – yes that WordPress – the one that does “blogs”. WordPress is NOT just for blogs, it can be used for almost any kind of web site – including a shopping site. Wordpress is a Web Content Management System – that just means that it is an easy to use web based system that allows for the content to be separated from the design. So when you need to write a news article, you just write the article, you don’t have to worry about how it looks on the page, because that is already handled for you. Other Web CMS’s are Joomla, Drupal and Squarespace (to name just a few of the thousands there are out there).
WordPress comes in two flavours – self hosted (WordPress.org) and hosted (WordPress.com). This post will mainly focus on WordPress.com as it is free, simple to us and suits 99% of the website needs for a community group. If you want to host your own WordPress install you will need a web hosting provider. There are thousands and thousands of them out there, but for a simple WordPress hosting service you should not have to pay more than about $150 per year. Self Hosted WordPress has many features that WordPress.com does not have, including the ability to extend your site by using PlugIns, control the look of the site exactly using themes and CSS and even use custom code to make it do almost anything you could imagine. I like this article that explains self hosted WordPress in a bit more detail. If you start with WorPress.com and want to move everything to a self hosted WordPress at a later date, then it is a simple process. So there is nothing stopping you from starting now with a WordPress.com site.
Setting up WordPress
WordPress.com is simple to set up – it takes just a few minutes and you have your basic site set up – for FREE. From there you need to choose a theme. WordPress.com at the time of writing has close to 100 themes to choose from, so you should be able to find one that suits your community group. (If you want more control over the look and feel then you can pay US$15 per year to be able to apply custom CSS to your site). My advice is to stick with a simple theme with a custom header (where you can put your logo), and maybe custom colours. (This is why I love the Vigilance theme that this site is based on). See more information about Themes from the WordPress.com support site, including the great video. You may need to play around with a few themes until you find the one that is right for your group. It may not be 100% perfect, but this is where you trade off perfection for cost – remember so far this site has cost you nothing but a few hours of your time.
The next thing you want to do is create some content. Your static content such as committee, about the group etc will be created with Pages. Your temporal content such as news, events and minutes will be created as Posts. Each Post will be given a Category (eg News), which will help you navigate to only the posts about news or events. As WordPress is orignally designed for blogs, by default he Posts page will be the first page that you see when you come to the site. You need to change this to be one of your static pages. You set the home page in the Reading Options settings.
The next thing you need to set up is the Widgets that display in the sidebars. (Sidebars can be on the left, right or bottom of the page, depending on the theme you have chosen). In the sidebar, I would suggest at least some navigation to the latest news stories, some information on how to contact your group a search box, and a links to any other web sites that your group has (eg you may have images on flickr or a twitter account or facebook page). In the Events post I will talk about how to put an events widget on your sidebar.
Map your Domain to your Site
Once you are happy with the overall site, it is time to link the site to the Domain and then publicise the fact that you have a web site now. To link the Domain to the web site follow the steps to Map an Existing Domain on the WordPress.com site. This costs US$10 per year. There are three steps to this process.
- Nameservers: You will need to go back to the domain hosting provider and log into your domain management to update the Nameservers. This is where it pays to have a good hosting provider as they will have some online help on how to do that, or they will be able to help you set it up.
- Payment: You will need a Paypal account to do this (but you probably want a paypal account anyway). Go to Settings > Domains in your site to do this.
- Mapping: Once the Nameservers are set and you have paid for it you can then set the mapping up. Go to Settings > Domains in your site to do this.
This process can be a bit fiddly and don’t expect it to take a few minutes. But once it is done, it never needs to be done again (except paying for it each year).
That’s it! A simple web presence online, with your domain name for a total cost so far of under $100 for the domain and the domain mapping.
See the next posts in the series for more things to do with your website such as events and applications and ongoing management of your site.
Domains for Community Groups
This is the first in a series of posts for Creating a Web Presence for your Community Group. In this post I will take a look at Domains.
Your Domain is the web address for your group eg www.yourclub.com.au or www.yourclub.asn.au. (actually the domain is the bit without the www, but that is getting a bit technical).
(I’m going to focus on .com.au domains – .org.au or .asn.au are similar also. There are more and cheaper options for hosting a .com or .org domain but there is also lots of info out there about them – just go to somewhere like www.godaddy.com)
First Step – do you have a Domain? If not – get one! It is very important to have a web presence for your group that represents the name of your group. There are 30 accredited resellers in Australia that can sell .au domains. The site WhatsInAName.com.au lists all the providers by price. However, price is not the only factor in choosing a domain provider.
Some technical details: Your choice of web hosting platform will also play a part in deciding which domain reseller to go with. If you require web hosting (see the next article on Web Sites for more info on that), it’s best to stick with the same company for domain hosting as it is easier for administration. If you don’t require web hosting, you may still need DNS hosting. The cheaper domain providers charge extra for DNS hosting or don’t include it at all, and it’s not really that obvious from looking at their websites. (There are free DNS providers such as OpenDNS or ZoneEdit).
This is where I would recommend not skimping and going for the cheapest option. You really want a Domain provider that is reliable, has great service and includes DNS Hosting. (For the record, I use TPP Internet, they are not the cheapest, but they do include DNS hosting. I have found their service to be excellent – they even phoned me to make sure I had paid for my domain name when it was due a few weeks ago).
Remember that registering a .au domain has rules associated with it – basically the domain name has to have something to do with the organisation you are registering. Eg you can’t registered MyClub.asn.au for a club called something entirely different. See the full rules here or there are more basic copies of the rules on the websites of all the domain providers. The site MyWebName.com.au also has some great resources and information.
You also need to decide how many domains to register. Do you want the .com and the .com.au? It’s completely up to you and would mainly be a problem if there were other names similar that might get confusing. To keep it simple, try to keep to one domain name.
If you already have a Domain then who owns it? When is it due to be registered? Do a Whois lookup on the domain. Go to MyWebName.com.au to do a Whois search on the domain. The Whois search will tell you the name and email address of the registered person. If that person has left your organisation you can at least try to email them to get the login details of your domain.
It also tells you who the domain registrar is and where the Nameservers point to – we will delve into Nameservers a bit later. If all else fails and you can’t contact the person who has registered the domain, then you can contact the domain registrar and ask them how you can take back control of the domain. (They may require a letter in writing on a letterhead from your organisation). But as the domain has been registered some time in the last two years, hopefully you will be able to get in touch with the person who did it.
Now you need to decide to keep the domain hosting with that company or transfer it to another company. Most domain companies will allow you to transfer your domains to them for free (as they want your ongoing business). If you have a few different domains it’s a good idea to transfer them all to the one company, and you can even have them synced so that they all expire on the same day.
All in all, the domain should not cost more than $140 for 2 years, and you can get it for a lot cheaper than that.
Keep a record of everything you have just found out – it will come in handy for later.
A Web Presence for your Community Group
This is a series of posts about how to build a web presence for your community group using free or very cheap online tools that are simple to use.
I received an email a few weeks ago from a member of a community group. They had somehow ended up with two domains and two websites. They found my post on WordPress.com for your Domain and decided to email me out of the blue to see if I could help. I’m glad I could, so I thought it would make a good post. Then this week my Mum is building a website for a community group she is involved in, so I convinced her to try it the way I’m suggesting in these posts, rather than the old fashioned way of uploading a bunch of static HTML files.
I’m focusing on Community groups, because I am a member of a number of community groups and I also look after the websites for a few. With community groups I am also including sporting teams and associations, religious groups, not for profit groups and just general community focused groups.
The trouble with community groups is that people in the group come and go, and whilst there may have been someone who set up a website way back when, they are long gone and have taken all the info with them. And the site was probably set up on Geocities or some other equally horrible, outdated platform, and it’s full of static text and never updated.
So it’s time to leap headlong into the 21st century and rebuild or create your online presence. Think of your web presence as you would any other equipment your group has – it should be fully documented and minuted and someone should be designated to be in control of it. Once you have it all under control, don’t loose it again by letting someone walk away from the group with all the information in their head.
This series of posts will focus on the following:
- Getting a Domain Name
- Building a Simple Web Site
- Email for the Whole Team
- Events, Members lists and emailing members
- Other Handy Online Applications
I welcome any feedback on triumphs or disasters that you have had with setting up an online presence for your community group.
Selenium Locator Tips
I was writing this in an email to a client to I decided to make a post of it. When using Selenium for web testing (see my previous post on Selenium), these are the some tips I have found when creating Selenium Element Locators.
Element Locators are the way of finding the HTML element on the page to perform a Selenium action on. The Selenium reference for Element Locators can be found here and the excellent Selenium documentation here. Element Locators can be a simple as the name of the HTML element or a very complex XPath reference or you even may need to use a combination of different selenium commands on the one locator to perform an action to fire off a javascript event.
In a perfect world every HTML element on the page we are testing with Selenium will have a unique name or ID that we can always reference. Unfortunately, we are usually doing black box testing and have no access to the developer and need to work around the absence of unique names to find the correct elements. Also, some web coding systems like ExtJS recreate the element ID’s each time the application is run – which makes it difficult (see my previous post on working around this).
Below are my tips for the way to use Element Locators from the simplest to the most complex way. The simpler the element locator the less likely the test is to fail in future, and it is easy to read when coming back to the test later. Complex XPath elements may be required, but they may also be very fragile and one small change on the website may break the test in future. Note: This does not cover speed of locating the elements, there are many other blog posts about that – XPath may be slower, but sometimes it is the only way.
1. Direct Reference
Using one of the direct references to the HTML element via the Name or, the ID. This is the most straightforward way of finding the correct element.
Id=MyButton (note in this case, “Id =” is not even required)
Name=Description_Field
Value=ABC XYZ
Link=Contact Us
2. DOM or CSS
This is still very straightforward but can be a little bit harder to read next time you come back to it, and requires some knowledge of HTML and CSS. See the Selenium documentation for locating by DOM or locating by CSS for more information.
dom=document.images[0] (the first image in the page)
css=H1.topic (the first heading with the class name of topic) or css=h1.topic[value="Topic Index"] (the heading with the specific text)
3. XPath References
I would even divide this into 2 sections – simple and complex XPath References. My favourite XPath resources are the W3Schools reference and the Zvon Tutorials. There is also the great content and links in the Selenium Wiki
3a. Simple XPath
Relatively straightforward to compose and read later down the track.
//td[text()='My Cell Contents'] (the first table cell with the specified text) or even the very useful //td[normalize-space(text())='My Cell Contents'] (for finding text that is surrounded by spaces).
//p[contains(text(), 'My Para Contents')]
//div(@class=’MyClass’)
//input[contains(@id, 'myTextField')]
3b. Complex XPath
These may be necessary if there are no unique ID’s or names in elements nearby the element you need to click on. Try not to use the raw XPath that Selenium records with (See the great post by Browser Mob on this topic), but refine the XPath to be a bit more robust and readable in future.
Remember, when dealing with Xpath’s Firebug is your friend – and for advanced users, try the Xpath $X command in the Console in Firebug (as detailed in the Browser Mob post or here) . There is also XPather to help you find XPath queries.
/html/body/div[1]/div[5]/div/table/tbody/tr/td/p/a[3] (An example bad XPath – it will break as soon as the page layout changes a bit)
//td[contains(text()),'My Label']/following-sibling::td[2]/input (an un-named input box that has a known label 2 table cells away from it).
There are many more commands I could put here but they will not mean much except to the person who knows the website under test. I have used very complex Xpath expressions for finding even the most obscure of elements that do not have a unique name. Eg a text box on a Pop Up dialog that was actually just a series of Div’s. I found the Pop Up box’s Title, traversed up the DOM using the ../ command to find the Div containing the whole Pop Up box, then use // to search within that div for the specific text box (even using the search for the label trick above). It was the only way as even the label was not unique on the page.
4. Click and Mouse Events
Sometimes to replicate a specific Javascript event that occurs, there are a few tricks that need to be tried. The Javascript may not activate on the selenium Click event. It may actually activated on the Mouse Up Event. There is no way to know this except testing each different scenario (if you don’t have access to the developer, who may be able to help).
Some of the useful commands are:
- Click and ClickAt
- MouseDown and MouseDownAt
- MouseUp and MouseUpAt
- MouseMove and MouseMoveAt
- DragDrop (useful for moving slider bars that calls a JavaScript event to change a value when the slider is moved).
You usually need to use these in combination with each other.
eg doing a ClickAt, MouseDownAt and MouseUpAt in sequence on the same locator, may actually make the Javascript work, whereas a Click will not.
5. Keyboard and Coordinates
If all else fails (and believe me, sometimes it will), you may actually have to resort to using key press events on locators to get the right action (or even just to fill text into a stubborn text field).
Usually the Type command works fine, but there may be cases where the javascript is called after every single key press and you need to replicate that (eg like the Google search box that shows the results after each key stroke).
You can also go to the extreme of KeyDown and KeyUp – rather than the equivalent command of KeyPress as the Javascript may be called on KeyUp. Have a look at the great post by Nathanel Boehm on his efforts to use Selenium for keyboard commands to test a website for keyboard only accessibility – I thought this was a fantastic use for Selenium and shows just how powerful it is.
In the absolute worst case scenario you could use a ClickAt event with X,Y coordinates from the top left hand corner of the page. Fortunately, in all the extremely complex Selenium testing I have done, I have not had to resort to this method. I have found that even if it takes a while, there is usually a way to find the locator and work with it using one of the tricks listed above.
SBTUG WordPress Extravaganza
At SBTUG this week we are having a WordPress Extravaganza – everything you need to know about running WordPress as the CMS of choice for your business. My talk will showcase a few of the WordPress sites that I have done without having fantastic skills in CSS and PHP – see my Portfolio Page – and the great features available in WordPress.com, including how this very site was created for a total cost of US$10 / year (+ domain) – see WordPress.com for your domain. I will also talk about WordPress Themes, CSS, and the benefits of choosing a Premium Theme over a Free Theme.
CSS
Firstly, to create any website, you need to understand some CSS. It is well worth taking the time to learn the basics. After months of being too scared to touch the CSS in some of my sites, I decided the take the plunge and got Russ Weakly from Max Design to give me a day long crash course in CSS. For me it was well worth paying the money for a one on one course, but Russ is starting a series of CSS, Javascript and Accessibility courses soon, and I would highly recommend his courses to learn CSS. If you don’t want to do a course, there are some good web resources available and I would start with the W3Schools.com CSS Basics course. There is also CSSTutorial.net which also covers the basics. This is a good resource for showing how just changing the CSS affects the layout and structure of the site. No amount of CSS knowledge is going to benefit more than just playing. So start with Firebug in Firefox (or the IE Developer Toolbar if you have to use IE – it is Built into IE8 Developer Tools), or the Inspect Element command in Chrome. The great thing that Firebug (or the other tools) does is show you that CSS is just a series of boxes. And once you can understand that, then understanding CSS is a lot easier. These tools also allow you to test out changes, before committing your changes to your CSS file. Must Know CSS These are just a few of the CSS topics that I would recommend you need to know about.
And for some more advanced topics
And if you want to go the whole hog, the W3C CSS reference is not that difficult to understand once you know some of the terminology. http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS2/cover.html#minitoc
WordPress Themes
There are thousands of Themes for WordPress. They can be free or you can pay hundreds of dollars for Premium themes or even have one built especially for yourself (eg 99 Designs). The options are endless – and the choice is overwhelming. My suggestion is to just start somewhere, with a theme that you like the look of, but are just wanting to tweak a bit. That way there is less PHP tweaking and more just modifying the CSS. Also, using Firebug allows you to “steal” (sorry, borrow) ideas from other sites you like. I would also go down the path of buying a premium theme – one that costs up to say US$150 as the support will be worth it at some stage. One thing that you need to be aware of is that the CSS in these themes is usually based on a CSS framework (see below) or has a lot of extra CSS in there to cover the multiple theme options, or they have CSS elements applied via PHP, or worse still, they have 3 or 4 CSS files and you are not exactly sure where to change the CSS. This can be very confusing, and make a beautiful theme that you love, be very difficult to work with.
Some of the terminology around themes can also be confusing, such as Child Themes, Magazine Themes, Portfolio Themes, Theme Options, etc etc. Also themes can have built in options such as LightBox, Thumbnail creation, built in SEO features, multiple sidebars or zones etc etc. The only real way to work all this out is to try one and see how it works for you.
CSS Frameworks
Many Themes use CSS Frameworks. There are a heap of different Frameworks, but mostly what they do is set up a grid for you to work with (usually 950 or 960 pixels wide). You can usually tell if your theme is based on one of these frameworks if it has a Div named Container, as this is the very common layout of the white box on a darker background. One of the widely used CSS Frameworks is Blueprint, and you can see how the BluePrint grid works with this example http://www.blueprintcss.org/tests/parts/grid.html. There is also a basic video about Blueprint which is helpful to get your head around any type of grid based framework. Most of the Frameworks make use of the CSS construct of applying multiple classes to the one element. This is what happens with the “span-24 last” type syntax. The Span-24 class is applying the width of the box, and the “last” class is setting the right margin of the right hand column – usually to be zero pixels. Frameworks can be good, and easy enough to work with, and they give you a way of structuring your site that is at least going to look consistent with elements aligned to this invisible grid. However, if you want to control your site to the nearest pixel, you may not want to use a constrictive grid. Usually when you mess around with a grid, you will stuff it up and make it look ugly.
Base Themes
WordPress themes have become big businesses and there are a number of large Themes that are now base themes for many others. The biggest of the lot is of course, Thesis and another is Thematic.
Favourite Themes
The free theme that I used that is based on the grid framework is from Graph Paper Press and it’s called Modularity Lite. It was quite a good free theme, and there is the premium Modularity Theme also.
WordPress has an extensive gallery of Free Themes, but the choice there is quite overwhelming.
The Magazine Theme I used is Arthemia Premium from Colorlabs Project (also see JobSeekr by Michael Specht – his blog is Cutline Theme). Colourlabs have some great themes and the support is good also.
Other notable theme sites are Woo Themes (Craig Bailey’s Xen SEO site) , Elegant Themes (eg TechRepeater also by Craig Bailey) and Themeforest.
And last but not least, this site is the Vigilance Theme by ThemeFoundry, which just happens to be included in the themes offered in WordPress.com.
Some Media Coverage
Just a quick post as I like to keep track on my blog of other places I am mentioned.
I recently had an interesting experience of having an article and photo shoot done of me and my new Kindle featured in The Australian IT section. It was interesting to have my pic show up on the front page of the Australian IT website for a day. The article was good and the photographer did a great job and the end result was a great photo of the kindle with me in the background.
See the full article here.
The second bit of coverage is a video that I was in, taken at a Girl Geek event late last year. The video is talking about mentoring tips for younger women entering IT. As usual, I find all video’s of me to be horrible but once you have gotten over the horror of seeing yourself on video the first time, it gets easier.
The video is on the blog of the wonderful Catherine Eibner and can be seen here. I’m at 4min 25 seconds, but it is worth watching the whole video.
A day at the Tennis
As I sit here watching the final of the Australian Open 2010, it’s a great opportunity to write about my day at the Tennis on Monday.
I was very fortunate to be a guest of IBM as part of their Insight10 project. Insight10 is a group of 10 people who IBM have gathered to help them understand what is happening in small to medium business, so they can become more relevant to these businesses. The 10 of us will be blogging a bit over on the IBM Business Insight blog(and twitter feed). The day at the tennis was a great opportunity for 5 of the 10 of us to get to know each other over a casual and relaxed day out.
I’m not a huge tennis fan and have only ever watched a few big matches on TV (if I had to choose I would probably watch a good cricket match or game of golf before watching tennis). I had never seen a game of tennis played live before.
The day started with (soft) drinks in the IBM corporate tent (well, have a look at the pics and see for yourself – it was an impressive tent), and then went for a tour around Melbourne Park and underneath Rod Laver Arena, (but not in the areas the players were in). We go to see the bunker where the team from IBM run the IT at the event. It was great to see them very relaxed and sitting back watching sport (grid iron, not tennis) – as everything was obviously well under control.
Over lunch we had a Q&A with John Fitzgerald which was great. My question to him was, “As someone who has never seen the tennis live, what should I look out for that you don’t pick up on the TV”. His answer was that I would be amazed at the power with which they hit the ball – and I sure was.
After lunch we had a special treat especially for us geeks… whilst everyone else went out to see the tennis match, we had the pleasure of grilling two of the team that look after the Australian Open websites. These guys have a great job travelling around the world going to each Grand Slam, the US Masters Golf and the Tony Awards, where this IBM software is used.
Then we headed out to watch the tennis. Wow! Fantastic seats – 3 back from the court and in the corner near the baseline – and in the shade the whole day! We had two great games to watch – Djokovic vs Verdasco and then Williams vs Stosur. The first game went for 4 hours so it was fantastic to watch. The 2nd game only lasted 1hr and 5 mins but it was still amazing watching the impressive Serena Williams at close range.
The Tennis finished at about 7.30pm so we had a very long and full day. There is a great tweet and pic from the day here… (and I actually wasn’t tweeting, I was trying to work out how to MMS from the Android, but that is another long story)
Some of the things I learned on the day:
- The tech is very impressive. You can read more about on my Insight10 colleagues blog posts here, here and here, and in the article published in the Australian IT section the following day (the reporter was obviously part of our group).
- The amount of people required to run a tennis match is amazing – 2 sets of line people and ballkids (they swap every 30 mins or so), 1 umpire and 2 (or 4) players. So that’s 33 people just to play the match. Then there was 14 camera’s (some with 2 people running them, and they also swap out with new teams after a while), 4 stats people and various other people down on the court, not to mention the commentators, and other broadcast staff. There are 3 televised courts and 15 courts in play on the main tennis days – that all up is a huge amount of people.
- The stats are impressive. There are people on the court who manually enter every shot into a very basic (looks like an old VB app) application – they have keyboard shortcuts to make it quick. Every forehand, backhand, winner and fault is entered manually. The stat’s people also enter the scores, but the court umpire has a PDA like device that can override the score that the stats people enter. These stats and scores are then fed live to the broadcasters, the web sites, and the on court and off court displays. It is a very impressive feat to have all this happening instantaneously.
So I had a great day at the tennis and would very much love to go again – especially with the great experience of the corporate tent and the tour and lunch.
We also did some video Q&A for IBM so it will be interesting to see what comes of that – I will post a link in the comments when that is up. Thank you so much to Andrew Bidese and the team from IBM for a great day.
UPDATE: The video is now live and can be found here…
Swtiching to Android – Gmail Contacts
This is my first post about switching to Android for my primary phone. Whilst there are things I love about the iPhone, I just HATE the way it works with Gmail and I want the Android phone specifically for it’s gmail integration. The first thing I have to do, however is import my contacts into Gmail… and so the fun begins.
Last Christmas (2008), whilst working on my Mum’s computer I accidentally deleted her whole Outlook contacts list – 400+ contacts. As she was moving to Gmail anyway we decided to rebuild the contacts list from old backups and import them into Gmail. Well long story short, it took me about 3 days and I ended up having to manually edit all of the 400 contacts to get them to appear correctly in Gmail.
When Gmail when out of Beta in 2009 I could not believe it – how could they take it out of Beta when the contacts support was sooo bad! But, here I am and now I have to use Gmail for Contacts. My Mum loves having all her contacts in Gmail now and I can see the benefit.
My contacts were a complete mess… I had:
- 1300+ email addresses in Gmail, of which probably 200 are of any value.
- A very old outlook file with contacts that are probably mostly irrelevant
- 250 or so contacts from my phone that have shortcuts for names (generally only Initials or @twitter names) and the barest of minimum info like Mobile number only.
- My Mum’s family contact list from her Gmail, which I would like to have the contacts from
- My Gmail contacts are in a complete mess – some have names, some done.
- Some people could be in all 3 lists, and some could be in just one… it’s a mess.
- My phone also includes non people data such as bank accounts, ABN numbers etc – which I like to have handy in my phone at all times
A quick Google search on importing Contacts into Gmail says it’s easy – it’s just a few steps – export your CSV file from outlook, and Import into Gmail. But my past experience is that the fields just don’t match up. But Reading posts about things not going well does not fill me with confidence, and I agree with that post. Google needs to provide the definitive CSV list that will import 100% of data 100% of time. Outlook does a perfectly acceptable job of importing contacts, so why cant Google.
I found a great post last year with a guide to the full Google Contacts CSV file and another post that reveals the trick to importing Gmail Addresses by switching to the Old Version of Google Contacts (which is what I had to do last year). Thankfully, however, Gmail has improved a bit and I will NOT recommend using the Old Version trick as there are just too many issues with it not labelling details correctly. Gmail now has a great tool for finding Duplicate contacts, which really does help, but it is still not good enough!
(Note: I manually cleaned up all my contact lists in Excel but I think the Gmail duplicates would have done a great job of cleaning up my duplicates, but I wanted to do a really thorough clean-up).
So eventually I did get my 420 (yes, that’s all after the clean-up) contacts into Gmail. I had huuuge dramas getting them in there, and tried reading every post about the terrible “Oops. An unknown error occured while importing your contacts” message to no avail, as it seems that everyone’s issues were different. But here is a quick guide to getting it right, I hope:
- Use the full CSV File – See my version of the full CSV file, including notes on which fields to use
- Save as the DOS CSV file format
- Delete Suggested Contacts*
- Delete All Contacts*
- Delete any commas in the CSV file*
- Delete any reference to your email address in the CSV file*
- Ensure there are no non-blank cells in the CSV file!
* Whilst I can’t vouch for the accuracy of these fixes, for me it was the non-blank cells issue. Here’s how I fixed it. Select all the cells in your spreadsheet, hit F5 then click on Special…, choose Blanks. This selects all blank cells in your worksheet. Colour those selected cells any colour. Now go through your sheet cell by cell looking for any white cells that have no text in them. Click on that cell and hit the delete key, deleting the contents of that cell. Repeat this process by re-selecting and re-colouring until you are 100% sure there are no non-blank cells.
Oh and I did delete all my contacts – all 1300 of them that were in Gmail originally, but I’m now not convinced that was necessary (and I forgot to take a backup, so it was an enforced cleanup of my contacts in a way).
So if this long winded post helps at least one other person save a few hours of frustration, then it will be worth it. But Google really really really need to get their act together. Surely they could have an error message that tells you which contact it failed on, why it failed, and then import the others. Without this fix Gmail contacts is still completely crap and not worth dealing with unless you really really have to (or really really want an Android).
Update: As @trib just very rightly pointed out, if all I wanted to do was switch my already super organised contacts over from the iPhone (or any other device) into Gmail, then there are a number of Google Sync tools that may help. These did not help me because my contacts were in such a mess.
Too Many Gadgets?
If you know me, you know that I love my gadgets… but can there ever be too many new gadgets? I think I may have surpassed even my quest for new gadgets over this Christmas / New Year period. This is just a quick list of the new (or new to me) gadgets that I have been playing with / setting up over the last few weeks and next few weeks.
It did not really occur to me that I had a gadget problem until the gadget to end all gadgets came to me on New Year’s Eve. A wonderful and completely unexpected gift of a Kindle from two very beautiful friends. I was floored and so touched that all I could do was cry (yep, still teary now whilst writing this). All I can say is WOW! Thank You! Thank You! Thank You!
So here is the list…
Work Gadgets
- Dell Laptop – about 5 years old, and only 1GB of RAM, so it probably won’t last long… but lots of setup needed on it
- Nokia E51 – a decent business phone. The data doesn’t yet work and I haven’t synced it so still lots more setup to do
- Next week it will be setting up the new desk with extra monitor, docking station etc etc
Gadgets for Family (At least these were just set up and go, no further maintaining required)
- New TiVo
- New 24″ Widescreen Monitor
- New wireless keyboard and mouse
- New Kogan 10.4″ Digital Photo Frame
- And re-located and re-set up Router / Modem (although I did not have to do much set up on this one), Set Top Box and Old TV.
Gadgets for Friends – Yet to be set up
- Nokia 6120 – a good all round phone
- Telstra wireless home phone / answering machine bundle
- Skype Out (not technically a gadget, but something I need to set up)
Gadgets for me
- 2nd Hand HTC Magic, Android phone – have had it for 3 weeks now and have not really even played with it yet (Having owned 4 phones in 2009, and tried at least another 3, I’m a bit over phones at the moment)
- New Canon Pixma MX860 Printer
- New Vodafone 3G Wireless
- New Laptop (coming in 2 weeks time)
- My current Eee PC (which had some issues so needed some TLC)
- I’m still getting used to the iPhone which I’ve had for about 3 months and I still haven’t really set up my PC correctly since Windows 7 was installed
- and the New Kindle!!!!!
So the moral to this story is, if I ever ever say again that I NEED a new gadget, or my life will not be complete unless I have the latest phone that comes out… please remind me to re-read this post.
However, having said that, I can’t wait for all the announcements to come out of CES in the next few weeks, and I’m sure the perfect phone device is just around the corner…
Ah, there is no hope for me…
DVR’s – Why I choose TiVo
As a geek who uses windows, I often get asked why I have a TiVo DVR rather than use Windows Media Centre as a Home Theatre PC (HTPC). There are a number of reasons, which I shall try to explain.
Firstly, I do have WMC – it is one of my 3 dual tuner DVR’s that I have. I have my old faithful Toppy, my newer TiVo and now my main PC with Windows 7 Ultimate. As my Windows 7 box is in the office, not the lounge room, I don’t use it much for WMC use, and I’m still not convinced about it being a total TV watching solution. Here’s why.
About 5 years ago I first bought my Toppy – the Topfield 5000PVRt*. It was at the time, the best DVR out there, and I would still recommend it in certain circumstances. I also bought at the same time my beautiful Loewe CRT TV which is SD only and only has 3 rear Analog inputs, but it still have a great screen (speakers not so much). At that time Plasma was still very expensive and cheap LCD’s were not yet readily available. (If I was to buy now, I would probably buy one of the beautiful new LED TV’s).
* (Note that link shows a model with a 250GB HDD, mine has only 80GB).
So, I watch a lot of TV, and I don’t have Foxtel (I would watch waay too much TV if I had Foxtel). I have a friend who has Foxtel with the original Foxtel IQ box, so I have played with it quite a bit. The Toppy made so much of a difference to my TV viewing that I very rarely watch any live to air TV any more. Even if I am watching TV at the time, I will usually record it and start watching about a half hour in, so I can fast forward through the ads (there is no in-built ad-skipping on the Toppy* or the TiVo). And there are so many shows that you can just fast forward through most of it and just watch bits of – it makes TV viewing very time efficient. (*IceTV now says they have Ad Skipping).
A few years later the TiVo sort of came to Aus via the OzTiVo community and the first version of the WMC came out (years of watching Sex and the City and seeing Miranda’s TiVo love, meant that I knew I wanted a TiVo). I thought about dabbling in OzTiVo and did have a WMC on Vista, but I’m not a hardware geek, and I don’t want to build a box from scratch, and the WMC was a bit flaky. I want a reliable device that works all the time, records what I want it to record and just does TV. I don’t want to have to pull out a Keyboard and Mouse in the lounge room, and I don’t want to have to re-boot my TV viewing device on a regular basis (it may be better under Win 7, granted).
The Toppy worked with XP, I could link it to my PC, sort of link it up with IceTV, sort of transfer TV from the Toppy to the PC (it required so much effort to get it viewable on the PC, it was not really worth it), sort of watch photos on the TV. But when I switched to Vista it just stopped working, and I gave up. So I would just manually set recording times, like an old fashioned VCR, and rely on the substandard EPG available on FTA TV (Note: This has not changed. The state of the standard EPG’s in Aus is terrible).
But when the real, supported TiVo was released in Aus, I just had to have one. The fact that TiVo could learn what I liked and auto record TV for me, and record just by clicking on a show name in the EPG, and series record, and a 2 week in advance EPG were features that I had to have. I waited until it was a reasonable price ($610, but it is now in JB HiFi for under $500) and the Home networking kit was available (and did not cost $199).
So overall, I love AND hate the TiVo. It is still the best TV recording and watching experience out there (and still even better overall IMHO than Foxtel IQ). But things are changing on the DVR front and we now have new entries like PlayTV and the Telstra T-Box and PS 3′s new ability to watch IView.
Here is a Google Doc spreadsheet with some feature comparisons of the major devices, and some comments on the features I love and hate about each device. There is also a great comparison from IceTV here.
Overall, I recommend the TiVo as the number one choice for people who just want to watch and record TV and want a seamless plug and play experience. I recommend WMC (on Windows 7) to the Geek who wants full control over everything and is willing to spend the time setting it all up properly and does not mind having to reboot the PC occasionally. I recommend a Toppy to anyone who just wants a VCR upgrade and who wants to consume and delete TV. And I would recommend a PlayTV device to anyone who has a PS3 and does not yet have any of the other options (assuming the PS3 is already internet connected).
WordPress.com for your domain
I have just completed a bit of a revamp of my online presence. This was prompted by the repeated emails from Google about the closure of Google Web Pages (which I love as a simple web platform) – I had to do something to move my web site content. I have also had much more exposure to WordPress over the past few months and absolutely love it as a CMS platform. Finally, an excellent post from Kate Carruthers about your online presence finally prompted me to act.
My Website requirements are pretty simple. It is mainly a blog, a bit about me, how to contact me, and my Resume. I also had previously set up Google Apps for your domain (GAFYD) with my email and website. I never used any of the other GAFYD tools such as Calendar and docs as I use them already from my main gmail account.
I could have gone to a self hosted WordPress.org site but for my personal site I don’t really see the point in spending around $100 per year for hosting. That’s why WordPress.com is so great. And now they have made it even better!
You can now have your full domain linked to your wordpress.com site (for US$1o per year), so rather than http://blog.jodiem.com.au I can now map http://jodiem.com.au to my wordpress.com site. To do that you need to remove your current DNS hosting and let wordpress.com handle it. That is great, except for the email.
But WordPress.com now has email covered too! You can now use your wordpress.com hosting to link to your GAFYD email account! Brilliant! Now this is a full domain solution from worpress.com for US$10 per year. I would highly recommend this solution for any personal account or very small business. (See updated link below).
There are a few downsides to this approach, but they are not a big deal for me:
- I can no longer have subdomains for my other GAFYD services such as calendar.jodiem.com.au, but that is fine as I never used them anyway (and I can still access them through the google.com/a/yourdomain/ link).
- WordPress.com is still a bit limited in what you can do with it. I wanted to embed a google calendar on another wordpress.com site and they won’t allow embeds of anything other than the few specific things they will allow, like You Tube and Google Maps.
- You can chose to customise the CSS but that’s an extra US$15 per year and I found a great theme (Viligance, which has some customisation options) as part of the standard Themes gallery.
One small tip when setting this up is how to find your unique google verification string in GAFYD to re-verify the site ownership with wordpress.com. Twitter came to the rescue for this one, so here is how to find it:
- Log into GAFYD dashboard and click on Email
- Click on “Instructions on how to activate Email”
- Click on Change MX Records
- Click on Verify Domain Ownership
- Choose Upload a HTML file and the unique string will be there!
Easy when you know how!
Update! May 2010:
This is great! WordPress.com now lets you edit all DNS records for your domain. So now you can have sub domains like mail.jodiem.com.au etc. See the full details for this new feature here http://en.support.wordpress.com/domain-mapping/custom-dns/
+61 408 560 840
jm@jodiem.com.au
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