This is what prompted me to write frigtool, a little application that takes a desired image width and height, then searches out some random flickr photos, scales them randomly, then crops a random region matching the desired width and height, finally outputting the image for saving. You’re unlikely to ever get the same image twice, even if the same source image is used.

To make it all a bit more interesting, I also wanted the ability to provide a few tags to refine the content of the images selected, as well as the ability to specify whether it should be my flickr photos that get used, or those from other flickr users who mark their photos with a suitable Creative Commons licence.

I have made it available for all to use via my website at http://www.jamescaws.com/frigtool/.

I envisage it being useful for designers who need to quickly obtain dummy filler images of a specific dimension to insert into a mock design. There are probably a heap of other uses for it too that I can’t think of — let me know in the comments below how and why you use it.

If you think the maximum image dimensions you can provide are a little on the tight side, this is because larger images would require a large original image to be obtained from flickr in the first place, which not only slows down the generation process, but also eats up my bandwidth. Depending on how much the utility gets used, I might eventually transfer it to another server with less bandwidth restrictions, at which point I’ll allow larger images to be generated.

Please use this post’s comment facility to report any bugs, provide suggestions or simply let me know how you find it performs.

I hit Google and searched on his name. The snippet returned in the search results read:

Richard Paul “Rick” Astley (born 6 February 1966, Newton-le-Willows, Lancashire) was an English singer-songwriter and musician. Astley was married to…

WAS an English singer-songwriter. WAS married to. Surely if Google had indexed the page then it must have been around for quite a while on Wikipedia and must therefore be true?

I clicked through to the Wikipedia page to find that there was no mention of his death, nor any mention of a return to the Top 100 either. The uncited update of his death in Germany clearly didn’t sit well amongst Wiki moderators and proved to be yet another celebrity death hoax, one of a number to come into fruition since Michael Jackson’s death just 4 days ago.

A couple of things that struck me about this rumour, as I am sure happened with previous such hoaxes as well as the real stories of celebrities passing, was the sheer virality of it (top trending topic on twitter within a short period of time) and most of all how quickly, unless it was just coincidence, Google indexed the Wiki page.

Was the quick visit from a Google indexing bot down to Google monitoring page interest in real time, or as a result of some collaboration with twitter where by trending topics are shared directly with Google on a frequent basis, prompting them to prioritise indexing of related pages? Sounds like the stuff of SEO dreams whatever the case if you ask me.

UPDATE: An hour on and a Rick Astley search now returns yet another updated Google snippet, this time reading:

Richard Paul “Rick” Astley (born 6 February 1966, Newton-le-Willows, Lancashire) is an English singer-songwriter and musician. Astley is married to producer…

Google really does love Wikipedia. Or Rick Astley.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/SwanseaJobs

For a user without basic HTML experience, I think using the Feed43 system might prove a little tricky, however for those with some mark-up knowledge, they should find the pattern matching mechanism quite powerful, resulting in more accurate feeds than those generated by the other sites I listed, FeedYes and Feedmaker, if indeed they could even manage to produce a feed in the first place.

For those interested in how I set-up the RSS feed, the Swansea jobs page is located at http://www.swansea.gov.uk/jobs. Using this as the source page address at feed43.com, I set-up the following item (repeatable) search pattern to pull out each job listed on the page:

<p ALIGN="left"><b>{*}
<a name="{%}"></a> {*}
{%}<br>{*}
{%}<br>{*}
{%}<br>{*}
{%}<br>{*}
{%}</p>{*}
<p>{*}

The text matched and extracted using {%} is added to a list of per-item search results, whereas {*} matches are discarded. This therefore allowed me to set my RSS item titles as {%2} (the job title), the link template as http://www.swansea.gov.uk/jobs#{%1} and the content as

{%5}<br />
<br />
{%6}

Unfortunately the HTML mark-up of the jobs page is not perfect which results in an invalid portion of content in many cases. I know that Feedburner has an option to make feeds validate, so this is one of the reasons why I have piped the resulting feed through the Feedburner service.

Over all I found the Feed43 system quite straight forward to use and it also has some nice little extras too, such as being able to email a summary of the feed name, feed URL and URL for editing to a designated email address for reference. Well worth a go if you want to keep tabs on new jobs or other regularly updated items on a static web page that does not offer a RSS or Atom version to subscribe to.

What I am most looking forward to is their monthly audio slideshow by one of their own photographers, explaining how they approached the assignment. As a person who enjoys taking photos, but who has never attended a class or fully interacted with a professional photographer, sometimes you wonder how the professionals would do it, what settings they might opt for, or what kind of lens they would use, and these monthly videos promise to give a good insight into how it’s done. Just as a result of watching their June audio slideshow by Sarah Lee, I have learnt a few interesting points.

Anyway to the point of this post. I simply cannot stand trying to build websites on Windows and will always fight to get SSH access to a host when necessary. Having previously worked directly from and on a Linux based machine, I became quite attached to multiple desktops and Xterm. Being able to group Xterm windows on their own desktop was mighty handy. Xterms are so clean and simple in my opinion too, they make coding a pleasure.

For some time I have been using PuTTY Tray to connect into remote servers in order to work. It got to the point a few weeks ago though where having several separate PuTTY windows open was making my Windows task bar a mess and alt-tabbing between them was a massive pain in the arse. I set out to find a decent program that would allow grouping of multiple windows or applications in the one frame. I found many possibilities, but most had their fair share of issues or down-sides. Eventually I came across WinTabber. It’s a relatively small application, nothing fancy and it also has native support for PuTTY. I’ve been using WinTabber to house all my active PuTTY connections for a couple of months now and I have to say I’m very happy with it.

So with my terminals grouped, the only other thing left to do to make my PuTTY interface seem more like Xterm was to find a suitable Xterm style font. Now, this might be an easy task for someone with access to a machine that has Xterm installed with its native font, but I don’t have such access at present and even if I did, I would struggle to find the font in the first place. I spent some time searching the Internet for the name and/or an actual copy of the Xterm font, wishing it to be in True Type Font format, but had no success. Eventually I discovered the font ProggyCleanTT which lead me to the developer’s website where there are a range of programmer’s fonts to download. I’m very pleased to say, that set at 12-point, ProggyCleanTT is a darn good substitute for whatever the Xterm font is.

WinTabber + PuTTY + ProggyCleanTT = one very acceptable Windows based Xterm when you are working over SSH on a Linux based machine and can’t be bothered with all the extras of Cygwin.

There’s no predicting when something undesired may happen to the data stored in your MySQL database. It could be as a result of human error, such as updating a whole bunch of records with a value instead of just one, or it could come down to hardware or software issues resulting in corruption of data. Whatever the reason, whilst a lot of hosting companies provide automatic backups of your files and databases, some do not or they only provide you with the facility to do it manually. In terms of accessing automatic backups made by the host, sometimes they can only be retrieved through a support ticket or phone call which can delay getting things back to how they were.

With these issues at the forefront of my mind when I carried out a project recently, I set about searching for a PHP based, Open Source tool that would perform backups of multiple MySQL databases and allow the easy recovery of data if required. My research led me to phpMyBackupPro.

phpMyBackupPro is a feature rich solution that would probably satisfy the demands of the majority of those looking for a MySQL database backup tool. It allows the backup of multiple databases that do not necessarily have to be on the same machine. This is ideal for service providers who want to backup multiple MySQL databases on behalf of more than one client whose hosting is distributed. Generated backup files can automatically be FTP’d to a remote server or sent via email, a critical factor when performing backups to safeguard against data loss if the server itself breaks down completely. An easy to use interface is provided for browser based management, but there is also the option of administering it via command line which ultimately means that it can be scheduled in cron or as a system service to operate automatically, thus meaning you do not have to remember to set it off however often you wish to perform a backup.

For a full list of features and to download a copy, visit the phpMyBackupPro web site.

The search engine bots that crawl the Internet looking at web sites and analysing their content consider a link from one web site to another as a recommendation, much like in the real world when a person verbally tells another person about a product or service. The more people who talk about a company, their product or service, in essence the more important that company, product or service is deemed as being. Putting aside that in the real world a person could actually be bad-mouthing a company, the generated hype is seen as positive from the subject’s point of view as it generates interest in them and if you heard lots of people talking about something, you’d probably consider it interesting too. The job of the search engines is to promote links to web sites that are considered relevant and interesting, for good or bad reasons (within reason), to a topic. They see and interpret such cyber chit-chat (linking) much like us humans hear and appreciate buzz around a subject in day-to-day life.

Whether your site is ranking top of the search engine results pages or not, inbound links are good for a number of reasons, including:

1. The vote system talked about above. Whether you are top of the pile or not, a link to your site is generally a vote in your favour. If you are top of the search engine results pages for a particular term, a link will simply help to reinforce your dominance. If you are some way down, the extra link should help to boost your position a little.
2. Even if the search engines don’t consider the vote very worthy, a link is a link and when it comes from another web site, it is extra exposure of your web site on another web site from a human perspective. You never know how well another page ranks for a particular search term and who is looking at it, so if that page is popular in its own right and a user sees your link they might click on it. SEO is not just about ranking high on search engine results pages, it is about increasing traffic to your site over all, never forget that.

We know that inbound links from external web sites are important for at least two reasons, but just who is linking to you and more importantly, who is linking to your competitors?

A useful took that I use is the Yahoo! Site Explorer. By entering in the URL of any web site on the Internet, be it yours or that of your competitors, you can quickly and easily get an idea of who is linking to the web site. By then visiting the sites that link to your competitors, you can gauge whether or not they are suitable sites to link to your site. It may be that some inbound links to a competitor’s site come from a subsidiary company web site or the web site of a friend. Naturally you’d be hard pressed to get a link from them, but this practice of link exploration often reveals suitable directories and on-topic web sites on the Internet that you may not previously have known about. Links from such new found sources are a great way of generating traffic to your site, either directly or indirectly. The more on-topic or respected the site linking to you is, the better.

Link building is not something that can be rushed. Not only can it take a long time to find suitable sources for links, but it may be the case that a sudden, sharp increase of links to your site may be considered by the search engines as a little suspicious, especially if you’re not receiving links from more of the well respected web sites on the Internet. Arousing such suspicion may result in a small penalisation, but that’s not a known. Nevertheless, a slow and steady approach should be adopted to keep things real.

Whilst many web site hosts and Internet Service Providers offer an email hosting service, businesses sometimes end up feeling tied to the provider even when things go bad because they know that if they change to another company, it could involve a lot of disruption and hassle, not just with their email but with their web site hosting or office Internet connection too. This is why many businesses choose to stay and suffer with their existing provider, even if it means sub-adequate service and higher costs. Using a quality, reliable and independent provider for your valuable email service is vital.

Enter Internet giant Google. You may or may not have heard about their offering called Google Apps. This solution can only be described as a God send for small businesses. Encompassing a selection of their most successful products, Google Apps allows small businesses to easily carry out some of their most important IT related tasks absolutely free of charge and with the option of using the business’s own domain name to maintain a professional appearance.

Included in the Google Apps suite of products are:

• Gmail for email
• Google Docs for basic web browser based administration of common Office documents
• Google Calendar
• Google Sites for simple web site creation (it is very restrictive though)
• Google Talk, for cheap phone calling via the Internet and instant messaging

Two plans are available, a standard free edition and a paid-for premier edition. Unless your business is planning on expanding to dizzying heights, the features of the free edition should suffice even the slightly hectic of small businesses.

With the free edition you get the standard Gmail features that include:

• 6 – 7GB of storage space (a figure that is continually growing)
• Ability to access email via POP or IMAP protocol, in addition to the very attractive and useful web based interface and Google Mobile site
• Auto/vacation responders
• The option of in turn downloading email from other POP email accounts
• Google’s impressive reliability
• Email filtering

Whilst it is possible to define a business email address as the sender address of a standard Gmail account, the primary Gmail address still gets transmitted with the message and in some software the message then gets displayed as being sent by “you@yourbusiness.com on behalf of you@gmail.com”, which slightly defies the point of using an alternative sender address to preserve anonymity.

By signing up via Google Apps, Gmail works based on your domain, so when you send an email from you@yourbusiness.com, the email will be displayed to your recipient as being sent by you@yourbusiness.com.

I am inclined to say that Gmail from your own domain is by far the most useful feature of Google Apps for a small business. However, increasingly more users are coming round to the idea of also using Google Calendar and Google Docs for other business administrative tasks when comparing the cost of using them (free) to the cost of proprietary software such as Microsoft Office.

Migration to using Google Apps for your email, that is transferring all your existing email and contact lists, is relatively straight forward and help is provided via Google help pages.

Moving to use Google Apps is a move well made in my opinion. The extra freedom this gives you in the future to move ISP or web hosting company makes it all worth while, if the Gmail service alone isn’t enough of a benefit to your small business.

Whilst the move to using Google Apps for email is relatively straight forward, it does involve a certain degree of DNS configuration and in some cases a trick or two in order to transfer old emails to the new account. I have successfully set-up and configured Google Apps for a number of small businesses, so if you wish to make the move and require the assistance from someone who has experience with making the switch, please contact me.

Wordpress is open source, and therefore available free of charge, dramatically reducing web site development costs. Many of the features it provides are exactly the same as those you would find in top of the range paid-for solutions and the majority of most advanced features that are perhaps not included as standard, can be added with ease from the extensive repository of open source plug-ins that are again, free.

Wordpress initially started out as a dedicated blog platform. Whilst it now adapts and works very nicely as a generic web site content management system, it still retains the blog functionality as well, so it is perfect for making announcements and updating web site visitors with the latest news and developments.

This very web site is built on Wordpress.

If considering a new web site and it’s one that doesn’t need all the bells and whistles of an ASX50 company but does need to offer a level of content management, Wordpress is probably the solution. Despite the software itself being free of any price tag, there are a few ingredients that make up the whole Internet presence experience that do attract a cost, namely:

• A domain name so that the web site can be found, for example joesbakerysupplies.com
• A suitable place to store the web site so that it can be accessed publicly, most commonly referred to as web site hosting

Neither of the above need be expensive. Domain names usually cost around AU$15 per year of registration, though that depends on the extension, for example .com/.com.au/.net and so forth. You may already have a domain name though, so no worries there. Hosting companies are ten-a-penny, but for those based in Australia you might like to consider GD Webhosting, who currently host this website.

Wordpress is a PHP based system, so I am available to:

• Install and configure it
• Modify and customise it for your needs
• Create or modify Wordpress themes, also referred to as the web site design

In addition, I can also obtain and register a suitable domain name, and source and set-up web hosting if required. You might say I can do it all for you.

Please feel free to contact me whatever your Wordpress or web site requirements are.

Whilst looking for a suitable, cross-platform image manager the other day for a Linux project I am considering undertaking, I came across the Google quick-tour video for Picasa 3. I watched the whole 5 minute presentation with intrigue and excitement.

I immediately wanted to put it to the test and so downloaded and installed it on my Windows Vista machine.

I have photos scattered across a number of drives, primarily on my local hard disk and then backed up on a separate USB drive. I have traditionally stored photos in folders named after the day they were transferred, for example 2009-01-25, so that folders are ordered correctly when browsing. Of course this doesn’t make life very easy when trying to recall photos for a particular event where the date has been forgotten. As Picasa 3 scanned my system I was impressed to find it automatically grouping folders together by year and then ordering by most recent to oldest. In a few cases it got it wrong, but that’s presumably because I’ve moved files around and somehow file dates have been adjusted. Overall though, I was impressed with this grouping, ordering and presentation, so a big tick from me. I have since started to rename my folders with more meaningful titles.

With all my photos organised, I got about playing. The interface is pretty cool and I like the scroll-bar on the right and how it feels like it is attached to a piece of elastic, scrolling faster in either direction vertically the further you pull it. What I also like is how the main folder details and functions remain at the top of a folder whilst that folder is in view and then once you have scrolled on to the next folder, the details of that one take over (hard to explain, but try it and see).

Picasa 3 has a good selection of common image enhancement and editing features. We’re not talking Adobe Photoshop complex, but more than enough in my opinion for your point-and-shoot user, from basic fixes such as red-eye and straightening, through to tuning light levels and adding a few effects, all of which are very easy to apply. As mentioned in their quick tour video, original files are not modified, instead Picasa 3 logs changes in a text file and then when you view the photo through the software, it applies the appropriate changes at that time. It is possible to apply and save the changes to the actual file as well though, back-ups of the original are kept in a sub-directory.

Geo-tagging photos is done in conjunction with Google Earth. In my opinion it can be a little labour intensive, not just for the person doing it but for the computer as well, but it is relatively painless nonetheless.

Probably my favourite feature and service of Google Picasa 3 though, is the integration with Google Picasa Web Albums. Directly from the software where you manage and organise your photos on your own machine, you can opt to synchronise any folder or folders you wish with their online service. Being obsessed with file backup as I am, I absolutely love this feature because it means that as well as having my original images locally, at the click of a button I have the folder backed up remotely. Should the worst ever happen and I somehow lose all my local copies, at least I know somewhere out there on the ether, Google has copies. There are a number of options when it comes to syncing, including folder privacy and image resolution. By default I currently have all my folders unlisted, i.e. only viewable to me and individuals I select, and I have also set the max resolution to 1600 pixels wide, this allows faster uploading and means I won’t be consuming my free 1GB storage allowance too soon, not least until I have saved up $20 to purchase 10GB of extra storage for a year!

For Windows Vista users who hate as I do the truly ridiculous slide-show feature that is so slow to operate, Google Picasa 3 can become your default image viewer, and trust me it works at light speed compared to the Windows version.

Picasa 3 in my opinion is a really cool piece of software, even more sweeter because of the usual Google price-tag of $0. The fact it is available for most common operating systems, including Mac and Linux, is excellent too.

For all the positives, I do have four gripes:

• If you have already sync’d a folder with Picasa Web Albums, if you move photos to another directory that is already sync’d, the Picasa software re-uploads the images to the new Web Album. It is my belief that it is not too difficult for Google to put something in place that knows when image_xyz.jpg is being moved from folder ABC to DEF, it is the same image and doesn’t require re-sending to the server. It’s not so bad for one image, but when you decide to combine a folder of several hundred images with another, it can be a little frustrating having to wait for the images to be re-sent to the new folder and then having to visit the Web Albums site to remove the old album.
• When you decide to save edits to images (permanently), Picasa keeps a backup of the original files. I completely understand why and I think it is a good idea, but I would prefer it if it was optional, because personally in some situations if I am committing to saving my changes I don’t want a doubling up of files on my hard disk.
• Whilst it is possible to set a directory as Public, Un-listed or Sign-in required to view, when it is uploaded to Web Albums, it doesn’t appear to be possible to set such privacy levels on a per-image basis. This is a shame and probably the main feature lacking that would if available convert me from Flickr to Web Albums. In some cases I have multiple hundreds of photos for an occasion, let’s say Christmas. I don’t want all my Christmas photos available to the public. I could create a public and a private directory for the purposes of Web Albums, but from the point of view of my local file system structure, it is a less favourable solution.

My final gripe is not really a gripe I suppose, it is perhaps an inexplicable disappointment with myself though. Why is it that I suddenly become enamoured with almost anything and everything Google produces?!