The Ask a Techo forum was created in October 2003 and ran until the Community closed in December 2004. Moderated by Peter (Shaggy) Shanks, it was very popular with newbies and techos alike. The forum also attracted lots of member contributed content and these are threaded throughout this article as well as the other articles on the site summarising the outcomes of the forum. Many thanks to all who contributed questions and answers.
Clippings from the forum...
Rosegarden 4 release 1 now available
http://www.rosegardenmusic.com/
Since no-one's had any problems of late, I've had plenty of time to indulge in extra curricular activities :-)
One of them is music, and I recently came across a pearl for Linux users which I just had to share: Rosegarden, which is a free, open source audio and MIDI sequencer, score editor, and general-purpose music composition and editing environment. Quite simply, the bee's knees. (Sound on Sound review it here)
I can't wait to enter a few bagpipe tunes...
What’s RSS?
RSS is a way for publishers on the Internet to let their readers know when there's new content available to be read.
Often an RSS feed takes the form of a headline with or without a few lines of text to let you know the gist of the article, and a link to the publisher's web site for the whole article. These are wrapped in special RSS tags (for a much better introduction to RSS I recommend RSS for non-techie librarians).
In its raw form, RSS is more suitable for programs to read than humans. Usually you would use a program known as a news reader/aggregator to convert the results to something friendlier, but there are clever work-arounds that allow you to see RSS on an HTML web page. For a comprehensive tour of RSS, see the links on the webreference RSS page.
Stephen Downes has a slightly more sophisticated answer to the question of what it an RSS and how do you get one started.
Using wav files/voice in Word
Q: The other night I was talking to someone who said that you can record a short wav file and then include it into Word. I've recorded a wav file using the Windows Sound recorder in Accessories but I couldn't figure how to paste it into word. Can it be done?
A: You didn’t say which version of Word you are using, but with Word 2003 its under the Insert menu > click Object and then scroll down and select wave sound.
You been able to embed sound in Word files since about Word 6. I think you will find its a similar process for most versions of Word.
Web page audio
Q: I'm thinking of presenting a language course online, for Asian students wanting to learn business English. I'd like to show text on a web page with linked audio. When the mouse pointer is clicked on the word, the spoken word would then come through the speaker. I don't have programming skills in Javascript and I'm busy developing course content so I wouldn't be able to undertake this project myself. I'd be looking to engage IT university students to do it as a way of keeping the cost down.
It would be helpful to know if its going to be a difficult task, with huge workload, or whether it could be done without too much trouble therefore reasonably inexpensively
A: QED (quite easily done :-)
I messed around for a while getting this to work, and then looked around for other people's solutions. Needless to say, theirs were a lot more elegant. See: Javascripter's How To Guide for a great short explanation.
How to remove pages from search engines
Q: An organisation I am associated with has been asked to remove information from a web page which we have done. However search engines are still coming up with the URL. While people cannot access the PDF file in question it is still accessible via html PLUS the details to be removed are still visible in the search engine blurb. How do we get rid of this?
A1: This is a new one, I'm usually trying really hard to get pages included rather than removed, but I looked around and found a short description on how to remove pages from the Google cache , it's mostly for plain HTML, but includes an interesting link for removing a specific URL. As far as I know Google is the only engine which caches PDF files, so taking the URL out of their directory should see you out of the woods. Good luck
A2: If you want to protect certain files or folders in the future try this "robots.txt" trick as well (from the Google remove page):
"To prevent Google and other search engines from crawling your site, place the following robots.txt file in your server root:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
"This is the standard protocol that most web crawlers observe for excluding a web server or directory from an index. More information on robots.txt is available here: http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/norobots.html ."
A3: The robots.txt trick is a nifty one. You should note that the example Google gives actually tells every obedient robot (and not all are, in particular the Perl spiders operated by spammers trawling for email addresses) to ignore *everything* on your site. The URL above is a pretty good tutorial on using the Robot Exclusion Standard.
If you're extra keen on geeking out, it's worth keeping mind that if you have areas of your site which aren't public and aren't protected through some sort of authentication or password, robots.txt files can be a good way of letting people what you don't want them to see. All the inquisitive web surfer has to do is look at your robots.txt to see that mikessite.com.au has /secretstuff and /notforpublicviewing, and hence is provided with an easy map. Not a big deal if your security is up to scratch, but a quick road to embarrassment if you're just relying on things being hidden.
It's worth considering the robots META tag with its noindex,nofollow attributes as an alternative, since it does pretty much the same thing - tell well-behaved robots to move along without picking up the page.
Compressing audio files for web delivery
Q: I put some audio files (avi format) onto our online course however the files were too large and took too long to download for dialup users. Removal of these audio files restored download time to an acceptable level. I would like to restore these audio files and would like to know what the industry standard is to do this and still achieve acceptable performance - i.e. what compression format is best to use for this purpose, traps involved etc. Comments on experiences could be helpful. Thanks
A1: I reckon you should do it in Flash. Do you have a Flash developer? Flash will export your audio files as mp3 in a swf file. In my opinion, given that Flash can play just about any media now days, you would do well exporting all your multi media as swf so that your clients are only expected to have one plug in installed to the browser, that being theh flash player.
A2: I think your best bet here is MP3 encoding. There are several shareware and freeware encoders available, a search on Tucows should turn up a bunch of them to pick from.
AFA tips and traps: audio only needs to be encoded as a mono track, and the lowest bitrate per second will probably be acceptable (8kHz at 8 bits is about telephone quality, 11kHz is noticably better, and not too much more expensive in file size).
Autorun software for Power Point Presentations
Q: I have set up a few learning tools in MS PPNT for tool identification. The latest one is linked to a self test created with "Teaching Templates". The trouble is, when I burn the package to a CD for in house learning with a group of trainees, there are several folders and files on the CD. No problem for one who knows which folder to open, but it takes a while to get all the trainees onto the right track.
Is there an autorun tool out there that would self-launch the PPNT presentation so the Trainees can get on with the task?
A1: http://www.see-search.com/webdesign/cdautorun.htm
The autorun at this location is simple to configure, and can be used on a range of file types. It should be left in the root directory of the CD.
A2: Nice link Paul - looks like a winner. I've also used a piece of freeware made by Ashzfall which works a treat. http://www.ashzfall.com/products/autorun/
Getting your photos to load in order on a web page
Q: When preparing images for a web page prior to uploading, how can I name the images so they 'load' on the page in the correct order? That is, from the top of the page to the bottom, when the page is viewed on the net by another user.
I have tried numbering the pages in ascending order as they descend the page, but that only works marginally well. As long as the first few images load first I would be happy. Is it something to do with the size in KB of the image, or is their something else I am missing here?
A: I'm afraid you're in the hands of the web browser software when it comes to what order graphics are loaded in. Typically IE will load the smaller images first, but there's no hard and fast rule for this.
There is a trick you could employ called 'pre-loading' which works by inserting the images on an earlier page, but telling the browser they are only 1 x 1 pixel (it will appear as a dot and the visitor won't even know it is there). The browser caches the image. When the visitor arrives on the page with the large image, it appears almost immediately.
There's also some javascript which will not display *any* part of your page until all graphics are loaded, but I don't recommend it - why make your visitors wait?
Animated gifs – where do they come from?
In the beginning there were emoticons made up of keystrokes. Then came ‘smilies’. Now the ether is seemingly overrun by animated gifs.
Some people find them annoying – others are totally addicted. However, there’s no doubt there’s something cute about those little moving graphic ‘thingys’.
There's loads and loads of places you can get them from, but here are just a couple of faves...
http://www.gifanimations.com/index.jsp - a pretty good collection of nice animated graphics, arranged into categories to make it easy to find things.
http://www.animationlibrary.com - another huge collection of nice animations.
Oh... and the other day I was told about http://smileygenerator.wenpigsfly.org - it's a make your own smiley thingy! I just haven't had time to give it a try yet.
Of course, you can always save the ones you see in other people's messages... just do the right-click/save thingy...
Looking for a cheap or free chat?
I know, I know… Talk is cheap. But did you know it can also be completely free?
That’s right, you can chat online for free if you want.
Moodle chat is great – free, simple, clean and very practical. It has pictures that, although a very simple feature, really add the human touch.
Another alternative is Compued voice (very affordable monthly pricing) - an excellent tool for community building.
If you're not running your own web site you could try Talk City, but you don't get a lot for free.
There are plenty of scripts you could run if you have your own server. The easiest would be something like Parachat, but if you've got some programming experience there are plenty of others.
