I’m going over the data at the site and its amazing stuff,
the main page has lots of statistics which is shown in a new way,
the gapminder app shows the data at what i think is a 4 dimension way,
it shows x and y axis stats, and another axis represented as the size of the balls in the demo,
and how they grow over the 4th dimension – time.

Amazing stuff.

Gapminder

This is the main stats app:

you can see the advance of the bubbles over the x and y axis,
the z axis is represented with the balls size,
and its all advancing in time.
this default presentation shows Life expectancy over income per person, over population size.

wonderful demo.

Marriage Statistics

This great demo shows you the connection between women age at marriage and the amount of kids they have,
on of the things this tool does best is break myths.
I was under the impression that in Europe – Sweden for example, the marriage age went down,
and with it the number of kids in the family,
but from this graph you can simply see that the number of kids in a family went drastically down over the last 100 years, but the marriage age went drastically up only in the last 30 years,
ans the same behavior can be seen for the US as well.

Now for the good news.
you cannot upload your own stats to the gapminder app directly,
but Google supplies a very similar tool through its Google documents apps.
Its called motion chart and on the gapminder site you can read the short or the long explanation to how to use the tool, after testing it the outcome can be inserted into any web page and it looks something like this:

I’m still exploring this Google motion chart app,
and my main concern is that it can only be embedded in a live web page,
I still need to find a way to have this presentation as a file on my laptop, to show even if I’m not connected to the net -
If anybody knows how to do that – leave a comment here please

Technorati Tags: google, statistics

These are some of the questions bothering web masters and site owners all the time,
here are some tools and readme’s that will:

• test your site
• find bottle necks
• measure performance from the outside
• get tips for fixing the problem areas in your site
• and knows list of issues every site is suffering from

so lets start with online freeware tools and external web site test tools.

Check if your Google Analytics is working well in your site

Who is watching the watchman?

first thing to check – are you getting the accurate statistics from your site?
is your Analytics account configured well?
are you even really using one?

SiteScan™ is a diagnostic tool from EpikOne that verifies if your Google Analytics (GA)
Tracking Code is installed properly on your website.

This scan will go over each page and verify that the Google Analytics code is embedded correctly to each of your page, this can help you diagnose if your bounce rate is high because the Analytics cant see their next click,
or maybe you should really work on your site design.

How does my code looks like from the browser?

From the firebug download page:

Firebug integrates with Firefox to put a wealth of development tools at your fingertips while you browse. You can edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page..

This is the basic tool to verify your code as it seen from the browser side,
you can click a specific element on your page, and get a list on the right pane window of firebug,
of all the css code that is effecting this element, even if the code span multiple css files.

Why is my page so slow?

the yslow tool from yahoo will go through the elements of your page,
and by using a preset list of rules, it will tell you which parts of the website you should fix,
and what to fix.

The yslow firefox plugin needs the firefox firebug installed first.

If you want to learn more deeply on the reasons behind each of the testing rules yahoo though about you can read the very informative document from yahoo about “Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Web Site”

Feed Validator

Get your rss feed validated

AOL webpagetest

from the AOL web page test:

Pagetest allows you to provide the URL of a webpage to be tested. The test will be conducted from the location specified and you will be provided a waterfall of your page load performance as well as a comparison against an optimization checklist.

Technorati Tags: apache, google, php, wordpress

After you have played with the main look you can generate the files and download a zip file which contains these files:

• style.css
• reset-fonts-grids-tabs.css
• index.php
• header.php
• footer.php
• sidebar.php
• comments.php
• searchform.php
• search.php
• archive.php
• page.php
• functions.php
• screenshot.png
• images/bg_overlay.png
• images/bg_gradient.png

Or you can download each file seperatly.

This gives you the basic structure for a working wordpress theme, from here you only have left to customize as you wish.

Technorati Tags: theme, wordpress

Starting from the begining:

what is mediawiki?

MediaWiki is free server-based software which is licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL). It’s designed to be run on a large server farm for a website that gets millions of hits per day. MediaWiki is an extremely powerful, scalable software and a feature-rich wiki implementation, that uses PHP to process and display data stored in its MySQL database.
Media wiki site

Media wiki also saves the versions of the updated files – allowing for easy reverts and versioning of edited files.

The largest sites using medaiwiki:

Design matters

Wiki website doesn’t have to have the MediaWiki standard look,
you can design the look and feel either manually to suite the corporate guidelines or with existing skins.

Novelle’s wiki site:

marvel.wikia.com:

Extensions

Extensions are compilations of PHP code that add new features or enhance functionality of the main MediaWiki core. Extensions are one of the main advantages of MediaWiki. They give wiki administrators and wiki end-users the ability to adapt MediaWiki to their requirements.

The extensions can add capabilities like:

• Embed videos (YouTube)
• WhosOnline – shows you who is currently logged in to your wiki
• Allow embedded flash
• Iframe – to load pages from other site in your wiki page
• Convert to pdf
• Images preview popup window

Integrate into the Organization

• Email address
• Real name
• Nickname
• Language

First steps with editing wiki pages

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki_User%27s_Guide:_Editing_overview

This simple editing tutorial will show you the basic step in editing a new wiki page:

• headings
• lists
• links

Technorati Tags: Linux, mediawiki, php, wiki

Well finaly I joust found this great intro to wordpress theme writing,
it’s simple, written for beginners, and explains the basics of what blog template writing is all about.

Matt’s post explains what the loop is – which from what i gather – a simple query that collects all the relevant posts to show,after first calling it with the first line:

<?php if ( have_posts() ) : while ( have_posts() ) : the_post(); ?>

now you start dropping the other wp blocks into place just like lego:

the title,
the date,
the content

and thats it – now the loop will just drop these 3 again for the next post, until it runs out of posts.

From matt’s post:

There have many concerns and question about the template system used in WordPress. Mostly the concerns are with n00bs and the complications of PHP. “I want to change this and that, but don’t know PHP”. I hear this a lot. But the thing is, you don’t need to know PHP to change the Templates in WordPress.

so thanks Matt for helping me to finally understand what its all about

Anybody writing a blog or editing a web site knows the importance of SEO for its search engine ranking, search engine optimization is second in importance to a good page content alone.
The words are arranged in the site, the headlines, the page title, meta tags and other on page elements can affect the site’s search engine ranking and basically -- count for how many people will see the page at all.
Like the old saying -- Its not just what you say, its how you say it.

And that’s where Matt Cutts comes into the picture,Matt works for Google search engine group for a long while now and has many insights into how Google ranking works and what to do if you want to be part of the top 10.
These are a couple of great videos featuring Matt, where he explains and shows many examples as he reviews specific sites for the good and bad elements in the sites SEO wise.

Another great lecture from Matt, although a little old -- and yet still very relevant is the SEO for wordpress lecture which is really worth the time spent listening to,
In his Blog Matt gives many links to those who don’t want to listen the full hour it takes,
starting with the power point from the lecture, through a full transcribe of the talk, and even a shorter summery for the full lecture.

Basically since I have started to follow these guidelines,
my web site traffic has doubled itself and that’s the best incentive I can offer to sit and watch the 2 videos as long as they are, so go on and watch them, you’ll thank me later…

Technorati Tags: google, SEO, wordpress

In Apache you have a specific module called mod_ldap which allows you to use the Active Directory as an authentication server for your users,
so you can create a secure wiki branch for each department users.

To setup the apache server to use Active Directory as access manager you will need to make sure the mod_ldap was compiled with the apache server and that these lines are in the httpd.conf file:

LoadModule authnz_ldap_module modules/mod_authnz_ldap.so
LoadModule ldap_module modules/mod_ldap.so

If you have a Windows server installed with the xampp install of apache and mysql, you will have the module pre-compiled into the apache server,
however testing that it’s loaded can be done with:

C:\xampp\apache\bin\httpd.exe -t -D DUMP_MODULES
the output should have these lines:
authnz_ldap_module (shared)
ldap_module (shared)

Once you have the mod_ldap modules loaded you can add to the apache configuration file the user authentication support:

Any Authenticated user from the Domain:

<Location /Finance_Wiki>
Require valid-user
AuthType Basic
AuthName “Finance Wiki Access”
AuthBasicProvider “ldap”
AuthLDAPBindDN “CN=proxy_user,OU=sub_group,OU=main_group,DC=some,DC=domain,DC=com”
AuthLDAPBindPassword “proxy_user_pass”
AuthLDAPURL “ldap://pdc.some.domain.com:389/OU=main_group,DC=some,DC=domain,DC=com?sAMAccountName?sub?(objectClass=*)”
</Location>

The AuthLDAPBindDN and AuthLDAPBindPassword settings are for setting a user that will allow the apache server to browse the Active Directory structure,
the user created for this should have the minimum rights possible in the domain.

This specific apache configuration will allow any user from the domain to share the /Finance_Wiki folder, but if you want to allow access for a specific group you need to add this configuration line:

require ldap-group CN=groupname,OU=group.container,OU=main_group,DC=some,DC=domain,DC=com

This is the part that will require the active directory authentication for a specific group.

This way you can prepare a wiki branch for each group in your company to securely share internal files.

Technorati Tags: apache, Command line, desktop, Linux, windows, xampp

You can take a look at the adsense targeting page or read the short version below:

Target area for adsense:

<!– google_ad_section_start –>

<!– google_ad_section_end –>

I think its best to have the whole post between these tags, and I also include the comments section between them,
and you can use more then one section like this on your page.

Make Google ignore a part of your page:

<!– google_ad_section_start(weight=ignore) –>

<!– google_ad_section_end –>

For wordpress you need to edit the single.php and add the tags before and after the post data.

Hopefully this will bring better targeted ads for each page, and higher click rate. good luck!

Technorati Tags: adsense, google, wordpress