Ed's Tech Tips

A co-worker asked me for some options for online collaboration - web tools to help members of committee or task group to easily communicate with one another, edit documents, post comments and so forth from any where at anytime.

E-mail is rather inadequate and can be unwieldy. Everyone might not get a message, if the subject changes the messages can be difficult to organize. Different email programs treat attachments differently. Aggressive spam filters may even prevent the messages from getting through. However, even with all of these pitfalls, e-mail software is still used most often for collaborative projects because everyone has it, uses it on a daily basis and knows how to use it - at least the basics. Nevertheless, I am a proponent of exploring alternatives, such as the following:
 
1. A simple option is to create a blog. I know blogs are not what you might consider as a online collaborative tool, but blogs are easy to use (that's why millions have them and even more read them). Blogs do not have to be just for self-expression, marketing or political campaigning. In LifeType, the free open source blogging platform we use for Mount Blog, a single blog can be created with multiple user accounts with one person being the blog owner. You could post articles or topics and others could comment on them, so that not everyone would need a user account. You can upload a wide variety of attachments (doc, xls, pdf, images etc.). You can assign categories and tags. Everything would be search-able. The blog can be hidden from others and require a password to access it if you want to make it private using the secretblog plug-in.

2. Wiki's are very popular collaboration tools. The free form nature is a plus or a minus depending on how you look at it.  I have been experimenting with Xwiki on our file server as a possible staff intranet document management/collaboration tool.  It has numerous features, both basic and advanced. It can be as complex or as simple as you want. Xwiki includes support for traditional wiki syntax, as well, as WYSIWYG word processor style editing. It includes version control, PDF output of any page or series of pages, attachments, commenting, RSS feeds, full text search and rights management. Of course, Xwiki is just one of many wikis in existence. Visit WikiMatrix to compare a wide variety of free and commercial wiki applications.

 

 

3. BaseCamp is a popular commercial project management/collaboration tool. There is an open source alternative called ActiveCollab . I had set up sites for the finance committee and the Lyonsnetwork, but neither appears to be active now. It has many features and is active development.

4. A fourth option to consider is Google Documents & Spreadsheets. Not only can you upload Word documents and Excel spreadsheets, but the documents can be shared and edited by others. Google Docs in conjunction with Google's Mail, Talk and Calendar tools makes for a strong online suite of collaborative applications.

I could go on with other tools, but the above will give you a good start. The blogs are easy way to start, but a wiki has a lot of flexibility, as does Google Docs. BaseCamp or ActiveCollab provide a framework or structure for your group project. Either way, I think any of these tools go beyond email as an effective means of working with others online.

 

 

Google has added a very cool new feature to their Maps application called "Street View." It is currently only located in a few large urban areas: San Francisco, Miami, Las Vegas, Denver and New York. You position a gold human icon onto blue outlined area of a map and then zoom in to see a panaromic street level view. You can turn around 360 degrees and click on the directional arrows to move along the streets. Use the - and + keys to zoom in and out.

There is a new site called Streetviewr where you can view and post unusual photos or pictures of famous sites. Google uses a van equipped with cameras. It must have a very fast shutter, but some images still get distorted. 

Here is a goofy video Google produced to promote Street View:

 

 

 

We have another reason to hate spammers. It was brought to my attention Friday that spammers had set up pages or advertisements via our e-cards trying to sell vicodin, prilosec, levaquin, ringtones, etc. The spammers attempted to recreate full pages or redirects and were sending out links to the pages.
 
I deleted the spamming cards in the e-card database and proceeded to make it much more difficult for spammers to use our e-cards by doing the following:

1. Limit the amount of time a card is available from forever to 7 days.
2. Limit the type of HTML tags that can be used in the body of the e-card preventing the use of javascript, redirects, links and so forth. There is a php function called strip_tags which does the trick.
3. Utilize two of the most effective and popular anti-spam services that are used in the Blogging and Photo Gallery comments:
   • Bad-Behavior: which stops spam links and spam robots before they can even see a page.
   • Akismet: which is a spam filtering service developed by the creators of WordPress. So if the spammer gets through the first defense, this service scans the content of the fields being submitted.

Bad-Behavior and Akismet are highly regarded and very effective separately. When combined they are even more so. The beauty and simplicity of PHP made these updates possible along with the fact that everything is open source. 

In addition to the above, I changed the WYSIWYG editor from FCKeditor to TinyMCE  which works in both Windows and Macs. FCKeditor did, too, but it did not work with Apple's Safari browser. TinyMCE also appears to load faster. I also brought back the preview function which hopefully will now display an accurate preview. I also added a noscript message to inform visitors that they need to enable javascript in their browser in order to utilize the e-cards.

I will monitor the e-cards more closely. I do not normally look at the content of the cards sent, but I will now periodically scan them. However, I feel that with the new measures in place we should continue to maintain the e-cards since they are a popular feature on the web site. If necessary, I will add a CAPTCHA ( Completely Automated Public  Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) to the e-card form.

I wish that Bad-Behavior was around when we were running the phpBB bulletin board because it may have helped.