Web review

Squeet is a so simple service that a few words are sufficient to explain it: insert, on the home page of their site, the address of a RSS feed of news that interest you, and your e-mail address; they will send updates of that feed directly to your e-mail.
This is a good way to set us free from any application, plugin or news feed aggregator site!

The service is free, it’s sufficient a quick registration that doesn’t require any particular personal data.

http://www.squeet.com
(update – June, 17th 2009 – it seems that this service has been discontinued)

Everybody is talking about Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia that anyone can read and edit, an immense patrimony of free and open knowledge.

Another project from the WikiMedia foundation, less mature but very interesting, is WikiBooks, an archive and collection of free books, written, editables and improvables by users. The bigger part of WikiBooks is, of course, the english one.

A book that I find really interesting and that I want to suggest as an ”invite to reading“ on WikiBooks is “Lucid Dreaming“: a manual of techniques to learn to dream in “lucide” way, dreaming and knowing that we’re sleeping.

http://www.wikibooks.org

Mozy is really interesting: it offers a 2Gb of personal space for free (1 with the registration, an another after a little survey) for our personal backups; they only send some advertising e-mail (we everybody receive tons of spam everyday, there’s no problem… )

After the quick signup, we can download their tiny software, that make us choose which files on our PC we want Mozy to save an keep updated in the backup copy. From this moment, the software will send data we chose, in a crypted mode for improved security, on Mozy’s servers, working while we’re not using the computer. A good choice to avoid data loss disasters.

http://www.mozy.com

This is a good way to promote a place. The American “Plantation Pancake House” has installed a motorized webcam (with very good image definition and a fast connection to the Internet) in the outside, and users that connect to their site can look at live images, but also move the webcam with their mouse!

It allows 2 minutes of control, and then another can pilot; anyway, if there’s nobody else waiting you can stay more. Near the place there’s also a painted ”X”, where lucky people that are near the Highway 17, Surfside Beach (North Carolina) can remain and call friends and relatives to be taken in photo, throught the site ;)

In the pic I took that you can see on the left, there’s the man of the near shop that is cleaning the windows

http://www.pancakecam.com

I was reading, from the very good site downloadblog.it, about the new service FeedYes, that allows to “grab” informations from any web page, and to organize it in a feed, according to RSS specifications, even if the site doesn’t offer this service in “native” mode.

If you don’t know what is a RSS feed: they’re pages written following a global standard that permits to show the data in a virtually infinite number of modes, from “Outlook” style visualizations (one news for row, with the new ones in bold and so on: this function is well-done by the free software FeedReader, that will tell us about news with little notices on screen, it’s really useful), to the funny shows of data in “news ticker” style, like news on the bottom of the TV on CNN (RSSNewsTicker is a good example of this).

I tried FeedYes, it’s really simple to be used and it is semi-automatic: it’s sufficient to write the address of the web page from we want to grab informations and the application used by the site captures every link, excluding that ones that are not “sensibles” (e.g.: if we ask for a page of a forum, it will exclude links to the single pages of the single topics, that are repetitions) and then it will ask us if we want to exclude more, as the menu links or the other “fixed” element, or simply part of the pages that are not of interest for us. The final result is a bit discutible: FeedYes often makes mistakes and it takes as news parts of the page that are not in the section we want: I tried with a forum: it often took links to author profiles, while I wanted it to grab only links to the topics. We can say that it’s good, but for the same reason it’s very automatic, it’s too much imprecise.

If you want better results, if you have 15 minutes for the configuration, and if you know HTML basics, I suggest Feed43 that is less automatic; it asks for the address to fetch news and then to define a “pattern”, a search model to apply to the page’s code, to recognize news and also to delimit the different fields in these: the link, the title, the description (or the subtitle, in other words). So, with a simple pattern like:

I got a perfect RSS feed of the page with the list of topics in a forum based on Invision Board, in which every news is presented by the title of the single thread, the link is directly to the page with messages, and the description is the subtitle (if present).

EDIT: Feed43 is a free service, even if they plan to start a “premium” version in the future. The free version provides updates to feeds every 6 hours.

While Google starts and stops its new service called “Pages“ for new users in a couple of days, victim of its own popularity, there’s a very good italian web space provider, known for many people but still unknown for the most: it’s Altervista. Running since 2000, now it has 1 million of unique users every month, and it hosts thousands of sites.

It’s different from the most of the other free web space provider: Altervista doesn’t insert ads or banners in users’ pages, and it also offers further services (everything is free) as the PHP scripting support, and it gives also a MySQL database to users that ask for it. Space limits are large (100Mb) and also the bandwidth limits compete with the ones of retail operators: 10 Gigabytes for month. File uploading can be done via web, with a nice interface, or via FTP.

For demanfing users, there’s also the possibility to buy space upgrades and/or bigger performances for the database, at very low prices.

Note for english speaking people: Altervista is only in italian, but the registering process is easy and understandable for anyone. If you’ve problems, you can help yourself with the automatic Google translation of the home page or of the sign up page.

http://www.altervista.org

Writely‘s target is to bring a fully-featured word processor on the web.
Currently in beta version, Writely.com allows to sign up for free and to use the word processor application developed by their team. No need to install any software, everything is usable from the web browser: with a couple of clicks you can create a new document and start writing, with (almost) every text-formatting option.
There’s some limitation (the first you’ll notice is the lackness for the available fonts , that are, of course, the ones that are standard for the web), but in general this online application works, and it allows also to import Word docs from your PC. There’s also an (experimental) function to export in PDF format, but this will be, probabily one of the future optional features for paying users.
The “Collaborative” are remarkable: they allows, for example, the possibility to edit together with other users the same document, at the same time, and to have the document automatically saved in every revision, to avoid the risk to lose some important part of the text.

http://www.writely.com

Cool site that allows users to upload a pic and to make the PC elaborate your face in another “ethnic” version. How we look with an African somatic “theme”? And what about if we were born in China or in India? Older? Younger? Painted by Modigliani or Botticelli?
And how we would like, if someone draw us in a manga comic book?

To get answers to these questions, it’s sufficient to go to the ”St. Andrew’s Face Morpher” site and start to play with the hosted Java applet… here on the left you can see my face in normal version, and in asiatic style, in the little box

If the applet will not work, download the JVM by Sun or by Microsoft!

http://www.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~morph