Calling on the good and willing to spread a worthwhile message

After 17 years in the field, working in front line humanitarian emergency response, of which 15 years in food aid relief, I took a sabbatical break. Taking a distance allowed me to discover an other side of the humanitarian work, something more longer term, but with no less impact: agricultural development. Over the past sabbatical [...]

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Yahoo Pipes upgrades to V2

Yahoo Pipes is a powerful and free tool, which allows you to combine and manipulate RSS feeds. I use it extensively for many of my news aggregation blogs. In the past, Yahoo Pipes has been suffering from regular downtime, and just over one year ago, Yahoo decided it was time to overhaul the Pipes’ core [...]

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Google Pagerank update: June 27

While Google continuously updates the pageranks for webpages for internal use, the only external sign we have is the update of the Google Pagerank toolbar. As I have quite a number of blogs, I can notice any pagerank changes quite rapidly, but I always check this site for a confirmation of the last update. And [...]

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When things break – Yet another look inside the workshop for a self-hosted blog

You can classify blogs into categories using many different criteria. From a blog-administrator’s point of view, the main classification whether a blog is self-hosted on your own server (such as WordPress.org) or hosted by the blogging service itself (such as Blogger, Tumblr, Posterous, WordPress.com,…) Blogs hosted by the blogging service make you dependent on their [...]

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Scroll wheels for Dummies

 Yep.. Looks familiar. I know all too many people who enter URLs in the Google search bar… “But it gets me where I want to go…” Animation by Guy Collins, music by Kevin MacLeod, titled “Comic Plodding”. (Discovered via Boing Boing)

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How to win the religious war on CMS’es?

“I need a website for my organisation”, people tell me, “which software should I use?”. I answer with an other question: “I want to buy a car. Which car should I choose?” The choice of a car depends on what you want to do with it: You need to go off-road? Transport goods? Race? Drive [...]

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How to compress pictures with Picasa

I am often asked to review blogs and websites. One of the most common problems I find, is simply that blogs are “slow”… A slow blog is no good. Believe it or not, most of the speed problems are caused by oversized and uncompressed pictures and graphics.

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Skype fails. Now what?

Since Microsoft bought Skype for 8 billion USD (“Don’t they know they could download it for free?”), it seems Skype had more downtime than ever before. Some of the problems are at the level of the server, but the most annoying problems have been the automatic (Read: “Forced”) upgrade to Skype version 5.3 on the [...]

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How to monitor your brand on the Internet

In the old days, public relations people would save clippings of newspaper and magazine articles mentioning their company or organisation. Even though nowadays, news travels much faster and spreads wider, it seems public media people often no longer have their ear on the ground. It sounds like a contradiction to me: In the current age [...]

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From social media “reach” to “impact”

When using social media for nonprofit causes, it is easy to get stuck on “reach”: the amount of visitors on your blog, “followers” on Twitter, “Likes” on your Facebook page etc.. Particularly for blogs, some actually take my tips on analyzing traffic figures really seriously. And that is good, but it should not stop there. [...]

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“dlvr.it”: RSS-to-Twitter tool now with statistics dashboard

If you want to tweet your latest blogposts and website updates automatically, you’ll need to use one of the “RSS to Twitter” tools I have described in an earlier post. “dlvr.it”, my favourite of the bunch continues to get better.

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