• Word HTML Cleaner
  Free version. Remove excessive tags from Microsoft Word generated HTML documents.
  (tags: word tools utilities productivity html)

MediaWiki Skins Design — Designing attractive skins and templates for your MediaWiki site is the first book by UK based web designer Richard Carter. The book covers practical tips from the very basics to integrating MediaWiki with popular social networking services such as YouTube, Twitter and Delicious. It is published by PACKT publishing (ISBN 978-1-847195-20-3) and is currently available at Amazon.co.uk for around £25.

The book is aimed at web developers and designers who want to customise the look and feel of a standard MediaWiki installation. Carter recognises that most people will find the default theme, monobook, rather dull. Whilst it is used fairly effectively on the Wikipedia site, it soon becomes tiresome after the third or fourth MediaWiki powered site you visit. Carter ably demonstrates that following a few simple steps will put you well on your way to stamping your own identity on your wiki. My personal aim was to make our MediaWiki wikis use Open University branding and web styles and standards. The steps in this book made it a breeze.

The content of the book perhaps goes over and beyond the call of duty. Whilst it covers all the things you’d expect: layout, headers, navigational systems and other user interface elements, I wasn’t expecting to find an entire chapter on integrating the software with social networking sites. Still, it was a nice surprise and actually incredibly useful. There’s also a nice appendix on troubleshooting browser issues which includes fixes for the ancient Internet Explorer 5. Some might consider this sort of stuff outside the scope of the book. Indeed there are plenty of dedicated CSS and HTML web design books to thumb through at your local Waterstones but it’s a nice touch that serves to indicate that the author really does live and breathe MediaWiki and web design.

The entire process of creating a MediaWiki skin is covered in relation to the book’s case study, a fictional theme called JazzMeet. From planning (purpose and audience) through design (html, css, javascript) to development (php). Key subjects such as usability, information architecture and the various page states are well documented.

One personal irritation. A default install of MediaWiki calls the homepage Main Page and it’s not obvious how you change it to something more useful. As hard as I searched within this book I still couldn’t find the answer. Maybe this is out of scope of a book on Skinning MediaWiki as opposed to administrating MediaWiki but as a designer it’s a task I find myself performing with each and every new install. I want the homepage to announce itself as something more meaningful than Main Page. This is a minor annoyance though as a little searching on the web will find the answer.

MediaWiki Skins Design offers a nice structured approach to creating a usable, customised template for your wiki. You can happily skip the chapter on decorative touches if you’re a designer by trade and try your hand at some of the more complicated stuff. For anything you need to know that isn’t in the book there’s the official MediaWiki documentation. If you just want a practical step by step guide book to creating MediaWiki skins then this is the book for you.

Read a sample chapter from MediaWiki Skins Design (PDF, 1.26mb).

• Where is Your Username registered
  Finds out if you've got accounts with various web2.0 places.
  (tags: useful)

• Colours Are Brighter: Various Artists
  “If, as a parent, you are sick of the fact that "children's" albums seem to consist solely of muzak versions of nursery rhymes, and you'd secretly prefer to be playing the latest Killers album, then this should be top of your purchase list. It seems such a simple concept - get some of the country's top bands, ask them to write and record a song for children, and put out the resulting compilation for charity - that you wonder why it has taken until now to do it.” — How did I miss this?
  (tags: music kids belleandsebastian)

• Roger Waters on Rick Wright's death
  “I was very sad to hear of Rick's premature death, I knew he had been ill, but the end came suddenly and shockingly. My thoughts are with his family, particularly Jamie and Gala and their mum Juliette, who I knew very well in the old days, and always liked very much and greatly admired. As for the man and his work, it is hard to overstate the importance of his musical voice in the Pink Floyd of the 60's & 70's. The intriguing, jazz influenced, modulations and voicings so familiar in "Us & Them" and "Great Gig In The Sky", which lent those compositions both their extraordinary humanity and their majesty, are omnipresent in all the collaborative work the four of us did in those times. Rick's ear for harmonic progression was our bedrock. I am very grateful for the opportunity that Live 8 afforded me to engage with him, & David & Nick that one last time.
  I wish there had been more.” — Roger Waters.
  (tags: rogerwaters rickwright pinkfloyd music)

Well that’s not strictly true. During my first year of employment with the Open University (OU) in 2002-2003 I undertook a 10 point course on web design which was being piloted. I think it might have evolved into Design and the web. It wasn’t really my bag as it was pitched at a much too low level for me (I’m a professional don’t you know?). The course introduced me into the world of OU study which had been a bit of mystery to me up until that point.

I did my first degree at Coventry University — Communication, Culture and Media — which I really enjoyed but the social aspect was a really big thing for me. I could never really understand why people would want to study alone, at a distance, in their own time. I wanted to get a feel for it all as I was designing websites for people who this kind of study appealed to. So I learned more about all the support the OU gives to students than web design. It was intriguing meeting other students online who proudly listed all the courses they’d studied in the email signatures.

The course was assessed by a number of electronic assignments and I didn’t really have interaction with the course tutor but it all rolled along nicely and I got a certificate at the end to add to my portfolio. I’ve been tempted to take a few courses in the last four years but have never got round to it. We have course materials for everything in the OU library and I’ve leafed through endless excellently produced materials just for fun. The OU lets it’s staff do courses for free. So why don’t I just crack on and do some study?

Well.. I just feel I’m too busy. I find I have little free time as it is to socialise and enjoy my new son. Oliver. Maybe when things are less hectic I’ll dive in to the veritable glittering delights.

I do have one big advantage over other people in my team though — I approach each new project from the point of view of someone who is new to OU study, rather than a seasoned OU pro. So for my latest project — Student Induction and Orientation — I’m forced to do some proper research (focus groups, user testing) with Students to find out what both new undergraduates and new postgraduates need when they are wondering what the OU is all about.

So maybe you have considered studying with the OU. What has stopped you so far? And maybe you have recently begun studying with the OU? What would have made it easier for you to get started? What support and advice would you have wanted to receive that you didn’t get? I’m very keen to hear.

• Nikon 50mm f/1.4 AF-S
  The reason you want this new 50mm f/1.4 is that you can tweak manual focus simply by touching the ring without needing to move a switch, and that its performance ought to be stellar at f/1.4 compared to all previous 50mm f/1.4 lenses made by anyone. The only gotcha is its weird 58mm (not standard 52mm) filter size, and that after over 30 years, close-focus distance is still no better than 1.5 feet (0.45m).
  (tags: nikon d40 lens photography)
• Nikon AF-S Nikkor 50mm f/1.4G lens: Digital Photography Review
  A nice prime lens with autofocus that can be controlled by the Nikon d40. Ideal for sharp pics — "Headlining the new features is a built-in Silent Wave Motor which enables autofocus with the D60/D40x/D40 DSLRs, but the lens also boasts a brand-new optical system with 8 elements in 7 groups for improved image quality, a circular aperture diaphragm for more attractive background blur, and a barrel design which does not change length on focusing. The lens will be available from December 2008."
  (tags: photography nikon d40 lens)

• Subyo.com
  Subyo.com - find, use and create subtitles for YouTube videos. Quick and easy. — If only YouTube could import them from here.
  (tags: webdesign video subtitles accessibility)
• Subtitle Workshop
  Subtitle Workshop is the most complete, efficient and convenient freeware subtitle editing tool. It supports all the subtitle formats you need and has all the features you would want from a subtitle editing program. — Windows only
  (tags: windows software webdesign accessibility video youtube)
• Adding subtitles to YouTube videos with Gnome Subtitles
  (YouTube) "often people don't realise that you can add Subtitles (also known as Closed Captioning) to the videos that you upload." — here's how, using Ubuntu.
  (tags: video accessibility webdesign ubuntu)
• HOWTO Rip DVD Movies To Your iPod Using Free Software
  Mark Pilgrim offers a visual guide on what to do in order to use Handbrake to convert DVD films for ipod usage.
  (tags: video ipod tutorials dvd film)
• HandBrake
  HandBrake is an open-source, GPL-licensed, multiplatform, multithreaded DVD to MPEG-4 converter, available for MacOS X, Linux and Windows. — So now I've copied my old family VHS archive to DVD using the Dazzle DVD recorder, I can now convert the files for upload to YouTube, Facebook, Flickr and more. Nice.
  (tags: video dvd editing software)

• Nikon D40 User's Guide
  No-nonsense user guide for the Nikon d40. I've pretty much made my mind up on this camera. I'm a novice at photography (just look at my Flickr photostream for evidence). I want a dSLR so I can control the flash (point away from subject) and focus (control bg blur) and do better shots. D40 is cheap and gets good reivews and that's good enough for me.
  (tags: nikon camera dslr photography)

• smush it!
  "Smushit.com is a service that goes beyond the limitations of Photoshop, Fireworks & Co. It uses image format specific non-lossy image optimization tools to squeeze the last bytes out of your images - without changing their look or visual quality. You'll get a report of how many bytes you can save by optimizing your images and all the changed images as a single zip for download."
  (tags: webdesign image optimisation)