Centre for Social Justice -» Community

Jul 11, 2013 - Debugging your website

Modern websites, especially ones that use content management software like WordPress, Drupal and others, are easy to work with and add content but can be a little intimidating to get under the hood and make custom adjustments. One method to assist in the process is to debug the website. There are two utilities to help in the process. The first utility is a family of validators that are freely available on the W3C website. For validating HTML, there is this: validator.w3.org and jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator for validating CSS. There is also a unified validator which can validate RSS and mobile sites. Also a separate RSS validator.

The other set of utilities comes with your browser. Firefox uses "Firebug", and Google Chrome and MS-IE both have built-in "Developer Tools." They all do a similar job in isolating the code you want to debug, and they let you make small changes to the HTML and CSS attributes, which allows you to see the changes live. Here's a video on how to use Firebug.

Jul 4, 2013 - File Transfer Protocol (FTP)

For people who maintain a blog or update a website, trasferring files to your website is a very common task. This task can be accomplished by using interface like the control panel, or some custom program that comes with your website. One of the best ways to accomplish this is by using a dedicated program for this very task -- FileZilla. FileZilla is open source software distributed free of charge under the terms of the GNU General Public License. It works with all operating systems: Mac, Windows and Linux.

www.filezilla-project.org

Jun 27, 2013 - Publish documents electronically

When you need to share a paper-document, one of the best utilities is to convert it to a PDF (Portable Document Format). A free program for creating PDFs is available at www.pdfforge.org. Once you install it on your computer, it will act as a printer driver. Once your document is ready, go to print, and select "PDF Creator," and save it to your computer. You can also download the PDFArchitect, if you want to edit the final PDF.

Sharing e-documents on smartphones and tablets is best done with the ePub format. A free utility for creating ePub is available at code.google.com/p/sigil. Creating ePubs is a little more complicated than creating PDFs, but the final product looks nicer on the new hand-held devices. Using Sigil, you will have to organize your document with XML/HTML/CSS commands.

Install the ePub Firefox addon for your desktop browser. You can also install an ePub reader App for your mobile device - like Aldiko.

A good example of this is available on the GTWA website. The GTWA Solidarity Platform is published in HTML format, but is also available for download in both PDF and ePub formats at the bottom of the page.

Jun 20, 2013 - Spreadsheet: Quick formulas

Modern spreadsheet programs have many built-in programming functions, and people spend many hours developing the correct formulas. But what if you just want a quick SUM or AVERAGE of a bunch of cells without creating a separate cell for the result? There is a quick and easy solution. Select your cells, and then move your mouse-cursor to the status line (bottom-right corner). By default, you will see the SUM, but when you right-click, you can select other functions like MIN, MAX, AVERAGE, COUNT.

Remember, you can select contiguous cells by clicking on the first cell and SHIFT-click the last cell; or non-contiguous cells by clicking on each cell with CTRL (on a PC) or COMMAND (on a Mac).

Jun 13, 2013 - Advice from the Electronic Frontier Foundation

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has setup a resource listing many free computer programs as an alternative to the proprietary software - prism-break.org.

In addition to all this great free (as in freedom) software, I would suggest LibreOffice. It will work on a MAC and PC (running Linux or Windows), and their files can be shared easily with both free and proprietary software. From their website:

"LibreOffice is community-driven and developed software which is a project of the not-for-profit organization, The Document Foundation. The LibreOffice software is developed by users, just like you, who believe in the principles of free software and in sharing their work with the world in a non-restrictive way."

This is their home page www.libreoffice.org, don't wait, go directly to the download page and join the freedom.

Jun 6, 2013 - Split Screen

Have you ever worked on a large document with many pages, and wanted to work simultaneously in two different sections? Many modern wordprocessors (and spreadsheets) enable this with a function called "split screen." You can access it from the menu system, usually under "Window" - "Split Screen." There's also a special button just above the vertical scroll bar. There's a picture of it on the right side.

Spreadsheet programs allow for both vertical and horizontal split screen.

You can also open the same document in a new window.