I'm part of a professional-oriented undergraduate organization at Michigan State University that wishes to maintain its web presence on our university's server, in part because the .edu web address looks professional. However, we wish to allow various members of our organization to edit the website, which complicates the situation because not everyone in our organization has the programming skills for HTML/CSS (our university prevents all personal and group webspace from using server-side scripting).
One potential solution that I have discovered uses Weebly's website generating service. There is a feature of Weebly located under Settings > Archive/Un-publish that allows one to download a .zip file of the site after having manipulated the site through Weebly's GUI. Such a solution would allow our members who do not have the knowhow to edit HTML/CSS to simply edit the website through Weebly, download it, and then upload it to our university's server.
The issue is the following: for whatever reason, after doing this, part of the website is not rendering correctly in certain browsers. In particular, in Internet Explorer and Google Chrome (though not in Safari or Firefox) the two columns in the main content area of every page are vertically centered. This is most apparent on the our constitution webpage, as the relative length of the constitution leads to the "Meetings" sidebar being located very far down the page. You can compare this to the rendering of the same page on the Weebly site, where the issue does not arise and the "Meetings" sidebar is at the top of the page, regardless of the browser.
Does anyone know why this might be the case and whether there is an easy fix? As noted at the outset, we wish to maintain the website on our university's servers for professional reasons, so maintaining the website on Weebly and redirecting the .edu address to the Weebly site is not an option.
The td item in the table: .wsite-multicol-col needs to be set to vertical-align:top. To be vertically aligned to the top of the table.
In the old days, way back when...you could do <td valign="top">, in the markup - but that's no longer valid, and we can control the styling purely through the .css file.
I am working on a school project for me CS class where we are to find an application that is interesting to us and figure out how it works.
I have picked the technology on dudamobile.com
The app takes a URL and then converts the desktop version of a website into a mobile version.
I think I have a basic understanding out how this works....
Clean up the HTML
Parse the HTML and look for key tags
Store key tags in variables
Apply variables to a premade mobile HTML template
insert custom CSS to fit mobile devices
This is a pretty high level analysis, my question is what specific tools can I use to create something similar for my project? Is my analysis correct, in your opinion?
To me it just looks like they strip out large sections of css and replace it with more mobile friendly and less graphic intensive css. It also seems to choose odd links in navigation to make the top links so some kind of algorithm there (the top links of my site were all the ones I had for mobile devices).
I would start by doing a few tricks on the css files the site uses and strip out background images, changing images over a certain width into block level elements, changing font size, etc. until you get it looking like more of a simple layout and then add the other mobile elements as you see fit (making it readable without zooming is probably the most important though).
If the site uses html5 you can apply different css rules to the navigation section to make it a list of links and move it to the top.
Don't expect it to be a perfect crossover unless the site is moderately simple though.
You would need a back end technology to retrieve and parse the .css file to re-serve it. I would suggest whatever language you're comfortable with. I don't have much experience in PHP but I believe it would be a good fit for that application.
I'm working as a web developer and have lots (hundreds) of links with hacks, tutorials and code snippets that I don't want to memorize. I am currently using evernote to save the content of my links as snippets and have them searchable and always available (even if the source site is down).
I spend a lot of time on tagging, sorting, evaluating and saving stuff to evernote and I'm not quite happy with the outcome. I ended up with a multitude of tags and keep reordering and renaming tags while retagging saved articles.
My Requirements
web based
saving web content as snippets with rich styling (code sections, etc.)
interlinked entries possible
chrome plugin for access to content
chrome plugin for content generation
web app or desktop client for faster sorting / tagging / batch processing
good and flexible search mechanism
(bonus) google search integration (search results from KnowledgeBase within google search results)
I had a look at kippt but that doesn't seem to be a solution for me. If I don't find a better solution, I'm willing to stay with evernote as it meets nearly all my needs but I need a good plan to sort through my links/snippets once and get them in order.
Which solutions do you use and how do you manage your knowledge base?
I'm a big Evernote fan but a stern critic of all my tools. I've stuck with Evernote because I'm happy enough with its fundamental information structures. I am, however, currently working on some apps to provide visualisations and hopefully better ways to navigate complex sets of notes.
A few tips, based on years of using Evernote and wiki's for collaboration and software project management:
you can't get away from the need to curate things, regardless of your tool
don't over-think using tags, tags in combination with words are a great way to search (you do know you can say tag:blah in a search to combine that with word searches?)
build index pages for different purposes - I'm using a lot more of the internal note links to treat Evernote like a wiki
refactor into smaller notebooks if you use mobile clients a lot, allowing you to choose to have different collections of content with you at different times
Part of my job involves turning psd designs into html to be emailed out for email campaigns. In the past I've always gone through and converted everything to a suitable html element where possible but I'm now questioning whether there's any point to it?
Is okay just to use one giant image? I only ask because it seems using html elements is only really important if a) I want the information in the email to get to the client if images are blocked and b) for SEO.. yet search engines won't be indexing my code since it's all going through email.
If I'm pretty confident that the clients I'll be mailing won't have the images blocked, is it okay just to treat the entire email body as an <img />?
Thanks
I guess it would be okay, but I wouldn't recommend it. Here are a few reasons why:
The readers won't be able to select and copy any of the content in the email, which in my opinion is really annoying.
You will not be able to have links in your email, the only thing you can link is the entire image.
If they do have images disabled, which i believe is fairly common, the wouldn't see a thing without downloading the image.
Increased email size due to the large image, which for mobile devices is a pain.
An image will not adapt to the window/display size. Text/HTML-based mails can at least break row if the content doesn't fit, to make it more readable.
And the list goes on. The other answers point out a number of additional reasons as well.
I don’t know that there is any definitive answer to this question, but here is my take on it:
I think it’s a good idea to convert certain elements to text so that they can be copied or manipulated. If you have a phone number, you may want that to be readable so that anyone with an automated dialer can click and complete the call. Certain email programs might automatically convert an address to a link to the map. Those features won’t work if any of these elements are flattened into the jpg.
For those mobile email clients that will not render the image on the screen (either because it’s just showing the preview or hasn’t yet downloaded the content) it’s useful to see some of the alternate text (and body content) before viewing the full image.
I know you said that you are sure your clients won’t have images blocked, but you can’t really rely on that. A well-meaning administrator who makes a change to the firewall could accidentally block all incoming images to the entire domain and your email will be worthless.
Lastly, an HTML email with one line of code to load an image has a high possibility of being flagged as spam.
I hope this helps!
What about bandwidth concerns, for users viewing your email on a mobile device? If it's a large image, do you want to blow out their data caps?
Or users using assistive technology, for visually-impaired people. Such as a screenreader(text to speech).The real text is helpful for scenarios like that.
I have a website http://www.bccfalna.com/ and the contents on this site are in HINDI Language. I want to make all these pages read only for peoples so that they can not copy the content.
Since I have written some books in HINDI Language on Computer Technology and I know that there are very few Information in HINDI language on the Internet about the Computer and I.T. Technology so I want to sell my EBooks in PDF format.
To show the usefulness of the contents of my books, I have placed all the contents in TEXT format in my website, so that people can see, read and can make decision to buy the book if the book is useful for them.
Since I have placed my whole books in Content form on my site so that various search engines also can give more and more traffic to my site but I am afraid that since I have placed all my content on my site in text form, any one can copy and will not be interested to buy them as PDF Format EBOOK.
I want that people can Read the content of my site but can not be able to copy the contents in any word processor.
Is it possible?
I don't want to make image like content, because Google, Yahoo like modern search engines don't gives too much importance to image sites.
I don't want to use Flash like sites too. The reason is same. Modern Search Engines don't gives too much attention to these kinds of sites.
I want my contents in TEXT format but I want to make them READ ONLY. Is it possible? If Yes: I would like to know HOW? and if No, I would like to get the alternative type solution.
Is there someone Genius to solve this problem? Thanks.
Generally speaking, any web content that is readable by a search engine will also be readable and copyable by people visiting your page.
I suppose you could examine the user_agent in the HTTP request to determine whether it originated from a popular search engine or not; if it did, return the plain-text of your content; if it did not, return a raster image of your content (text in an image can't be selected for copying and pasting, but it could be OCR'd or otherwise printed by the user). Some websites will use a script to disable right-clicking to save an image (but such scripts can easily be circumvented). Some sites will place a transparent image over the image containing the content (but this, too, can be circumvented). Note that the user_agent can be falsified if the web surfer knows you're treating search engines specially.
I suggest the best approach, though, is to keep things simple. Only publish the first chapter of your book and a table of contents online, or else only publish the first page of each chapter, or something similar. Search engines do not need the complete text of your book, only representative samples. Nobody will go to the trouble of copy/pasting your text if they can only get to a portion of the complete book.
You can't make it indexable to search engines and incapable of being copy & pasted... Google has to be able to copy words from your text to use in it's index. Maybe you could put snippets of the parts you want indexed in text format and put the majority in image/flash. It's not uncommon to see chapter previews on websites selling books.
Try Google Books:
I don't know if it works with the HINDI Language (It works. Some examples: http://www.scribd.com/doc/15257971/Google-Hindi-Books)
This solution allows Google to index and everyone to read the whole content. Anyhow copying remains awkward.
http://books.google.com/googlebooks/tour/
"Read-only" means they cant modify your webpages, "readable but not copyable" is impossible by definition, and makes about as much sense as "I want to give someone some water, but I dont want it to be wet". So, to answer your question, no this is not possible at all. (I regularly have to deal with people who think that this (and others) law of physics/mathematics doesn't apply to them, so sorry if I sound a bit rude.)
On a practical level, if you only give them some of the information, then they will only be able to copy that part of the information. (If they buy the book, they will be able to copy the rest from there.)
As others here have said, what you are asking is not possible.
If you host content for people to view in a browser, and for Google to index, there is absolutely no way to stop anyone from copying it. It is possible to make copying the content difficult (or at least inconvenient), but there's no way to stop someone from copying it if that's what they really want to do.
The only alternative, as others have already said, is to only post the first chapter of the book, and allow your readers to make a judgement based on that chapter. If they like the chapter they'll buy the whole book. This is a pretty common practice.
I understand that posting only part of the content is not what you want, but if you want to make it impossible to copy the whole book then this is your only real option.
The other alternative is to not worry about it. Cory Doctorow (and others I'm sure) publishes all his books under a Creative Commons license. They are free to download from his website but he still manages to make money from selling actual books. If people like your work enough, they'll pay to have it in a nice format.
There is, a way to instruct the browser to disable copying text. This does not, however, prevent copying, just makes is difficult. Not all browsers recognize this, especially older browsers. However, there are ways around this, the user can download the entire page and search for the text embedded in the HTML.
Another way, is to make it a graphic, rather than ASCII text. That way would mean that if anyone really wanted to copy your content, they would have to go through the process of using OCR (optical character recognition), then proof read plus correct the result.
Another way is to make it into a Flash animation, that can also be bypassed by doing a screen capture, then doing an OCR. In short, there is no way to prevent copying of material displayed in a browser ... but you can make it difficult and, hopefully, people won't bother.
FYI, typically people want their website to be read-only, to make it difficult or impossible for hackers to change their website content (i.e. replace content with vandalized content) ... not to prevent people from accessing the content legitiamately uploaded to the website.
Hope this helps.
Scan the text and post as an image, people can still read but not copy the text directly. They can copy the image but that will not matter as it would be the same as just reading from the screen they would have to retype it all if they wanted to steal the work.