Padlet walls URLs improve

It is good to see Padlet (once Wallwisher) continuing to add features. Padlet converts web pages into 'walls' where you can create and share information snippets such as links, files and photos. Today we see the ability to adopt a suitable user name and have that appear in the URL used to share your walls in your social media. So my small collection of cloud information gems can be found at:

http://padlet.com/MichaelRees/cloudgallimaufry

Padlet can generate your wall in a number of formats like PDf, Excel and CSV. Another generated format is a snapshot image:

Publishing in the Cloud

In October 2013 I created a short MOOC called The Cloud and You on Udemy.com. I scripted the dozen or so 3-4 minute video lectures and there are a couple of Cloud workshops in downloadable text documents. It seemed a good idea to turn these texts into my first venture into a Kindle book - another Cloud-based format. This finally came to fruition a week ago.

Those who have self-published on Amazon will know they recommend you create the text in Word and save in filtered HTML format before uploading to Amazon. Sadly initial experiments showed the filtering still left huge quantities of extraneous Word HTML and lists and images weren't treated well. I soon turned to editing in pure HTML to achieve a clean layout on Kindle.

When I therefore needed an HTML editor at this point my thoughts naturally turned to a Cloud-based text solution. The editor obviously needed to be aware of HTML and CSS syntax highlighted sensibly and provide some auto-completion to avoid mismatched tags. An HTML pretty printer would also be useful.

Having some small experience with the Cloud9 IDE I turned to it, and since it supports Github repositories this again was a natural choice. And so it was these two free Cloud services allowed me to create my first Kindle book. The HTML pretty print feature of Cloud9, triggered with a single key combination, was particularly useful in spotting tag start/end errors and keeping the whole text easy to manage as shown to the right where the generated overall structure is shown rather than the detail of the text itself.

There was a lot of fiddly but simple copy and pasting of the script text out of PowerPoint presentations into the book text then adding some HTML tags. Little of the text changed as I adopted the more casual style of the online course lecture scripts for the book itself. The versioning of every text file on Cloud9 came into its own when I suddenly noticed half the text was missing due to an Internet connection interruption. Reverting to a version of a few minutes before was very easy. However it forced me to increase the frequency of Git syncs to my Github repo which of course acts as the backup.

Even the final proof reading and the actual layout of the book the Kindle can be done from the Kindle Direct Publishing web site via a Kindle emulator running in a browser window.

It was my hope that I could actually create and publish my ebook just using my Chromebook, ie completely within a browser. As it turned out I did cheat in this regard doing most of the authoring in Cloud9 using Chrome on a Windows 8 machine to exploit the excellent text expansion capabilities of the much praised AutoHotKey app - it's so much easier to type cay[ instead of The Cloud and You! I wish we had an workable equivalent of AutoHotKey on Chrome OS. As well there is a much more comprehensive Kindle converter and emulator on Windows which allows you to see how the book will look on a wide range of Kindle devices and apps.

One downside of editing your Kindle book text directly in HTML is you miss out on the automated Table of Contents (TOC) features of Word. You need to insert <a name="..."> tags on the headings and build the TOC entries with <a href="..."> tags. In my short how-to book of only about 70 pages and a couple of dozen TOC entries the extra work is small. However in a longer volume that also requires an index this would soon become tedious.

I enjoyed putting together my first simple Kindle book and found the self-publishing learning curve relatively short and painless. Being able to do it with Cloud apps was even more satisfying.

ICE appears - the integrated cloud environment

I have long been a proponent of integrated development environments like Cloud9 which allow cloud app development via the browser. Now out of private beta we have Icenium from the well-respected Telerik stable.

Icenium Mist allows development of cross-platform iOS and Android apps using only HTML5, CSS and JavaScript and your Github repos. Development and testing can be done from any Internet-connected machine running modern browsers. Also available is the Icenium Graphite Windows desktop development environment working to the same cloud backend.

The ice on the cake comes in the invention of a new term for this type of development - ICE, the integrated cloud environment. Long overdue.

Chrome Social Media Hub–Android v iOS

I am on my 3rd iPad model but acquired a Google Nexus 7 a couple of months ago or so on its release in Australia. In that relatively short time I now use the Nexus three times as much as the iPad on a daily basis. There are obvious differences but today I just comment on the use of Google Chrome on the two platforms as a social media hub. This use occurs when I browse a web page and need to disseminate the link and a comment across my social media assets that primarily include Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Google+ and now App.net. Add to that list the asset repositories Diigo and Instapaper.

On iOS Chrome when you want to share the page link the menu is shown on the right. It is basic but useful, especially the Google+ link which for me is important as I am tending to use Google+ rather than Facebook as my first choice. Of course most of my social media channels feed into Facebook by choice so I rarely need to go to Facebook directly.

Contrast this with the equivalent menu on Android Chrome. The vastly different extensive list of sharing locations is not built in to Chrome per se. Rather a mechanism is provided to allow any app installed on Android to register itself to be a source of sharing. This can be a little overdone of course as you see some unlikely sharing locations that I will never use. like Godaddy mail.

Note that the Power Note app saves the link to Diigo. Hooha is the portal to App.net. For those unaware the Remember the Milk app is a great Aussie task manager.

The ability to save to the cloud storage systems such as Drive, Dropbox and SkyDrive is also a huge bonus.

Evernote has become my lifeline with data accessible on every portable device I carry so its inclusion is a lifesaver at times.

Flipboard and Skype are added bonuses which I am yet to explore.

Which platform would you choose for your social media hub? Android has become my first choice.

Create Pure HTML5 Slides with free Google Page Template

Cut the cord to PowerPoint, Keynote, Prezi, PDF and more, and create and display your slide presentations in pure HTML5 using the free html5slides project from Google. Download the single web page template from Google code to your local machine. This single file contains the HTML5 layout and sample content for a great many slide types. Edit in your own content with copy and paste using your simple HTML editor or even Notepad. Use your modern browser to show your slides. Simple.

Try out Google’s sample presentation in your browser.

A smattering of HTML5 like this:

<article>
  <h3>
    Slide with bullet points and a longer title, just because we
    can make it longer
  </h3>
  <ul>
    <li>
      Use this template to create your presentation
    </li>
    <li>
      Use the provided color palette, box and arrow graphics, and
      chart styles
    </li>
    <li>
      Instructions are provided to assist you in using this
      presentation template effectively
    </li>
    <li>
      At all times strive to maintain Google's corporate look and feel
    </li>
  </ul>
</article>

will display:

There are some choices in themes and layout, and according to Google html5slides ‘should work on modern Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Opera… and generally touch devices’.

Thanks to Steve Dalton, @spidie, for giving a talk about this at BarcampBNE at the November meeting.

A much-needed icon for web apps

I think this is a much needed attempt to put up a standard logo to indicate a web page is acting as a web app, especially when viewed on a mobile device. Developers take note.

http://www.readwriteweb.com/mobile/2011/11/mobile-web-apps-get-a-dedicate.php

Major Shifts in IT Encore

Great diagrams convey information to all readers with utter simplicity. I think the diagram below by Dion Hinchcliffe conveys complex IT trends with pure clarity. I simply have nothing to add except the appearance of cloud in the context of this blog is important.

See Dion’s post for a much more detailed commentary on these weighty matters.

Customised Social Network Connections, if this then that

As a computer scientist I am naturally attracted to the simple conditional statement programming paradigm of a new web app that allows you to connect status updates between your favourite social networks. ifttt or ‘if this then that’ leverages the ‘if-then-else’ conditional statement, one of the three major building blocks of all programming languages. You connect your social networks by a simple collection of if this then that rules that yield a highly customised set of connections.

This is an example of a rule or task as ifttt calls it. The ‘this’ part is a specified event on trigger channel, a typical activity on your chosen social network or channel. I chose a check-in with a photo in my task. For the ‘that’ part I chose to upload the photo on Foursquare to a chosen album on my Facebook account. It works extremely well and took only 30 seconds to establish.

ifttt comes with several default channels but it is very straightforward to add your own social networks. My list is on the left. I have used less than half of the social networks (channels) supported.

Each channel typically has two of more possible actions from which you choose. Some actions require parameters which are entered via simple forms. For example, I was able to define the message content that accompanies my photo when it finds its way into Facebook. You can see that my 17 channels allow 1485 different possible task combinations.

A simple ‘{{ … }}’ notation is used to transfer key information from the trigger to the action such as {{VenueMapImageURL}} from the Foursquare check-in in my example. ifttt checks for triggers every 15 minutes so the typical delay in the action being executed is half that time.

For me one of the key omissions at the moment is a Google+ channel, but of course we need the API to be extended from its current read-only capability before ifttt can make use of Google+ in a full-featured way. ifttt is free and easy to get an invite by leaving your email on their web site.