Phil Bradley trawls the internet to find the answers to this month’s readers’ queries.
A couple of responses regarding my reply last month on the individual who had problems using a mouse. Alan suggests: ‘Further to your response in the latest Update to the reader who has a user with hand-tremor problems and a tendency to right-click the mouse, an easier solution would be if he switched to a Mac, which has an ‘uniclick’ mouse. Not only would this solve the problem at once, but he’d be using a much better computer than a PC! ;-)’ Another reader says ‘You may want to have a look at www.naturalpoint.com too. The technology has been hijacked by gamers (myself included) who use it for view control in various simulator games, especially flight sims. It was originally intended as an alternative for PC users who had poor or limited hand control.’ The same reader also suggested looking at www.dwvac.com/ – a program that you use to issue commands to your flight simulator or role-playing game. Since you have your hands full while playing, you can now put your voice to work for you.
Q Where can I get a weblog template?
A Most organisations that provide weblog software will also provide some basic templates to use with them, so if you’re happy to use a generic design, just pick the one you want during the setup phase and go with that. However, you might also want to take a look at http://blogplates.net/ which provides useful tutorials on creating them. Alternatively take a look at blog templates from About.com (http://weblogs.about.com/od/blogtemplates/). If you still can’t find what you want, try a search for ‘weblog templates’ and then the name of the blogging system that you use.
Q I want to find new material that gets added to search engines, rather than always seeing the same sites over and over again. Can you suggest any ways in which I just see ‘the new stuff’?
A Firstly, try one of the web page monitoring services, which will keep an eye on pages that you specify and send you emails when they are updated. I tend to use Watch That Page (www.watchthatpage.com) for this purpose. Alternatively, try your search on Exalead (www.exalead.com) which has an advanced search feature to limit your results to material that has been published during a time period that you specify. MSN search creates an RSS feed for any search that you run – simply add the feed to a news aggregator like Bloglines and it will update you with the new material it finds on a regular basis. Finally, if you prefer using Google try GooFresh (http://tinyurl.com/fxnsx) and limit a search to today, yesterday, last week or last month. (I’m not always convinced that it works as well as it should do, but it’s worth trying.)
Q How can I easily add a Google map to our site to display our location?
A A quick method is to use a site called DonkeyMagic (http://donkeymagic.co.uk/googlemap/). Simply scroll over the map, decide on your location, activate the screen controls, and then cut and paste on to the page. Nice, easy-to-use application, free for non-commercials.
Site of the month
As there are some sites I like to visit every day, I created an HTML page of all of them and told my browser to load that as my start page. This worked very well for years, but then I discovered various utilities that will create Start Pages for you. Simply add the links you want, and you can then view your own page from any machine. Moreover, you can add in things like RSS feeds, weather maps, mail-checking facilities and so on. These things really do make life easier. I use PageFlakes (www.pageflakes.com/) but there are plenty of others, such as Netvibes (www.netvibes.com/). Try one out, and save yourself a lot of time!
Phil Bradley is an internet consultant, trainer, web designer and authors. Visit www.philb.com
Updated: 31 May 2006