Tom Goskar

Freelance consultant for digital heritage

Category: Web Stuff

  • Why I’m creating my own URL shortening service

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    Tom Goskar
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    I’ve long been concerned about the proliferation of “short URLs”, whose use has gathered great momentum, especially in the light of microblogging services like Twitter. Short URLs, such as those generated by TinyURL are convenient, especially when you only have 140 characters to get your message across. You can turn a huge URL, many hundreds…

  • Scribd – YouTube for documents

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    Tom Goskar
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    I’ve been looking at Scribd recently as a way of distributing documents online. Think of it as a kind of YouTube for documents – upload a document (Word, PDF, OpenDoc, RTF etc), tag it, choose a Creative Commons license if you so desire, and it gets converted into FlashPaper and is viewable online. You then…

  • Cleaning up Word HTML

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    Tom Goskar
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    Today, whilst building a new data downloads section for the Archaeology at Heathrow T5 website, I had to convert a load of Word documents full of tables and subheadings into beautiful xHTML Strict for pages in a WordPress environment. Normally, I’d open the files in Word 2004 (on a Mac), save them as HTML, then…

  • Zooomr Mark III launched

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    Tom Goskar
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    [Update] I can’t log back in after the first time – all I’m getting is a blank page. Apparently they’re swamped with interest, and things are being ironed out. Just a quick message to say that Zooomr has relaunched! When I’ve used it a bit more, I’ll post a review of it here. If you’re…

  • Zooomr’s photos are back online

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    Tom Goskar
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    As of now, blogged photos hosted on Zooomr are now back online. Here’s a quick test: Silbury Hill, Wiltshire Hosted on Zooomr It seems as if Zooomr is back on track with new servers, thanks to a big community effort, and support from some big names like Robert Scoble, Zoho, and Sun Microsystems. And of…

  • The Zooomr Soap Opera

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    Tom Goskar
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    This last week, I’ve been following the ongoing launch of Zooomr, an up-and-coming photosharing website. The whole web application is programmed by just one man, Kristopher Tate, backed up by photographer Thomas Hawk. Kristopher is just 19 at the time of writing, and despite criticisms of “copying Flickr”, he has made a huge achievement with…

  • Google buys Feedburner

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    Tom Goskar
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    According to TechCrunch, Google are in the final stages of acquiring Feedburner for $100 million. I use Feedburner for a lot of the blogs that I look after, and it’s a great service. I’m sure that their acquisition by Google will ensure that their service will be around for a long time to come. And…

  • Podshow+ Profiles

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    Tom Goskar
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    I’ve spent a while messing about with my BTpodshow (or Podshow+ or whatever it end up being called!) profile, and for ages I haven’t been able to work out how to edit the “About Me” text. I’ve been pulling my hair out over it (well, metaphorically at least). At last I’ve worked out how. You…

  • Hosting

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    Tom Goskar
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    This website, and most of the others that I run, are now happily sitting on Dreamhost servers. I’ve been using them since February, and they’ve been great so far. It took me a while to get the Windows hosting paradigm out of my head, and I haven’t looked back. I’ve used their support via email…