KnowledgebasePublisher is an opensource knowledge base software, FAQ software, or just content manager about any other type of article that you want to publish on your website. It’s so easy to use that you can be managing knowledgebase on your website right from your own web browser.

What is Snap Preview Anywhere? Snap Preview Anywhere enables anyone visiting your site to get a glimpse of what other sites you’re linking to, without having to leave your site. By rolling over any link, the user gets a visual preview of the site without having to go there, thus eliminating wasted “trips” to linked sites.

My testing in WordPress:

Snap Preview Anywhere Website

Find A Way in Hong Kong

All About Hong Kong Primary Schools

• FormSpring - Make Online Forms for Free; The easy way to build, host and process online forms.
• JotForm -It is the web based WYSIWYG form builder. With it, you can design forms to use somewhere else and let the JotForm server collect the data for you.
• Sidewalk - The easiest way to gather and analyze customer information; Create custom forms in a matter of minutes. Then, place them on your Web site with a simple copy and paste. When people fill out your new Web form, Sidewalk automatically saves and organizes the information for you.
• StarterBase - It lets you create, organize, and share data on the web. With starterbase, you can create a quick and easy CRM system, and create customer feedback forms, among many other things useful for a startup.
• The Blue Form - It is the process automation service for creating and managing online forms in your organisation. It allows complete control over the form workflow, allowing you to select approvers, and keep track of the form after it has been filled-in.
• The Form Assembly - It lets you create and process web forms, and collect responses.
• Wufoo - It is an online tool that helps you build and host online forms. You can create a mailing list, a contact form, a marketing survey or even a complete customer management system.

Step 1: Open a Putty session and type the following commands:

wget http://www.activecollab.com/files/0.6/activeCollab.zip

unzip activeCollab.zip

cp -r activeCollab /var/www/

cd /var/www

chown -R www-data activeCollab/

cd activeCollab

chmod -R 766 cache/

chmod -R 766 config/

chmod -R 766 public/

Step 2: Create MySQL database and database user. I use ‘activecollab’ as the database name, ‘acdbuser’ as the database username, and ‘******’ as the database password’. Type the following commands with the existing Putty session.

mysql -u root -p

Enter password: ******
mysql > create database activecollab;
mysql > grant all privileges on activecollab.*
to 'acdbuser'@'localhost' identified by '******';
mysql > exit

Step 3: Open a web browser and type ‘http://yourdomain.com/activecollab/install’ as the URL. Follow the instructions. You need to input the database name, username, and passowrd you decided earlier.

Please be reminded that the following steps are what I did to make phpMyAdmin installed and password protected on my web server. They are by no means perfect. There should be a number of different ways to complete the same task.

Step 1: Find a URL to download a phpMyAdmin-2.8.2.zip from here. I use http:// superb-west.dl.sourceforge.net /sourceforge /phpmyadmin /phpMyAdmin-2.8.2.zip. After that, type the following commands from the Ubuntu Server.

wget http://…/phpMyAdmin-2.8.2.zip

sudo unzip phpMyAdmin-2.8.2.zip

sudo cp –r phpMyAdmin-2.8.2 /var/www/

sudo mv /var/www/phpMyAdmin-2.8.2 /var/www/pma

sudo chown –R www-data /var/www/pma

Step 2: Create a file named config.inc.php by the following command. Type the content for it and press Ctrl-x then y then Enter to save the file.

sudo nano /var/www/pma/config.inc.php

<?php
$i = 0;
$i++;
$cfg['Servers'][$i]['host'] = 'localhost';
$cfg['Servers'][$i]['extension'] = 'mysqli';
$cfg['Servers'][$i]['connect_type'] = 'tcp';
$cfg['Servers'][$i]['compress'] = false;
$cfg['Servers'][$i]['auth_type'] = 'config';
$cfg['Servers'][$i]['user'] = 'root';
$cfg['Servers'][$i]['password'] = '********';
?>

Step 3: Create a file named .htpasswd by the following command. Type the content for it and press Ctrl-x then y then Enter to save the file. Replace ***** with the appropriate passwords. The first one is the password for the root of the Ubuntu server. The second password is for entering the phpMyAdmin.

sudo htpasswd -cm /etc/apache2/.htpasswd mysqladmin

Password: *****
New password: *****
Re-type new password: *****
Adding password for user mysqladmin

Step 4: Create the .htaccess file. Type the content for it and press Ctrl-x then y then Enter to save the file.

sudo nano /var/www/pma/.htaccess

AuthUserFile  /etc/apache2/.htpasswd
AuthName  AccessToPMA
AuthType Basic
require user mysqladmin

Step 5: Configure the Apache2 by creating a file in the directory /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/.

sudo nano /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/pma

<Directory /var/www/pma>
     AllowOverride AuthConfig
</Directory>

Step 6: Reload the Apache2 with the following command.

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 force-reload

I am interested in finding a CMS that is simple and good enough to build a basic school website. One of my requirement is that it should use PHP and MySQL. The features I am looking for include simple mechanism to add and organize contents, good layout and usability for visitors, and support for Chinese language. From my initial and brief checking, it seems that e107 is a good candidate for me to take a closer look of it.

phpMyFAQ: It is an open source FAQ system using PHP and available for many databases. The following lists a few example websites that I found by googling the term “powered by phpMyFAQ”.

• DRM SDK - powered by phpMyFAQ 1.6.1
• Xtreme Internet Help Desk - powered by phpMyFAQ 1.6.2
• faq.phpwcms-docu.de - powered by phpMyFAQ 1.6.2

ODFaq: It is a PHP script that allows you to manage frequently asked questions. Users can create, edit, and delete entries using a user-friendly web based interface. The following lists three example websites that I found by googling the term “powered by ODFaq”. It may be a good option for some special needs of FAQ systems.

• Digital Space :: FAQs - powered by ODFaq v2.1.0
• Computer Services at the College of Family and Consumer Sciences - powered by ODFaq v2.1.0
• Liquid Frog FAQ’s - powered by ODFaq v2.1.0

Lethal Penguin’s FAQMasterFlex: It is a free, database-driven web-based application for creating and maintaining Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) on your web site. The following lists a demo provided by Lethal Penguin.

• FAQMasterFlex - Powered by Lethal Penguin.

Which one is the best you ask? I would say it depends on your needs. phpMyFAQ features a community-based FAQ system; users can both take and give in the growing of the FAQ knowledge base. It also provides many other features such as statistics about most viewed questions. ODFaq features like a company’s FAQ system for its customers and has a professional user interface on viewing and printing of web pages. Lastly, FAQMasterFlex has a different interface using popping up of small window for viewing FAQs. It may be a good option for some special needs of FAQ system.

• PDF Online ~ This free PDF conversion service supports a number of document formats including DOC, XLS, PPT, RTF, PPS, TXT, HTML, and PUB. You upload the document and receive the resulting PDF from your given email account.
• DOCTransformer ~ I know this web service via Robin Good. This web-based service allows you to upload a document file and to have it freely converted to PDF, RTF or to the OpenOffice Write document format.

How to rip a DVD: A Tutorial

Ripping a DVD to xvid or divx avi is really quite easy, if you have the right tools. You’ll first need to download DVD Decrypter and Auto Gordian Knot (AutoGK). DVD decrypter allows you to rip the raw DVD video and audio data off of your disk drive, decrypt the CSS protection, and finally remove any other protection schemes, such as Macrovision. AutoGK is a package of codecs and a GUI interface that will take the raw DVD data through an AV processing pipeline to produce a single windows video file.

AutoGK can also be used to convert various other formats of video, such as MPEG1 and AVI sources, into your favourite MPEG4 format.

RSS-Import (WordPress Plugin) - Import RSS-newsfeeds in your site. I think it is a simple and good plugin. However, it cannot do with multiple RSS feeds at a time. You use it by putting a PHP code like RSSImport(5, “http://www.stevenchoy.com/feed/”, false, false) somewhere in your wordpress template file. If you want to embed a feed content into a page or a post, you need to install another Wordpress plugin such as PHP Exec (need PHP version 4.3.0 or later) that allows running of PHP code in posts or pages.

Lector_RSS (Wordpress plugin) - Insert RSS feeds in the blog. I have installed it and played with it. It can accept multiple RSS feeds by inputting them via the administator’s “manage” menu. However, it cannot mix all the feed content and re-arrange them. It just displays the post titles one feed after another. You can also use it to display all the feeds’ content in a page or post with the PHP Exec Wordpress plugin.

FetchRSS (Wordpress plugin) - Embeds an RSS reader into a page. You can see the plugin in action on Owen Winkler’s Website. I have tried it by inputting 25 blog feeds. It then displays all the posts of these blogs in the past four days. However, it takes quite a long time before I can see the result and, sometimes, it results in some PHP errors. I will try to figure out the problem later.

BDP RSS Aggregator (Wordpress plugin). It can capture multiple RSS feeds and displays them on your blog. This plugin is fully configurable from the Wordpress dashboard. It also needs the PHP Exec Wordpress plugin if you want the feed content displayed in pages or posts. You can see the plugin in action on the author Bryan Palmer’s Website. I think it is the most sophisticated plugin when compared to other four described here. However, when I installed this plugin, I experienced the following PHP error, and I had to manually delete this plugin and drop the MySQL tables created by this plugin.

Fatal error: Call to undefined function: mb_internal_encoding() in /wp-content/plugins/bdprss/bdp-rssfeed.php on line 5

RSS Reader (Wordpress plugin). I did not install and try this plugin. I think it cannot combine multiple RSS feeds into one, which is similar to the case of RSS-Import and Lector_RSS. Merely based on the instructions provided by the authors, I think RSS-Import is easier to use. One difference about this plugin is that it uses the Wordpress’s database to cache the RSS feed content for performance.

So, I still do not find the best solution that I want. Maybe I will use a combination of them, and find other tools or services for re-mixing RSS feeds.

MoonEdit (Version 0.14.1s released on 28.01.2005)

Both are newly released freeware that feature multi-platform text editor for realtime collaboration (i.e multiple users, who are remote from each other, edit the same document together in realtime). I just wonder how can I make the case for a good application of these collaborative text editors.

Software List For a Better Computing