Website Sustainability

I know I should have known about the W3C link checker:  https://validator.w3.org/checklink/docs/checklink#wait   but unfortunately I didn't, at that is a shame. It is great little tool and free for check for broken links. Example of it 'in action'  The results are shown in summary and in more detail Useful tool and automatic once you enter the URL and press check. The link to the tool is:  https://validator.w3.org/checklink/docs/checklink#wait

10 best free HTML5 templates | HTML5 | Creative Bloq : "These free HTML5 templates will ensure your site looks great, and is bug-free and customisable. If a website is disorganized, confusing, hard to read or just plain ugly, chances are, you're going to move on. And – if this poorly designed website is yours – guess what? You just lost a potential client. Thankfully, when designing a website, you don't have to start from scratch. There are literally thousands of HTML5 templates available on the Internet. Some are free; some are not. Some are easy to work with; others – well, not so much." To read more go to:  10 best free HTML5 templates | HTML5 | Creative Bloq 'via Blog this' This work has been supported by funding from JISC.

My Top 5 List of Free Web Hosts - Yahoo Voices - voices.yahoo.com : Taken from:  http://voices.yahoo.com/my-top-5-list-free-web-hosts-12095296.html?cat=15   Looks at    evaluating several web hosts and comparing them to premium service providers and seeing how they stack up. 'via Blog this'

▶ How To Build A Website Free With Weebly - YouTube : " " I found this interesting and useful. 'via Blog this'

Found this interesting but haven't had time to play with it but Designly looks like it might  be a solution, though I don't know what the pros and cons are. Creative Bloq  said  "The ultra-easy way to create a website. If you think that making a website ought to be as easy as clicking, dragging and typing, get a load of Designly..... Plus, if you're happy with your site being on the Designly domain and are happy with slightly limited bandwidth and storage, it's free to use. " To read more of the article go to:  http://www.creativebloq.com/web-design/designly-offers-website-creation-rest-us-10135058 Designly Demo:  http://www.designly.com/demo/ Designly:  http://www.designly.com/templates/ 'via Blog this'

How to Share Your E-learning Course for Free With Google Drive - E-Learning Heroes : ' via Blog this' Related Dropbox (see: http://websitesustainability.blogspot.co.uk/2011/03/alternative-hosting-approach-1-dropbox.html )  Google Sites (see: http://websitesustainability.blogspot.co.uk/2011/03/google-sites-for-sustainability-week-3.html  ) Hosting options: http://websitesustainability.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/hosting-how-to-get-it-out-there-for.html Free tools: http://websitesustainability.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/the-best-free-tools-for-website.html Amazon S3 (see: http://websitesustainability.blogspot.co.uk/2011/10/thoughts-about-using-amazon-s3.html ) Google Drive see  http://websitesustainability.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/hosting-on-google-drive-case-study.html

Came across this article  Best Free WordPress hosting options  (no prizes for guessing what that is). Also the following might be of interest on setting up a wordpress site in the first place. 'via Blog this'

As an example of the ideas of web sustainability can be used for local and small charities: Hartwell Home and Garden Produce Show - a village produce show run entirely by volunteers:  http://hartwellproduceshow.weebly.com/ Principles - Free web hosting; - Easy to implement and relatively quick to produce; - Web skills are likely to be basic - no HTML knowledge - Easy to maintain - it must be relatively easy to give control of the site when or if the original person leaves. For more information on the tools being used:  http://websitesustainability.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/hosting-how-to-get-it-out-there-for.html

Previously I looked at using other tools    to host sites sustainably (or even free)  such as:  Dropbox  (see: http://websitesustainability.blogspot.co.uk/2011/03/alternative-hosting-approach-1-dropbox.html )  Google Sites (see: http://websitesustainability.blogspot.co.uk/2011/03/google-sites-for-sustainability-week-3.html  ) Hosting options: http://websitesustainability.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/hosting-how-to-get-it-out-there-for.html Free tools: http://websitesustainability.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/the-best-free-tools-for-website.html Amazon S3 (see: http://websitesustainability.blogspot.co.uk/2011/10/thoughts-about-using-amazon-s3.html ) In this post I look at a real web site being moved to being hosted on google Drive as a case study of moving sites that need preserving on to Google Drive as a hosting option. 1. First step is to capture the static HTML files. We need to copy all the files we want, this has been discussed previous see ...

By Ahsan Anderson, (anderson.ahsan@gmail.com)  Nuffield Bursary Student . All views are Ahsan Anderson not necessarily the views of the blog editor. It’s easy to be lured in by a website offering you unbeatable deals on their web packages with ‘Cheap Hosting’, a myth in my eyes. What is hosting? Before you commit to going with said website, you should consider what is actually meant by hosting and understand that maybe, it could turn out to be A LOT cheaper than you think. Consider what your site is; A blog, multimedia, press, social, a band page. Whatever the site is, in conjunction to an appropriate web builder (such as Weebly) you could get away with not having to pay a penny! How you ask? Simple! 1)   DIY Hosting can keep everything in the house/office. Instead of forking out ‘£x’ per month, why not look at spending the same/equivalent on buying a mini server? Or if you have an old laptop or Desktop that’s gathering dust you can make use of...

By Ahsan Anderson, (anderson.ahsan@gmail.com)  Nuffield Bursary Student . All views are Ahsan Anderson not necessarily the views of the blog editor. I’ve created a few websites in the past, varying from those for business use or those to advertise bands in local areas, but with my line of work they’ve all had the same thing in common, and that’s money. When I’ve created them I have used a variety of tools; web builders for example, and one very key thing to these is that they all cost money for hosting. There are a few hurdles you can’t overcome, for example, there is no escaping the cost you will have to pay to have your domain name bought, but when building your website, sometimes there is no need to have to pay for the tools, as I will explain now. Whether you are willing to pay for the hosting or you wish to host yourself (or use free sites like 000hosting.com) this list will narrow down the choice of good modern builders that you can use. I was looking for...

One of the comments that came out from the user's survey was about searching the 'Tube Map'.    3.  Perhaps a search box on this page that users could use to quickly locate the item on the map would complement the site. A partial solution was to add a search, that search the site. this has been achieved using Google Custom Search to the www.sustainablity.net site (see below) To create the search, yo u need a Google account and then go to  http://www.google.com/cse/ Create a new Custom Search Engine and decide what sites you want to include, the name of the search and whether you want to pay.  For this project I went for the free/standard edition option which means there will be adverts, as well as the search results from the site.  When you include the sites to search the format does matter to get it to search the whole you will need to put * at the end, so for example  http://www.web-sustainablity.net/*  to search all of...

As an alternative free hosting option I have started looking at Amazon's web service. Go to  http://aws.amazon.com/free/ To give some idea of why I have copied details in quote below from http://aws.amazon.com/free/ "AWS Free Usage Tier (Per Month): 750 hours of  Amazon EC2  Linux Micro Instance usage (613 MB of memory and 32-bit and 64-bit platform support) – enough hours to run continuously each month * 750 hours of an  Elastic Load Balancer  plus 15 GB data processing* 10 GB of  Amazon Elastic Block Storage , plus 1 million I/Os, 1 GB of snapshot storage, 10,000 snapshot Get Requests and 1,000 snapshot Put Requests * 5 GB of  Amazon S3  standard storage, 20,000 Get Requests, and 2,000 Put Requests * 30 GB per of internet data transfer (15 GB of data transfer “in” and 15 GB of data transfer “out” across all services except Amazon CloudFront) * 25  Amazon SimpleDB  Machine Hours and 1 GB of Storage ** 100,000 Requests of ...

To get more feedback an on-line survey has been produced using eSurveysPro ( http://www.esurveyspro.com ). eSurverysPro is a free on-line package that lets you produce surveys and email them out or provide a link. A selection of emails addresses, taken from the EMKN site, were used to invited people to take part, as these are people who may be interested in the site. The reasons  eSurveysPro ( http://www.esurveyspro.com ) was selected was: It offers a free on-line service; Invites of up to 50 people in a month can be sent from a free account; Anonymity - IP or email address of respondents won't be collected; There is an option for people to withdraw themselves from the list. If you would like to take part in the survey, it can be found at:  http://www.eSurveysPro.com/Survey.aspx?id=67775a0a-336f-45a5-a222-2f1a6615752c

The currently free Dropbox   provides an alternative place to store a website. But only if we talking about static content (ie. content which is not changed dynamically by PHP, etc but is basically HTML). Dropbox provides a public folder which can be view by one with the appropriate link. First we need to copy the site, so we have local copy on our own machine. This can be done using the method as an example shown in  the earlier blog entry Caught it . Next, we need a Dropbox account. Go to www.dropbox.com and you should see the following: Click on the download button and follow the instructions. You will need an email address. We actually on need the Typical setting. This will add a piece of software to machine. With a little box icon at the bottom of your screen, if we click on this we see the files and folders in the dropbox, open the public folder, now.transfer files over to public folder Go to the dropbox website and log-in Then do Step 2...