I’ve just started a Japanese-language blog for Felix.
The Japanese blog will basically have the same type of content as the English blog, but geared more toward Japanese users and Japanese text handling.
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Category: website
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Find broken links on your website
I’ve been revamping the Felix manual, and I was worried about creating broken links in the process.
I was able to use a very cool tool called Xenu to find all the broken links on my site and quickly fix them. Xenu has a minimalistic interface, but it does what you need it to do, and very simply. First you feed it a URL or the path to a file on your computer. Xenu then spiders your site, and pops up a web page with all the broken links and the pages containing them. This is a great touch, because you can then jump right to the offending page and see where the broken link is.
The Google webmaster tools also give you a report on broken links, but it’s usually outdated (since they last spidered your site) and it doesn’t tell you where the broken links were. Xenu is thus a valuable addition to the webmaster’s toolkit.
I’ve added support for PDF files to my online wordcount tool. Now the tool can provide word counts for PDF files using the pyPdf library.
Addendum: I’ve replaced pyPdf with another pure-python library, pdfminer, which is much more robust at handling PDF files.
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New online tool: Word count utility
Today I launched a new tool on the Felix website: an online word count utility. One of my goals for this site is to make it useful to translators, and word counts are one of the pain points for translators. This is especially true of those of us working into or out of (East) Asian languages, since most of the word-count tools out there don’t give Asian character counts (unlike those given by MS Word).
Basically, instead of luring people to this site, I want to make translators — my target customers — want to come here, and keep coming back, and tell their friends to come here, too.
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Creating a demo
I just got through my first attempt at creating a demo. I made the demo using Camtasia, which is very easy to use and has a generous fully functional 30-day demo version.
It’s kind of funny — I’m pretty used to public speaking, and don’t get all that nervous doing it, but I was nervous creating the demo. Maybe because it’s kind of creepy to just be talking to yourself.
Overall the demo was pretty easy to make, but the audio has some pretty bad popping. It’s due to the cheapo mike I’m using: in order to get enough volume on the sound, I had to get the mike close to my mouth, which picked up all those lovely popping “p”s and “t”s.
I’ll get down to the computer shop tomorrow and shop for a better mike, but for now I think I need a nice cool beverage to wet my whistle.