Hiding addresses

This is often done by writing the e-mail addresses in a form that only a human could understand; perhaps james@freecharity.REMOVEMEorg.uk, or james (at) freecharity (dot) org (dot) uk, or as an image embedded in a page. These address can’t easily be picked out as a valid e-mail address by automated software.

More recent schemes use JavaScript to hide the address in the source of the web page but reassemble it when executed in a web browser. This works as long spammers don’t execute JavaScript in the pages they crawl and we’ve no reason to suspect that some are not already doing so. These schemes don’t account for readers who can’t run the embedded script and so fails to meet the most basic level of conformance with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.

Your readers want to click on a link and start writing an e-mail straight away and you’ve purposely stoped them from doing so. Someone impulsively contacting you might be put off, another person might not understand your scheme.

Contact forms

Replacing e-mail addresses with server side scripts and HTML contact forms can provide a means for people to contact you without publishing an address. This seems ideal.

Unfortunately, most of your readers already have a familiar, comfortable and functional environment for sending communications – their e-mail software. It allows them to record, sort, archive and search through past communications, manage attachments, addresses and presenting all this in a format tailored to their individual accessibility requirements. By forcing the use of contact forms you take this away from your readers.

(Not that web forms don’t have their place. They’re great for ensuring that people send you precisely the information you require from them).

Summary

Publish your addresses and deal with spam as it arrives. Spammers use other sources of e-mail addresses over which you have no control. The limited reduction in spam that these methods provide comes at a burden upon your legitimate readers. You should design your website to be usable for them; not convenient for yourself.

Know your audience: people working for charities aren’t always computer experts and are likely to have been volunteered into being the organization’s accidental techie. They might not have had any choice over what software tools they use for practical, political and financial reasons; don’t criticize them for it. Most people are going to have a pragmatic approach to IT; they have problems and need them solved now. It’d be nice if everyone could share your view of ethics but the practical benefits are more important now.

Use positive, vigorous arguments. FOSS has far more to offer than simply being a better alternative to Microsoft. Great sales messages don’t focus on how better your widget is than all previous widgets (many technically superior products have failed) but by concentrating on what instant benefits using your widget will bring. There’s no need to refer to Microsoft as M$ or otherwise insult them; it’s unprofessional.

Be consistent, but more importantly be realistic and correct. Here are some common mistakes.

• FOSS is not without costs. Even GPL licensing can cost.
• Commercial software and FOSS are not mutually exclusive. The most important projects are worked on by multinational companies.
• No software is without problems. FOSS has bugs and usability problems too.
• Open standards are not exclusive to FOSS. Proprietary software often makes good use of open standards to exchange data with other applications.

It’s easy to think that the world is against FOSS; especially when the facts seem to fit that view. Some people are hard to win over, some you can’t. Accusations of conspiracy will not help your case and make you look unprofessional. Expect people to have different opinions and viewpoints to yourself.

Don’t get personal: ignore others when they do. Be prepared to apologize if you accidentally offend someone. Knowing when not to advocate and when to back down is more productive than trying to grab even the smallest opportunity.

I’d love to hear, by e-mail or in the comments, if there’s anything you think that could be added or removed from this short list. It’s a tricky subject.

1. Disable comments completely
2. Allow only registered users to comment
3. Install a spam fighting plugin – Spam Karma 2

Disabling comments completely

If you don’t want people to be able to comment at all this is a quick, easy and straight forward method to stop the spam. In the administrative interface for your WordPress installation, select Options -> Discussion. Uncheck “Allow link notifications from other Weblogs” and “Allow people to post comments on the article” and click “Update Options”.

After you’ve done this, you could go a little further by removing references to comments, and the comment form template from your theme. This will avoid some themes needlessly announcing that comments have been disabled.

Allowing only registered users to comment

Allowing anyone in the world unrestricted access to comment is a fast route to spam. If do allow online discussion, ask your users to register first. Once logged into the administration pages, go to Options -> General. Tick the boxes for ‘Anyone can register’ and ‘Users must be registered and logged in to comment’. You may also wish to investigate the ‘An administrator must always approve the comment’ or ‘Comment author must have a previously approved comment’ options under Options -> Discussion.

Installing Spam Karma 2

Spam Karma (SK2) is a WordPress plugin that monitors comments and scrutinizes them before allowing them to be published. Every comment is scored against a number of tests such as where the comment was posted from, is the poster known to be good, does the content look like spam? Posts with a high enough score will be published, posts with low scores will be held for approval and posts with very low scores will be swept away. Each day an e-mail is sent to you with a summary of what actions SK2 has taken.

Download SK2 from it’s website and upload it to your plugins folder in your WordPress installation. Enable it in the ‘Plugins’ administration page. SK2 can now be configured from the “Manage -> Spam Karma 2″ page. Although the default settings should suit most people, you can tweak the tests the plugin performs. Further pages allow you to release comments from moderation, or remove spam comments that slipped through.

Further information can be found in the SK2 FAQ.

Read more about how to use WordPress for web publishing.

Unfortunately the recording software I use, xvidcap, doesn’t come included with Ubuntu but there’s a Debian package available which worked just fine for me. It’s not as sophisticated as many of it’s Windows counterparts but you could be able to use the accessibility features of your desktop to compensate for features such as magnification. I’ve created a short meta-screencast giving a brief tour of xvidcap.

Once you’ve finished with xvidcap you’ll be left with an MPEG video file which you could upload straight to YouTube or another hosting service. I’m happy with this informal style of short screencasts as single takes but the video editing software Kino comes with Ubuntu for your basic editing needs.As is usual for free software there are many alternatives, this was the selection of software that worked best for me as a complete beginner to screencasting and video in Linux. You might also wish to look at ffmpeg and Istanbul for screen capture and Cinelerra and LiVES for editing.Take a look at the WordPress screencasts I’ve produced, or read about how to use WordPress for web publishing.

• Reach a potential audience of million at little to no cost
• Publish video content online without worrying about the technical issues
• Increase the value of their website to users through video content

If you don’t want to miss out on how publishing on YouTube can help your charity read on.

Whilst we can’t talk you through every step in this short article it’s likely that you’ll fall into one of three cases. It’s less common for video to be produced in an analogue format so we’re going to presume that we’re starting with some digital source.

• A short DVD made by a production company or yourselves and all you want to do is place the video as it is on YouTube. You will need to use a DVD “ripper” to produce a video file on your computer. We recommend AutoGK for Windows and HandBrake for Mac OS X.
• The video is still on your digital video camera which you can connect to your computer’s firewire port. You might be happy with the video as it is but there’s a possibility you may wish to edit the video before publishing. You should import the video from your firewire device into your video editing software. Edit the video until you’re happy and export it to a file, ready to upload to YouTube. YouTube limits the size of the video you can upload to 100MB and ten minutes in length so it’s important that your exported video fits in these limits. Your video software is likely to have a wizard or guide to help you with compressing the video to a suitable file size.
• You already have the video in a file on your computer. All you need to do is check that the video is suitable for publishing on YouTube, perhaps recompressing it in your editing software to make sure it fits within the acceptable limits.

You might wish to look at the following video editing packages. Don’t forget the limitations of 100MB and ten minutes!

• Windows – Windows Movie Maker, Adobe Premier Elements, Ulead Video Studio
• Mac OS X – Apple iMovie, Final Cut Express, Adobe Premier
• Linux – Kino, LIVES

Currently we recommend Apple’s iMovie for it’s ease of use. For basic editing, Windows Movie Maker should suffice. In a future article we look at video editing with free and open source software tools.

You’re ready to go, sign up for a YouTube account and upload your video. Be patient as a 100MB file can take some time to upload even on a broadband connection!

For further information, advice and help on how you can best use YouTube, please contact us.

The site in question is that of my local government, the Vale of White Horse District Council. It’s a little disappointing as they are on the whole, rather accessible when using the WCAG guidelines as a baseline. The main page is pretty much valid markup and degrades nicely when features such as colours, style-sheets, images and are disabled but a closer inspection reveals problems with XHTML validation, navigation, broken links to accessibility information, and use of absolute measurements that are likely to cause accessibility problems for users.

There’s a working page containing accessibility information, where the claim of compliance is made and it looks likely that at one point in time they had commissioned a positive report, or successful test of their website’s accessibility. What we must assume happened is that over time the website has changed (as all good websites do) but that accessibility has not been built into the process of producing the site. At one extreme we might even get the impression that accessibility was seen as an inconvenience that needed to be looked at once to satisfy some requirement.

Convince your management that your website’s accessibility is important; make sure everyone understands that it’s not just a technical problem. Build accessibility into your processes, bring accessibility checks into your testing of updates to your website and think about accessibility whilst you plan new content. Use automated tools regularly to check for silly mistakes but understand their limitations; software cannot solve all your problems. Care about how your users access your site and the problems they might face. It’s also important to remember that achieving compliance with any level of the WCAG is not the end goal of accessibility.

If you’re looking for a web publishing system that makes all this as easy as possible for you, you should check out our web hosting.

If you’d like to read more about website accessibility, here are some of my favourite web accessibility blogs.

• Accessibility Blog
• Web Site Accessibility Blog
• RNIB Web Access Centre Blog
• Accessibility 101 Blog
• isolani : web accessibility blog

Installation and Configuration

RT is Free Software and available as a free download for a number of platforms but most use some distribution of Linux. Ideally it is run a well specified server but is usable on an average server for small installations. Numerous user interfaces are available but the overwhelming majority of users will only be interested in using RT by e-mail and the web, making the system usable from most platforms, including mobile devices.

Installation on Debian Linux using the Debian provided packages and documentation was straight forward but some experience of configuring Apache and MySQL databases was advantageous. Installation of RTFM was also simple but I did need to be careful that I installed the request-tracker3 package. The more recent request-tracker3.4 package may not be compatible with Debian’s rtfm package.

Integration with your e-mail system requires a little knowledge of Unix mail systems, mail aliases need to be configured for e-mails intended for RT to be piped into RT’s e-mail gateway. RT is customisable and and tweaking the configuration to get it just right will require some time and reading of the documentation. I added a new queue, gave “everyone” permission to create new tickets in that queue, created a group for support staff for access to those queues and modified a few “scrips“. Scrips are actions carried out by RT when particular events occur – I disabled the auto-response e-mail that is sent to users upon starting a new support ticket.

RTFM

After such a simple installation I had expected RTFM to just work out of the box and was encouraged by the appearance of forms to allow you to search RTFM whilst updating a support ticket but I was left a little puzzled when I tried to create a new article on RTFM and was only presented with options to create a title and summary for the article, but no actual article. A quick read of the documentation revealed a need to create custom fields to contain the body of an article and then everything worked as expected and I was able to create articles from existing documentation and also my replies to support requests.

Summary

I’ve installed and successfully used RTFM but what difference has it made to my work? It’s to early to tell but I think the most testing part will be the discipline required to create and use articles rather than respond anew to each request. Thankfully there’s been little to alter in my existing work flow, with much of work done through the e-mail interface. For end users, nothing has changed apart from the e-mail address used to contact us for support.

RT itself has been useful in pure management and prioritisation of support requests, ensuring they are resolved promptly and not lost in an e-mail inbox. If you’d like more information on RT and how it can be used to help your organisation please feel free to contact us.

There are many similarities – Fair Trade helps to build the capacity of growers whilst Free Software levels the field for new developers with a capacity to build upon an existing body of work, but the discussion talks about the moral choices a buyer makes when choosing a fair trade or free software product. This misses the point. The moral concerns a buyer of fair trade products has are for the producer of their product whilst it’s the properties of our software, and our rights as users, that concern us as providers and users of software. We shouldn’t lead people to think that free software can make a difference to the lives of developers of proprietary software in the same way that fair trade does to growers in the third world. The best we can claim is that both involve a choice and a concern for people.

As users of Free Software we expect to be granted the freedom to do as we chose with our software as long as we don’t restrict what others can do with our derived software. As purchasers of Fair Trade products we expect a fair deal for growers and manufacturers.

(See also Beth’s Blog: Is Open Source Fair Trade for nonprofits)

Don’t make the mistake of using a more complicated and proprietary format than is absolutely necessary to present your information. Your readers want simple and quick access to information and anything that gets in the way of this – such as the downloading of a plugin to view a file – is off-putting. Don’t place information inside a Microsoft Word document when it can be just as well presented directly in a web page. If you do feel that you need precise control over the document’s presentation use a format such as Adobe’s PDF but remember
that not everyone has Acrobat installed.

Keep the number of formats used on your website to the minimum possible; preferably use nothing in your pages beyond HTML. If you do post word processor documents to your website be consistent about their use: don’t use a mix of Microsoft Office and OpenOffice formats, pick one and stick with it.

The most important lesson here is to think carefully about the use of a particular format: what are its weaknesses and strengths, why is it necessary and how will it impact your readers?

As an organization you are likely to have a lot of material that may or may not already be suitable for publication on the web. This needs to be collated and assessed by someone with an eye for what makes good content. It’s likely that this won’t be the person in charge of the technical aspects of the site. Whether you use simple static pages or a more sophisticated content management system it is important that you create a work flow that allows for the separation of content from the design and technical aspects of presentation.

The system that FreeCharity.org.uk uses allows you to do just that. A technical person can create the layout and presentation of your site through the most complex templates but still leave your content authors with a simple, easy to use interface to write, edit and upload content.

The key lesson here is to draw upon the best skills and resources that already exist throughout your organization to create the best website for your organization. Don’t assume that one person can do it all and don’t let the software you use determine the nature of the problems you face. If you are interested in using our services to make creating a website as easy as possible, please contact us.