Scribd – over 2,400 viewings of documents

This is the first in a series of articles about the services that operate behind the scenes on the BCN (Blackpool Community News) websites.  This series will look at Box.Net, Odiogo, Amazon Associates and WordPress services and those of TypePad. But we start by revisiting Scribd:

This website (and the BCN main website) first used Scribd back in July (2008). Since then over 50 BCN documents have been given the Scribd treatment and shared with a wider audience as iPaper documents. This has allowed us to offer a service to readers enabling them to view or download a document. There has been over 2,400 total views of documents shared by BCN on Scribd.  The single most popular document on BCN Scribd with nearly 200 views, is the Blackpool Local Area Agreement reproduced as an embedded document below. The same document can be viewed as a Scribd Document Page or as a Scribd Fullscreen Webpage document.

iPaper is a document format built for the Web. Virtually any document format can be converted to iPaper, which is embeddable into any website or blog (and just very recently into WordPress Blogs as well).

Above is the Control Panel for Scribd documents. The iPaper drop down menu gives you different publishing and viewing options (including viewing as a Book and as Slides). The – and + controls the zoom. You can view the page of your choice and can view single pages or all the pages. You can search the document. The final control allows you to view the document as a web page.

Important note: iPaper is built with Adobe Flash for creating animation and interactivity on websites. So if you can watch videos on YouTube, you won’t have any problems with iPaper. You must also have JavaScript enabled on your browser. If you can see the document below your browser is enabled.

You should see the embedded document here:

View this document on Scribd

News from the Corridors of Power – through the power of WordPress

The UK Parliament Labs are developing the services they offer through customising their use of WordPress blogging software. This will make their news services more accessible – and more friendly – to use!

“WordPress is open source software that is free to use and customise. This is the first time Parliament has used the open source option. The main reasons for doing so are the ability to customise the look and functionality of WordPress easily, it’s economical, and inputting and publishing content is simple and fast. And it lets us provide RSS feeds. And unique, fairly friendly, URLs. Basically everything you’d expect from a website today.”

Parliament is not the first influential institution to use WordPress in the UK, indeed the Number 10 website uses it as well, but it will undoubtedly do a lot to promote WordPress and Free and Open Source Software across the UK – and the World!

New ICT Magazine for 3rd Sector

Civil Society IT is a new quarterly magazine and active website about the effective use of ICT in all kinds of not-for-profit organisations.

The magazine offers:

• 4 information-packed issues per year
• A fully-interactive digital edition
• A regular e-newsletter with news, jobs and events
• Unlimited access to online-only content at civilsocietyIT.co.uk. What we can’t fit in the magazine will go on the website.

You can look at the magazine and associated material on their website now – the digitised page-turning version of the  magazine is quite funky!

They have a useful web page on Free stuff.

A one year subscription will cost you £39 for one year – however, subscribe before the 6th February and you will get two full subscriptions for the price of one.

OpenOffice 3.0 released

OpenOffice is the free open-source alternative to Microsoft Office. And it certainly gives that corporate giant a run for its money; in fact Microsoft has responded by reducing the costs of its own suite with student versions now available for £70-£80.

OpenOffice has Writer its wordprocessor, Calc spreadsheet, Draw graphics editor, Impress for presentations, Base databse and Math for equations!

The OpenOffice suite is compatible with Microsoft Office. Documents can be saved as OpenOffice ODF files or as Microsoft files (useful if e-mailing to those who can’t open ODF files yet).

Is OpenOffice any good? Well as someone who got new computer a year ago, I was faced with learning to use Microsoft Word on a free trial – and then have to pay for it – or learn Writer which was similar to earlier versions of Word and not pay for it! The choice was simple – I’ve used OpenOffice for 12 months and am quite excited with my latest version.

See for yourself – it can be downloaded free from OpenOffice.org 3.0. It is a full programme and so a very large download. But you do have the option of ordering on disk.