Trick and Tips

• Link to Alexa
• Alexa Blog

WHAT?
"Founded in April 1996, Alexa Internet grew out of a vision of Web navigation that is intelligent and constantly improving with the participation of its users. Along the way Alexa has developed an installed based of millions of toolbars, one of the largest Web crawls and an infrastructure to process and serve massive amounts of data. For users of Alexas Toolbar and web site this has resulted in products that have revolutionized Web navigation and intelligence. For developers this has resulted in a set of tools unprecedented in scope allowing whole new services to be created on the Alexa data and platform" ...more

HOW?
"Alexa is continually crawling all publicly available web sites to create a series of snapshots of the Web. They use the data they collect to create features and services:

• Site Information: Traffic rankings, pictures of sites, links pointing to sites and more
• Related Links: Sites that are similar to the one you are currently viewing

Currently, Alexa gathers approximately 1.6 Terabytes (1600 gigabytes) of Web content per day. After each snapshot of the Web, which takes approximately two months to complete, Alexa has gathered 4.5 Billion pages from over 16 million sites"...more

JUICE?
Whether the results are 100% accurate or not (methodology!), Alexa has a wonderful set of learning tools (Search, Traffic Rankings, Director, Alexa Toolbar and Developers Corner) to search, discover, rank and compare different sites around the world. For example, the most visited sites in all Education categories are:

1. W3C - The World Wide Web Consortium
2. How Stuff Works
3. Classmates
4. Massachusetts Institute of Technology
5. National University of Singapore (NUS)

Surprisingly, NUS is ranked ahead of (6) University of California, Berkeley , (7) Stanford University, and (8) Harvard University. How is that possible? Well, this should give us some incentive to research Why this is the case. Let the students figure this one out! Also, perhaps Wikipedia should be placed in the education category. Yes, it will probably be ranked No. 1.

What about Malaysia? Currently, Yahoo is ranked No.1, but interestingly Friendster is No. 2, and Facebook is way down in 11th. I suppose in two months time, Facebook will probably overtake Friendster.

The beauty of Alexa is that you can actually use this tool to compare different sites of your own liking. In this example I have compared 5 Mambo Jumbo sites (Dont need to clarify!):

If you havent tried or used Alexa, it might be time to have some fun learning with your friends, colleagues or students exploring different rankings and comparing your favourite sites :)

Microsoft Signs the Joomla! Contributor Agreement

So, the deal with HTC isnt the only partnership Microsoft entered into today. The Joomla! project has announced that Microsoft has signed the Joomla! Contributor Agreement, meaning the Redmond company is now a contributor to this GPL project. Microsoft code has already found its way into the upcoming Joomla! 1.6 release, and closer cooperation between Joomla! and Microsoft will follow.

The news was announced by Open Source Matters, Inc., the not-for-profit organisation behind Joomla!. The fruits of the closer cooperation between them are already finding their way into the code base; Joomla! will be better optimised for running on Microsofts IIS, while it will also be delivered through the Web Platform Installer.

"Microsoft signing the JCA is big news for the Joomla! community. Not only is this the largest organization to ever contribute code and to agree to the terms of our contributor agreement, but this means Joomla! users will get improved performance and usability of Joomla! on Microsofts IIS," said Ryan Ozimek, president of Open Source Matters.

"Weve always had a portion of our community that has been IIS-based, yet we havent been able to offer the ideal level of IIS support and integration," Ozimek added, "With the new agreement in place, Joomla! will not only offer tighter ties with IIS, but our community can better work with Microsoft to make improvements or address future engineering issues. Were very happy to have Microsoft as part of our GPL development community."

So, what exactly does it mean when they say theyll be working closer with Microsoft? "Microsoft has helped here by providing test environments (with a lot of us being Mac users, IIS testing isnt the first thing that comes to mind or the easiest thing to do)," explains Joomla! developer Sam Moffatt, "With the release of 1.5.16, well have solved some long term bugs with IIS compatibility and be able to provide support for IIS on the same level as we have for Apache."

This is good news for Joomla! users. While contributions from Microsoft will almost certainly annoy armchair internet lurkers, they will provide a better user experience for those that actually use Joomla!, and improve the overall products quality, while at the same time, the GPL will ensure the continuing benefit of these contributions.

MightyMeeting, a new entrant in online PowerPoint meeting domain, unlike other presentation meeting tools like Present Live from authorSTREAM , SlideLive, Zoho Show or Google presentations,  lets you conduct PowerPoint presentations on the go even from your smart-phone. Using MightyMeeting  you can conduct presentations remotely via its web interface or  iPhone and Android applications. Despite the fact that animation effects seems missing on MightyMeeting, running a synchronized slide show from mobile phone has its added advantages.

The only presentation meeting tool which retains animation effects is Present Live from authorSTREAM though they dont have any app for mobile yet. MightyMeeting could come in handy when you have to start a presentation meeting at a moment’s notice.