Call me silly, but I'm looking for a way to use a website automatically, same time every day, but with the capability of responding to many different situations (all of them can be predicted so I can do it myself, I just need it to recognise it) The problem is im very new to programming as a whole and I'm totally lost on where to start with this project... can anyone help? Is it even possible for someone at my level?
To be simple. no. AI programming is very advanced and requires a lot of in-depth knowledge of programming. You might be able to hack together a solution using selenium, which is a tool for testing the UI.
There is also the possibility to make a bot that clicks on specific locations on the screen. they cannot respond to what is actually on the screen however. If the website is a bit slower than normal things can go wrong as well. That would not be the best solution.
Related
I had a website which was built using the CMS WebYep. Now I want to shift it to WordPress. Can anyone tell me how to do that?
Thanks is advance :)
Regards,
Ryan
I'm afraid there is no automatic process for most CMS.
You can either do it manually, or write a program (or hire somebody to write it) to help do the job.
In most cases the manual way is preferred. Different content management systems work quite differently, so there's usually not a universal way to set things up. Recognizing the differences and how to achieve a similar result is an easy thing to do for a human but a very hard thing to do for a computer. Plus, from my experience, with a relaunch usually comes a re-structuring. When you're moving to a new house, you might just get rid of that old broken sofa while you're at it, basically.
When you have a very large website with lots of similar content, a developer can certainly write scripts to aid in the process of moving your content over to WP. This will usually not be cheap, so it's not a smart idea for a site that consists of a dozen pages or where the content isn't very homogenous.
I will explain exactly what I am trying to do, and maybe someone can tell me a simple way that I can do it.
I want to track the amount of money pledged on a Kickstarter project page. The amount pledged is consistently kept within a certain tag. What are all the ways I can do this programatically?
I am just starting out to learn how to develop on the web, so that should be a good context to allow you to better help me. (I've learned bits and peices of C, Python, VB, JS, HTML/CSS)
Is there a simple hack way to do this with free tools? How would I do it all on my own? Extending this idea further, how would I notify my android device when the amount has surpassed a predefined threshold? Is this the process known as scraping? What tool do I need at my disposal to accomplish this? What language do I need to use? Do I need my own web space?
If I eventually made this concept into an android app, is there a way to only load a small portion of a website (maybe even just enough source to get to the tag I am looking for) so that I can get the data I want on the page but not have to waste a bunch of my smartphone data loading the rest of the stuff that I didn't want?
Thank you for any help you can provide!
I'm not familiar with Kickstarter's API -- do they have one? -- but here is how I'd approach this problem:
You want to "ping" the Kickstarter periodically for information. One way to do it on Android is using BuzzBox SDK
With each execution of the background task:
Load a portion of the Kickstarter page with jQuery into your own HTML document.
Compare it with a threshold and possibly the previous stored value. Should be doable with basic <= unless you want to go anal-retentive with parsing and stuff.
Use notification in Android to notify the user once the amount is updated.
Wrap all this into an app.
i am a hobby programmer with very little experience in web programming, i devote an average f 20-30 hours a week, but with summers coming i have some free time to experiment and learn. could anyone please tell me, whether a framework like (Kohana/cakePHP/CI) should be used or directly a CMS tool like drupal/joomla should be used to make a website something like stackoverflow, on a smaller scale though.
Thanks for your help.
It depends on what you want to learn. Depends on your goal.
Is it webdevelopment you wish to learn? CSS? Webdesign? Programming? Building sites?
If your goal is the site itself, I would suggest to start high up in the stack: use a ready-to-go CMS, such as Drupal, that gets you going fast. And that offers a (production ready) result in a few hours. Your downside will be freedom: sure Drupal can do a lot, so can Wordpress. But unless you move down in the stack (develop addons and such) you will have to do with what you are offered: ready made components that work according to the authors wish. Possibly not your wish.
If your goal is to learn webdevelopment in a more general way, you should start lower down in the stack. Ruby on Rails or Django are probably the best options. Simply because of their vast resource on newbie documentation. You will learn programming along the way there too. Within a few days you will have built a site according to your exact wishes (obviously, your milage may vary, depending on the wishes:)).
If your goal is development of software, Python and Ruby are most probably a good start too: both are cross-platform, have good newbie resources and offer great documentation. Both are really well (opinions may differ on this) abstraction and object orientation. They will form you into a good programmer, simply by their nature.
There's a Stackoverflow clone called Qwench that is free.
(search stackoverflow for open source stackoverflow clones)
and one built on drupal http://drupal.org/project/arrayshift
Wordpress can act very much like Stackoverflow with a proper template. See here: http://p2theme.com/ (demo here: http://p2demo.wordpress.com/). Actually you can than start editing the theme (.php files) and make it behave more and more like Stackoverflow (with reputation system etc. which should be easy to implement). This way you won't be reinventing the wheel and have a good headstart.
I personally use CodeIgniter and love it. I would recommend it to any novice looking to further their knowledge of object oriented programming, and any veterans looking to get their projects off the ground quicker. I am not going to go into great detail here, because I know Kohana and CakePHP are similar, and its mostly opinion. CI does have great documentation though.
I think learning the most common CMS is going to be hugely beneficial to you, tons of sites and companies use WP/Drupal/Joomla/Etc and it really can't hurt to understand them. These projects are very large, so you don't necessarily need to know their internal operations 100%, but you should know enough to be able to install, customize and get a site up and running fairly quickly.
Everyone has their favorites, but I invite you to try them all and see what moves you. It will NEVER hurt to learn something and not use it, especially with some extra time.
There are times to use a packaged CMS and hopefully be able to theme/customize it to what you need quickly...then there are times you will want to code a special case by hand using a framework.
Just understand the depth of the project you want to undertake, because starting from scratch is fun and rewarding, but once you get neck deep in code and get stuck its easy to lose motivation all together.
I would suggest learning the basics of HTML before diving in to using a content management system. The importance of understanding the basic building blocks of websites can't be overstated.
There are loads of resources online to learning about HTML - once you've got some experience with that, you can look at CSS, Javascript, and server-side scripting languages. Knowing the basics will help with using any content management system.
Joomla / Drupal are a good place to start with content management systems, as is Wordpress, but you'd be much better off learning how it works underneath (at least to the most basic extent) before diving in to anything else.
If you're already a programmer you won't find it too hard, but it's definitely worth doing.
Running an MVC2 site against IIS7 and would like to capture more detail of how users traverse the site - ideally to the point of being able to replay even the duration between mouse clicks - feedback of where people pause and/or backtrack.
I could do this with flash but that's no longer an option. Now it's just IIS7 via asp.net f4. IIS7 _should be able to provide this via 3rd party extensions - especially for this sort of niche need. I'm willing to consider client-side .net components but this sure seems to be the responsibility of the server.
[opps...does this belong on serverfault?]
thx
justSteve. Here is a solution that we have used:
http://www.seevolution.com/
I don't think that it gives time between clicks, but it does give very detailed tracking considering it's price (I don't know if that's an issue). We have really liked it. Fantastic detail.
You could also roll your own solution. Using jQuery and the $(document).click() function, you can log when they click, and the points on the screen. Then every couple of minutes, serialize it and fire it off to the server. You can get extremely fine-grained detail that way. The nice thing with seevolution is that they've done all of the work for you already, but it probably isn't as detailed as you would like.
JMax
Maybe not the "in-house" solution you're after but we are about to implement SessionCam at my company, which seems like a pretty good match for what you're looking for. Not having actually finished implementing it yet, I can't vouch for it in terms of quality at this point - but the description of the product certainly matches.
You aren't going to be able to capture the level of detail you need using a solely server-side solution. There needs to be a degree of client-side work - whether it's in flash or javascript - to capture things such as where the mouse is hovering (for heatmaps etc).
I personally haven't used this product, but a friend of mine spoke highly of it.
Clicktale
this is my firts post here ever.
I have to develop an aplication for a group of people with special needs. The functionality is really trivial, however, i have no clue of how to do the interface for them to be able to use it.
Their intelectual habilities are perfect, they are actually studying high school, but one of them types with his nose which needless to say, is very dificult and another one types reaaaaaaally slowly with only one of his fingers and neither can use the mouse.
I was wondering if i could use javascript to develop a usable interface, based on huge grids or something like that or maybe you guys have a better idea.
Political incorrectness aside, why don't you ask them? You're talking about accessibility here, if they're using computers they must be able to tell you about what they like or dislike about user interfaces that they've encountered.
I'm going to split my answer into two parts - design and implementation.
From a design perspective, it's important not to be intimidated by the fact that the users use a computer in a different manner. Treat this like any other project. Observe how they currently use other apps, and ask about the kind of things that they find helpful, or have difficulty with. If they claim nothing is difficult, ask a teacher or assistant, who will be familiar with the kind of things they struggle with.
Once you've started implementation, try an idea and get initial feedback. If you simply ask how they find the prototype, they'll likely say it's ok. Instead, try observing them using it without saying anything or giving guidance. If they get stuck, let them find their own solution to the problem. If appropriate, you could ask the user to speak their thoughts out loud (e.g. "I need to save this form, so I'm scrolling to the bottom, and clicking save").
On the development side, try to use web standards (valid HTML, CSS and Javascript). People often point to the "Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0" (WCAG2) but this is quite turse and hard to understand; there are many more friendly articles on "Web Accessibility".
Someone with a physical disability is likely to use an alternate input device, such as a "Switch", onscreen keyboard, head-tracking device, a device for pushing keys on the keyboard, or speech recognition. Many of these methods involve simulating the keyboard, so by far the most important thing is to consider the accessibility of your site without using a mouse. For example, try tabbing through the page to see if you can access all elements in a reasonable amount of time. Consider using the acesskey attribute to provide an easy way to jump to different parts of the page (using 0 through 9 is often recommended so you don't interfere with browser shortcuts).
Also make sure that no part of your site is time-dependant, as different users may take different amounts of time to perform a task. For example, don't use the onchange Javascript event to update a page based on a listbox selection. Ensure you have alt text for images, so it's accessible for speech recognition. make the pages short enough so that excessive scrolling isn't required, but not so short as to require following lots of links.
Those are just some ideas to get your mind going in the right direction - but there are many accessibility resources on the internet - steal freely, and don't reinvent the wheel.
I realise I haven't addressed your question about Javascript - that's because I think it's probably one of the less important considerations. If possible, use Progressive Enhancement techniques to make the site work with and without Javascript. You might also look into the WAI-Aria standard for giving semantics to your Javascript.
And finally, to reiterate my initial point - make something simple, show it to the users, tweek, and show again.
It doesn't really matter what technology you use. Use whichever suites you.
But, make sure that you make UI components BIG in size(Bigger buttons, bigger font, bold font, coloured font(are there any colour blind?). This is for the ease of use of people (you said someone types with nose).
Also, better to have audio as informative source along with the usual screen display whenever some wrong action is performed on the application. This way visually impaired people will be assisted more.
Do it well, you are doing a divine job.
The first thing that you should read up on is the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines written up by the W3C.
In a nutshell this document describes the basic principles for people with disabilities in general.
For your needs regarding persons with special needs, you might want to look at Jakob Nielsen's article on Website Usability for Children, wherein principles of web design for young children or people with otherwise limited cognitive ability are outlined.