There are a few ways to easily keep track of what others are saying about your Free Software project. In a very popular project, you may already have enough feedback from its busy forum or mailing list, but in new and small projects, you often have to actively seek feedback/comments from end-users.
Here are a few ways to find out what people are saying online about your project.
Google Alerts
I have also signed up for the following Google Alert:
- Search terms:
link:safe-rm.org.nz - Type:
Comprehensive - Deliver to:
Email - How often:
as-it-happens
which emails me anytime someone links to my project's homepage in one of the resources indexed by Google.
Talkwalker
In addition to Google Alerts, I also subscribe to the Talkwalker Alerts service with the following alert:
- Search query:
safe-rm - Result type: (leave blank for Everything)
- Language:
All languages - How often:
As it happens - How many:
All results
Anything else I should subscribe to or follow?
There are lots of excellent tools to help web developers optimise their websites.
Here are two simple things you have no excuse for overlooking on your next project.
HTML, XML, Javascript and CSS files
One of the easiest ways to speed up a website (often to a surprising degree) is to turn on compression of plaintext content through facilities like mod_deflate or the Gzip Module.
Here's the Apache configuration file I normally use:
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html text/plain text/css text/javascript text/xml application/x-javascript application/javascript
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4 gzip-only-text/html
BrowserMatch "MSIE 6" no-gzip dont-vary
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4\.0[678] no-gzip
Images
As far as images go, the following tools will reduce file sizes through lossless compression (i.e. with no visual changes at all):
gifsicle -O2 -b image.gifjpegoptim -p --strip-all image.jpgoptipng -o7 -q image.png
(An alternative to optipng is pngcrush.)
Note that the --strip-all argument to jpegoptim will remove any EXIF/comments tags that may be present.