conficio

I did start working the user experience of Plan-B for Openoffice.org because I thought that 70% of a bounce rate is rather high. While I succeeded with some first steps to encourage visitors to explore the site, some other steps did not do as much as I had hoped. However I was wondering what my target should be? What would be a good bounce rate, specifically a good bounce rate for my type of site? I wondered if there is a benchmark that I could measure myself against? Today I read the... Read Full Story

I recently decided to replace the lucene based search engine on Plan-B for OpenOffice.org with a Google Custom Search engine. At first glance this seems to be an easy task. Remove the old code and replace it with some Google Java scripts. However this is not how it turned out to be. I targeted a layout, where the search box is part of the general navigation menu bar and results appear on their own page. However the HTML/CSS code generated by Google is rather inflexible. The two page template... Read Full Story

I have replaced the Plan-B for OpenOffice / LibreOffice search engine with Google Custom Search. The local search engine based on lucene was heavy on resource consumption and did require a lot of effort to keep up the indices with new or changing content. So I decided to switch to a Google Custom Search Engine. I hope this change makes the site an even better resource or OpenOffice and LibreOffice users. Please let me know if you have any suggestions on how to improve search on the site. Read Full Story

In my quest to improve the user experience at Plan-B for OpenOffice/LibreOffice , I did change the over 1,000 video pages, such as “ Export a presentation in PDF format ” or “ How to create an Agenda Template with Writer .” All video pages were constructed the same. Front and center was a massive frame for the 800×600 video player. Every video started instantly when the page loaded. I replaced the frame it with a simple “play video” button that brings up an overlay to play the video. This... Read Full Story

Three days ago I asked the question “ How often do you view OpenOffice/LibreOffice documents on your Android device? ” on Plan-B for OpenOffice.org/LibreOffice The 100 free answers came in fast. The survey was closed in less than two days. Thank you to all that participated, here are the results Clearly ODF documents are not very popular on Android devices. 54% that did take the time to answer the question said, they never needed to do so. 27% replied they don’t have an Android device... Read Full Story

Today I added a survey to all video pages on Plan-B for Open Office / LibreOffice . The survey asks “How often do you view OpenOffice/LibreOffice documents on your Android device?” Never, I don’t have an Android device Never, did not need to Tried once, did not work Tried once, successful Several times Once a month Once a week More Often I used SurveyMonkey with a free account. Read Full Story

After a longer time of minimal maintenance at Plan-B for OpenOffice.org , I find more time to edit and improve the site. I did clean up some broken links, updated the statistics to reflect that we now have over 1,000 videos and worked on some spelling errors. I have decided I have to move this web site project of mine from an altruistic endeavor to something that sustains itself. I’ll experiment how to change things to make this resource more attractive to its users and also how to... Read Full Story

The recent GNOME 3 hackfest in the UK got me thinking of my ideal desktop design – task oriented and controlling interrrupts Here would be my vision of this: Have separate desktops for each task (open documents, web pages, chat sessions, e-mails, contacts, bookmarks, browser/search history, …) and that persists across login sessions (under a name) and ideally across machines (web sync like Mozilla Weave) When I start a task I might want to start with the desktop of another task... Read Full Story

The recent GNOME 3 hackfest in the UK got me thinking of my ideal desktop design - task oriented and controlling interrrupts Here would be my vision of this: Have separate desktops for each task (open documents, web pages, chat sessions, e-mails, contacts, bookmarks, browser/search history, …) and that persists across login sessions (under a name) and ideally across machines (web sync like Mozilla Weave) When I start a task I might want to start with the desktop of another task... Read Full Story

For over 8 months I have been working on a Mac Pro now. Let me share some of my experience with the you. First I ran the beast with Windows XP on it. And this machine is a beast! It’s quad core server type processors are fast and the box in itself is put together in a way that it deserves the “Pro” for professional in its name. After realizing that memory under Windows XP was limited to 2 GB for some reason and we could not get it to even accept 3 GB of the 6 that it was configured with, I... Read Full Story