Category: Resources

Geo-specific URL shorteners

Posted on by Comunicació

A uniform resource locator, or URL, refers to a website address or another type of internet resource. The term is used because a URL is the specific address assigned to each of the resources available on the network, enabling them to be located and identified. By resources we understand websites, documents, attachments, files, folders etc.

We can’t begin to imagine how many thousands and millions of resources there are published on the internet, with new ones added every day. It’s an immense volume of information and each resource has its own exclusive URL. It’s perhaps no surprise then that most addresses consist of an endless combination of numbers and letters, which are often unpronounceable. One downside when it comes to sharing these addresses is the number of characters they occupy. That’s a problem if we want to share them in a post, or particularly in a tweet, where characters are limited. Long and seeming illogical addresses can also be a bit of an eyesore.

URL shorteners

Because of this, URL shorteners have been around for a few years now. These free pages enable us to paste in the address we want to share and automatically generate another much shorter and exportable link. This address has exactly the same function as the long version, redirecting the user to the original URL.

Another advantage with shorteners is that URLs can be personalised, meaning that after the shortener’s domain we can write the address we want to, making reference to the content of the site the link will take us to. This helps the person clicking on the link to know where they are being redirected to, and also allows for a freer and more creative use of text.

There are plenty of URL shorteners, most of which have generic domains, seeking internationalisation or a short name which is easy to remember. But if you’re looking for more personalised alternatives, there are some which have geoTLDs.

One example is ja.cat, a URL shortener in Catalan which also allows addresses to be personalised. Similarly, i.gal shortens addresses with the Galician domain, and if you’re looking for a shortener in the Basque language then labur.eus is for you.

Other advantages to URL shorteners

Besides the two main advantages mentioned, of reducing the number of characters and personalising the URL, there are other advantages that are perhaps not so obvious.

Some shorteners allow for the extraction of data on interaction with links, meaning that an analysis can be made of the statistics for our sites and others. This data may show the number of clicks, their geographical origin and the number of shares.

Many shorteners also make things easier by offering the option of directly programming posts on social media. URL shorteners don’t affect SEO either as they simply re-path the original address, meaning all the work to position the resource stays intact.

How can open data help small commerce?

Posted on by Comunicació

One of the winning pilot projects has been presented from the urban innovation grant call “The Proactive City: Data x Commerce”. The project should help small commerce use open data for decisions to improve their business and gauge customer behaviour better.

The project has been developed by the Barcelona Open Data Initiative Association, with support from the Sant Andreu Shopping Hub, the Mirall de Pedralbes Retailers’ Association and La Marina Retailers’ Association.

The pilot project allowed for the development of a new wesbite and a new app for interactive viewing of open data, easy to interpret and enabling establishments to analyse the situation and potential impact of action and bridge the digital divide in this sector. The tools will be tested until the end of July in three shopping areas which have supported the project. The final versions will then be presented with a view to rollout in other areas.

  • The mobile app displays data for a specific establishment in comparison with others in the area and generates graphics, basically transforming data into information and knowledge. Individual user areas mean each business can carry out personalised follow-up relating to:
    • their invoicing
    • their customers
    • perception of success
    • other parametres
  • The website features interactive viewing based on open data and providing structured information useful for local commerce. Specifically:
    • data on the economic structure of the neighbourhood
    • data on consumer habits
    • data on population
    • data on social dynamics and associations

The project is one of the winners from the urban innovation grant call ‘The Proactive City’, launched by the City Council and implemented in June by the municipal foundation BIT Habitat. The goal is to find solutions to the new challenges generated or accentuated by the crisis in the spheres of social inclusion, sustainability, urban resilience and the promotion of the local economy.

Why do they call it an address when it’s a domain?

Posted on by Comunicació

When we decide to create a website, whether personal or for business, we need to take various things into account. Just like when we set up a company, we need an office and an address for it. In the language of technology, this has its own concepts. People know them, but it’s always useful to clarify which is which.

Domain

In the comparison with a company, the domain would be the postcode. This is the name of your website, which users must type into their browser when they look for you. It needs to be as clear and as simple as possible, ideally with the name of your company or initiative and a familiar extension which helps identify your business. The extension is what comes after the “dot”. A clear example of an address would be www.latevaempresa.barcelona.

The .barcelona domain accepts a broad list of special characters. What does that mean? It means you can use letters with accents or the ç or the ñ when you create your domain. If your company name contains one of these letters, it’s better to use it so that you can be recognised more easily.

Thinking of a name for your .barcelona domain can be a complex task, which we spoke about in one of our articles. Perhaps it will help you!

Hosting

When we talk about hosting, we’re referring to where all our website information is housed. This would be our office. Once we’ve created the name, we need a space for all our material.

Hosting refers to the server where all our website information is housed, and so we need to choose our provider well. There are plenty of options to choose from and a wide range of prices, but we need to be sure our hosting is secure against internet attacks and that regular back-up copies are made. The information on your website is very valuable. It’s also important to have good technical support in case there’s an issue to resolve, which tends to happen more often than we think!

IP address

All websites have an IP address, but very often we don’t even see it. An IP consists of a set of unique numbers which identify our server. To go back to the comparison with a company, these would be the GPS coordinates to get there. We normally put the street name (domain) into our browser and not the coordinates, which are very complicated to remember. Yet what the browser really identifies is this specific IP.

Tools to help you with teleworking

Posted on by Ana Tapia

More and more companies and organisations are turning to teleworking, mainly in response to the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic but also as a way of optimising time and resources. Yet working remotely also has its difficulties if communication is not good enough and workloads are not managed properly between teams.

Here are some tools which are sure to help you with everyday teleworking.

Communication and meetings

If there’s one thing we’ve discovered during lockdown it’s the various videoconferencing tools available, from the classic Skype to WhatsApp and Zoom, probably the biggest discovery of 2020. If you’re after an alternative which gets well away from large corporate options, there are a couple of free tools available to you: Jitsi, with the advantage that you don’t need to create a user account to make use of it, just create a link and share it, and Framatalk, a videoconferencing tool from the Framasoft project which also allows you to create a virtual meeting room without the need to register.

Shared files

Tools for shared files exist to avoid having multiple versions of a document, enabling users to share files in the cloud, update them and share them with various other users. The best known are Google Drive, which offers 15GB of free storage, and Dropbox, which offers 2GB of free space with the possibility of increasing this up to 16GB by inviting friends to use the service.

Other options here include Mega, with 50GB of free storage space, and Degoo, which offers 100GB, although the free version only allows users to upload files from three different devices.

Framasoft also offers various free open-source tools such as the collaborative calendar Framagenda, the collaborative spreadsheet Framacalc, the presentation software Framaslides and the meeting planning tool Framadate.

If you want to go a step further, the French collective Chatons offers a list of various open-source software alternatives to Google Drive and Dropbox.

Organisation and management of projects and tasks

One of the main difficulties with teleworking is managing tasks carried out by people participating in the same project. There are various tools available which can really help us with this and provide control and information on the tasks being done by each person.

One example is Trello, a collaborative tool for managing tasks and projects based on cards, lists and panels which allow users to organise and prioritise work right down to the last detail. Another example is Asana, a web and mobile management app which allows users to divide projects into a list of allocated task for each team member, view the status of each one and pick up on any issues which might hamper task fulfilment.

Optimisation and management of time

Anybody concerned about too many distractions working from home or who needs to organise their day to ensure it is productive also has a couple of interesting tools available to them.

TomatoTimer is a timer for applying the Pomodoro technique (25 minutes of work and 5 minutes of rest) and managing the time needed for each task. It allows users to configure the time needed for each task, along with audio tones and the volume of alerts. If you want to know how you’ve used your time you can use the Toggl app, available for web and mobile alike. This tool enables you to monitor the distribution of your working hours and generate reports which can be exported as Excel, CSV or PDF files.

Want more?

If you’re interested in finding more free open-source office automation tools, the Xarxa d’Economia Solidària (XES) has shared a repository of open-access tools where you can find browsers, mail managers and tools for editing images and video.

How to spot fake news?

Posted on by Irene González

Internet forms part of our daily life and is often the place where much of our information comes from, be it the websites we view, social media or news items sent to us via WhatsApp by our friends and family.

This volume of information and the speed at which it circulates means information which has not previously been substantiated is understood to be true. To avoid getting led up the garden path and be able to stop this sort of information from circulating, here are some tools to help you spot that dreaded fake news.

Check information with different sources
The most immediate way of finding out if information is reliable or not is to compare it on different media or check it directly with the source cited in the news item. Some journalists have also set up initiatives such as Verificat, a website for cross-checking social media content on politics or relating to Covid-19 and other topics of public interest.

Check the veracity of the images

To check the real origin of a photo you can use reverse image searching tools such as Labnol and TinEye. All you need to do is upload the image you have your doubts about and introduce the URL. If the image belongs to another piece of information you will see the original publication and be able to see what it actually refers to. If it does not appear, this is a good sign as it means it does not belong to information published elsewhere in the past.

Another tool for those with a Sherlock Holmes inside them is the app Historical Weather, which you can use to check what the weather was like at the time and place the photo was supposedly taken. If the photo shows a radiant sun and Historical Weather tells you that it was raining all day in the place the photo was taken, it means somebody’s misleading you with that image.

If the news item comes with a video, you can verify it with InVid, a tool developed with European funding and which works as an extension to your browser. The app allows you to introduce the link to the video and shows you the information relating to it (when it was uploaded, a description, the channel where it is housed etc.). Those with more expertise can even manage to detect if the video has been manipulated by checking the consistency of the images.

If with all these tools you still have your doubts as to whether information is true or not, the best thing is not to share it and help stop the circulation of potential fake news that way.

Five tips for choosing the name of your website domain

Posted on by Ana Tapia

Choosing a good website domain is a key step for your internet presence. Using a provisional name and changing it later can cause all sorts of headaches: people who already know you keep searching for you by your previous domain, loss of indexing with search engines, not very robust as a brand etc.

With this in mind, here are some tips to help you find the best domain name right from the start.

Got your own name?
If you’ve got a business or a project with its own name, that’s a good start for creating your .barcelona domain. The first thing you need to do is check if it’s available. How? Easy. On the .barcelona website you can check by using the registration section and putting the domain name in the search field. If it’s available, it will appear as such and you can register it. If it’s taken, a message will appear showing that it’s unavailable.

If the name you want is unavailable, think about the key words which define your project and try various combinations to see if they’re available so you can choose the one that suits you best.

Make sure it’s not too similar to other domains

If you’re fortunate enough to find the name you want is available, don’t rush things. Search the internet and check if anybody else has got a project with the same name. If you see projects appearing with the name, but which rather than using a .barcelona domain use others such as .com, .cat, .es, it might be a good moment to think the name over again before registering it.

The shorter the better
If you can come up with a short name which is easy to memorise, it will be much easier for people to remember your domain and access your website spontaneously, or for people to remember your website domain when they see it written somewhere.

Easy to write
A good domain name is one that is easy for people to share verbally or in writing, and which is easy to understand. It’s important that you also consider whether your potential users speak just one language or various languages. If the latter is the case, you’ll need to take special care to find a name which is easy to write and understand in any language.

Avoid hyphens and numbers
While we might often choose a free email address by adding full stops, hyphens and numbers because the combination we initially wanted is unavailable, when it comes to domain names it’s not advisable to use the same strategy as it may lead to errors.

We only recommend the use of numbers or special characters if they’re included in your brand name.

Choosing the best registrar for your .barcelona domain

Posted on by Ana Tapia

If you want to register a .barcelona domain you need to use a domain name registrar. There are currently over 25 companies offering .barcelona domains, but what do you need to consider when choosing the best registrar for your domain?

If you check our price comparison, you’ll see that the cost of the domain varies greatly from one registrar to another. This may be due to the various services that come with the domain registration. Depending on your requirements, you may only need the domain registration, or you may want to include other services.


DNS: This service manages the Domain Name System and translates domain names to IP addresses. It allows for the creation of sub-domains and forwarding. All registrars include this service as it is essential for anyone wishing to have a website.

DNS SEC: Some registrars offer DNS SEC, an innovative technology whereby encryption provides added security for the domain. This is recommended for anybody requiring their website to perform electronic transactions or handle sensitive information.

Hosting: With the registration of the .barcelona domain, some registrars include space for hosting information used on the domain: text, images, videos etc. If you want the domain to have a website, you need hosting. This service can be contracted directly with the domain registrar or from different website editors such as WordPress, who also offer hosting. The space offered varies from one registrar to another, so take into account the volume of information you want on your website to see what hosting you will need. 

Email: This is the number of available mailboxes you want for your domain, for example correu@elteudomini.barcelona. Email addresses with your own domain help you create your own digital identity under you own domain. There are currently various registrars offering between 1 and 3 mailboxes. Decide whether you need a generic email address or whether you need various addresses for your domain (useful for small businesses or organisations where there are various people or departments).
Statistics: Some registrars offer the possibility of viewing data or graphics relating to the domain’s performance (number of visits, duration, dates etc.). This is an alternative to services such as Google Analytics, allowing you to discover the content which attracts the most interest on your website and the type of people who visit it.

Finally, the price comparison also includes information on customer support provided by each registrar (phone, chat or email), their contact hours and the languages in which they can attend to you.