Organizing My Life with Web 2.0!!

I just made my life a whole lot easier, and I have Web 2.0 to thank!!!

Before using RSS and del.cio.us, I saved links to articles, checklists, reports, work-related blogs, newsletters, and online journals in my Bookmarks. I kept the frequently updated sites (blogs, newsletters, and online journals) in a Bookmark folder titled "Websites to Check". As part of the name of the bookmark I had written in parentheses how often I needed to check it (daily), (weekly), (quarterly), etc.

I kept other bookmarks filed away in (what I thought) were self-evident folder names like "Website Design" and "Digitization".

Unfortunately, my bookmarks grew over time and took on a life of their own. I had so many bookmarks tucked away in various folders that I didn't even remember them all!!

Today, I went on a mission: to organize my life with Web 2.0

First, I signed up for an account on del.icio.us and installed the bookmarklets "My del.icio.us" and "Post to del.icio.us" on the toolbar of my browser.

I then went through my list of bookmarks, clicking each one. If it was no longer relevant for my work, it was deleted. If it was something with an RSS feed, I clicked my "Bloglines" bookmarklet and seemlessly ingested it into my Bloglines account. If it was an article, bibliography, report, or otherwise non-changing site, I clicked on my "post to del.icio.us" bookmarklet and it went easily into del.icio.us.

The whole thing went incredibly quick and was surprisingly easy. I was able to delete all the bookmarks that I moved into del.icio.us or Bloglines and now my bookmark list is short, sweet, and easy to use!!

I, for one, welcome our new RSS and social bookmarking overlords!!

Building Customized Search Boxes

In the fast-paced world of online information, users have become accustomed to the ability to quickly and easily search across web sites or within a specific web site using a few key words. It's no wonder, then, that several "build your own search engine" tools now exist to facilitate the creation of customized searches across or within specific web sites.

I tested out two such tools and compare/contrast them below:

Rollyo

This tool is still in the Beta stage and therefore it still has some snags. I'll get to those in a minute.

1) Building a Customized Search Tool: It's easy to build a tool in Rollyo. You don't even have to register (although the tool won't become widely available to the Rollyo community unless you do). You just name your "Searchroll", and enter the list of URLs that you want to search. You can also categorize the searchroll and/or enter tags but these steps are optional.

There is even a tool you can download that enables you to create a searchroll from your list of bookmarks/favorites in your browser!

2) Sharing Your Search Tool: You have the option of creating a direct link to your searchroll which you can then e-mail, post in a blog, or insert anywhere that a link can be used. Most importantly, though, there is a tool which will allow you to embed the search tool in a web site or blog by automatically generating the code. This automatic code generation is a very simple process of selecting your searchroll and selecting the search box style which will, in turn, generate the code.

3) Tools and Toys: Rollyo tools include the ability to create widgets and bookmarklets for your browser's toolbar that directly link to your Rollyo search. However, the best part about Rollyo is the user sharing experience. Users of Rollyo can search for other searchrolls, can select/deselect popular web sites to search, and can create a customized "My Rollyo" list of searchrolls.

4) Detriments: My biggest complaint with Rollyo is the speed. It takes a painfully long time to run its search even when I was only searching one site. Nowadays internet users expect instant gratification, and I wonder how many users will be patient enough to wait while Rollyo conducts its search. Also, the search engine's hits are peppered with advertisements and links to "sponsored sites". There is no real way to exclude these from the search. The last problem with Rollyo is that once you create a searchroll, there is no way to delete it. I accidentally created a duplicate searchroll, and now I can't get rid of it... I suspect that this is merely a bug resulting from the fact that they're still in Beta Testing.

Google

1) Building a Customized Search Tool: This is a pretty easy process. You need to sign in and create an account, but if you already have a Blogger account, you can just sign-in with your Blogger username and password. Once signed up, you name your search tool, enter its description, enter some keywords (or tags), and list the sites you want to search. The NICE thing about Google, is that it also gives you the option of turning off advertisements if you're a non-profit or government entity.

2) Sharing Your Search Tool: Once you've created your tool, you go to the "My Search Engines Control Panel" to customize the look/feel of your search box. You seemingly have a lot of options with this control panel such as adding your institution's logo to the search box, and changing the search box's color scheme, but I could not get any of these options to work. I could make changes, but they never saved. As a result, I could really only generate code for the generic/default search box which is simple with no bells-and-whistles, but works.

3) Tools and Toys: Offers Google Gadgets which allows you to insert an "Add to Google" widget on your website, so people can embed your customized search box on their site. There is also a Google Marker button that you can add to your browser's toolbar which allows you to add a site to your customized search box by merely clicking on the button in the toolbar. Google lacks all the social/sharing perks of Rollyo.

4) Detriments: My biggest complaint with Google was the fact that none of their search box customizations worked. Also, there is no way for creaters of Google search boxes to shared their customized searches. This sharing ability would greatly improve the usefulness of the tool.

Side By Side Comparison

Alrightey... Now is the moment you've all been waiting for: The side by side comparison! I created 2 identical customized searches; 1 using Rollyo and 1 using Google. Both search tools search the same 3 sites: http://statelibrary.dcr.state.nc.us/, http://www.web2atlunch.blogspot.com/, and http://www.statelibrarync.blogspot.com/

Rollyo:

Select...State Lib. of NCSearch The Web

Google:

I conducted several searches in both boxes including: "Youth Services" "Web 2.0" and "Renovation". I noticed that Rollyo retrieves hits from the State Library's web page but not the State Library's blogs. Google retrieves hits from all three sites.

Personally, I prefer Google's box because it offers more comprehensive hits and the delivery time is MUCH faster. As such, I plan to add the Google Search box to the sidebar of my blog just above my LibraryThing list.

LibraryThing

Before I used LibraryThing, I was very curious to know how it worked. How user-friendly was the access mechanism? How much information about the book did I have to input? How useful would this tool really be for a library with an OPAC?

A quick tour left me pleasantly surprised. First of all, for well-known books, there was little or no effort involved in adding them to my collection. I simply typed in a keyword phrase (either title or author), scanned through the hits/results and selected the book I wanted. Easy as pie!!

Upon selecting the title, I was given the option to add my own personal tags so that I could create my own unique subject areas.

For those books that did not appear in LibraryThing, I had the option of adding the book manually. This process was also very quick and required very little information beyond the title, author, date, and publisher. What I liked about this option was that it enabled you to add URLs for book reviews or interject your own comments. When adding books in this manner, I used the "comments" field more like a "description" field in which I offered additional descriptive information about the title.

After my collection was built, I had the ability to view other folks who had the same titles in their libraries. I found this option to be pretty cool, but my username was often listed multiple times as if there was more than one user with the name: "digitizationdiva". I suspect this is a small bug that they're working out.

In terms of access, I can view my library collection in either the "title" view or the "cover" view. If I had lots of books with lovely covers, the latter view would really help simulate the feeling of browsing a bookshelf.

Finally, I played with the LibraryThing widgets that allowed users to post their library collections on a web site or blog. The versatility of these widgets are truly amazing. You can display info about your LibraryThing collection grouped by titles, covers, most recently added books, tags, or simply display random titles. I have chosen to add the widget that displays my most commonly tagged titles.

I suppose now that I've gotten to the very end of my post, I should explain what my LibraryThing Collection contains.

I have listed all the books and conference proceedings that I keep on my bookshelves as reference sources for my work. These cover the topics of digitization, digital preservation, metadata, digital libraries, and general cataloging info. I hope this collection will be useful for folks internally within the library who may want to borrow some of these materials for their own uses.

This is just one possible use of LibraryThing: to list library staff-only copies of books and publications so that those titles can be shared among staff who might not otherwise know that their colleague owns them.

Playing with Generators!

I love cats, so the Random Kitten Generator is my favorite lazy generator. Just click the mouse to generate a new image!!

All kidding aside, I did find some fairly interesting library-related generators.

Card Catalog Generator: Generates Library Cards based on the information you input.

The META tag Generator: A quick and user-friendly form for generating META tags to insert into the HTML of your web site for higher hits in search engines.

Dublin Core Generator: This generator generates Dublin Core metadata for embedding into HTML code. All you have to do is supply the URL of the site, and the generator does the rest itself.

For me, though, the most fun and most versatile generator was the Comic Generator . The ease and flexibility of using it was incredible! The only problem I had was that I couldn't figure out how to post my newly-created comic on my blog. There was no "link here" or "e-mail this to" option.

To make it widely accessible, I basically had to do a "Print Screen" for each panel, dump it into my graphics program, and then splice the three panels into one. Here is the result:

Playing with RSS!

So, I know that my assignment is to blog about my experience using Syndic8, Feedster, Topix, and Technorati, but I honestly don't have a whole lot to say about them. I played with each one, didn't really find anything particularly blog-worthy, and decided to address RSS topics of more interest to me (I'm such a rebel!!!)

Today's blog post will focus on two topics that I'd like to learn more about:

1) How can I create an RSS feed for my web site, so that others can read it through an RSS aggregator?

2) How can I embed an already-existing RSS feed into my web site, so the web site is automatically updated every time the RSS feed is updated?


Adding an RSS Feed to my Web Site:

The Digital Information Management Program (DIMP) has a news page which I update periodically. I'd like to add an RSS feed to that page, so that readers won't have to keep checking back to see if it's updated.

I discovered the following resources online for creating RSS Feeds

1) Create RSS feeds from scratch using XML code. The website: http://www.make-rss-feeds.com/ walks you through this step-by-step.

2) Once an RSS feed is generated, it can be validated for accuracy using: http://feedvalidator.org/

3) Another alternative is to sign up to a free RSS generator service like http://www.feedpublish.com/. You can also download RSS generation software like http://www.feedforall.com/ (available free for 30 days. You don't need to have administrative privileges on your computer to download it.)

4) I also discovered that a separate piece of code known as "RSS Autodiscovery" is necessary for the little RSS icon to appear at the bottom of the screen in the Firefox/Safari browsers. Here is the code:

< link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS Feed for http://statelibrary.dcr.state.nc.us/dimp/news.html" href="/rss/" / >

5) There are also web tools that automatically convert existing HTML or XML web pages into RSS Feeds (even if you didn't create the web pages). This is known as "scraping". You can view a list of such sites here:



Embedding RSS Feeds into Web Sites

Finding info. about this is a little more complicated... It seems that RSS feeds can't simply be copied and pasted into web sites. Some kind of conversion must take place, and as such there is software available to convert the XML feeds so they can be served up on the web.

1) RSS to HTML is a PHP script that will allow for the creation of web pages using RSS feeds. The web page can apparently be as simple or as fancy as the designer wants. Unfortunately, because it's a PHP script, it requires a server that supports PHP Easy.

2) RSS Viewer converts RSS to javascript for inclusion in a web page by walking web designers through a 3 step process

3) Finally, I found RSS Feed Converter which allows a web designer to convert RSS into either PHP, Javascript, or HTML. Converting the RSS Feed to HTML allows those users with the Javascript turned off on their browsers to view the RSS feed, while allowing non-PHP web servers to support the converted RSS feed.

I found all of these resources by searching on Google using (what I thought) were fairly specific search strings. However, it is very possible that I missed some major resources in this area. If so, please feel free to let me know about them!!

RSS Feeds and Readers

I've always understood the idea behind RSS and Feed Readers like Bloglines, but I never got to play around with the tools until today.

Bloglines was surprisingly fast and easy, although it did take a little while for me to copy/paste the RSS feeds into Bloglines and get them saved. It also took me a little while to figure out that I could create different folders for my various feeds. One such folder I created linked to all the Web 2.0 Blogs created and maintained by North Carolina government librarians as part of this Web 2.0 Brown Bag Lunch. You can my RSS feeds by clicking here:

http://www.bloglines.com/public/digitizationdiva

Next, I played with creating a feed for a search ("State Library" "North Carolina") on Feedster. I have to say, I wasn't too impressed with the search results that I got through Feedster, so I'm not sure how often I'll check this feed.

I also added a tag feed from Flickr. All newly created images that are tagged with "statelibraryofnorthcarolina" will now pop up in my Bloglines account.

Finally, I added a podcast feed from the Department of Cultural Resources' podcast site. Unfortunately the URL in their feed was incorrect and was directing users to: http://www.ncculture.com/podcast.htm rather than their correct URL which is: http://www.ncculture.com/podcast.asp

Oh well... Except for this one slight technical difficulty, all went smooth!!

Yay for RSS!!!

Web 2.0 Uses for Web Sites

My two friends own the game store All Fun & Games (AFNG) which is devoted to "unplugged gaming." This refers to games that don't require a computer or video game console to play them. E.g. board games, card games, puzzles, etc.

I created and maintain their website, but I'm honestly not all that happy about it. Updating it requires quite a bit of time on my part because I have to resize and upload all the pics on the "Photo Gallery" portion of their site, and keep the "News" page constantly updated with new gaming events.

It's occurred to me that both of these problems can be alleviated using Web 2.0 applications. I can set up a Flickr account which will allow the owners of AFNG to create subject specific photo albums, upload the images, and create captions for them. All I would need to do, is put a link to the albums on the site.

I can also resolve the dilemma with the "News" portion of the site by creating a blog. The owners can update the blog with new events, and I can put a simple RSS feed to the blog on the web site, so that the news will always be current as long as the blog is maintained.

Finally, I thought that it would be cool to create a MySpace page for AFNG. A lot of the Game Store's regular customers are part of the MySpace Generation, so this would be a great way to reach out to them.

But, to bring this back to a library focus... The AFNG site does have one cool Web 2.0 feature in place now: a virtual tour of the store.

This virtual tour was made on FilmLoop which requires you to download free software. I have not yet tried it out, but I would imagine that this could be very useful for our library. We could make a virtual tour so that patrons can find our newly renovated space and can find specific collections of material.

How cool would that be?