Wiki in the Library

Info Junkie Sarah Washford has posted a brief report on her blog on how her library is using a wiki to support an LMS training project. It’s early days but in one of the comments Sarah says that she has “been pleasantly surprised by the fact that people are actually using it”!

RSS Feed Reader tip-bits

Patti Biggs (Pattibuk) has commented on her experiences with some web based and desktop feed readers in her Library Bunny’s Blog. So far she has looked at Opera 9 (has built in feed reading capability), Firefox with Sage extension, IE6 plus the Windows live toolbar and Onfolio add-in, IE7, Bloglines, Google Reader, RSS Bandit and Sharp Reader.

She has also produced a brief review of 3 Clipping tools for the web – Google Notebook, Onfolio and Zotero – which is worth a look.

Sharing iGoogle tabs

You can share an iGoogle tab that you have created, including its gadgets. Click on the little arrow next to the tab name and select “share this tab”. Then enter the email addresses of the people with whom you want to share the tab, a short message (optional), and send it off. Each person in your list will receive an email with a URL that triggers a confirmation dialog. This allows the recipient to choose which gadgets in the tab are to be added to their own iGoogle home page.

Exporting and formatting your Furl bookmarks

Furl, like del.icio.us, is a social bookmarking site. As well as bookmarking and annotating a URL, you can store ‘clippings’ from the page or even a copy of the whole page.

To back up and export your entire collection:

1. Log in to your account
2. Click on the My Tools tab
3. Click on Export
4. Under choose a collection, select All or a single collection
5. Then choose your format

The format options are:

• Furl XML format
• Zip archive of your saved documents
• Internet Explorer favorites format
• Mozilla/Netscape bookmarks format
• MLA citation format
• APA citation format
• Chicago citation format
• CBE citation format
• BibTeX citation format
• RIS/EndNote citation format

The Furl XML format will save your bookmarks, clippings and comments. To export copies of any web pages that you may have made you will also have to export to a ‘Zip archive of your saved documents’.

Adding a Flickr photo to your Blogger profile

Getting your Flickr hosted photo to display in your Blogger profile is not as straightforward as you may first think. First display the Flicker photo page for the photo. Under ‘Additional Information’ to the right of the photo click on ‘See different sizes’. You then have 5 options/sizes for download. Select a size and Flickr then gives you two options for linking to the photo. The first URL links back to the photo page and the second is just the URL of the image. The Flickr terms and conditions state that if a photo is to be displayed on an external web site there must be a link from each photo back to its photo page on Flickr, so you should use option 1. Unfortunately, the code for that is usually rejected by the Blogger Profile page because it contains “illegal characters”. Using option 2 would be a breach of the Flickr T&Cs.

So the only way to use one of your Flickr photos and remain within the terms and condition is to download a copy to your computer and then upload it to Blogger. Blogger Help: How do I add my photo to my profile? has detailed instructions on how to do this.

Adding Google Reader to iGoogle

You can view your Google Reader RSS feeds on your personalized iGoogle home page. Sign in to your iGoogle page, click on ‘Add stuff’ and then search for Google Reader. Click on the ‘Add it now’ button next to the details for the ‘gadget’ and it will be added to your home page.

Pageflakes in education

Thanks to Phil Bradley for blogging this and bringing it to my attention. Pageflakes Brings Web 2.0 to the Classroom describes how Pageflakes is being used in schools and education. There are links to 5 examples from Australia, UK, Scotland and the US. Pageflakes, itself, now has a version especially for students and teachers at http://student.pageflakes.com/ making it easier to set up a page with education-oriented Flakes and news feeds.

Using a wiki to write a thesis

An interesting example of using a wiki to write a masters thesis is described in Useful Chemistry: Thesis on Wiki Interest. The thesis can be found at http://usefulchem.wikispaces.com/Alicia+Holsey

There are links in the posting to examples of a theses being written via blogs and discussions on whether this would be considered prepublication should the author wish to subsequently submit a paper based on the thesis to a journal.

What is Atom?

Question: On some blogs I see an orange Atom logo for the feed. Is this the same as RSS?

Answer: It is Blogger’s own ‘version’ of RSS. If you just want to add the feed to your web based or desktop feed reader there should be no problem. If, though, you want to use other services or programs to manipulate the feed or display it on your web page you may have to convert it to RSS 2 using something like FeedBurner. The UKeiG home page uses RapidFeeds.com to display the first five headlines from the blog, but there were problems displaying the Atom feed. The converted RSS 2 feed works fine.

The mystery of the disappearing Blogger text

One of the UKeiG blog contributors reported several months ago that although she could type in the title and body text of a posting to the UKeiG main blog , which uses Blogger, when it came to publishing the body text was not displayed. Going to the Edit function revealed that the text for the body of the posting had vanished. Other contributors were unable to replicate the problem but she still cannot post. Then, on one of the UKeiG workshops 4 out of the 20 PCs in the training room exhibited the same problem. What was puzzling was that on the other 16 PCs, the text was published as expected. All 20 PCs were updated centrally with identical setups and the programs locked down so that people could not change the settings! So why the problem with just 4.

A search has revealed that this is happening to others. One page’s suggestions include:

• Clear cache and cookies
• Check security on your computer and on your network. Make sure that all necessary trusts are given to “blogger.com”, NOT just “www.blogger.com”, especially for cookie management, pop up blockers, and script control
• And if you’re using Internet Explorer, check cross-frame scripts. Or use another browser.

It appears from other reports that the only guaranteed solution is to switch to Firefox, which is not an option for most people.

P.S. Our UKeiG blog contributor is still unable to post 😦