Russell Harrison

Questions © Tim O’Brien

Dear Lazy Web,
We have a bunch of internal blogs at work, or we will soon. Problem is that we have many different ways for people to blog. We’re working on an official solution but there are other ways to blog. For example, some of the wiki’s have blog like features, some groups have set up their own servers, and many of the “collaboration” products out there have similar features. It would be really nice to allow people to post in the solution they like best, yet still have a central location for people to see what’s going on in our “blogosphere” so to speak.

A traditional aggregation solution like planet or Feedjack isn’t going to work because they won’t scale to the number of feeds we’d need to track. After a certain number of feeds are configured in the system its going to spend almost as much time (if not more) crawling the feeds as it would displaying them. Especially when you consider most of those feeds won’t have been updated, crawling all of them each time isn’t very efficient. Its become very clear that a solution more like Technorati is the direction we’d want to go. By only indexing sites when they “ping” it to tell it they have been updated the content can remain up to date without wasting time crawling pages that haven’t been updated.

I’m somewhat surprised that I wasn’t able to just find something to accomplish this task very quickly. It seems like it should already exist and a simple search over a freshmeat should have turned up several options.. I think I’m looking for the wrong things though because I haven’t found anything yet that does what I’d like it to. So dear lazy web what should I be looking for instead? I know it must be out there…

I’ve been playing around with the excellent zotero Firefox extension lately. Which has me thinking about my sources and what is the proper way to cite them. Because I work with Open Source software every day I’m very conscious about giving credit for the work of others. Especially ever since I learned about the Creative Commons.

I’ve been doing a bunch of research at work lately, and even though I’m only posting it on internal wiki pages I wanted to make sure I was doing things correctly. I’d hate for something like this to happen to me. Whenever I need to learn how to do something properly I go look at what the “pros” are doing. So when I asked myself “What is the correct way to cite sources on a wiki page?” I went straight to the biggest wiki in the world. I knew they’d most likely have already tackled this question, and already had a policy to address it. I wasn’t disappointed.

The first thing I found was a new link in the toolbox section of the left column.  Its been there for years, I just hadn’t noticed it before. “Wikipedia - Cite this page” which takes me to a page that I guarantee will save many a school student’s paper grade. At the very top is a disclaimer warning that tertiary sources, such as encyclopedia articles and Wikipedia pages, aren’t considered as acceptable sources by most teachers. The Bibliographic details of the article are listed next. zotero detects these and imports them with a single click. Finally, ready for cutting and pasting, is the proper formating of the bibliography entry of the article for eight of the major style guides, BibTeX, and LaTeX. Now that’s helpful!

Oh, by the way, I did find what I was looking for. There’s extensive information on the proper way to cite sources. There’s a beginners guide, citation templates, examples, and much more. While there isn’t a set standard it apears the most popular method is to use APA style entries in the contents of footnotes.

Wikipedia gets better and better on every visit! Its an excellent research tool as a jumping off point, and I learn so much every time. Just be very carful to stay on topic or this might happen.

People keep sending me “screen shots” that turn out to be Microsoft Word documents with web pages pasted in them. Last time I checked screen shots were images not text documents. When I asked them why they didn’t send me an image instead they said $40 was to much to spend on an application just to take pictures once a month with it. Thankfully, there’s a Firefox extension that does this job quite well, works on all platforms, and its free!

Screengrab! is an extension for Firefox that makes it easy to save a web-page as an image. With it, you can save anything that you can see in a browser window - from a small selection, to a complete page.
Basically Screengrab! let’s you take what you want from a web-page: the entire scrollable document, just the visible bit, or a draggable selection. Screengrab will even save just the contents of an individual frame. — Screengrab! website

I use it to grab all my web page screen shots these days. It couldn’t be easier to use. Just click on the Screengrab icon in the bar at the bottom of Firefox, select save and you’re done. Go get it from the Firefox Add-ons site right now! You won’t regret it.

Screengrab! :: Firefox Add-ons