Tag: tools

Categories
meta technology

Linking to Newspapers

For today’s edition I thought I would share a tool I found back with my previous blogs. It is most useful for those who like to blog their reactions to news items. I used to link to New York Times articles and that would become a problem once those articles left the one week timeframe and were no longer accessible for free. I was not the first to see this problem because someone else made a tool which generates special links to articles in the New York Times which are freely accessible in perpetuity. (They do this with the permission of the people at the New York Times so there is no question regarding the legality of the tool or the practice.)

I don’t know how many other major newspapers pose this challenge for news bloggers nor if any of them also have such tools, but this is a great tool for anyone who does that kind of blogging and likes nytimes.com as a news source.

I was reminded of this tool when I linked to an NPR story yesterday. I don’t know how much I will need it since before I was often commenting on Op/Ed pieces which are mostly only Times Select (paid service) now. Since I don’t pay for that access I may not use the tool much, but hopefully it can be useful for other people.

Categories
technology

Picasa 2

I was already a fan of picasa as a powerful tool to manage and touch-up pictures. Now I have tried Picasa 2 and it is a 100% improvement over Picasa. I would not have thought that possible, but the editing is even easier and more powerful plus they have added new tools to view movies and create web pages from your pictures in about 10 mouse clicks.

Congratulations Google on another big score by the Picasa team.

Categories
technology

phpGedView

I got the family genealogy site up in skeletal fashion. Enough to know that it basically works. I can’t wait to get it fleshed out and get more people adding to it as time goes by. At the suggestion of a cousin of mine I used phpGedView to manage the gedcom files on the site. So far I am very pleased.

Categories
life technology

GMAIL

I have a Gmail invitation available if anyone is interested.

Categories
technology

Genealogy Collaboration Online

I have been thinking about how to effectively use the internet to work with other people in my family on the same line from different locations. I have thought about using a wiki structure. I am now thinking that it should be based on some widely used genealogy software such as Personal Ancestral File so that the web pages can be easily converted to offline editable forms.

The next consideration I thought about was ensuring the integrity of the information being added to the files. That is as easy to ensure online as offline if you limit the people who can contribute to the people you know who participate in genealogy offline already. The problem is that I expect the list of names to grow and converge with other lines so that new people would like to participate who I don’t know. If I open it up to unknown users I have to find a way to know if someone is playing a prank on me or really interested in adding to my genealogy file. Actually I know that very few people would waste their time playing a prank on my genealogy, but I do not want people adding information if the information is based on poor research. I think that the solution is to require logon credentials and only allow people to log on if they can prove a connection to the line. This will give them a vested interest in keeping the information as accurate as possible. The logins would be simple and not designed for security, but we would also be able to trace who was entering information and contact them if the information was consistently suspect.

Categories
meta technology

Validation

I really enjoyed Alan’s Best Quote (Today) About HTML. It was worth a laugh but it also got me thinking about the value of code validation. That is a concept that is at the forefront of my mind right now because I just re-designed my website and as I did so I made sure that it would validate as good XHTML. Ironically the only pages that did not pass as valid XHTML were my blogs because of some built-in numerical id tags – apparently id tags cannot be numerical to validate. One thing that I can say from going through that process is that getting your code to validate forces you to really think about what you are doing, how you are doing it and why you choose the things that you do. That is probably more valuable to me than the fact that I have validated code.

As for Microsoft, they don’t care to write good HTML, but where’s the incentive for them? I had to tweak my code after it validated to keep IE from displaying it incorrectly. Why write good code if you are busy supplying a browser that cannot interpret the code correctly?