more del.icio.us hacks

I'm seeing more possibilities for library applications in del.icio.us. Seeing that you can use link rolls to generate links within a Web page, it seemed like it would be useful to be able to upload any lists of links you'd already published. Since delicious doesn't have a direct means of uploading links except through browser bookmarks, I set out to find a way to bulk load links from files into Firefox bookmarks and from there into delicious. I'd heard of "screen scraping" as a way of pulling the data from a Web site you were viewing, but searching Google didn't help find anything I could make use of.

In the process I found an article about exporting bookmarks from IE which mentioned the favorites file. That set me to looking for a bookmarks file, which I then copied to my desktop. This seems to be a simple html document with a DL tagged list. Copying the format for the entries I found there, I was able to upload a list of links I pulled from another file. (I haven't figured out how to display html tags within a blog post - it is treated as code instead of raw text.) After a bit of trial and error I was able to bulk load more than 1,000 entries into my Firefox bookmarks and from there directly into delicious.

http://del.icio.us/ldjaffe

Here I've encountered two new frustrations with delicious. First, it automatically marks all the items bulk loaded in this way as "unshared" and I haven't found a way to change this setting in a lump. Second, I'd like delicious to feature a link checker. That would make sense, no?

Back to the project: the idea isn't to have uploaded a lot of links for its own sake. I'm looking at ways to re-use this information in library guides once it has been properly tagged. I've started one example at my Geocities site.

http://www.jaffebros.com/pottery/

I hope this will replace the old pottery links site I started years ago. It currently runs on Filemaker but hasn't worked well since Filemaker has changed some of its features. It's not pretty at the moment but I'm just sketching in the raw content before I begin worrying about how it looks. I think there is enough there, however, to demonstrate the functionality.

technorati redeemed ... sorta

Since I had the technorati window open still I tried searching again after using ping-o-matic to ping my blog. Searching a couple of words I'd used to tag one of my posts, it found my entry this time. It was even on the first page, though still below a couple of spam entries and just before a teenage rant about driver's education that would have gotten me sent to military school.

I'm glad to see that the exercise worked but I continue to be unsold on the value of blogs. I'm getting old and I don't want to know what everyone thinks.

Tagging (isn't that ...?)

The good news is that Ping-O-Matic seems to be working today. I pinged 4-5 services, including Technorati since I don't see my item showing up after directly pinging that site yesterday.

The bad news is that searching Technorati for my tag terms resulted in dozens of hits, all but 1-2 of which are spam and none were my post. I had to scroll through screen after screen of ads for poker and cialis. I work very hard to filter that stuff out of my email -- which I need -- so why would I ever, ever spend any time with a new, and mostly useless, venue that is 90% spam, 9.99% hateful, ignorant racist, misogynist rants, and 0.01% thoughtful and compassionate?

After this exercise, I need a shower.

p.s. to complete the thought in the title "tagging is a) what dogs and other canines do to mark their territory and b) another name for graffiti

Week 6. Tagging

Ping-o-matic repeatedly times out. I tried different sites to ping to see if that was the cause, but it happened no matter what I tried.

del.icio.us part 3

OK, so here's the cool stuff (which completely trumps any of the issues I mentioned in my last post).

* link rolls - http://del.icio.us/help/linkrolls
You'll find this function under "settings" (not help). At its simplest it creates a javascript string you can paste into an HTML document that will pull your links into your Web page live. That means any changes you make to your del.icio.us links will change on your page. This alone is cool enough - IMHO - for us to drop everything and start building up libraries of del.icio.us links and importing them into our subject guides.

To see any example of the sort of thing I'll describe below, see
http://library.ucsc.edu/~ldjaffe/del.html

I was really surprised that none of the examples of libraries using del.icio.us took advantage of this capability. Two just pointed to their del.icio.us site and one imported the entire tag cloud into a page. It seems you can do so much more with the link roll function AND feature it within your existing Web site that this is the way to go. No? Yes!

And, that's just the minimum. The link roll utility let's you specify which items are displayed and customize how your links will look. Some of these features aren't (well) documented, but if you look around a bit and experiment, you can figure out some easy hacks. For instance, you can specify more than one condition (additional tags) be met for inclusion of links (e.g., library+pathfinder). If you thought ahead, you could tag your links with this in mind. For instance, if you were doing a guide for a class, tag all the related links with the class number and some other feature (astro101+reference, astro+journals, etc). Then build a page that clusters those items according to relevant categories. You can easily generate four or five link roll scripts and paste them into a page to make a quick and easy guide.

The trick here is getting the links into del.icio.us. I was hoping to find a way to bulk import Web page contents directly or at least to import them into a browser's bookmarks as an intermediate step but haven't found one yet. I did use the menubar tool to add all the links from one of my guides but that was tedious. However, I think that's going to be worthwhile in the long run.

* tag rolls - http://del.icio.us/help/tagrolls
For the moment, I think these look cooler than they really are (but maybe I shouldn't underestimate the importance of looking good). These are less apparently customizable than the link rolls, but only apparently. Having generated scripts for both formats, I noticed that they shared similar syntax, which suggested that you could limit tag clouds to links with specific tags. The example we were pointed to included all the tags for all the links in a particular collection, whether or not they were relevant. Obviously you can manage that by having subject-specific collections but that rubs against the grain.

original javascript code:

script type="text/javascript" src="http://del.icio.us/feeds/js/tags/ldjaffe?icon;size=12-35;color=87ceeb-0000ff;title=my%20del.icio.us%20tags;name;showadd"

... and the hacked version (all caps)

script type="text/javascript" src="http://del.icio.us/feeds/js/tags/ldjaffe/JEWISH+LIBRARY?icon;size=12-35;color=87ceeb-0000ff;title=my%20del.icio.us%20tags;name;showadd"

So, take a look and let me know what you think. http://library.ucsc.edu/~ldjaffe/del.html

del.icio.us part 2

Still loving this utility and finding more and more features that look like they can be useful, either for personal use or as a library tool (or both).

Before going into some of what I've discovered, having used del.icio.us intensively for the past couple of days, here are a few link management functions I'd like to see added to its capabilities:

* duplicate management - it's easy to import duplicate links by accident (e.g., it treats http://library.ucsc.edu/ and http://library.ucsc.ed/home.html as different links) and I'd like to have some way to look at or search my links to sort this out.

* organizing links - it shows your personal links only sorted newest first. you can see all the links sorted by either newest or most popular and with link rolls it allows you to sort alphabetically by title. but it only let's you see you see your links in one, not too useful way.

* flakiness - I can't be absolutely sure but I feel like I've had to edit some links more than once before I've managed to make them stick; and I'm also under the impression that some bookmarks imported from Firefox never made it; but I could be wrong...and eventually things have made it into place, so no permanent harm

* skanky links - the problem with humanity is people and del.icio.us has a lot of people adding links and some of those people are hateful and add their hateful links to this site. For instance, searching 'jewish' for interesting links, I found "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" tagged as a serious document without any indication of its status as a forgery or its antisemitic nature. I'm wondering whether I can add relevant tags? It seems to require that I add the link to my list in the process. Could I delete it afterwards? Would my added tags go away as a result?

That's it for now... I think I'll add my cool discoveries to my next post

del.icio.us

... just like the name. I'm loving this tool! I've had bookmarks on at least three different computers, and even more different browsers, for years and haven't found a way to coordinate my resources before this. This makes me very very happy.

I actually signed up to delicious months ago but was using a public computer at the time and got stuck at the point where it allows you to install menu bar utilities for your browser and import bookmarks. It took until this assignment for me to get back to it. It helps that I've switched to Firefox in the intervening time. It was a bit tricky figuring out how to bulk import Safari book marks (first import them into Firefox and then use delicious import tool in Firefox).

Having spent the first while organizing (checking and re-tagging) my bookmarks within delicious, I've just started to scratch the surface of what it can do. I've tried searching for other sources by tags and have added some good resources into my list. I'm also very interested in the Link Roll feature. I don't have any lists that are as complete or as clean as I'd like, but I can see some very nice applications for this.

The whole idea of collective tagging and sharing resources seems to be the perfect embodiment of Web 2.0.

mySpace chapter 2 - the evacuation

I keep getting msgs from Tom and now one from Christina who was so taken with my profile she just had to write. I tried to block her but somehow mySpace sent me to her profile -- she likes long walks on the beach, candle-light dinners and bondage -- and it still says she's in my circle (or whatever you call it). This is not a community that interested me in the first place and the very rapid intrusion of unwanted solicitations and the poor mechanisms for managing them pushed me over the edge. I've canceled my account. There is just too much crap in the world already to indulge in something that leads to more.

p.s. Another participant called MySpace "seedy" and said you felt "sticky when logging in." I quite agree. I think this was poorly thought out. MySpace is too wide-open, too much of a dating (hitting on) scene, and too open to abuse to serve as a useful platform. I understand that it is an important part of Web 2.0 but so are bars, strip clubs and casinos a significant part of the social environment in the real world. 'nuf said.

my second so-called life : weak 5

From what little I'd seen of it, I was not disposed to take SL seriously. Having reviewed the 3 recommended videos, plus another from Ohio State that showed up in YouTube, I'm less interested than ever. I've also read an article in my SLIS alumni newsletter.

All I want to say is, if this is the best that it's adherents and fans have got to show for themselves, then I'm ready to write it off. (Seeing librarians dance is bad enough but seeing their avatars "dance" will put me off dancing for awhile.) There is something so sad, I'm afraid of laughing, but it looks like a renaissance faire for anime' fans. I can't help but think I have better things to do with my time (and I watch a lot of sitcoms and browse eBay auctions).

My objection isn't about techn0logy but about the inept application of technology. I keep thinking of the doctor in "Star Trek: Voyager." He's a holographic creation, meaning he is a visual manifestation of a computer system. Yet, in repeated episodes, this computer avatar sits down at computer console to type at the keyboard and review information on the screen. He's a computer: whatever he knows the compute knows and whatever the computer knows he knows. He doesn't need to type!

I kept thinking of this while watching a demonstration of SL where one avatar needed to be in a particular virtual space in order to rendevous with another. They had to "look around" to see if they could "see" the other. Both avatars are computer manifestations. Why such a strict adherence to physical metaphors, esp. in a world where avatars fly and teleport to locations?

Similarly, information is re-rendered in physical containers, with virtual books put in trunks and you need to be in physical proximity to find out what is in them. Why? Why create a virtual world that mimics the physical one -- particularly the least useful ones -- and subsequently limits it?

When I eventually get involved in a virtual world it will be one that has transcended the physical metaphor to a significant extent. Until then, I'm fine with my so-called first life.

mySpace: week 5

Something I did this time worked and I have a mySpace account. It is far creepier than I imagined. As soon as I joined I already had a "friend" -- Tom Sherwood -- who I immediately stood in front of a wall and had shot. This instant friend business is a sure sign of social decay.

There is all sorts of other garbage on my page I really don't understand or want. I don't want to take the trouble to fix it or clean it up since I'm not staying any longer than necessary.

The Randy Newman song, "Mama told me not to come..." keeps running through my head.

I was in San Diego this weekend and saw a t-shirt that read, "You were much cuter on mySpace."

notMySpace: week 4.2

OK, I decided to suck it up and join MySpace for the sake of the assignment. That part about "invite Library Learning 2.0" made it hard to move forward without doing this. But it wouldn't let me join! First, as a joke (and a test of what I encountered with NING) I tried entering my birthday as 2/31/06 and it wouldn't let me in. The first few times it didn't say why, but on the third try I changed the date to 2/28/06 and got an error message:

We’re sorry. Based on the information you have submitted to us, you are ineligible to register on MySpace.com.

So then I corrected the date, making it 2/28/54 and I got the same error message. Am I now too old? That's ok by me.

I tried, I really tried, but I can't say I'm too disappointed that I couldn't register.

social networking: week 4.1

This is starting to enter into uncomfortable territory for me. I've lived a good part of my life online, so the "virtual world" is not exactly new to me. But lame is lame. I just couldn't bring myself to set up a MySpace site with all the implications of sexual predation involved. Afterall, I'm a 53 year old male: what am I going to do on this site? Again, trying to honor the spirit of assignment rather than the letter, I set up a Ning account instead, since the intro explained that it focused on groups. I've been maintaining a Yahoo mail group for my high school class since 2000 and thought that a social networking site might be a better platform than the stale (and stalled) email exchanges we've maintained. Therefore I created a group for my class at http://chs1971.ning.com. I've sent mail through the Yahoo list to invite members.

One odd item about ning: When first signing up it asked almost nothing of me. However, the photo I uploaded didn't display right. Going back to change that required editing my profile. But this insisted on supplying more information than I wanted to share. In frustration, I entered my birthdate at February 31, 2006 and it accepted it!

I think that as these exercises continue I'm going to find I'm more and more uncomfortable with conducting silly activities online. While I've been pretty open to some sort of online existence and have been active in a wide variety of network initiatives, there are some places where I draw the line. In this case, have a space for a group I already belong to makes sense to me. Getting online to join a group which interests me also seems like a good use of the medium. I've been part of discussion lists for library technology, pottery, and 18th century studies.

I'm also interested in tools that let me do things I cannot do in any other form. I was an early member of librarything (http://www.librarything.com/catalog/ldjaffe) and I've been posting pictures on Shutterfly for years. I belong to the Long Now Foundation and participate in discussions there. I even had a blog for a little while but dropped it when I found I couldn't maintain a reasonable level of currency.

But I have to say that I don't get some of these social networking tools for their own sakes. It reminds me of the Dave Barry column where he compared the Internet to CD Radio, "only with more typing." Trying to get beyond the personal to the professional aspects of these tools, I can see where some might have library applications. We looked, for instance, at a wiki tool for the suggestion box (but the available system at the time wouldn't support our needs) but perhaps a public blog might be the way to go in the near future. I could also see a more interactive set of Web tools as a future platform for the Library's Web site. I mentioned earlier that I could see something like a blog for different "what's new" pages. I already maintain a series of pages for Jewish studies research, including a fairly static set of "new titles" pages. A blog could replace this in a snap.

But do I want to be a librarian in MySpace? Categorically and unconditionally, no!

RSS or blogs: week 4

We seem to be back at blogs and there seems to be some confusion about blogs and RSS. Almost any Web content can be shared as an RSS feed and the fact that it makes most sense to syndicate regularly updated sites shouldn't lead to confusion between RSS feeds and blogs. I wouldn't call the NYTimes news feed a blog. Referring randomly to RSS feeds as blogs makes me feel like we're going backwards. I'm experiencing deja vu and not enjoying it much.

I managed to add a Flickr site -- the "interesting, new photos" feed but not the main page -- to the feeds on MyYahoo. Again, not a blog (as far as I can tell) but still an RSS feed. I already mentioned adding the 23 Things blog to MyYahoo. Oddly, I can't add my own (this) blog. It tries and says it can't do it and suggests I try again later. So maybe it is just some temporary issue at Yahoo's end.

Setting aside my hairsplitting, I think that the potential for RSS in the library is enormous. I think blogs by themselves are pretty tedious if the user needs to seek them out and read them. Coupled with the RSS feed capability where they can be published to a space the users already visit it is an entirely different matter. I mentioned finding a Jewish studies library blog -- the selector at a library communicating news about the collection and services to his constituency -- and can see adding this tool to our kit just as it is. It would be even more useful if it can be syndicated and therefore fed to another site. We do have feedsplitter on the Library's Web site that allows displaying RSS feeds within a Web page. I don't know if any live sites are using it but I've been experimenting with it for a project . You can see an example at http://library.ucsc.edu/~ldjaffe/admin/educ.html

One question is where the potential for RSS publishing exists within the tools we have. Does cruzcat or melvyl allow syndication? Wouldn't it be cool to feel a canned search (e.g., most recent titles on a particular subject)? Can we feed from wiki or RT or cruztime? I know Zope supports RSS in both directions.

The other item is publishing outside info within our sites. On a simple level it maybe just a matter of including the RSS address with the sources we list. But if we can include (feedsplitter, again) live content within our pages that's so much better.

RSS: week 3

I already have a lot of experience with RSS and I really didn't want to create yet another account on another service. I have a MyYahoo page that allows me to install RSS feeds on my main page. I already installed various news sources, a couple of cartoons, and local movie times, local weather and a mapping tool. Since one of the sources mentions using Yahoo as an aggregator instead of BlogLines, I'm going to honor the spirit, if not the letter, of this exercise. For the sake of this exercise I've added the 23 Things feed to MyYahoo page.

This brings me to another issue, the proliferation of sites to manage an online life. Yahoo was already my main site for my personal life online. As mentioned, I have some stuff on my MyYahoo page and it is my email site. I belong to a Yahoo email group (it started out independent but was acquired by Yahoo later). My personal Web site started as Geocities until it was acquired by Yahoo. Now I have a Flickr site (again owned by Yahoo). I did try blogging within my Yahoo site but the editor really sucked. In a way Yahoo was my online aggregator.

But now with these exercises, I'm getting new sites to manage. We're only 3-4 weeks into this and I've got several more new places to keep my stuff than I did before. I thought the virtual world was supposed to make things simpler or better!

I think that as part of a side issue, I'm going to look for ways to integrate as much of this stuff as I can. I've already added an RSS feed from Flickr on MyYahoo. I'm going to see if I can also add this blog to MyYahoo.

week 2.21 (flickr searching)

First rule: Do not search for the term "library" unless you can dedicate the next 8 hours to sleep and are not planning to drive or operate heaving machinery. I was actually hoping to see some sort of assessment project using photography that I could use as an example for a future project here. (I did find a collection of photos from the library assessment conference I attended last year, but I'm not in any of them.) The assessment project was probably not a realistic expectation, but I'm thinking that we should post any assessment pictures we do on Flickr now that I've seen it.

I generally like the intersection of lots and lots of pictures and tags. Most search results -- with some humorous false hits -- are right on the money. It ain't precise but it is fun. For instance, search "UCSC". I also searched "hummingbird" and saw an amazing variety (10s of thousands) of photos like mine. Even searching "hummingbird UCSC arboretum" brings on about a dozen hits.

On the other hand, I didn't see my own pictures. Even though I uploaded my photos last evening (July 2) and reviewed them by most recent first, my pictures don't show up. Hmmmm. It isn't a case of recentness, because I see other July 2nd uploads. I guess I'll double check my tagging or maybe my permissions...

In the meantime, I did some other searching with mixed results. The map business needs rethinking. They can only show about 25 photos per page, so when you browse or even search via maps, you have to page through page after page. Focusing on Santa Cruz means many pages with no SC content for every one that has. I don't get the point. Somehow it should be able to show only pages with photos in that region, no?

One other interesting approach is looking at groups. There are 190 "librarians" groups. (See health alert above.)

Again, I think this is more fun (i.e. social) than practical. Library apps? Still thinking about that.

week 2.2 (flickr)

I set up a Flickr account (http://flickr.com/photos/ldjaffe) but had to do the uploads from home since that is where my iPhoto library is.

I found out that flickr's uploader isn't compatible with Safari, but that's hardly news. I got bogged down trying to figure out Uploadr's "authorization" process which was launching Firefox in another window. I think maybe because this is a kind of backwards assignment the process of finding photos to upload into Flickr was more awkward than it needs to be. It doesn't really let you browse the iPhoto library with ease so I had to first find photos in my iPhoto library, note the date and filename and then browse directories accordingly. It's a little cumbersome.

By comparison, I have had a Shutterfly account for a few years and that let's me "share" (upload) photos directly from iPhotos via a free plug-in. That way I can be looking at a photo in iPhoto and decide then and there to upload it without a lot of extra steps. I will note that Shutterfly has a different focus - they sell prints and sharing is a secondary proccess. I did set up a shared album for this assignment. http://share.shutterfly.com/action/welcome?sid=8AaM2jhq0bs2FE¬ag=1 But there is no general access to photos in Shutterfly.

Back to Flickr ... I'm slowly getting on top of some of the basics. For instance, I noticed that some photos were tagged with the camera model. I tagged mine accordingly and then did a tag search for this model. I saw a lot of photos come up without the tag and discovered camera information ("taken with..." ) embedded in a "further information" section. I spent a bit of time trying to figure out how to add or edit this part before discovering that it was included automatically when I uploaded my photos.

My other issue is that the "My Photos" display defaults to showing the photos in the order they were loaded. I was working backwards through my iPhoto album during the upload process and so the images are in reverse order. I was able to resort the photos in the set (there is a sort order option), but I can't discover any way to change the order on this opening screen. it is a small thing but annoying.