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September 28, 2005
literature map
If you're an avid book reader, once you've completed a book, you'll probably want to read another, either by the same author (if its a good book) or in the same genre. This neat little site, literature map, allows you to enter the name of an author and then shows you a visual map of other authors who write in a similar style or genre.
Posted by weaver at 11:53 PM | Comments (0)
September 26, 2005
Grokker
Google is a very powerful search engine, but it displays its results a as a big list. A friend has just recommended Grokker which uses the Yahoo search engine and places the results in to categories or clusters.
Its a different way of localising results and though its only a beta demo , I think its visually pleasing and informative. You can instantly tell the size of a cluster and sees whether it can be broken down further. I predict that this sort of visualisation of search results will become more popular in the future.
Try entering Metheringham to see how the results are displayed
Stupid , juvenile name though....
Posted by weaver at 11:01 PM | Comments (0)
September 24, 2005
Turning the pages
The British Library has developed an excellent way of viewing old manuscripts online. Turning the Pages allows visitors to virtually 'turn' the pages of manuscripts in a realistic way. You can zoom in on the high-quality digitised images and read or listen to notes explaining the beauty and significance of each page. Its absolutely fascinating.
They've alreday completed about 14 manuscripts and the site really brings the documents alive. Heartily recommended.
Note: Turning the Pages needs the Shockwave plugin on your browser
Posted by weaver at 6:39 PM | Comments (0)
Opera
I'm a keen fan of Firefox. Its a much better internet browser than Internet Explorer. As Firefox has grown in popularity, it has attracted an undesireable element who now get their kicks from finding and exploiting holes in the coding, much as has happened to IE over the years.
In the background there has always been an excellent alternative, Opera. Opera has been available for years, initially only to this who were willing to pay for their browser. As MS provided one for free, most people never bothered. Lately, there has been a free version of Opera availablebut it was ad encumbered.
Now the good folks at opera.com are giving away the latest version of Opera. Its as good, some say better, than Firefox and easily outranks IE. If you're in the mood for a change of browser then give it a go, you won't be disappointed.
Posted by weaver at 11:21 AM | Comments (0)
September 18, 2005
Populicio.us - the end
Populicio.us is a site that I've been using this year to see what's hot on the Del.icio.us site. Its a sort of aggregator for current sites that have been tagged. Populicio.us was really good in that it only had to be checked about once a day to see the most popular sites.
Sadly it is no more. I for one will miss its functionality....
Update 20/09/05: Oops I spoke to soon, it back up and running......
Posted by weaver at 1:06 AM | Comments (0)
Playing Catchup
Microsoft's finally decided to play browser catchup with Firefox. One of Firefox's strengths is the web developers toolbar extension. Its been a great help in dswigning and debugging web pages or just to plain see how web pages are put together.
Now IE has its own web developer toolbar. It may be a touch too late for me but if you're still using IE then it could be useful.
Now, if only IE had tabbed browsing..... oh and pop up blocking... and a good download manger and.........
Posted by weaver at 12:55 AM | Comments (0)
September 15, 2005
Blog Upgrade
This blog has been upgraded to Movable type 3.2. This will hopefully mean that I can turn comments back on. I'm reluctant to do this because the comments script is currently getting about 1000 hits per day from an automated spamming bot.
Just need to dig into the manual a bit more to find out about styles and templates. The default look is pretty poor compared to what went before..
Posted by weaver at 6:56 PM | Comments (0)
September 12, 2005
Personalised mapping
Experimenting with the Google Maps API to custom build a map for a site, produces this little gem for Metheringham.
You can move the map around and zoom in and out but there's a lack of decent imagery at the higher resolutions.
Posted by weaver at 10:57 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Sci fi Shorts
If you're a sci fi fan, 365 tomorrows is publishing a short story every day for a year.
Posted by weaver at 10:51 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
Digging To Australia
As kids, we used to wonder where we would pop out if we dug a hole through the centre of the earth and came out on the other side.
Australia was a popular choice as was New Zealand. Some even thought of China. Now you can find out. Visit Dig a Hole
Posted by weaver at 10:45 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
September 3, 2005
Internet Explorer Security Flaw
This one is a bit scary - especially if you buy things over the net.
Visit this page and see if anything comes up in the clipboard box. If it does then visit this Lifehacker page to do something about it.
Posted by weaver at 2:46 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack