Visit my new blog home

I have moved my blog to jeffbridgforth.com. Please update your subscription feeds.

First Podcast

I posted my first podcast today. I have been working on it for a couple of weeks now. It was recorded by one of our staff in California. I used RSS Buddy to write the xml "feed" for the podcast. It helps you write the feed for iTunes. I have been ready for a couple of weeks but needed to wait so that I could take advantage of a partnership with another department with Campus Crusade.

SnagIt

Last week, I bought new software that I really like. It is called SnagIt. It allows you to capture screenshots. I had heard about it at the User Interface conference I attended in Boston earlier this month.

I downloaded a trial version and after using it once, decided to buy it. What I really like about it is that you can take a screenshot of a website and scroll down to capture the entire length of the page, which you cannot do by just doing a print screen in Windows. Also, it is smart enough that you can just capture a certain element on your screen. This cuts down on the process of having to go into my graphic editing program to cut down images to just what I want.

You can also apply effects like torn edge with SnagIt. For $40, it is a nice little program.

Web 2.0 Themes

Last week, I attended the User Interface Conference in Boston. It was hosted by UIE. It was a really good conference and I would like to go back next year if I can get the funding.

Joshua Porter did a seminar on Web 2.0 and here is my summary. He talked about it using different themes he has identified.

• Information Remixing - He showed us housingmaps.com which is "mash up" of Google Maps and Craig's List. Information remixing takes previously disparate information and ties them together in new ways that are more useful.


• Architecture of Participation - We looked at del.icio.us. This theme takes one person's activity and makes it a useful tool for others. Del.icio.us allows a user to enter bookmarks and then tag them with different categoried that are useful to that person. Then I can look to see what others have put under those tags. It is collabortive filtering that takes personal info to help others find valuable content.


• Social Networking - Flickr and Netflix would be examples of this. This theme deals with sorting information based on who I am and who my personal authorities are.


• Interfaces - This theme deals with making new interfaces for content through what are referred to as APIs or Application Programming Interfaces. One example is Andale which uses information in eBays database to help those who sell on eBay become better at it. Here is a description from their website, "Andale Research is a power tool that can boost your sales every day. By helping you uncover the secrets to successful selling on eBay and formulate winning pricing strategies, it can show you how to sell more and maximize your profits on every sale."

I thought Joshua did a good job of trying to make the concept of Web 2.0 a little easier to understand.

Attensa RSS Reader for Outlook

I had heard about this utility a couple of weeks ago. I decided to download it last week to try it out. I had used SharpReader before my computer got reimaged a couple of weeks ago.

I have been reading a book called Taking Back Your Life, Using Outlook to Get Organized and Stay Organized. One of the concepts in the book is that you minimize your collecting points for information. This is what motivated me to try Attensa.

Here is my review:

Attensa worked much like SharpReader in that it created folders in Outlook based on the categories you want to sort your feeds into. You can keep things like you do in SharpReader and delete the posts that you are not interested in. You can choose three different way to have the posts displayed: plain text, default view which describes itself as faster and richer and then source web page contents (which they say is the slowest) which looks like the website. I have been using the Default view and the one quirk I have found in it is that it displayed apostrophes as boxes. Attensa has tag functions but I have not yet played with that. You can forward the articles through Outlook to others and you can post to your blog with the Attensa utility bar in Outlook but I have not yet tried that either.

In comparison to other readers, I have not used the RSS reader in Firefox and I did a little with Bloglines. I had also been playing with Google's reader but was not real keen on it because I could not get rid of posts that I was not interested in. Attensa has provided me a pretty good solution as I am trying to integrate things from the Taking Back Your Life book.