Heidi Olson

Here is an interesting website that takes your URL, analyzes the html code and creates a visualization. You can see what makes up your page: links, tables, etc.

http://www.aharef.info/static/htmlgraph/

Here is a graphic for the CDE website front page: distance.uaf.edu

blue: for links (the A tag)
red: for tables (TABLE, TR and TD tags)
green: for the DIV tag
violet: for images (the IMG tag)
yellow: for forms (FORM, INPUT, TEXTAREA, SELECT and OPTION tags)
orange: for linebreaks and blockquotes (BR, P, and BLOCKQUOTE tags)
black: the HTML tag, the root node
gray: all other tags

Try this with your favorite website or with one that you are working on to see what it looks like.

In keeping with the tradition of giving thanks for the upcoming holiday, I’ve been thinking about what makes my work-life easier and how thankful I am for having such a tool to help me manage the tremendous amount of information that is out there. This tool would be my RSS feed aggregator! There are many of these types of tools available Google Reader, Netvibes, Newsgator, Blogbridge, and many more, but I’ve chosen to use Bloglines as the one place I can go and see what’s new in topics that are of interest to me.

My feed reader takes the RSS feeds that I subscribe to and keeps track of when something new is posted to that blog, wiki, discussion forum or website. Instead of having to visit each of these sites, I rely on Bloglines to keep track of that for me. I can go to one place on the web, browse through my list of subscriptions and make a choice on whether or not I want to see what’s new. I almost never have time to review all the new items in one sitting. I can quickly run through my list, select the ones that are most important at that time and read the headlines. There are certain subscriptions that I look at every day, sometimes more than once. But sometimes the number of new items grows until it looks even too large for me to look at; its too overwhelming. Then I simply clear them out and let the aggregator start over at 1. If I missed something I can always go back to the inital website and look for it. For example: I subscribed to several blogs that aggregate posts from other blogs on a similar topic. This syndicated blog might post twenty new items every day. If I miss one day of looking at the new posts then the number quickly adds up. Most often, out of the twenty posts there might be only one post that is actually meaningful to me. When the number grows too big I know I will never look at all of them so its just easier to clear it out. Its almost like all those boxes that I have in storage. There are things that have been there for about two years. Most likely I could just give the box away. I probably wouldn’t miss anything. And what a feeling of freedom that would be! (not too save a $$ savings!)

Also available is something called RSS-narrator, like TalkingNews which takes your text-only feeds and converts them to podcasts so you can listen to the articles on your ipod or other mp3 player. I haven’t tried this out but it seems like a pretty handy thing to have especially if you had a long commute to make each day.

For more information on RSS and Aggregators check out commoncraft.com for an easy to understand explantion on RSS.

List of Aggregators on Wikipedia

Comparision of Aggregators on Wikipedia

What’s your favorite digital tool that you give thanks for?

Ever wonder who is reading your blog? I ran across this widget that you can load into your blog’s sidebar that shows where your readers are coming from and how they got there. Often your blog might be linked from another blog or website. Its always interesting to see how people got to your site.

This widget is called Feedjit. With Feedjit you can see:

• Which city and country your visitors are in
• Which website they arrived from, if any
• Which page they visited on your website
• Which external link they clicked to leave your site, if any

It gives you to option of using a live traffic feed or a live traffic map. If you use blogger or typepad you can quickly add it to your sidebar. If you are using another platform, Feedjit says:

If you use a different platform or if you’re installing Feedjit in a website, then simply cut and paste the script we provide into your blog template or website HTML. Feedjit will appear in the position you paste the script.

They also say that if you’re using a free account from wordpress.com then you won’t be able to use feedjit. If you have your own installation of wordpress you can modify your template with their code and add it to your site.

If your visitors don’t want to be seen there is an option link that they can click and remove themselves from your list.

Here’s what it looks like on my personal blog:

I’ve become a big fan of “toread+“. I have it in my toolbar in my Firefox 3 browser.

When I’m researching a topic I usually start with a search in a search engine and begin to gather websites that contain interesting and relevant content. I open links as I find them in new tabs in my browser. At some point I get overwhelmed by the number of tabs or I find a sufficient amount of information that I’m looking for and then I start to sift through it. Most often I find myself spending way too much time on it and decide to move on to another task before completing my research. I don’t really want to muddle up my bookmarks with links to these open tabs since I probably won’t need them more than once or twice. I could move them to my delicious.com social bookmarking account but once, again, they aren’t necessarily topics that I want to keep and the links may not have relevance to others who are following my newly added delicious feeds. I may not have had time to determine if they are really good resources and want to be reminded to look back at them. I also don’t want to spend too much time finding these links again as I probably want to get back to the topic within a day or two.

This is where” toread+” comes in. Like I mentioned before, I have it showing as a link on my toolbar so while I’m on a web page that I want to be reminded of I can click the link and I can send myself an email that has the web address listed in it. I also have the capability to add a short comment about the link so I can customize the email’s subject line.

This also works well for me when I’m in a meeting/conference/class/presentation and someone mentions a web address that I want to get back to when I have more time to spend on it. I can send myself an email reminder and then determine how important it is to me to keep at a later time. I normally don’t keep one of these emails in my inbox more than a day or so. I find time to determine the webpage’s importance and then move on and delete it or give it permanent home in one of my other social tools.

For me, using email to manage things like this has been working well. I know that some people prefer not to fill up their inbox with a lot of messages so this tool might not appeal to them. I’m able to keep a pretty clean inbox and archive (or trash) most of my incoming mail, move tasks to a todo list (I use todoist), send bookmarks to delicious, or categorize my messages.

For more information look at: http://toread.cc/howtouse.php

There’s also a tool called Read it Later – I haven’t tried it yet but I’m thinking about installing it and seeing if it has more features that work with my work style. In fact, I found several references to it yesterday and used my toread+ tool to send myself a couple of links as email reminders!

You might find yourself wanting to limit searchs to specfic sites, ones that you deam reliable and accurate. You can create a custom search engine that you can use for your use or to distrubute to students through google. Whether it is one website, multiple websites, or individual web pages, you designate which places should be included. Examples include a teacher who wanted to limit her students to finding resources within specific websites that she had pre-approved, an institution creating a custom search for student-related issues, a tech-related custom search composed of trusted resources, and more.

Boot Camp is being shipped with newer intel MACs (since Jan 08) using the Leopard operating system (10.5) and is a program that allows you to install the Windows XP or Vista operating system so you can run windows-only applications on you MAC. When you switch from one operating system to the other they both run at native speed. Part of the setup process is to create a partition or dedicated portion of the hard drive so the different operating systems don’t interfere with each other. You must purchase the Windows operating system of your choice and install any Windows based applications you want to use. Programs for that specific operating system are stored on their respective partition.  The reviews that I have read say that Bootcamp runs Window well with few errors. Some say that applications run faster then on PC-only machines. A huge downside is that if you want to switch between the two operating systems you must close out of all applications and perform a restart. If you want to switch back and forth between them you can’t do it without a restart. Thus enter Parallels!

For a small fee (currently $59.99) you can install Parallels which creates a virtual machine much like the older Virtual PC except….Parallels is a lot slicker, doesn’t bog down your speed and actually works!

After installing Parallels, just like with Bootcamp, you have to install the Windows operating system of your choice. Once you’ve done that you can install your Windows-only applications and get started.

A couple of really great features is when you are in Parallels you have access to all of your MAC files and folders so you don’t have to have duplicates or mount a separate drive. Windows mirrors your Mac’s home directory. This includes drag and drop capability.

You can also open Windows files with Mac apps and vice versa as long as you have the same software. You can see any USB devices you add and you can use the Parallels explorer to look for files that you have on Windows even if Windows is not open.

I don’t need a PC very often but there are a few applications that aren’t MAC-friendly so it’s really nice to have the option when I need it. I have found that working with parallels is very easy and suits my needs nicely. When I need windows I’m normally manipulating a file that I need to move back and forth between MAC and Windows so the seamless file management systems is a great addition. I also like the fact that I can check to see how Windows XP reacts with other tools I use like Blackboard.

When a quiz or survey is set up for a single attempt for student completion, you may find that certain circumstances occur that will require you to reset the assessment so that students can complete it.

Once a student clicks to enter the quiz if they click out of it, click submit, the power goes out, they close their browser, etc. then if they try to go back in to complete the assessment they will be “locked” out.

At this point they might contact you to ask what to do to complete their assignment or you might noticed a “lock” in the gradebook.

To reset the quiz so that student’s can continue, click on the lock. You will get the Modify Grade page where you can see that no points have been assigned. Click on the View button.

Here you see the student’s attempt to take the quiz or survey. Quickly scroll down through the quiz to see if they happened to answer any of the questions before their problem occurred that closed their quiz attempt. The best place to look is under the Given Answer.

If you see no answers then click on the Clear Attempt button to clear out the quiz and reset the student’s ability to retake the quiz.

If you see that students have answered some of the questions then you’ll have to make a judgement call on if you want the student to retake the entire quiz or just the parts that they did not get a chance to answer. At this point you’ll have to manual give points to the remaining questions.

Just a reminder that we have several short tutorials on our CDE Website on various topics pertaining to using Blackboard – both for students and for instructors. If you have questions about using Blackboard that you can’t find answers for, please let me know and I’ll try to help you out!

The previous beta document converter (Open Office XML Format Converter for Mac ) that Microsoft put out only worked with word documents (.docx) A new converter has been released that works on word, excel and powerpoint documents that have been created in Office 2008 and can’t be opened in older versions. If you don’t have the latest version of Office it can be annoying when you got those documents that end in x and can’t open them. Here’s an article in MacWorld and the Mactopia link to the converter you can download to your desktop to open documents that end in .docx, .xlsx, and pptx.

Extensions or Add-ons for the popular browser Firefox are being added every day. Many of these add-ons add functionality to enhance how you use the browser and are task specific. Some of my favorites include Colorful Tabs, Resizeable Text Area, and add to del.icio.us. These extensions allow me to visual, change, or quickly accomplish things I do on the internet.

I just ran across this add-on called Speed Dial that lets you see thumbnail views of multiple website on one page. Its like a visual bookmarking system, in a way. But if there are website that you go to everyday (or very often) this might be a quick way to see them. Of course, the most efficient method to see if there is new information being added to a website would be to subscribe to the websites’ RSS feed and refer to your RSS aggregator as a one-stop notification. Here’s a short video explaining what a RSS is and how to use it.

When you download Speed Dial to Firefox, a new button is placed on your toolbar and opens your speed dial page. There is also a drop down list that lets you select individual pages or groups and change the Speed Dial options.

Adding websites There are several ways to add websites to your speed dial: you can use the “Set as Speed Dial” option your bookmarks menu, or by right clicking on the website you want to add, or by editing the speed dial options.

Keyboard Shortcuts By pressing the “Control” key and a number you’ll access the website assigned to the Speed Dial entry with the same number in the current window. If you add the “Shift” key it will open in a new tab.

Groups You can set up your thumbnails into groups of websites to further define specific topics of websites.

I keep my UA resources in one group and the blogs and content areas I write to or monitor in another group. I could also see the use of using speed dial when I’m researching a topic and want to review and look back at multiple websites. Sometimes the names of the websites, since they might be similar, get confusing and a visual guide would be very handy.