Technologist, Traveler & Human Being
LibX Plugin for Firefox and IE
So I have been spending a good deal of time lately diving further into the world of library technology. Everyday I feel like I am picking-up some new concept or utility. Today, I want to share a free browser plugin called LibX, that allows you to create and share a browser interface to explore your catalog.
The plugin claims compatibility with both IE and Firefox (I can verify that it works with Firefox 3.6, but does not work with Firefox 4.0.7 beta) and can be linked to and installed like any other browser plugin. When you visit LibX’s edition builder, you More >
Going Beyond Slides with Prezi
One of the coolest things I discovered in the final residency of my graduate program is a site/service called Prezi. Prezi is a free online presentation generator that allows you to create amazing animations, that zoom, jump from topic to topic, etc. Check out the sample presentation below to get a taste of what you can create.
Power of storytelling on Prezi
Pretty cool stuff. The entire zooming in and out / moving around functionality allows one to exploring a large, multifaceted topic, in a visually compelling and meaningful way. These presentations are easily shareable / embeddable, making them reusable in a variety of CMS, More >
37Siginals: Getting Real
37Siginals is a pretty awesome IT organization. Not only did this seven person team create Basecamp, perhaps the greatest online project management suite available, but in doing so they also created Ruby on Rails, my favorite development environment by far. In 2006 they published a book titled Getting Real: The smarter, faster, easier way to build a successful web application. You can read it online here.
The bottom line is that you need to read this. Though written for an audience of web application developers, this text is relevant to any IT organization (and really any modern business). Just like 37signinals’s software, More >
Google Translation Widget
So while meeting with one of my project groups today, the need to translate our site into Spanish came up. While having a human translate all of our entries into Spanish would probably result in a more accurate translation, the feasibility of doing this was questionable. Tasked with coming up with an auto-magic style translation solution, I fired up the Google and stared searching. It didn’t take long to find something pretty awesome.
Google Translate is free, easy to implement, and, based on my limited understanding of Spanish, fairly accurate. You can follow the link for a full fledged tutorial, but below More >
WordPress, OS 10.6, Php.ini and Almost Going Crazy
So I am new at this whole WordPress game. Having developed some pretty nice chops in Ruby on Rails the last year or so, I figured I was too hip for an out of the box CMS system. However, after lamenting the mobile apps support that I could provide myself using a homegrown rails blog, I decided to install WordPress on my MacMini web server and am very happy that I did.
WordPress provides an elegant interface that allows me to do pretty much everything I want to do (including changing the entire look and feel via some simple css and More >