Tag Archives: editor

You need to flock to Flock

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Ok, that’s a dumb title for this post, but deal with it.  After abandoning Flock for several months in favor of tricking out a standard Firefox browser setup, I decided to give Flock a try again.  Fortunately, my timing was great because around the same time as I decided to return to using Flock as my main browser, they release their 0.9 beta version, which is miles ahead of previous iterations in terms of functionality, stability, and performance.

I’m not sure why it has taken the Flock wizards to get this far, since the initial preview release came out almost two years ago.  But I’m not complaining now.  As far as I am concerned, Flock beats a tricked-out Firefox any day, because of its neatly integrated functionality, and also because it can do anything Firefox can do, including using all of Firefox’s lengthy list of handy plugins.  This latter point was the main reason I abandoned Flock for a while, because there were plugins I routinely use in Firefox that I couldn’t get to work in Flock and just didn’t feel like working without that functionality.  Now I don’t have to.

There are still some areas where Flock can improve, most notably in terms of initial load time.  I also have played around with Flock’s built-in blog editor and although I like its simplicity, I haven’t been able to use it to edit posts that I’ve published through other means (i.e. through a different editor or in my WordPress admin).  This is something that Flock’s built-in blog editor used to do but now does not.

Still, I am happy using it and recommend anyone to give it a try.

[tag]flock[/tag]

Editor indecisiveness

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I have yet to standardize on one, single way to post to this blog. I never seem to find the perfect fit — if there is such a thing. And maybe it is ok to use multiple ways to post. Some of the editors and/or posting methods I’ve used include the following:

  • Log in to WordPress admin and write a post there
  • Use Flock‘s built-in editor
  • Windows Live Writer
  • WordPress Dashboard widget (OS X)
  • Blog by email

And this isn’t all. There are some more editors or methods I’ve used that I can’t recall right now. I’ve tried a whole bunch of different ones.

Bet you would never guess that I’d point to a Microsoft product as one I’m liking more and more: Windows Live Writer. (To paraphrase or misuse a well known Bible verse: “Can anything good come out of Nazareth Redmond?”)

Although it is still officially in beta, I am using ver. 1.0 and enjoying its features, including the fact that there is a small but growing set of third party plug-ins for things I might use. Among them are plug-ins for inserting Snagit screen captures, Technorati tags, Flickr images, Bible verses, maps, tables, videos, and more. It seems to format the output nicely and correctly (something that hasn’t been the case in the past for some Microsoft products), and offers one of the best preview options I’ve seen anywhere. I also like the fact that there are several good keystroke shortcuts built-in.

My del.icio.us bookmarks for April 6th through April 16th

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These are my links for April 6th through April 16th:

Wired News: Open-Access Journals Flourish

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Wired News: Open-Access Journals Flourish

I was interested to see this generally positive (i.e. balanced) review of the open access journal phenomenon in today’s Wired News. I thought some of the negatives put forth by anti-open access persons were a bit ludicrous. E.g. the editor of the New England Journal of Medicine was quoted as saying:

“It’s possible, Drazen said, that an open-access journal would find itself in deep financial trouble and loosen its standards about the papers it accepts. The researchers, possibly from drug companies, will be ‘more likely to get their paper published because they can afford to get their paper published, and that’s exactly the wrong reason.’”

This kind of statement seems to assume that there is no such influence, or at least that there isn’t the same kind of possibility for that influence, in the traditional journal publishing model.

The only other criticism I have of this piece is that it makes no mention whatsoever of the vital role that libraries play in the whole dissemination of scholarly communication, especially in the form of journal articles. There is no recognition of the fact that libraries’ budgets have been imperiled for years in large part due to the outrageous costs they are being asked to pay for access to traditional journal literature.

Blog session at Greater Cincinnati Library Consortium

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In an earlier posting I mentioned that I was going to a session on library blogs as marketing tools held at the Greater Cincinnati Library Consortium (GCLC). I also stated that I didn’t think I’d learn much from the session, which in retrospect sounds kinda snotty, and I didn’t mean it that way. What I meant was that I had already been delving into the blogging world quite a bit of late and had a pretty good knowledge base already. Turns out I did learn some things at today’s session, which is always a good thing ;-)

The presenter, Darlene Fichter of the University of Saskatchewan, did a good job of covering quite a bit of ground. For some reason, my boss and I didn’t realize that it was a videoconference presentation, but actually, aside from a few glitches, Darlene did as good a job via videoconference as if she had been there in person. I particularly appreciated her emphasis on establishing an editor and/or editorial guidelines for library blogs to which more than one person contributes. This is exactly the kind of thing I have set up for my library and her point helped to solidify some ideas I’ve had about how best to operate the whole thing. Darlene also emphasized the need to establish a particular “voice” or “niche” for a weblog. I’ve heard that before but her mention of it again helped me to think more about what “voice” or “niche” I would want my library’s weblog to have. She also pointed out the flexibility of a weblog in terms of being able to use the information posted to it in various ways. For instance, the output of a weblog could be in email form, delivered via a newsreader, presented as a static webpage, or fed into an institutional portal environment. The latter point in particular struck a chord with me because my institution is introducing a portal environment beginning with the fall semester. Overall this was a very thorough and well presented session and I’m glad we drove all the way over to Cincinnati to attend it. And an added bonus was Cincinnati itself; really a beautiful city with interesting homes and buildings built up on a bluff high above the river.

As an aside, I had a wireless laptop with me at the time and was surreptitiously looking at Library Stuff and some other weblogs to which I subscribe. Darlene mentioned Kansas City Public Library’s RSS feeds, and just a few seconds later, lo and behold, I saw Steven Cohen’s post at Library Stuff about that very thing. Talk about convergence!

Another column to do for Serials Review

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I am editor of a column for Serials Review called Bits & Bytes. I’m working on a column for the vol. 30 no. 3 (fall 2004) issue and my topic is what I call journal viewers. My focus is on two that I’ve used a fair amount: Zinio and Newsstand . The main thing I want to do is to address the question, are these journal viewers just as good as reading the print version? Obviously because they are reading digital versions, there are many things these viewers can do that can’t be done in the print environment, but the main thing is, if given a choice, would someone prefer receiving a magazine in digital form, to be read with one of these viewers, instead of getting it in print? Also, what are the implications for this kind of new technology for libraries, assuming it becomes widely accepted? If anyone who reads this blog knows of sources of more information about these or other journal viewer software of which I’m not aware, please drop me a line.