Thanks to an email from Brent Simmons, the Firefox extension Feed Your Reader lets you auto-subscribe to a feed from Firefox to NetNewsWire.
Just install Feed Your Reader and select the “Feed Protocol” option in the extension’s one and only configuration option. Then right click (or hold-click) and select “Subscribe to This Page”. You’ll be prompted by Firefox to choose an application to work with the “feed://” protocol. Just find NetNewsWire and you’re all set.
I’m going on a week+ of vacation to the Denver area, up to Wyoming and over to South Dakota. I will happily accept suggestions on must-sees, places to avoid, restaurants and of course- wifi hotspots.
I’ll be hopefully doing some flickr posts too.
I know you can’t wait.
Update: Thanks for the recommendations for the trip, I wasn’t checking email frequently enough, but I’ll be sure to check them out *next time*.
TextWrangler, My favorite text editor for the Macintosh has an update to version 2.1
Don’t forget to pair it up with Daring Fireball’s Markdown for easy, markup goodness.
Shelby Foote, novelist, narrative historian, PBS personality (and perceived Foghorn Leghorn inspiration) died this monday, June 27, 2005. The New York Times has a fine obit, with at least one good quip by the author, which we are want to expect and enjoy. NPR also just re-ran an interview with him made in 1994.
I can make the claim that I’m one of many who have read all 1.5 million words of his Civil War, a Narrative three volume set. Not only are they essential to getting an understanding of how the South and North (note the capitalization) are similar and different from each other even today, it’s also a great read into the management styles of the various military leaders as well as one of the best (threaded throughout the set) Lincoln biographies in context of this series of battles.
I also enjoyed a series of letters between Foote and his friend Walker Percy (author of most famously The Moviegoer).
I remember savoring an interview with Mr. Foote in September 2001 where we got to hear him talk about his work and life, as well as tour his home office and get a look at his favorite books. Memorably, he was a devotee of Proust and had read his Remembrance of Things Past many times, from the same set and each time and wrote the dates of his readings in the back of one volume. That is something we all might want to do with our favorites. Perhaps I’ll do that with my own editions of Mr. Foote’s works.
Note: the phrase “Let us cross over the river, and rest under the shade of the trees” is said to be Civil War general Stonewall Jackson’s final words before dying in 1863, which some say was a major turning point in the Civil War.
I’ve got a chapter in a new book coming out next month: Theories of Information Behavior (Asist Monograph).
It’s a survey of the various characteristics and methods of studying people’s information behavior. Of course, my chapter focuses on Web-based information use behavior with a quantitative spin.
Take a look at the Aardvark Firefox Extension, it’s the live action equivalent of the View-Page Source menu command. What a great way to learn how a page is coded, especially combined with the ever-popular Web Developer Extension by Chris Pederick.
OK, while we’re at it, don’t forget the best extension ever – adblock.
The ingenuity of various independent developers in conjuction with simple scripting, open source databases and XML data formats such as RSS are making old school (1994-1997) portals nearly obsolete. Take this great idea that annotates a prototypical New York Times front page with links to related blog posts (and other feeds) : The Annotated NY Times – About
Throw in Bloglines with its easy to use, Web-based interface for any number of RSS feeds and very soon, a few personal tweaks with greasemonkey, not to mention integrating your own personal blogosphere view using Technorati tags or even more personally oriented, pluck with its client interface/information dashboard++ and you can kiss your portal application providers goodbye.
ORACLE’s recent buyout of Peoplesoft may not be so smart in the long, long run when every business unit, not to mention employee, can crank out structured data feeds, tweak simple logic to act on other’s sources and keep up to date with everything in the organiztion with just a few clicks on everyone’s favorite orange button: 
.
Maybe not all 46 are useful, and some are obvious, but these Windows apps look pretty good if you need them or didn’t even know there was an application that did some of these things. And hey, they’re supposedly free: The 46 Best-ever Freeware Utilities.
Note that these are classified as free, but that’s not explained in depth. While some are open source, the provenance of many of them are either unknown or not stated by the list makers.
Many presentations are linked in (click on the titles) for sessions from the ASIS&T 2005 Information Architecture Summit.
As you may know, George Kingsley Zipf was obsessed with a rank-ordered world. The law named after him has a number of uses beyond even what his grandiose, universal plans were, so read all about it: information on zipf’s law.
Trivia note: originally Zipf’s work was based on some ideas from Condon (which GKZ acknowledged), way back in 1928, but Zipf’s name won out over time.