A meandering mind…

Well today we had a fairly intense class in all that’s Digital and History. As a relatively frequent blogger and user of such sites I’m fairly comfortable with this sort of stuff so the initial part of class although interesting and I did learn one or two tricks was a repeat of what we did last year with better examples showing us the how’s and why’s of blogging tools. But then, then we did organisational skills and then the class took off! Here again we dealt with the organisation of files, standard hierarchies etc. Which is something I do anyway, as I’m obsessed with keeping things organised and easily accessible. One thing I have however always found a little messy and cumbersome has been the storage of PDF Journals in particular. These tend to be vast journals full of information often entirely un-searchable. Then we were shown Evernote.

It is possibly one of the best mobile databases available that I’ve worked with. Despite the fact it can be slow and cumbersome it does one other fantastic thing. There is an app which exists for the iPhone (and for those of you yet to experience my Apple propaganda be prepared for it, I’m regularly described as being an iPhone missionary put on this earth to spread the good word about iPhones). This app does a number of rather interesting things. As well as allowing you to access and search your Evernote database from the iPhone it also allows you to upload images from the phone, images that already exist on your phone, images emailed, screen captures of your iPhone etc. All of these fully text searchable despite being images, fantastic! I know I’m going on a little about it but I genuinely was fascinated and excited by this technology. As you can see from the menu to the right that is the basic access screen available on the iPhone. Other features include dictated messages and notes. Yet to try this one out. Very much looking forward to tinkering with it to see how I may benefit from all of this.

One further thing before I dismount from this newly found hobby horse of Evernote, Twitter! It syncs! So when you upload pics to twitter and tag @MyEN in the tweet you’ll send that tweet and image URL and it’ll be stored in the online Evernote database.

As we dealt with a number of referencing tools I’ll touch on this briefly. Bookmarking, woe betide those people I see with spammed browsers with fantastical buttons all along the top with links to sites. Personally I use these bookmarks but I have folders and normal Links. My main bookmarking facility is in Safari, which although lacking in a tagging facility has an extensive folder and organisational capability with webpage previews at a glance. Very much to my taste and mind set (Clearly apple has brainwashed me!). Tags are something that can sometimes frustrate me. I can see their merit but “foldering” is more my style I guess. And as my bookmarks sync with my mobileme account I have access to it everywhere including Safari on my iPhone. We looked at Delicious too and although I can see the benefits it’s not something I’d make much use of I feel, this is after some considerable testing previous to this course as I’m always on the look out to be more organised!

This is Zotero. Another exciting application or rather plugin. It works only with Firefox browser, which is sadly a disappointment as I rarely if ever use my Firefox as I find it very unstable and unreliable compared to the updated Safari 4.0.3. But from toying around with it, another excellent application. And a very useful one for those of us plagued to work extensively with books. It’s a referencing tool. Which is able to pull and catalogue all bibliography information necessary from a page and store it has you need/require. Furthermore there are plugins which can be used for Microsoft Word which allows you to insert footnotes from your

Zotero logs. To the right is another interesting development to Zotero. A web log of your references. Making these references non machine specific. So if your working on a library computer on the university campus for instance you can access your Zotero logs either on your mobile browser(, in my case the iPhone). Or via the web browser your working on with the machine.

Back to the topic of blogging itself I myself use wordpress software installed on my server, under my own domain name. The reason I prefer to use wordpress is has much better range of skins, control settings in other words more customisable. I find Blogger rather basic. The comprehensive nature of settings and controls in Wordpress can often daunt the virgin blogger. Once your set up it’s actually quite simple so you shouldn’t be afraid of it. One of my main reasons I like Wordpress is the app I can use for my iPhone. Wordpress have this handy Application I can use to create rough drafts of ideas and thoughts I have during the day and they’re then waiting for me online all typed up and ready to publish if I feel happy enough with them. It’s more a case of independence for me that I prefer to use Wordpress and it’s better functionality.