IL2006: Keynote: 5 Basic Web Design Tips

Shari Thurow of Grantastic Designs shared a zillion different tips for web design.

The 5 Basic Rules of Web Design are:

-easy to read: HTML, text and graphics, animations shouldn’t be moving too fast and have a good font

-easy to navigate: know where they are at on your site at all times (sense of place), because most people won’t get to your site from the home page; scent of information: need to be able to click on a site map or home page button so they can find where they are

-easy to find -shows up in appropriate location in search engine results.

-consistent in layout and design: communicates trust, reliability

-quick to download: general rule is that majority of a page should download within 30 seconds (average)

-All of above rules are interrelated: people won’t wait for video to download, so if your #1 position in Google will be wasted.

IL2006: You, too, can do Javascript!

I thought this was one of the best presentations of the conference. I learned a lot of stuff that I can use NOW.

RSS & Javscript Cookbook: Rip, Burn, Mix

Meredith Farkas mfarkas@norwich.edu http://meredith.wolfwater.com
Paul R. Pival ppival@ucalgary.ca http://library.ucalgary.ca/services/libraryconnection/contactus.php

Paul and Meredith used a Wiki instead of a Powerpoint to organize their presentation. It seemed to be an effective way to collaborate.

pg. 53 of conference proceedings has their presenation and all the information about the tools, etc.

Repurposing RSS tools

Personal firewall – if everything has to go through IT to get posted, then it is no different than a personal firewall. You need to find ways to get around barriers and post yourself.

Traditional subject pages
-not often updated
-not easy to add content if you don’t know HTML
-no field is static so HTML page may not be best tool for a subject guide (need dynamic content)

"< script language = “Javascript” >" tells you what parts are dynamically generated

Dynamic Content

Give people the information where they login; don’t point them to blog. Put the blog information where they are.

-content lives elsewhere, but is pulled on to a page
-updated as content is updated elsewhere

RSS
-format for syndicating on the web
-based on XML
-view content from different sites on a single page
-dynamically updated
-allows content to be delivered in many ways
*view content in aggregator like Bloglines
*get via e-mail
*show up on a webpage by tweaking with Javascript

Javascript (definition came from ASU information overload glossary)
-simple scripting language that can interact with HTML to put dynamic content on a page
-use to write functions for HTML pages that HTML cannot do on its own
-don’t have to know how it works to use it

Content on a Subject Page (think practice areas)
-dbs
-articles
-new books
-new articles
-new blogs
-etc

Different sites will allow you to pull content from their sites (news, book and cover art, etc)
*delicious (look at San Mateo Public Library delicious bookmarks)
*blinklist
*Furl

Simple RSS to Java tools
-RSS to Javascript
-Feed2JS – http://www.feed2js.org
*script resides on their server - script that does the work of feeding the information from the blog/info sources. They also have a version you can download to your own server so the script resides on your server.
1. Build feed
2. Put in URL of RSS feed
3. Preview
4. Get your code – cut and paste from generator into webpage

-Grazr – www.opmlmanager.com/opm/nengard.opml - allows you to read via a widget on your site. Not sure why you would want to, but it looks cool.

OPML file – outline format for creating a group of feeds – good if you are switching aggregators

Possible to syndicate from delicious using RSS link on bottom of delicious tag page.

Tools to Mix RSS Feeds
-KickRSS – must register to use
-RSS Mix – www.rssmix.com – has an HTML version or you can put new feed into aggregator. Doesn’t show where info comes from, however - mixes up posts from a variety of blogs.

-FeedBlendr – www.feedblendr.com
*can create a title
*tells you where articles/information are coming from

RSS to Email – people are used to this/comfortable with this format of information delivery (e-mail)
-R /Mail
-Squeet
-FeedBlitz
-Feedburner

Creating Feeds where none exist
-Feed 43
-RSSxl
-FeedYes
*some of these tools are not as straightforward to use as Feed2JS

RSS Calendars - an RSS feed that tells people where/when events happen
-RSS Calendar- tells you exactly what to do
-Calendar Hb

Feed on Feed -Aggregator
Wikis have RSS feed
*Media Wiki allow syou to create an RSS feed on every single page

Web developer toolbar for IE
-view generated source code to see where Javascript comes from

IL2006: Keynote Clifford Lynch

Clifford Lynch covered a lot of ground and talks on a very high level. It is important to pay attention and take notes visually, so that you can backtrack to a previous point easily. He goes off on tangents, but always comes back.

The thing that struck home for me about this particular speech was his comment about the mass of information we each are creating.

He identified a number of problems with data in scholarship, but said that scale is a big problem as well. Currently, people work off a small number of documents and may speculate on lost pieces, because they are working off all there is. Now people can deal with the scope of records available. You can't read all of the correspondence of a person if you are writing a biography, because there is too much: e-mail, blogs, computer files - all of our data is electronic. You see this in corporate litigation as well (electronic discovery). Lynch thinks that dealing with the mass of electronic files is what future inquiry will be about on these collections. This is an issue for research libraries, but also for other types of community organizations that collect personal history information.

IL2006: Second Life Meets the Library

The cool dudes & dudettes spearheading Info Island on Second Life have produced a video tour of Info Island and posted it on YouTube. Take a look at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jTQkzfz5osQ

IL2006: Mashups #1

Mashups were a BIG deal at IL. It kind of bites for those without their own servers, but there was some fun to be had by all:

Cool Tools and Mashups for Webmasters Darlent Fichter and Frank Cevonne

-Font Tester – fonttester.com make sure that your font combinations look good on the page.

-eXactmapper Lite – create different views of a site map. Could save a lot of time on web development. This is a download.

-Gliffy is like Visio. It allows drawing of and sharing diagrams on the web. The gang also has layouts for office moves (they have a furniture gallery to use)

IL2006: Improve your Search

Advanced Search – Greg Notess, Search Engine Showdown

If you think you know how to search, go to the Features chart and check out some of the cool things you can do with search engines. One feature is link checking. It doesn't work that well on Google.

Link Searching
-who is linking to whom – you can use this search to evaluate your website
-Link: http://ibm.com
-This works well @ Yahoo
-Link:http://loc.gov NOT site:loc.gov to eliminate internal linking
-On Live use a slightly different syntax: linkfromdomain: loc.gov and site: hr – tells you what Croatian websites are linked to from the Library of Congress

Also, phrase searching is out. Exalead now has proximity searching. YAY!

If you put NEAR between two words in Exalead, you get those two words within 16 words of each other. Not Lexis or Westlaw, but still really useful for more precise searching. This works well; it gives you a new view of web search results.

If you put NEAR/5 between two words, you those two words within a 5 word proximity
-Google has less precision in this area : “teddy * bear”

IL2006: What is the big deal about social search?

Search Engine Report by Chris Sherman

I am only putting excperts into my blog posts as many other bloggers were at the conference and have information up as well. Check out the IL Wiki to see other bloggers and their comments.

What is the big deal about social search?

-wayfinding tools informed by human judgment
-Yahoo is biggest proponet
-all guides to the web
-search engines reflect human bias, because programmers have to make choices. They also watch us while we search to see how good they are.
-personalization to refine search for everyone.
-algorithmic search has plateaued. Google was last big breakthrough.
-social search companies are leveraging the work of volunteers

Types:
*delicious, Furl, Diigo, MyWeb – shared bookmarkes. MyWeb is good for group projects
*tag engines – Technorati, bloglines
*collaborative directories – Yahoo directory, ODP, Prefound, Zimbo, Wikipedia (adding lots of links to articles with the info they already have)

*Personalized verticals: Kosmix, Eurekster, Rollyo. Latter two create a list of sites you find interesting with community based aggregation system.
*Collaborative harvesters: submit articles to a community where the articles get voted on- popurls.com, Digg, Netscape, Reddit
*Social Q&A site: Google Answers, Yahoo Answers, Answerbag – Yahoo has a “stupid filter” so good info rises to the surface.

Problems:
*scale & scope – many non-English sites
*Tagging: language is inherently ambiguous (orange the fruit or orange the color?), lack of controlled vocabulary + chaos, human laziness (nobody adds metadata to word docs, etc), idiots= people doing something to get attention and not to help people, spammers

What will work:
*people efforts are good – need blend of people/algorithmic searching
*trust networks (rating)
*increased personalization & user control over result filtering
*social search will work best with non-text content (photo, music, video) because regular text was missing and other textual aren’t generally associated with the file.

Future trends

-blurring of content & process (blog commenting)
-more personalization
-more dynamic interaction with both search & web
-more vertical/mashup specialization

IL 2006: Pam Gore on FAQs

Pam Gore gave some great information about creating a FAQ for your library. She has good basic information while going into enough depth for more advanced users. Her slides were right on point and she was poised and knowledgeable. Check out her presentation on the InfoToday site: