David Mattison: Cool Tools

Goodbye to Radio UserLand and hello to DavidMattison.ca on Tiki

Thu, 03 Jul 2003 22:09:43 GMT

I'm saying goodbye and it was fun time with Radio UserLand over the past year. My subscription has 14 days till it elapses and I get bounced from the UserLand server. So set your bookmarks now to http://www.davidmattison.ca/tiki where The Ten Thousand Year Blog continues in a slightly different form. The RSS 1.0 feed URL for all blogs (two at the moment) at my new home on the Web is http://www.davidmattison.ca/tiki/tiki-blogs_rss.php

The Tiki Wiki version I'm running is 1.6.1 and I am eagerly awaiting the release of 1.7 which updates the blog functionality of Tiki so it's more in tune with other blogging software, with features like multipage posts, posting by e-mail, permalinks and trackbacks.

In case you're wondering, Tiki Wiki, as its name implies, includes wiki functionality, and it runs on a LAMP (Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP)-type platform. I gave up on Zope as being needlessly complex and with too steep a learning curve for my requirements. Tiki gives me everything and more in one open source, free, sweet package.

Silva open source Content Management System

Sat, 31 May 2003 17:34:30 GMT

Check out Silva, an open source Content Management System that's browser-based and uses Zope as the backend. It's from Infrae.

Roller Weblogger Java application and FreeRoller.net blog hosting service

Fri, 30 May 2003 02:54:12 GMT

FreeRoller.net offers free blog hosting that includes support for RSS headline aggregation (not very useful) and RSS syndication of your blog content via the Java-based Roller Weblogger Version 0.9.6.5+ application. You can easily post without publishing, and use an external Blogger API client such as w.bloggar (a little short on details in the Roller Weblogger manual on how to do this through FreeRoller.net). There's also supposed to be an export feature by which you can export your blog entries into the Roller XML format as a safeguard against a Roller administrator who's not regularly backing up the blog database. Bookmarks are included, and some other goodies you can check out for yourself.

The Roller Weblogger site also points you to some other interesting Java-based blog authoring/publishing software, some of which incorporate wiki-like functionality.

Plone vs Tiki

Tue, 27 May 2003 14:56:41 GMT

Did want to mention too that Plone, a frontend for Zope, a multiplatform Web publishing system, is a very comparable tool to Tiki. Because Zope has a much bigger community of developers than Tiki, more backend tools will always be available for integration with Plone. Zope also does not restrict you to the use of MySQL.

Future Learning Environment software from Finland

Tue, 27 May 2003 05:19:45 GMT

Future Learning Environment is a Zope-based e-learning tool developed by UIAH Media Lab, University of Art and Design Helsinki, Finland. It's open source and freeware. A demo version is available.

Tiki, a wiki-blog portal-type content management system

Mon, 26 May 2003 05:45:40 GMT

Finally managed to get a full-scale CMS PHP-based wiki-blog installed under Windows. I came across a WAMP (Windows-Apache-MySQL-PHP) product from e-novative in Germany. So I installed that, then installed Tiki version 1.6 Tau Ceti release from SourceForge.net.

The installation part of the documentation with Tiki is not the best because it assumes too much knowledge on the part of the end user. Because Apache got installed into Program FilesApache GroupApache, I had to figure out that the Apache "htdocs" folder is where the "tiki" directory tree needed to reside. There was also a misnamed Tiki database in one of the PHP script files. The Tiki installation also assumed a different MySQL user ID. So once all that was sorted out, the installation worked like a charm.

Tiki's a full-fledged portal-type CMS that incorporates elements of wiki into its design. You can have wiki pages and the blog pages can also be wiki-enabled. There are a whole rack of features, such as a Yahoo!-style Directory or link farm you can build yourself.

Tiki reminds me very much of Infocetera. I think I like Tiki a whole lot better.

Libraries and RSS Roundup

Thu, 22 May 2003 16:37:13 GMT

Libraries and RSS Roundup

Roy Tennant drinks the RSS kool aid in an article in this month's LJ called Feed Your Head: Keeping Up by Using RSS, and he has the [overall] same idea as Steven Cohen about highlighting Library Purchases Via RSS. Curiously, an RSS feed is not listed as one of the Fifteen Library-tested Programs and Policies to Increase Circulation of AV Materials, so let's just write it in ourselves as #16. ...

[via The Shifted Librarian, 20 May 02003]

4XT.org (Java XSLT processor) site

Thu, 22 May 2003 16:18:26 GMT

4XT.org, "a site of resources for XT (a Java XSLT processor), by and for XT users, powered by XT." James Clark wrote the original XT and his site is at XT. You'll find some interesting tools on 4XT.org via the Downloads and Resources pages, including downloads for generating RSS 1.0 (the official version) with XT.

Resource list on blogs-RSS-wikis and RSS syndication information

Thu, 22 May 2003 15:56:08 GMT

A copy of a handout I prepared for a presentation to government and special librarians, along with information technologists, at a provincial government office can be found in a couple of places:

Searchers' Zwiki: http://searcher.freezope.org/zwiki/blogs-rss-wikis

Ten Thousand Year Blog: http://radio.weblogs.com/0110793/stories/2003/05/21/blogsrsswikisCompiledByDavidMattison.html

Because the document was written in Microsoft Word 2000, there's a lot of extraneous HTML tagging, even with the Export to Compact HTML feature used. I keep needing to remind myself never to write something in Word that's intended for display as a Web page.

I'll likely maintain the authoritative copy on the Ten Thousand Year Blog. The Zwiki version is fully editable by anyone.

For those interested in RSS, I'd like to again point out the new myRSS.com service, along with Doug Ransom's excellent presentation on RSS, "Connecting Interested People to New Web Content With Syndication and Aggregation", http://www.weav.bc.ca/slides/weav.rss_files/v3_document.htm

Some other RSS tools Doug pointed out for generating RSS content directly from HTML or XHTML pages -- what's called scraping HTML -- are found at

Site Summaries in XHTML (W3C Semantic Web Development): http://www.w3.org/2000/08/w3c-synd/ (includes basic formatting instructions for your XHTML page and an example using data from the W3C Web site)
XHTML-to-RSS Extractor service [trial-release]: http://www.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/discovery/2000/08/hss/sw.html ("This service uses a generic webdata transformation service (an XSLT server) to convert from a dialect of XHTML to the proposed RSS 1.0 channel format. Goal: author in XHTML, syndicate in RSS.")

Doug Ransom and Ian Davis are also working on a hypertext syndication proposal that would embed RSS right into XHTML, so a document would be capable of being read as either an RSS feed or an HTML document.

myRSS.com, a very cool tool for creating RSS feeds and finding them

Thu, 22 May 2003 04:48:24 GMT

myRSS.com is a very cool tool that allows you to create an RSS feed from any Web site without one. Depending on how well organized your site is, especially if it's blog site, the content may or may be exactly what you want. I created and tested an RSS 1.0 news feed for my personal Web site, E komo mai, and it works fine, though again, the content is not exactly accurate. myRSS will create an RSS 0.91, RSS 1.0, a "Javascript Include" and a "Microsoft SharePoint Web Part". The RSS channel is stored a la Syndic8.com by myRSS. I added my E komo mai news feed to NewzCrawler and it was accepted. The interesting part of this exercise is that a myRSS channel needs to be "sponsored", otherwise a little ad window appears for myRSS before you get to see the feed. You can, for the moment, instantly click a hyperlink in the ad window to get to the content.

Bloki.com, a new blog-wiki service for collaborative content management

Wed, 21 May 2003 02:42:47 GMT

Got notified by e-mail today from a staff member at Bloki.com about their new free blog-wiki (hence, "bloki") authoring-hosting service. You'll find my home page at http://knoall.bloki.com (not much there) and the blog part of my site at http://knoall.bloki.com/blog Individuals can collaborate on both the blog and the main site pages. The blog includes an RSS feed. The browser-based editor is derived from htmlarea, and features a Microsoft Word-like interface, very similar in fact to the editor used by the WebCrimson service. Bloki.com is powered by Zapatec.com (and no, they didn't pay me to promote their product).

SimQuest 5.1 available for download

Mon, 19 May 2003 21:06:56 GMT

We are very pleased to announce: SimQuest 5.1

You can download SimQuest 5.1 for free from our website: www.simquest.nl

New features of SimQuest 5.1 are:

improved installation procedure
long directory name problem solved
auto store option for graphs
new library icons
updated demo simulation
improved SimQuest meeting
improved hypothesis scratchpad
improved hypothesis list

[Distribution list notice from Jan van der Meij, member of the SimQuest Team at the University of Twente, Netherlands, 15 May 02003]

GIS maps from British Columbia

Mon, 19 May 2003 18:34:45 GMT

Some very cool new and updated Geographic Information Systems (GIS) maps coming out of British Columbia.

FishWizard (Fisheries and Oceans Canada and Province of British Columbia)
MapPlace.ca (Ministry of Energy and Mines, Province of British Columbia)
Online Cadastre (Ministry of Sustainable Resource Management, Province of British Columbia), probably the first of its kind in North America, and designed for locating and displaying detailed information on Crown land holdings, as well as alienated Crown land (private property). Government users can also link directly to Tantalis GATOR, the Crown Land Registry Services database where digitized legal survey plans, surveyor's fieldbooks, and Crown Grant documents are found.
Provincial Base Map (Ministry of Sustainable Resource Management, Province of British Columbia)
Aquifers and Water Wells in British Columbia (Ministry of Water, Land and Air Protection, Province of British Columbia; a description of this service is at http://wlapwww.gov.bc.ca/wat/aquifers/index.html)
MapView Lite (Ministry of Forests, Province of British Columbia)
Forest Service Recreation Maps (Ministry of Forests, Province of British Columbia; not quite GIS, but large scale maps)
Natural Areas Atlas for the Capital Region (Capital Regional District, BC)
VanMap (City of Vancouver)
GISInquiry (City of Richmond)

CGI::Kwiki, a Perl module for creating a wiki

Mon, 19 May 2003 18:09:13 GMT

CGI::Kwiki by Brian Ingerson, May 13, 2003, Perl.com (O'Reilly Network), describes a new Perl module, CGI::Kwiki, that lets you "create Wiki Web site in less than a minute." CGI:Kwiki is an abbreviated, less complex and non-database version of another Perl wiki module, CGI::Wiki, by Kate "Kake" Pugh. It's not clear from Brian's article who wrote CGI:Kwiki. You can download CGI::Kwiki from FreePAN, the Free Programming Archive Network.

[Perl.com via Ben Hammersley's Webloggery, May 19, 02003]

Sat, 17 May 2003 00:54:58 GMT

k-collector is an "enterprise news aggregator that leverages the power of shared topics to present new ways of finding and combining the real knowledge in your organisation." [Scripting News]

XFML.root tool by Bill Kearney

Thu, 15 May 2003 04:49:11 GMT

Just downloaded XFML.root by Bill Kearney. Looks interesting. Allows you to export a Radio 8.x post as a faceted metadata (in other words, according to what I'm reading, topics like lliveTopics). Looks cool but no idea yet about how to apply it.

Blogwise blog tracking site

Mon, 12 May 2003 14:24:42 GMT

Here's another fairly new blog tracking site called Blogwise

Stroll down BlogStreet and look for a blog

Sun, 11 May 2003 23:44:05 GMT

BlogStreet is a fantastic blog-tracking tool that includes a large directory of RSS feeds (over 11,000 as of May 11, 02003), and a Visualization Neighborhood (Java applet) that lets you see the relationship of any blog to other blogs.

Sat, 10 May 2003 05:49:15 GMT

DiGIR (Distributed Generic Information Retrieval) was built by the natural history/biological collections community, led by The Species Analyst Network at the University of Kansas, as a replacement for the Z39.50 information retrieval protocol. DiGIR uses Darwin Core, a metadata standard developed by the same community to describe specimen collections. Further information is also available on the DiGIR Wiki.

Sat, 10 May 2003 04:45:11 GMT

GeoURL, another really cool tool. Guess it's a good one for burglars, now they'll know who's got computer equipment in proximity to one another. One-stop shopping.

VoodooPad, a Wiki-like PIM for the Apple iPod

Sat, 10 May 2003 04:02:08 GMT

Quoting the Flying Meat Software site, here's a cool tool I read about via O'Reilly Network's Meerkat Open Wire Service (http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/3164):

VoodooPad is a new kind of notepad. It's like having your own personal hypertext library, where you can jot down notes, web addresses, to-do lists... Anything on your mind. VoodooPad automatically links each page together, to form a miniature world wide web, on your desktop! Anybody familiar with the WikiWikiWeb will feel right at home with VoodooPad.

Type in your notes, and highlight important words or phrases to create new pages; or drag and drop folders, applications, or URLs into VoodooPad - they're linked up whenever the word representing it is found.

You can export your VoodooPad library as html to share with others, or copy it to your iPod so you can view your library on the go. VoodooPad also includes a services menu- so you can select text in Safari (or any other application that supports services) and have it show up as an entry in VoodooPad..

Cost: $10 (Limit of 15 new pads until registration).

TownPortal 0.3 released

Sat, 03 May 2003 20:21:24 GMT

TownPortal 0.3 released Submission by Henri Bergius TownPortal is a community portal system for villages and local communities including home pages of local clubs, families, and businesses. TownPortal runs on Midgard and the MidCOM Component Framework.

[via cmsInfo]

This looks very similar to the portal application developed by Telecommunities Canada and also available for free download. See http://portal.victoria.tc.ca for an example.

NISO OpenURL site and OCLC OpenURL Registry

Fri, 25 Apr 2003 14:38:50 GMT

The OpenURL from the NISO Committee AX site. OCLC Research announced its OpenURL Registry

Source: DIGLIB mailing list, 02003-04-25

LISfeeds.com, a new Web-based RSS aggregation service for library news

Mon, 21 Apr 2003 20:08:00 GMT

Blake Carver of LISNews.com announced a new Web-based RSS aggregation service for library news at http://www.lisfeeds.com/

Mapping the metadata territory with MetaMap

Sun, 13 Apr 2003 00:43:17 GMT

Another cool Web tool from Canada as described in this e-mail announcement to the Digital Libraries Research mailing list on April 12, 02003.

We are pleased to announce that the Web site for the MetaMap is now on line, at the following address:

http://mapageweb.umontreal.ca/turner/meta/english/index.html

What is the MetaMap?

The MetaMap is a pedagogical tool in the form of a subway map, the goal of which is to help people understand metadata standards, sets, and initiatives related to information studies. With the exponential development of the World Wide Web, there are so many metadata initiatives, so many organisations involved, and so many new standards that it's hard to get our bearings in this new environment. The problem is exacerbated by the fact that the names of most of these new standards are represented by acronyms. The MetaMap exists to help gather in one place information about these metadata initiatives, to try to show relationships among them, and to connect them with the various players involved in their creation and use.

The Web site of the MetaMap gives detailed information about why the project was undertaken. It offers access to various verions of the MetaMap (svg, gif, jpeg, pdf). There is also general information about metadata, a guide to using SVG to navigate within the map, and frequently asked questions about the MetaMap.

The MetaMap is constantly undergoing change, since elements are added regularly. We are grateful for everyone's input so we can keep the MetaMap up to date. If you have any suggestions or comments about the MetaMap, you can use the form available on the site to communicate these to us.

At the moment, the MetaMap is available in English and French. We are looking for partners to help produce versions in other languages. If you can help, please let us know and we will supply you with a kit explaining what is involved.

Both existing versions of the MetaMap are a click away from: http://mapageweb.umontreal.ca/turner/

Production team: James M Turner, professor at the l'École de bibliothéconomie et des sciences de l'information (Université de Montréal) and Véronique Moal, research assistant.

**********************************

Véronique MOAL

Assistante de recherche

EBSI - Université de Montréal

veronique.moal@umontreal.ca

http://www.esi.umontreal.ca/~moalv/

Source DIGLIB, 12 April 02003, SITE: Check out the MetaMap

Not clearly explained in this announcement, however, is that you have to download the free Adobe SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) Viewer plugin in order to view and navigate the MetaMap. Curiously, when I checked this out and downloaded the plugin, the viewer reported in the status bar of Internet Explorer 6.0 "Unrecognized DOCTYPE declaration. Image might not display correctly." While the SVG Viewer plugin lets you zoom in and zoom out to specific image points, and restore the original image view, there's currently no ability in SVG Viewer 3.0 plugin to pan or move the image after you have zoomed-in.

When I tried the right-click plugin option to View SVG, I received the following error message:

The XML page cannot be displayed

Cannot view XML input using XSL style sheet. Please correct the error and then click the Refresh button, or try again later.

Use of default namespace declaration attribute in DTD not supported. Error processing resource 'http://mapageweb.umontreal.ca/turner/meta/english/metroanglaisfev.svg'. Line 3, Position 53

<svg width="800" height="470" viewBox="0 0 800 470">

You can, however, View Source and Save SVG As....