Wicked Cool

How to Embed Almost Anything in Your Website

This article has already gotten some librarian link-love, but a little more can't hurt (especially when it's full of quality advice). Here's a straight-to-the-point rundown of How to Embed Almost Anything in Your Website, from Digital Inspiration.

You'll see some familiar services making all this embedding possible (like Meebo Me and various Google services), but you may find reasons to take some new ones out for a spin too (like Issuu, Zoho, and Scribd).

Thanks to Cheryl for the tip!

Print What You Like (not what you don't)

Next time you print from a website that isn't "printer-friendly,"  run the page through PrintWhatYouLike.  It lets you selectively delete pieces of the page before printing—so you save a little paper, save a little ink, and get a cleaner printout.

Goodbye, banner ads, navigation links, and fine print.  I won't miss you in my printouts!

(Thanks to Stef and Jean for the tip!)

Portable Apps and Patron PCs Don't Mix

Or at least, portable apps shouldn't mix with patron PCs. In the comments, Rob lists the security risks that libraries open themselves up to when patron PCs are allowed to run programs from a USB drive: "keyloggers, spybots, and other hacks that let one patron send all the data from a patron station that doesn't get rebooted all day to an email or web page." Empowering patrons is good, but maybe not that much!

Based on my own test, LINK patron PCs don't allow portable apps to run. Check out the error message I got when I tried to run GIMP Portable on a catalog computer at Madison Public Library:

SLCS-supported non-LINK patron PCs are also similarly locked-down.

If your library manages its own patron PCs, be sure your computers aren't at risk!

Bring Your Own Programs (with a USB drive!)

Last week's topic mentioned portable applications -- programs you can install on a USB drive and use on any computer.  They're handy when your work requires you to move from computer to computer (like from an office, to a ref desk, to a circ desk, to home, and back again... sound familiar?).  There are a lot of different options, but some that might be useful in a library environment include:

• Firefox:  Browser (lots of library computers already have Firefox installed, but your bookmarks can travel with you if you're running the portable version)
• Sage (Firefox extension):  RSS reader
• Opera:  Another browser alternative beloved by techies
• OpenOffice:  Open-source office software
• Pidgin:  Instant-messaging software that works with most chat services
  
• GIMP:  Image editor

Not in the mood to mix-n-match?  Try the PortableApps.com Suite, which starts you off with a selection of the most commonly-used programs. 

Where to find portable apps:  PortableApps.com is the most popular, but PortableFreeware.com and Wikipedia also have monster lists. 

What to watch out for:  USB drives are easy to lose, so be careful about keeping track of yours -- don't forget it when you get up to leave the computer!  For the same reason, remember to back up your USB drive regularly, especially if you have any important data stored on it.

Will this work on patron PCs?  Should we recommend it to patrons?  It seems like portable apps could be useful for patrons who are power-users of the library PCs -- however, lots of libraries have security measures in place to prevent patrons from running programs from a USB drive (for good reason).  I haven't been able to test this on LINK and non-LINK patron PCs yet, but I'll be loading up some portable apps to test-drive on a patron PC soon. 

If you try it:  Give us a field report!  What did you try, and how did it go?

Creating Web Forms with Google Docs

Yes, this is another article about Google.  We just can't help seeing library applications for their products!  This week's discovery is the form builder inside Google Docs. 

Almost everyone wants a form for their website, right?  Suggestion boxes, book requests, meeting room reservations, and surveys all let you interact with your patrons online.  There are lots of different services for building web forms (SurveyMonkey and FormAssembly are our standbys, though we're also hearing good things about Wufoo), so this is just another tool to try out.

Why it's worth trying:  It's quick and easy and free to use, and the forms can be e-mailed to specific people or embedded in a website for anyone to use.  You do need a Google Account to use Google Docs to build a form, but you don't need one to use the form to submit answers.  When responses to the form start to come in, Google puts them into a spreadsheet in Google Docs for you.

What it's good for:  Conducting simple surveys, collecting feedback.

When to use a different form service:  A form in Google Docs is not a good option when you're planning to collect sensitive information, or you're creating a massive, complicated questionnaire, or you want to have more control over how the form looks.

Here's an example of a form that was created in Google Docs and embedded in a website:

If you try it:  Let us know about your form building experiences!  How did you use the form?  What worked and what didn't?

Thanks again to Kerri for finding this and testing it out!

Quarkbase is Another Way to Check Up on Your Website

The web has a lot of information about your website, if you know where to look -- but there are a lot of different places to look.  Quarkbase is an online service that pulls it all together on one page (their slogan is "Everything about a website") with information like summary, popularity, ownership, and traffic, drawn from Whois, Alexa, and other sources.  The results are surprisingly accurate, considering that they're entirely computer-generated.  Don't miss the section on "Similar and Related Sites" to see which sites Quarkbase sees as peers of your website!

Thanks to Kerri for the tip!

Fifty Ways to Take Notes

Via Rebecca's Pocket, the Solution watch blog has posted Fifty Ways to Take Notes. Try some out the next time you're at a conference or meeting, or find a favorite to recommend to library patrons to save their research.

My favorite new find is ShortText: it's incredibly fast and easy, and requires no registration. You can set a password ("key") if you want to keep notes private.

The author also lists a few neat personal start pages - like Netvibes, PageFlakes, Protopage, Fold, and Google Personalized - where you can gather your daily info (like various RSS feeds & weather) and handy tools.

DwarfURL

Tana @ MPL brought my attention to DwarfURL, a tool with which you can shorten monster URLs to include in email addresses, etc. It works like TinyURL, except that it also lets you track how many times people click on the link you create. Nifty!