GOV IT

Strategic IT for Government

March 23, 2004

Switching from PHP to Zope/Python. Occasionally, when working with computers, you get to experience a completely new way of thinking about problems long thought solved. Rarer still does one find a new set of solutions that are so well thought out and integrated that older approaches seem clumsy by comparison. Recently I discovered Zope, and having understood its principles I decided to abandon my years of PHP experience in pursuit of a better way. [kuro5hin.org]
5:47:50 PM

Raising the Bar for Toolbars.

"Dogpile Toolbar has launched its newest toolbar, which comes with an an RSS Tool for grabbing RSS and Atom-syndicated content. The Toolbar can display feeds constructed in RSS .91, .92, and 2.0 formats. The Toolbar also supports the Atom feed format." [Lockergnome’s RSS Resource]
Index and Search Your Computer, RSS Feeds, and the Web With New Desktop
From an overview article that that I've co-authored with Barbara Quint, 'Lycos has launched a free toolbar search product [IE, Windows 98, ME, 2000 or XP] from HotBot, their search service,which is 'the first product to integrate traditional desktop search with Web search within the browser.' The same search tool can now reach the Internet, e-mail folders for Outlook or Outlook Express, and user documents stored on a hard drive. The free application does not even require registration. It also incorporates a blocker for pop-up ads and an RSS News Reader syndication. Searching reaches six file types: MS Office, PDF, RTF, and text. Indexes created to track e-mail and user files remain stored locally to protect user privacy.' " [Resourceshelf]

So toolbars are continuing to evolve, with library services nowhere in sight. I'm more intrigued by the Hotbot toolbar, with its ability to index my hard drive. I love the Lookout search toolbar for Outlook, so combining that functionality with searching my RSS feeds could be incredibly efficient. I'm confused as to what list of RSS subscriptions the toolbar indexes, though. Hopefully it's not a second list that needs to be maintained separately from any existing user aggregator. I'll have to find time to give it a whirl, especially to see if I can add SWAN to its list of search engines.

Oh, and an important note from Gary's article: "Indexes created to track e-mail and user files remain stored locally to protect user privacy," and it's Windows only.

[The Shifted Librarian]
5:42:01 PM

Power Up Internet Explorer with Three Shells. Supercharge Internet Explorer with one of three wrappers. Once you use them, you won't be able to imagine how you got along without them. [O'Reilly Network ONJava.com]
5:39:49 PM

Blogs and Print, Working Together.

Jon Udell: Blog/print synergy: my strategies. For almost a decade I've used the Web -- and most recently my blog -- to research, develop, and enhance the articles I write for magazines. When I ran into Dan Gillmor at SXSW we discussed some of my strategies, and Dan asked me to write them up. Seems worth doing, so here goes. Much of this concerns the IT trade pub ecosystem specifically, but I think the principles will generalize. The basic pattern is simple: a story gestates in blogspace, appears in print and online, and then matures in blogspace.

Great advice here for journalists.

[Dan Gillmor's eJournal]

5:37:56 PM