Category Archives: Tech

Tech

Transition Complete

If you visit VirtuallyShocking.com directly, rather than just getting it through a feed aggregator, you’ll notice that the look of the site has been changed. I switched to a theme that functioned more as I wanted it to, in particular adding a menu bar and going to a three-column set-up.

I also created an image bar, but this will be replaced in a little while by some artwork that I’m having done.

In the wake of my decision to abandon my personal wiki, I’ve moved all of the outward-facing stuff from BrockTice.com to various pages here on Virtually Shocking. In particular, brocktice.com now redirects to the about page, and I’ve added a contact page. I’ve also moved my CV to LinkedIn, while my publications remain on the “Publications” page. The Talk References page has been cleaned up a bit, and some of the other pages are no longer available via a menu. As I clean up some more, those pages will either get links somewhere on the site again, or be deleted.

Aside from the lack of a spot for publications (which I may request), LinkedIn is actually a pretty good way to create and distribute one’s CV or résumé. Not only does it offer a public profile with a customizable amount of content, it provides the ability to create a nice PDF of the profile for snail mail or whatever.

Now I’m just hoping that I don’t lose my Google ranking from changing websites. It went okay before when I switched wikis, so I’m not anticipating any problems. I added my little tagline at the bottom of the page to help things along.

Search Brainstorming

This seems so obvious in retrospect that I’m sure someone else has already thought of it. I just don’t know what they call it.

I call it “search brainstorming”.

This is when I’m trying to put something together, like a project plan, a proposal, or a talk. Whatever it is heavily involves an internet search. What I’ll typically do is punch in a google search in Firefox, and then scroll through the results. As I see something I think is useful, I open it in a new tab, and keep going with the search results. Once I’ve exhausted the search results, I turn to my newly-opened tabs.

I read through each tab. As I find things that interest me, I add them to my Google Notebook. I close each tab as I finish with it, as the notebook saves the URL with each clip. Then, I go through and prune the notebook.

I call it “brainstorming” because to me, it seems so analogous to normal brainstorming. I let google generate a rush of ideas. Some of them are clearly not what I’m looking for, so I ignore them. The rest, however, may or may not be of use to me. I can’t tell until later. Therefore, I investigate all of them, adding what might be useful information to a list (notebook), trying not to really evaluate the content. The key ideas are generation and collection. I don’t want evaluation to hamper them — it comes later.

Is there another name for this?

WikiMindMap

This is so ingenious — I’m quite sad I didn’t know about it before.

Wiki Mind Map

I found it in a roundabout way.  Several days ago someone reminded me about YubNub, a so-called command line for the web.  I went to look at the “Golden Eggs (particularly useful commands), and one of them was “wimi” — creating mind maps based on the link structure in Wikipedia.

I thought that was a pretty cool idea, so I took it for a spin. I looked up “meme”, as I recently introduced the concept to someone. this is what I got. This is fantastic for what I call “search brainstorming”, as I mentioned in my Google Notebook post.

I’ve got a lot more YubNub commands to look into.

I’m about to write another post on “search brainstorming”. Hmm.

Backing Up Google Docs and Spreadsheets

If you use Google Docs as a wiki (as I suggested the other day), or even for documents that you don’t care to lose, you should probably back them up. Google ought to provide a way to just download a zipped package, but in the mean time there are some Firefox extensions and GreaseMonkey scripts that can help you out.

Directions are here. I tried it this morning, and it worked great. The hardest part is that you have to manually check all of the boxes.

I also just figured out, when making that link, that you can paste in the address of a tabbed site just by dragging and dropping the tab. It’s not necessary to go to the tab, copy the URL, and paste it. That will make my life a lot easier!

Google Notebook

I mentioned my newfound love for Google Docs the other day.  I’m also rapidly becoming a fan of Google Notebook.  It allows you to set up any number of notebooks, and with a browser extension makes it easy to add any highlighted bit of text from your browser to the notebook.

This isn’t a big deal, as it’s relatively easy to copy and paste text into an editor. It has three key advantages over that method:

1. It automatically includes the title and URL of the page from which the clip was taken.

2. It is accessible from anywhere and …

3. It’s possible to add comments on to any of the clips.

If you’re a Google Docs user, another benefit is that you can send entire notebooks to Google Docs. Thus, researching a personal reference page might go something like this:

1. Search for whatever it is you’re looking for. Your search could include web search engines, books, electronics, various other items, even library searches.

2. As you find things you’re interested in, just paste them into the google notebook (usually one dedicated to the topic).  This is the search equivalent of brainstorming. You might add notes on clips indicating why you chose them.

3. When you’ve exhausted your search, go back to the notebook. Trim down the list to get rid of stuff that ultimately you don’t need. Add further comments if you have them. Drag and drop clips to reorder them. When done, export to Google Docs. From there you can edit all of your clips and comments, merge them into a cohesive whole, whatever. You can then export to something else, like PDF, post to your blog, or publish to the web.

I know it’s been around for a little while, but I didn’t really grasp how powerful it was when it first came it. It’s definitely worth a try. I’ve used it as described above at least three times in the last two days.