Personalise your home page

One of the range of web 2.0 services now being offered is the personalised start or home page. Here you can combine all your RSS feeds into one place, gather all your email accounts together and through the use of widgets you can add extra functionality to you pages.

Netvibes is one of the most popular services in this category. It has a very friendly and easy to use interface and has a very active group of users who add to the netvibes ecosystem. This is my own choice for personalised startpage.

Pageflakes is a similar service to netvibes and also has an active user group creating its own flake or widgets. It also offers the ability to do take notes, keep an address book and maintain a calendar.

Webwag is another personalised start page that offers what are now the standardised features of this kind of service, which we’ve mentioned above. It also offers a very easy way of creating widgets for your startup page.

The great thing about these services that that you can mould your page into your own image and create an experience that is truly personal and specfic to you and your interests.

Diarmuid

Alternative to Endnote?

Power Firefox users may be familiar with some of the vast range of extensions that are available for this program. These extensions allow third parties to add new functionality which the Firefox developers may not have thought of or considered important. You can find out about the range of extensions here.
An extension that definitely has use in is the Zotero extension. This Extension allows you to collect manage and cite your research sources. It doesn’t offer the full functionality of Endnote, but its list of features include:

• Automatic capture of citation information from web pages
• Storage of PDFs, files, images, links, and whole web pages
• Formatted citation export (style list to grow rapidly)
• Integration with Microsoft Word
• Runs right in your web browser

It currently only supports a small number of the major citation styles, such as MLA and Chicago, but this should improve with time. Also as it’s an Open Source product it’s free.

Diarmuid

 

Do you wiki?

Wikis are becoming increasingly popular on the web, with Wikipedia being the most famous example. People are using them for a variety of different purposes, such as creating a user updated document that defines procedures and policies or a space for collaborating on a document in real-time or near real-time. The key feature of maintaining a full archive of all content change means that you have a full record of all content created and the contribution of participants.

More and more web based wiki hosting services are being made available. In common with many other web 2.0 services they are being made available for free.

pbwiki offers a very friendly and intuitive interface that allows you to quickly and easily create a wiki. There’s no need to have any code as it has a WYSIWYG interface.

 

Atwiki also offers WYSIWYG interface, but also allows you access to the code if you want it. It also allows you to create RSS Feeds.

On-wiki, in addition to features mentioned before also allows you to create a calendar, write math using LaTex and create graphs.

These are only a tiny sample of the range of wiki services available. If you use one that we haven’t mentioned why not let us know and we’ll feature it.

Diarmuid