For those who have not seen the news, Ex Libris is changing hands. Francisco Partners is purchasing EL. Francisco Partners also owns these companies. I am not sure what, if anything, this will mean for the future of the company. It appears that EL is the only library services vendor that Francisco partners owns.
To those of you who read this blog on a regular basis, I want to apologize 
for posting infrequently lately. I have had a couple other projects that I have been working on, plus my Church had vacation Bible school last week. You don’t get much done during VBS week.
I just wanted to take the time to inform you about a new social bookmarking service. For those of you who already have one, you’re probably groaning, “Not another one!” I know. I know. I have been using Del.icio.us for…well…forever. 
I can’t remember life before Del.icio.us. In fact, I have no intentions on ceasing from using Del.icio.us. (With Diigo and its toolbar, I don’t have to, but more on that in another post.)
For those of you who don’t have a social bookmarking service…well…you need one. Social bookmarking is a way to keep track of all of the websites that you visit. It allows you to describe the page using several one word “tags.” For example, if you visited the page for “Talladega Nights,” you might tag it as “movie,” “Will_Ferrell,” “stupid,” and “NASCAR.” This may seem like a useless service until you cannot find that page with the thing that you needed for your job and now you’re gonna get fired cause you can’t produce what you said you could. Or perhaps you can’t find that online add for that ring for your wife that you saw that would save you $1000 so now you can’t get a new johnboat because you don’t have the extra $$$$ you would have saved. Trust me. You need one. There are several out there.
Diigo is different, though. The service is only in beta testing at this point, so you have to actually request an invitation to participate. Diigo not only lets you save a bookmark to the page, but it also allows you to highlight content. It lets you add virtual sticky notes to the page. This really is the ideal tool for research and blogs. You can access your thoughts about a certain web page from anywhere in the world, right on the web page. How many times have you wished that blogs and webpages worked like books. You wish that you could add marginalia. You wish that the marginalia could be either public or private. It’s all possible with Diigo.
Don’t just take my word for it. Go try out Diigo’s playground for yourself. If you don’t think the service is the coolest thing since Cocoa Pebbles (it’s like cereal, only chocolaty), then walk away from your keyboard, go get in your 1973 Ford Maverick, throw in your favorite Captain and Tenille 8-track, and …well… you get the picture.
I have just started using Diigo in the past few days, so I will have more to say about it later. However, I do think that this is one of the best social bookmarking sites that I have used. Long live Diigo!
Totally off topic when it comes to archives, but I found this section of an O’Reilly PSP Hacks book. It explains how to put a keyboard on your PSP.
One problem, though. The hack says you need a server for the keyboard to reside on. Actually, you don’t need a server. You can embed the keyboard in your PSP. Just copy the code provided in the hack into a text editor on your computer. Then save it with a filename you can remember. I called mine kb.html. Next, connect your PSP to your computer, and load the file in the root directory of your PSP. Open your browser, and enter file:/kb.html (or whatever you named your file). Then, bookmark the file, and you can use the keyboard at any time without accessing a server.
Now, if someone could just create a text editor for PSP.
I just looked at this site with IE. I rarely use it, but I did just now. I apologize to you for the way that the navigation bar at the top looks. It looks fine with other browsers like Firefox, Opera, and Netscape Navigator, but not IE. So, I usually don’t do this, but if you want to use this site, I recommend that you use something other than IE.
I found this script at Steven Davies’s website. It was designed to insert a random picture into a page. I tweaked it so that it would output a random background image into an embedded CSS. To use it, copy the code below and save it into your directory as rotate_script.php. Make sure to change the $dir variable to the display the directory in which you keep your images. Then include include a line like background-image: <?php include("rotate_script.php"); ?>; in the midst of the embedded style in the header where you want it to appear.
(more…)
This is definately off topic, but I have been playing with the PSP my sister got me for Christmas, and I just put an ebook on it. I bought a 2GB Sandisk memory card this week, so I have been playing around with it. I decided to see if I could put James Petigru Boyce’s Abstract of Systematic Theology on my PSP just for kicks. I went to the Founders Ministries website, because they have the .html text there. Luckily, when I went into the index for the book, they had a tar.gz file of the whole book there. I simply downloaded it and unzipped it into a folder on my PC’s desktop. I called the folder “boyce”. Then I connected my PSP and my PC via USB and just moved the folder over to the E drive (the drive that represents my PSP).
Now here is the not so tricky part. I found the table of contents file that provided the main structure for the rest of the site. I opened the browser on my PSP and entered the address file:/boyce/toc.html. I bookmarked it so that I would never have to manually enter the address again. I now have a fully functional copy of the entire book that I can read whenever I want.
If you can get to the directories (folders) of other such html based books that do not have the tar.gz files, you can use the firefox extension Down Them All to download all of the files into a folder you can put on your PSP.
I love technology.
