From My Armchair: 4 August 2012

At the BookShelf

I am into my last days of annual leave, so it is doubtful I’ll be able to read anywhere near as much as I have this last week. I’ll probably have the Kindle out at lunch for a bit, so I’ll still be getting some reading in even while I’m at work. The Kindle has certainly made it a lot easier to have good reading material available no matter where I am. Loving the Kindle.

 

Social Networks, Web Applications & Other Tools

Not a lot has happened with the social networks in the book/reading niche over this last week, except that I have been updating Goodreads on a regular basis as to what I am reading, progress and cataloguing the books as I go.

I did do a quick addition to Quotista, which has a lot of potential but doesn’t appear to be being developed any further, which is…

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Joliprint

Today’s link is to a very useful web application. Joliprint is a bookmarklet that allows you to turn a normal website page into a PDF document. I have only just discovered this one and added it to my bookmarks. I think it will prove very handy in times to come.

Fore more, visit:
http://joliprint.com/

Diigo

Diigo has been about for some time, but I have only just registered an account. I use Digg, Delicious, Stumbleupon and the other bookmarking and surfing web applications/social networks that I have posted about in recent weeks, yet diigo adds another element to my web adventures.

Diigo is a social network sharing site, in that you can share the bookmarks/favorites that you save. But the new element that diigo gives me in my surfing the net is that which I have at hand when I am reading a book or magazine offline – a highlighter and the ability to add notes to the written page (which in diigo is done via a sticky note that is attached to the page you are on). I can then return to the page I am reading with a bookmark as it were attached to where I got up to (by way of a sticky note), highlighted sections that were of particular interest to me and the ability to share what I have added to that page by way of my highlights and sticky notes. It is also possible to take a collaborative approach to this sort of online research by creating a group of users within diigo.

I can see diigo becoming a very important research tool that I will use for many years to come.

Visit diigo at:
http://www.diigo.com

StumbleUpon

StumbleUpon is a social network for web surfing and sharing webpages and sites that you particularly like and find useful. You can easily surf the web by ‘stumbling’ along – that is, by clicking the stumble button on the toolbar that you can install, allowing you to visit random sites in the categories you choose to explore. As you visit sites, you can like/dislike them, allowing StumbleUpon to learn your likes and dislikes as you surf the web via StumbleUpon.

Being a social network, StumbleUpon allows you to share the sites you visit with friends and others within the StumbleUpon community. Of course, StumbleUpon can be used as a bookmarking type of site, by adding the sites you like to StumbleUpon in a similar way to that of adding favorites/bookmarks to Delicious or your browsers favorites/bookmarks. It’s up to you.

I tend to use StumbleUpon as a surfing tool and haven’t really added a lot to my favorites (I generally forget to do that). For this purpose I have adjusted the settings within StumbleUpon to reflect the topics I like to explore while surfing the web. So it isn’t such a sharing tool for me, as a recommendation tool for the various categories I have checked.

See more at:
http://www.stumbleupon.com

Plinky

For today’s ‘daily’ I’m going to post about a new service from ‘Automattic,’ the guys behind WordPress.com. They have a new service called ‘Plinky.’

Basically, what this new service is all about is giving its members prompts for Blog posts. The service will ask you a question, which you then answer. This then becomes your Blog post, which can be added to your usual Blogging platform, such as WordPress (which is what I do). It can be shared direct from the site or embedded via a code that Plinky provides. I have been copying and pasting this code into my web editor in order to format the text as I would like it to appear in my Blog.

I think this is a great little service to help those just starting out in Blogs, as it will provide you with the basis for a daily post. It will also help those who struggle to come up with content for their Blogs.

Me? I just use it to supplement what I already post – to give my Blog a little more personal appeal.

Visit Plinky at:

http://www.plinky.com/

Evernote: Changes to Premium Accounts Make Evernote Even Better

I use Evernote and have a premium account to which I save all manner of files and notes that otherwise would clutter my life. I use Evernote as an archive to which I can turn should I ever need something that I have stored digitally there. It is a great service which I will be using more and more as time goes by. This is why I am very impressed with the latest improvements to the Evernote service and why I have decided to post on Evernote for my post today.

Evernote now has a ‘history’ feature, allowing premium users to view a file over time as it develops. A past version of a note can be downloaded just as easily as the current version of the note. These historical views of files are not added to the monthly upload limit that premium users have for their accounts.

Another upgrade to the premium service is that individual note sizes have now been doubled from 25 Mb to 50 Mb, which certainly allows for much larger notes to be saved and uploaded. The current monthly limit of 500 Mb of file uploads a month may soon be increased also.

It is great to be a premium account holder at Evernote.

http://www.evernote.com/