Blue 2.0: Advanced Wikis

Wikipedia is loads of fun. I have read a number of blog posts where people have been interested in it, but have not found anything to change. If you are looking for something to change, try the following:

• Spelling! There are tons of spelling errors on Wikipedia and new ones being created every minute. Some are vandalism, but others are from editors with good content but poor spelling or spellchecking.
  
  Check out the Lists of common misspellings. For example, search for "secratary" or "seperate" to find pages with those misspellings — if the misspellings are still there by the time you get there, fix them and any others you see! Make sure you aren't changing something that's an acceptable variant.


• Sorting! Another minor edit you can make is to make sure that things sort correctly when you look at them in a category. For example, look in the category American writers and scroll down through the list. Note that most of them appear in the correct order, sorted by last name, but some of them do not!
  
  For example, I see:
  
  
  
  • T. Bill Andrews
  • Angela Johnson (writer)
  • Taylor Antrim
  
  So Angela is sorted by her first name instead of her last! If you edit
  her page and add the line:
  
  {{DEFAULTSORT:Johnson, Angela}}
  
  she will be sorted into the J's as she should be.
  


• Reference Desk! There are a number of reference desks where you can ask questions, or answer the ones there if you know them! My favorite is the Entertainment Reference Desk where people often ask about music and movies.
  
  Make sure you read the rules for the reference desk — don't give legal or medical advice, and try to avoid doing people's homework for them!

The reference desk is a great way to share your expertise, and making minor changes will help you get comfortable with Wikipedia. Happy editing — I hope to hear about your adventures!

Cooking experiment: cheesy cheddar pasta in the rice cooker!

This weekend I learned a number of things about my rice cooker:

• It makes good jasmine rice, and keeps it warm while you run out to fetch gumbo.


• The rice is good the next day with reheated gumbo.


• It can make pre-packaged rice and pasta mixes. (I learned that on the internet!)


• When you do so, the pasta cooks fine but has no cheese on it because it all pours out of the steam vent onto the counter.


• It's hard to clean the vent without watery cheese pouring down onto the heating element.

I know that the internet is not the best source for information, but I got this (about the rice mixes) from the rice cooker company's website and searched for corroborating evidence (about pasta mixes) on cooking forums. Many posts were of the form "you could do this, but why would you?" None of them mentioned the giant mess aspect; they were more concerned with "why would you use a rice cooker? are you too good to use a pot like the rest of us?" or "OMG basmati rice is so much better than jasmine." I think I'll stick with plain rice from now on.

Blue 2.0: play week!

Okay, so I did more than two. I may still comment on the others, but I wanted to be caught up through play week so I'd be in the drawing for the iPod!

1. Image Generators

Image generators are fun. One that is always amusing is the Church Sign Generator. I made this one, inspired by Becky's powerpoint presentation from a few weeks ago:



2. Personal Portals

I have set up a number of these portals, but continue to use only iGoogle because I don't intentionally log into it. I use Google as a search engine, and if I'm logged in I happen to see my mail, the weather, what movies are in the theater, and the last few books to be posted to Project Gutenberg.

3. Make your own search engine!

Interesting idea, but I can't really think of a use that I have for it. I made a Rollyo search engine using the blogs of my colleagues and tried a few test searches for uncommon words that I knew appeared in posts. For the most part these posts weren't indexed by Yahoo! so the searches only retrieved ads. These ads make me grumpy, but that is the subject for a later post. I wouldn't say you can "give Google a run for it's money" with Rollyo because you are not creating a new search engine, only using another one with restrictions. If I find a use for this concept, I will probably just add a new search engine to my Firefox that makes use of Google's site: and OR keywords.

4. Encore

Encore seems fine though I'm hard pressed to point out its "web 2.0" features. Web 2.0 seems to be all about collaboration and doing things your way: searching and monitoring things of interest and adding your own access points and information. Encore has a "tag cloud" (a common feature of Web 2.0 applications) but who sets these tags? Can you actually see the tags assigned to a given book (without just deducing from a refinement) and if you see them could you browse to find books that have those same tags? Why is the sequel Small Steps tagged with "african americans" when Holes is not?

EDIT: Ah, I see now. Those tags are just the LCSH subject terms gathered together and shown in the Encore interface. If you want to see them for a given item, just click "Show location, call number, and availability" to get back to the old infokat interface, go to either the Full View or MARC tab, and look at the subject terms. You can also click on the subject terms there to find other books with those subjects. So the tag cloud in Encore doesn't seem like a big feature. It has also thrown an exception both times I've used it now. The little book covers (which now also appear in the infokat search results) do make it easier to pick the children's books out of an author search for "Sachar".

7. Investigate open source software with SourceForge

I'm a big fan of open source software for the same reason I like cooking -- I know what's in there and I can change it if I don't like it. If Ragú spaghetti sauce has too much salt, you can either eat it like it is or not buy it. You can't take the salt out and you can't just make it yourself with less salt because you don't have the recipe -- that is, it's closed source. If your grandmother makes her sauce from scratch and it has too much salt, you can ask her for the recipe and make it yourself with as little salt as you like. Her sauce is open source. You know what's in it, and you can change it if you like. It may take some work: you need some cooking skill, but you can gain that if you care about such things. If you have a modification you like well enough, you can even post the recipe on SauceForge to share with the world. (Dangit! I thought I came up with that joke!)

8. Mozilla Firefox

Firefox is cool. I started using it because I could run it on linux and because I love tabbed browsing. Internet Explorer has tabbed browsing now too, but Firefox is still open source!

Some add-ons I like are:
* DOM inspector
* Web developer
* Firebug
* HTML Validator
* FoxClocks