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CIL2008--Widgets, Tools & Doodads for Library Webmasters
April 07, 2008 06:33 PM | CIL2008Donovan Lambright, Automation Librarian
Widgets, Tools, & Doodads for Library Webmasters
Darlene Fichter, Data Librarian, University of Saskatchewan Library
Frank Cervone, Director--Library, Information, and Media Studies, Chicago State University
From the program:
"Hop on board and look at some great tools that can help make your life easier and delight your visitors. Our experts and popular speakers are back with a whole new roster of free or inexpensive tools covering the gamut of Web 2.0 gadgets and widgets, hosted applications, server side scripts, and desktop tools. They highlight tools for people who are just starting out as well as some advanced applications for webmasters who like to dig their teeth into a bit of code."
This was a fun session. The presenters showed a bewildering array of tools with which library website administrators can make their lives easier, roll out new services, and generally make their users happy. The slides for the session are supposed to posted sometime today; they're not up now but I will post the link as soon as it comes up. Here are a few of the tools that I found particularly interesting:
- SafeCache--This Firefox extension protects your PC from cache-based tracking. In English, that simply means that it keeps one application from seeing cookies and other cached information left on your PC by another application.
- PollDaddy--Freeware that allows you to create polls and surveys that you can then embed directly into your website.
- Vischeck--Allows you to see graphics as they would appear to someone with different varieties of Colorblindness. You may not be able to build your entire website around the colorblind but you can at least avoid using inappropriate colors for critical things like navigation.
- reCAPTCHA--This one is so cool, I can hardly contain myself. CAPTCHAs are those distorted letter/number test that you must pass in order to enter information in many webforms. The idea is that automated programs can't read the data; you're proving that you are human and not a spambot. reCAPTCHA is a freeware CAPTCHA application that you can embed into your website. But that is not what makes it so cool. Instead of generating the letters randomly, reCAPTCHA uses single words from books that are being digitized. These words are the ones that the optical character scanner couldn't decipher. So we have a word that the computer can't read and a test where people prove themselves by reading text that computers can't. It's a perfect match. After a certain number of websites use a given word, the test results are sent back to reCAPTCHA and, if the results are all correct, that answer is used for the book digitalization. But wait, I hear you say. If the correct answer is not known, how does reCAPTCHA know that webusers are correctly passing the test? Good question. The answer is that the unknown word is used in conjunction with a second (known) word. If a webuser gets the second word right, the test assumes they got the first one right, too.
EDIT: The slides from this presentation are now up here.
