a framework for toolmaking
Librarians wail everywhere. I don’t write in library books, but in my own? Absolutely. Post-it notes will rip the paper on older books – but on newer ones or print outs I tend to make a note on the page and mark it with post-it note.
I think it was in 5th grade that we learned how to make note cards. If I had known how much of a research project I was doing I might have gone straight to that method, but eventually I started trying to keep my notes in a WordPress powered blog. I didn’t love this, actually. I was still working it out; it seemed a lot to have a single post per idea and the fact that I wasn’t sure that I could get the ID numbers out of Bookends to serve as a cross reference was frustrating. They do have something in WordPress called “custom fields” where you can have a field name (like Author) and a field value (like, Betty Edwards) but it is pretty rough. There is also a move towards something called Structured Blogging using XML where individual posts follow a data-driven template – but in the mean time, while I figure it out, I think I will use a FileMaker Pro database I started making myself as a holding tank. FileMaker Pro seems to have a hard time with relational databases, but I didn’t have time to build a decent interface for one done in php/mySQL. I did, however discover that that might be easier than I thought using some built in functions in Macromedia’s Dreamweaver MX 2004.
The fastest way to save a bookmark is “Add it to bookmarks” from a drop down menu. I am here to say – don’t do it, don’t do it, don’t do it. Maybe if you have 8 folders for each section of your already outlined paper… but I have a few huge folders now of really valuable bookmarks that I need to document, explain or find. The Mozilla browser Firefox is better than Safari because you can annotate the bookmark with your own description. If I had it to do again – I would SLOW DOWN and make sure that I put each link that I thought had actual value in a del.icio.us6 account with a description. For me the real problem is making sure that the important ones end up in the same place as the print ones eventually. They can’t do that if its in a links-only location.
Another option which is also useful is to create actual folders in the Mac OS X Finder and drag and drop links from the location bar into them. This way they act like files and can be grouped with other relevant files. The “file” can then be dragged into many applications and show us as a link, or you can use the “copy” and “paste” commands and get the location name. I am interested in seeing how the new Apple operating system deals with tagging and comments on actual files themselves.
A neat little feature I recently found is that when you drag a link from the navigation bar to a slide in Apple’s presentation software Keynote it creates a copy of the page layout and hyperlinks it to the original page. If you turn off the option to auto-refresh the page when the presentation runs it is a nice quick way to archive the appearance of a site. There is no ability to scroll down, though, so keep that in mind.
Another way to archive the appearance or text of a site is to use the print function to send it to PDF. To take a capture of just the browser window use shift-cmd-4 then space bar. Once that is done you should rename the file immediately. Whether it was a screen capture or a download I also recommend using the cmd-i feature to add the URL you got it from to comment of the file. Screen captures are also nice to dump into iPhoto although you have to convert them to a PNG file first because iPhoto doesn’t take PDF’s
WordPress allows you to create a section of links. It is about creating links to other sites of interest rather than a bookmark file, it seems. I started to do this, but there was no way to cross reference the links with the posts I was writing about them so it seemed kind of useless, so I stopped. The other thing you can do in WordPress is add a little script to your bookmarks bar that lets you create a post about the site at which you are looking. This is better, but I don’t like the format of the post, and it doesn’t give you an easy way to filter out the links from the rest of the content later. I might write a php/mySQL based plug-in for that later, but again a temporary holder in FileMaker Pro seems like what I’m going to use.