Heave ho, scallywags, there’s events listings o’er thar to liberate

(Avast, me hearties, this is the last of the pirate postings. Just be glad they weren’t podcasts 😉

So the other ‘mashups’ itch I’ve been wanting to scratch recently revolves around events listings, specifically a list of ed tech conferences that’s been around for a few years. Now before ye raise the topsails and give chase, hear me out – the landlubber who created and maintains this list every year is to be much praised, as I have done so in the past, as are the folks at CIDER for posting it as HTML.

But in this age of participatory media and user generated content, does it make any sense for lists like these to get created and maintained by one person, in a Word document?

Aye, you say, but it was probably the easiest tool at hand for what was a selfless act of giving back to the community. Right you are; but howseabout I shows ya how to take this page, database-enable it and allow others to add to new events to it in about 5 minutes with free, easy-to-use web-based tools. Come aboard all ye who’s coming aboard… Continue reading “Heave ho, scallywags, there’s events listings o’er thar to liberate”

Back on my feet and ready to sail the seas of trapped information, ya scurvy dogs!

Ahoy mateys, so that “moose fever” – turned into pneumonia for me! On top of which my entire family got sick too. But we’re finally over that now, so time to break the silence and set sail on the seas of end-user mashups.

As much as I felt some small discouragement with the NV mashups workshop because of certain technologies blowing up during the session and us not sticking with a more hands-on format, I have not given up on the dream of exploring mashups for non-programmers and have continued on, scratching a few of my personal itches.

Continue reading “Back on my feet and ready to sail the seas of trapped information, ya scurvy dogs!”

My search is over – Yahoo Pipe to constrain search to linked to pages

http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/zhmqsw_52xG4gUz8e_gC8A/

Wouldn’t you know it, a few seconds after I finish commenting on Tony Hirst’s blog that my personal quest has been a way to dynamically constrain a search to only those pages linked on any webpage, I actually read the entire post and learn that he had already done this! A simultaneous ‘Doh!’ and ‘Hooray!’

From a usability perspective what I’ve always wanted to see was this as a bookmarklet that passes the link the URL from whatever link containing page you’re on, so I’ll look into that, but Tony has demonstrated how this is seemingly quite straightforward with Yahoo Pipes.

Why is this important to me? Think of all of the collections of links out there, people who have painstakingly vetted links on a particular subject, collected only those they felt were important. With one click you can search just those linked sites. It can definitely be argued that this always runs the risk of missing stuff outside of those constrianed sites, but there’s times when limiting the context is useful and important. – SWL