Phil Gons has a short little guide on how to import your Logos Libronix Library into Zotero’s database.
A sample drop, here organized like a simple blog.
The web service drop.io is an excellent site that allows you to store just about anything you might want—text, pictures, audio, video, phone calls, etc.—in a secure, easily accessible “drop.” This may sound pretty basic, and it is, but what makes drop.io worth your time and attention are all the fancy features surrounding it. Let me give you an example that I frequently use.
Don’t Forget Sermon Illustrations
Imagine this situation. You’re preaching on Sunday. In the course of driving to work you frequently listen to the radio, to a book-on-top, or to music or NPR, and suddenly you realize that whatever you’re listening to would be the perfect intro analogy to Sunday’s sermon. What do you do? Trust you’ll remember? You won’t. Pull over and write it down? That’s neither safe nor time-efficient. Call your voice mail? Most voice-mail boxes give you 20 seconds or so, and it’s easy to forget about them.
Each drop has its own phone number
Well, with drop.io you can just call your drop and leave yourself a message, which will be sitting in your email inbox (or feed reader, or medium of choice) when you get to work. This is simple, convenient, and fast. You can’t loose your note or forget about it (since it’s in your inbox), and you can download all your voice messages at any time. And this is just the beginning!
Imagine the possibilities
The possibilities are legion. With drop.io you never have to forget a task or appointment. If you make a promise to someone, but aren’t at your computer to add your new task to Outlook or Remember the Milk, just call your drop. What’s really cool here is that your voice messages each have dedicated web links, so you can just copy the link into your Getting Things Done tool of choice and add a due-date. Easy.
Or perhaps you are prone to dissertation-related brainstorms in the middle of exercising or long walks. No need to pause to get pen and paper! Just call your drop and keep running. Your idea will be ready and waiting for you when you get home. You can even add the link or the file itself directly into Zotero (my Bibliographic/Annotating software of choice).
As mentioned before, you can store any number of items on your drop. You can easily add web links, documents, pictures, and music. You can call your drop or send it a fax. And all of this is then available immediately in your drop to view, download, share with friends or coworkers, or simply store in a safe place until you need it.
Setting Up Your Drop
Start here
It’s easy to get started. Just go to drop.io and follow the instructions. Drops are free (you get 100 mb of space per drop) and you can have as many drops as you want (I have one for GTD, one for sermons, one for my dissertation, one for each class I teach, etc). By default your drop will be named by a random set of characters. You can change this, however. Give it a name that means something to you. I created a drop called “nerdletstest” for this guide. You can access your drop by going to http://drop.io/[Your Drop's Name]; in this case, drop.io/nerdletstest.
Be sure to check out the “Additional Settings” on the start page. If you want your drop to be private, set a password. You can than share the drop password with anyone you want, or with no one. Guests can view, add, or delete files, or you can forbid all these actions. It all depends on how you want to use your drop. All of these settings can be changed at any time.
Bookmark your drop so you don’t have to remember where it is. Now you can view it anywhere!
Notifications
Several options for notifying yourself of new drop content.
You can use drop.io for a number of different things, but if you want to use it in the manner outlined above you will need a way to notify yourself when something has been added to your drop. There are several ways to do this, and they are all located under the “Share” tab.
The simplest notification option is to tell your drop your email address. Anytime you add something to your drop (like a phone message), you will receive an email in your inbox. (If you’re using drop.io for GTD, this is an ideal solution since your email is connected to the rest of GTD methods).
Personally, I’m a big fan of RSS Readers like Google Reader. Drop.io lets you subscribe to drops, and so my preferred notification method is by RSS (the link under Email Alerts). You can also subscribe by Podcast or send your cell phone a text message. Look around—there really is no shortage of options!
Sending Things to Your Drop
We have already mentioned that each drop has its own phone number. You can call your drop and the message you leave will be saved as a downloadable audio file. You can also use drop.io’s web interface to add files, links, text, and other items to your drop.
There are a wealth of other options, however. You can email files to your drop. You can set up conference calss through your drop. There is also a Firefox Plugin that allows you to bookmark your drops and drag-and-drop files into them.
More to Come
Drop.io is a fairly new service (though I mentioned it here last year when it was still in Beta), so expect more features soon. They have a rich programming interface, which means that there will be more and more ways to interact with our drops in the future. In short, drop.io is a great service (and an excellent replacement for the no-longer-free Jott). Give it a try, and please share your thoughts!
As a follow-up to my Westminster Bookstore Search Plugin I have created a similar plugin for the Westminster Seminary Library, which works in both Firefox and IE7. So now you can search Westminster Seminary’s library right from your browser, and since the site natively supports Zotero, this makes research all that much easier.
Add the Westminster Library to your search bar
Installing
The same instructions for installing the Westminster Bookstore plugin apply here as well. For Firefox and IE, while viewing this post just click on the search engine toolbar in your browser and select “Add the Westminster Library.” For Google Chrome go here and click on “Westminster Library,” which should open a dialog box. Leave everything as is, unless you want to change to the keyword to something simpler (like “wl”), which will allow you to just type the keyword in the URL bar, then tab, then your search. The plugin is also available directly from the Westminster Library site.
Updates
Consider this the official page of this little plugin. Updates will be posted here, so you may want to bookmark this post. Please post any comments, suggestions, or problems in the comments section and I will respond as soon as possible.
If you want to make this search feature even more powerful, follow this guide. There is also a Ubiquity command available.
As a side note, the plugin supports advanced boolean syntax. Typing “stott romans” into your search will return all results with both “stott” and “romans” that occur in any field. By contrast, “a:(stott) romans” will search for any books whose author is “stott” and also have the word “romans” in any other field. Similar results will occur with t:(“title”) or s:(“subject”). For more syntax suggestions, just search the Westminster Library Catalog and pay attention to how it formats your queries.
Update: This plugin is now official. In addition to accessing it here, it is now available from the Westminster Library Catalog.
Ever wanted to turn you Zotero database, or a portion thereof, into a web page? I have. It would come in very handy for publishing bibliographies for class or even a simple blog post. Well now you can, with a pretty simple plugin called Zotz. Check it out, and don’t miss the screencast.
In addition to a whole host of great features, you can use Zotero to annotate Web pages that you have saved as snapshots.
Now you can annotate you favorite web pages
Zotero allows you to take a snapshot of any web page for later viewing. If I then view that snapshot (all the files for which are stored on your hard drive, and therefore are in principle modifiable), a little toolbar pops up. The options are primitive, but helpful. I can highlight text or add little sticky-style notes to the page. The toolbar pops up for stored PDFs as well, but the functionality does not seem to work here yet–just web pages for now. Perhaps later releases will add PDF support.
You can download Zotero Sync preview here. Though this is the version I recommend, be careful, it is still pre-Beta. If you want the stable release, go here.
If you have not yet set up Zotero, follow this guide.
Update: Apparently this functionality has been available for awhile now, and I just failed to notice. Ooops. This post has been modified to take that into account.
Well, I’m back after the holidays. Quess what happened on my New Years?
For reasons that boggle the mind, I decided to type in the Linux equivalent of “format c:/”. Seriously. The result? My entire Windows partition is irrevocably gone.
Not a problem. I back up my data. Everything iimportant is safe, and all my dissertation research is secure, largely because of an excellent backup utility called Dropbox. I put all my important files into my dropbox and they are automatically synced accross multiple computers, and online. So after a little drag-and-drop, I’m back to work.
Back up Zotero
As many of you know I am a big advocate of Zotero for research and bibliographic management. It is worth noting that by default Zotero puts all required files in your Firefox folder, which is generally not backed up by most software. You can always add it to your Dropbox, but a better idea is to change your settings. Go into Zotero’s Preferences dialog and the Advanced Settings to set a new location for Zotero files. Put it in your My Documents folder under a subfolder called “Zotero.” Almost all backup software will backup you My Documents folder by default, so this is the safest place.
One Dropbox Limitation
One thing to be noted: Dropbox is not true backup software. True backup software archives your files on a periodic basis. Dropbox does something a little different; it mirrors you files. Any changes you make on your computer are automatically changed in your dropbox. If you overwrite or delete a file, it will be overwritten or deleted in dropbox.
This might be a problem, except Dropbox saves all revisions, so if you do something stupid, and then your stupidity is mirrored by Dropbox, you can “undo” your changes by going to the Web interface and clicking “Restore my files.” That’s what I had to do, and it worked flawlessly and quickly.
Thanks Dropbox!
Make a New Year’s Resolution
I have two suggestions for nerdy New Year’s resolutions: (1) Backup your data, (2) Use Super-User priveledges responsibly.
One of the real difficulties with Windows (at least versions prior to Vista) is the reinstall problem. After about 2 years or so your computer starts getting too slugish to be productive, and no amount of tweaking, defragmenting, or otherwise coaxing your computer to behave normally seems to help. Or perhaps something else has gone wrong. The bottom line: you need/want to start afresh, but are worried that you might loose something important in the process.
A Great Guide
Well, you’re right to be worried. Installing Windows is not a problem-free procedure. But there are steps you can take to make things easier and safer. Follow this guide for maximum security and minimum headache.
How to Backup your files (which you should be doing anyway)
One thing the guide does not mention (because it assumes you know to do this) is backing up your documents. You should already have a backup of your important files (Pictures, Music, Movies, regular documents, and program files such as your emails or Zotero database, etc.), so hopefully this step is pretty easy—just make sure that this backup is in a location that is not about to be erased when you reinstall Windows (the reinstallation will wipe your c:/ drive).
If you don’t already have a backup of these files, shame on you. You should. Really you should have 2 backup sets: one on an external hard drive, and one remote (that is, in an encrypted server somewhere far far away). As far as the remote backup set is concerned, Mozy Home and Carbonite are both great unlimited-space automated-backup solutions ($5 /month). Windows SkyDrive gives you 25 gb of free space (though you have to manage your files manually). And Dropbox provides 2 gb of free space and has a lot of great features like syncing across multiple computers.
Use WebNotes to annotate your favorite sites
The web is now a primary arena for serious research. With Google Scholar, the Internet Archive, academic blogs where writers self-publish their complete works (such as this one), it is now possible to do a whole host of respectable research on the internet.
But how do you take notes on a web page? Should you print it out? That seems to miss the point. Use Zotero? Sure, for simple things, but it would be nice to have a dedicated web-note taking system (to complement Zotero’s functionality).
Enter WebNote. From ReadWriteWeb:
There are any number of services that offer the ability to annotate Web pages or share finds with friends. So why spend time on WebNotes? Because it seems awfully serious about providing the types of features that allow professional researchers to do online research – and only those features.
Anyone who has spent a great deal of time doing research by sifting through printed materials will immediately notice that WebNotes offers the two most critical research tools for any bookworm: sticky notes and a highlighter. But it also offers a filing system that allows users to categorize notes and pages under topical areas, as well as the option to share your findings with others.
Read the whole thing for a full review and list of features. I have been initially impressed with the software, which runs as a plugin for your web browser.
The service is still in private beta, so you will have to request an invite. I have 10 invite codes available, so if you want one, request it in the comments or email me at tommy@nerdlets.org.
Nov 212008
The folks over at BibleWorks have announced the release of the eighth iteration of their software product. The announcement includes an extensive list of upgrades and new features. Read the whole announcement. Here are some highlights:
New Features
The biggest advances appear to be in the area of searching and analysis (rather than text handling or diagramming, though there are a few additions here as well). They have added a new phrase matching tool, as well as some other search improvements:
Over lunch in mid-2007, we asked ourselves, “How could we find all verses which are similar to each other?” Out of this discussion came the Phrase Matching Tool and Related Verses Tool. The new Phrase Matching Tool takes your current verse and finds all verses containing similar phrases. The new Related Verses Tool finds all verses using some of the same words from the current verse.
They are also adding in an “External Resource Manager” that lats you organize and collect your massive storehouse of documents, PDFs, and images into Bibleworks’s main interface. Personally I use Zotero for this, but some might like this feature.
New Databases
Two additional modern grammars are now available in the suite: Waltke/O’Connor for Hebrew and Wallace for Greek. The complete Early Church Fathers is also available (only the Apostolic Fathers are available in BW 7).More importantly, Bibleworks will finally include the Greek Text of the OT Pseudepigrapha (BW 7 included the Apocrypha, but not the Pseudepigrapha), which is a much needed addition. The Targum of the Psalms will also be added, though only in English.
Thoughts
There are a couple of features that would motivate me to upgrade from BibleWorks 7, and only one of them appears to be included: the OT Pseudopigrapha. I would really like to see Bibleworks include a robust semantic diagramming module (Logos has one). And I wish BDAG was bundled with the rest of the suite (though that is Chicago’s fault). BibleWorks also needs to seriously improve it’s map functionality (the map module is excessively sluggish on my computer, and my computer is rarely excessively sluggish). The most serious need in my opinion is full-fledged Unicode support. They claimed this would be available in Bibleworks 7, and while oen can certainly export text in Unicode, it is not native built it. ASCII is dead as a doornail. There should be no ASCII text visible in BibleWorks, especially since it attempts to handle so many languages.
I am optimistic, but need a couple of more features explained before I am ready to purchase. Stay tuned for updates!
Purchase
Bibleworks 8 can be purchased by visiting the Bibleworks site. Special upgrade prices are available for those with Bibleworks 6 or Bibleworks 7. Bibleworks will not ship out until mid-December, however, so you still have some time.
Nov 212008
A question came up in the Zotero Workshop I did last night: what are Zotero’s future prospects? Will development continue to be strong, or is this a passing fad? The question is a good one, particularly considering Zotero’s ongoing lawsuit with EndNote, but the answer is pretty easy to come by: development for Zotero is, and will continue to be, strong.
As evidence, consider Zotero’s recently announced partnership with Emory:
Rick Luce, Emory University’s Vice Provost and Director of Libraries briefly described the partnership: “Partnering on the development of open source software with CHNM, an established center of excellence in the digital humanities, allows the Emory Libraries to create value for the research community while sharing the risks in developing innovative software.”
Emory’s Zotero team will take advantage of local research environments and library expertise at Emory to contribute to Zotero’s growth. You can read the full press release here.
