Month: October 2004

Categories
Archiving

Archiving and Managing Web Content

I’m still looking for the best way to save web content to have it:
1. easily accessible
2. easily searchable
3. available from any computer or easily synced between multiple computers and transferrable
4. in a universally accessible format (e.g. HTML)

So far I’ve come across a few solutions, none perfect, but by combining them I’ve had some success in meeting at most of my goals they are:

  • I currently use del.iciou.us to store bookmarks online. Quicksilver has a plugin that makes them easily accessible in OS X, and there are also plugins for Firefox that make using it easier to add bookmarks. Del.icio.us makes bookmarks accesible, searchable and available from any computer and is available to save locally or subscribe to as an RSS feed.
  • I recently found Furl. This web service allows you to save pages from the internet to their servers to have a permanent, searchable snapshot of the page. Furl was recently acquired by Looksmart hopefully that means that it will improve and be around for the years to come. If not, Furl allows you to export to XML or a zip file (and several other formats) copies of your entire archive.
  • Slogger is a plugin for Firefox that lets you save a local copy if every webpage you visit. I have not been able to get it to function properly in the OS X version of Firefox, but if you just need a local copy of your browsing history, this plugin seems ideal.

Other Interesting things I’ve found are:

  • Bookmarks Sync – uploads your bookmarks to your website when you quit Firefox and downloads them when you start.
  • nutr.itio.us is an enhancement to del.iciou.us.
  • Dowser clusters results from major search engines, associates words that appear in previous searches, and keeps a local cache of all the results you click on in a searchable database.”
  • A9 the fairly new search engine from Amazon keeps track of things you’ve searched for as well as the links you followed.
  • The Wayback Machine on archive.org is nothing new, but sometimes works to get content that is no longer online if everything else fails.
Categories
Politics

The First Presidential Debate

I’m not going to comment much on this, but a couple things I noticed at the debate last night.

1. Why can’t they talk to each other? What I saw was no debate, it was just two guys answering questions.

2. Why can’t the audience applaud? What’s the point of even having a live audience if they’re commanded to stay absolutely quiet. I can see limiting applause to a few seconds but silencing them?

3. Why is there a chosen topic that they can’t stray from? After 30 minutes of hearing about Iraq I was ready to move on to other topics. I’m aware that other things will be discussed in future debates, but if they know ahead of time exactly what to prepare for, then their answers aren’t based on what they already know, they’re based on scripted answers they prepared for in the days before the debate. That’s not real life and it’s not how things will be when one of them is elected to president.

Personally, I’d like to see a true debate.