Installation Wiki Wednesday, 26 September 2007 5:08 pm
Posted by Dongmei in featured IT of the week, free/Open Source Software, wikis.add a comment
The Installation Wiki provides comprehensive and free guides to installing software and it’s an open wiki. The front page has a variety of categories, including open source, content management, Web development, databases, Java, PHP, Microsoft and .NET, and Networking and Telephony. Choose a category and you’ll get a list of software. I checked on some of the open source software like Moodle, it has very detailed instruction on how to install and configure the software.
via ResearchBuzz
wikis in plain English (video) Saturday, 14 July 2007 11:11 am
Posted by Dongmei in training, tutorials, wikis.add a comment
Yet another great show from Common Craft Show that explains another Web2.0 technology wiki. Enjoy!
Note: If you want to embed the code of the show/video in your blog/web site and share with others, go to blip.tv and click on share to copy the code (you can even share that in MySpace).
Authoritative version of Wikipedia for biology: Encyclopedia of Life Friday, 13 July 2007 4:13 pm
Posted by Dongmei in Internet Resources, biology, open access, wikis.add a comment
If the $50 million biodiversity effort launched May 9 goes as hoped, the Encyclopedia of Life could eventually be an authoritative version of Wikipedia for biology fans.
Potential applications range from planning natural conservation in suburban subdivisions, to mapping coral reefs in the Pacific, to identifying that odd butterfly perched by your window. Led in part by Chicago philanthropists and researchers, the project aims to create a free internet resource to catalog and describe every one of the planet’s 1.8 million species.
After a few years, as a head of a reference works publisher pointed out: “when the site gains enough content mass, there won’t be much need for libraries to purchase traditional animal life encyclopedias.” He also pointed out that “the trend toward free, scholarly Internt reference sources–the kind not as easily dismissed from a validity standpoint as Wikipedia–will continue”.
Wiki-based Earth Sciences Encyclopedia Friday, 6 October 2006 3:20 pm
Posted by Dongmei in Internet Resources, earth sciences, environmental science, wikis.add a comment
Encyclopedia of Earth
(about this encyclopedia)
“Welcome to the Encyclopedia of Earth, a new electronic reference about the Earth, its natural environments, and their interaction with society.
The Encyclopedia is a free, fully searchable collection of articles written by scholars, professionals, educators, and experts who collaborate and review each other’s work. The articles are written in non-technical language and will be useful to students, educators, scholars, professionals, as well as to the general public.”
Interestingly, unlike other, well-known wikis, such as Wikipedia, access is restricted to approved experts and all content is reviewed and approved by Topic Editors prior to being published from the wiki to this public site.
(Thanks Gerry McKiernan for sharing this on STS-L)
Steven Cohen’s “Advanced Weblogs” workshop at CIL06 (Computers in Libraries conference 2006, DC) Wednesday, 22 March 2006 1:34 am
Posted by Dongmei in blogs and blogging, wikis.1 comment so far
Hello from Washington DC,
Today I attended two preconference workshops, this was the first one, “Advanced Weblogs: Applications, Technology, Cases”, given by the editor of Library Stuff, Steven Cohen.
I’ve learned quite a few tricks from his workshop, I’m not going to blog about all the details of his workshop since (almost) everything he talked about in the workshop is on the wiki that he created.
Here are a few tips and tricks that I learned:
- a new browser called Maxthon, besides some of the cool features (which I have to explore once the conference is over), you’ll have the option to hide the ads on a Web page (so if you created a wiki using the free version of the pbwiki software that has ads on the wiki pages, you can use this paticular browser if you don’t want to see the ads);
- a good idea to set up some posting and commenting guidelines for your blog, check out Charlene Li’s guidelines for her blog, may well be adapted to a librarian’s guidelines for posting and commenting;
- automatic posting and notification systems (APNS)
- Ping technology (I haven’t paid much attention to this in my blog, I guess the technology is similiar to ping in UNIX system, I allow pings in this blog);
- besides Weblogs.com, Technorati, Feedster, there are also Pingoat, Ping-o-matic, Pings.ws (if you allow/enable pings in your blog, it will send notification of new blog post to these centralized service);
- APNS will get your content out into the blogosphere quicker (instantaneously), great for marketing (your blog);
- Feed2js; Magpie; RSS Mix;
- RSS Mix is great, you can combine several feeds into one, then you can embed it on your library’s Web site;
- Oklahoma University Library RSS Feeds
- University of Alberta (NEOS) Libraries’ New Books RSS Feeds (by library and by subject)
- Watch That Page http://www.watchthatpage.com
- Dodgeit http://www.dodgeit.com
That’s all for this post! I tried to summarize what I learned in 3 hours in one post (and you know what happens … ) and I’ve been writing this for 2 hours, literally wrote from yesterday (23:06 or 11:06pm) to today (01:11 or 1:11am) 
I hope that you find this informative and interesting, if not (or you want more info), check out Steven Cohen’s wiki about this workshop (http://stevenmcohen.pbwiki.com/CIL2006).
