Firefox 3

Mozilla has released the newest version of Firefox! Hopefully anyone that visits my site somewhat regularly is already using Firefox. For those of you who are not, it’s time to switch. Download Firefox 3 and start using it to see the difference a web browser can make. People always ask me what the difference is and there isn’t much I can tell them other than to try it and see how you like it. There isn’t much you lose by giving Firefox a try over Internet Explorer.

One of my favorite features are the built in SearchWords which allow you to designate a letter to your favorite search engines that simply let you search from the address bar instead of loading the search engine first. You type the letter, hit the space bar and then type what you want to search and hit enter. For example, if you want to look up Firefox on Wikipedia and you have already assigned w to the Wikipedia search engine, you would click on the address bar and type, w Firefox. This will take you directly to the Firefox page on Wikipedia rather than going to Wikipedia first and then typing in your search. It is a little thing but I find it hard to live without it now as it just makes searching things that much easier. I have a letter assigned to Wikipedia, Amazon, EBay, You Tube, Google, Webster Dictionary and a few others.

There are lots of add-ons in Firefox and each one brings new convenience to surfing the web. Firefox is faster, safer and has a better user interface. I can’t recommend it highly enough.

Online Databases: Nutrition, Medicine, Books

They say things come in threes and over this last week I found three really good databases. One on nutritional information, one that publishes medical articles for free, and one that has entire books online for free.

Nutritiondata.com

From the about ND section of the website, “The information in Nutrition Data’s database comes from the USDA’s National Nutrient Database for Standard Reference and is supplemented by listings provided by restaurants and food manufacturers. The source for each individual food item is listed in the footnotes of that food’s analysis page. In addition to food composition data, Nutrition Data also provides a variety of proprietary tools to analyze and interpret that data.” Sign up for a free account to store foods in your pantry and combine them to store recipes with the full nutritional breakdown.

PubMed

“PubMed is a free search engine for accessing the MEDLINE database of citations and abstracts of biomedical research articles. The core subject is medicine, and PubMed covers fields related to medicine, such as nursing and other allied health disciplines. It also provides very full coverage of the related biomedical sciences, such as biochemistry and cell biology. It is offered by the United States National Library of Medicine at the National Institutes of Health as part of the Entrez information retrieval system.” Wikipedia

As with nutritiondata.com you can sign up for a free account to store articles you find relevant for easy finding and reference later.

Project Gutenberg

This has thousands of public domain books available to read or download on the website. All of these are free and no longer under copyright so feel free to use them however you wish. It is also the host of LibriVox.org which offers public domain audio books for free download as well. Check it out if you want to download some Joyce to your Ipod for a road trip or cross country flight.

Shelfari: Catalog Your Library

As with most of my recent posts, this one will explain an online social network, in particular one used for book lovers. After getting this blog up and running and attempting to use it in order to share my interests and the things I believe to be important, I began to get the idea that one of the more important parts of me are the books that I read in my spare time and decided I needed a way to put them up for everyone to see. It was at this point that I started searching for online applications that could perform this task for me. I found three such services, LibraryThing, aNobii, and Shelfari.

The first was LibraryThing, which is incredibly intensive with more than 17 million books registered and access to over 80 libraries including Amazon.com and the Library of Congress. Although it had the best ability to track your books, it was the ugliest of the three websites and not necessarily the most intuitive or well set up. The biggest drawback to this site and that which made me decide not to go with it, is the fact that after logging 200 books for free you have to pay a 25 dollar one time fee for life to register any more. Although 25 dollars is not a lot of money, it is certainly more than either aNobii or Shelfari, which are both free not matter how many books you catalog over your life.

The next one that I found was aNobii which allows cataloging your books and putting them into several categories. It was also extensive in its search capabilities, looked better than LibraryThing, however, I felt the site was simply to busy and a bit to hectic for my tastes.

Finally, I was led to Shelfari, which was named as one of the 10 most beautiful online social networks and was very user friendlier and not cluttered by any unneccessary links and advertisements on the sidebar. It also allows to put your books onto your shelf, your current reading list, your favorites, and my favorite, the wish list. This lets people quickly see the difference between books you have finished, books you are reading, and books you hope someone might get you so that you may read them in the future.

Pandora

Pandora is an online radio station that is completely innovative in the way that it goes about selecting music. You begin by typing the song or artist you want to hear and then it does an analysis of the song based on what Pandora calls the Music Genome Project. By figuring out the attributes that make the song what it is, Pandora is able to select music that is similar to the original song of you chose. Whatever the song is that begins playing next, you get to judge by giving it a thumbs up or a thumbs down. In this manner you are able to “talk” with Pandora and let the website know exactly which songs you do and do not like to further refine the radio station to your personal preference.

Pandora allows you to create up to 100 of these free radio stations, each with its own theme or style of music genre. All of this is supported through some advertising on the side of the screen which does not affect you, the listener, at all and makes it so that it is both free and uninterrupted by any kind of commercial. You can also share the stations that you make with a friend by typing in their email address that they listed with Pandora. With all the hours we spend surfing the web now it is nice to be able to listen to the music you like and continue to hear new songs you did not even know previously, but almost always like because of the song analysis. You can click on the Pandora link on the right hand side of my blog to visit their site.

FireFox

Recently I made the switch from Internet Explorer to Mozilla FireFox for my web browser. Admittedly I only changed because we use it at work and I was told I had to start using it, but since changing over I think it would be impossible to go back. There are so many awesome add-ons that are available through FireFox that you can use to customize it, that Internet Explorer just seems dull and out of touch with how interacting with the internet should be.

I am currently using a few of these add-ons that I think are pretty cool; they are search word, Foxy Tunes, and Me.dium. Search word lets you assign a letter in your address bar to a search engine that you commonly use. By doing this you can go to where you normally type in, lets say wikipedia.com, and instead simply type, w “wikipedia search”. Essentially it saves you the step of typing in the search engine address and replacing that step with an assigned letter. I currently have g for google, w for wikipedia, and d for websters dictionary.

Foxy Tunes is an add-on that allows you to control whatever music player you use through your actual internet page. This saves you the trouble of flipping back and forth from iTunes to your internet page by letting you hit play, pause, skip, or adjusting the volume all at the bottom of your internet page where it normally says done. It will also connect you to a web page that displays information about the song that is playing including the lyrics.

Me.dium is a bit more out there as far as the use of it goes. Basically, Me.dium allows you to see what websites people are looking at and if your friends are on it with you, the ability to chat like AIM. I think watching the demo video and looking at their site are probably the best way to figure out exactly what it is, but I think it looks like it could have some really cool uses for making the web a less lonely.

Google Reader Explained

Since I just learned what Google reader was I thought that it would be helpful to post a link that explains it so anyone else who is curious can see what it does. Basically it allows you to read all your favorite blogs by having them sent to you instead of you going to them. This link shows a quick video that explains it very well.

Google reader also lets you select blogs you like in order to share. These shared blogs are then put on a website where anyone that knows the site address can look them up and read the blogs you found particularly interesting… hence the link interesting blogs on the right hand side of my page.