The old science teacher in me was delighted to discover yesterday that NPR’s Science Friday program has started podcasting its weekly segments. Now if we can only get Fresh Air, This American Life, and the rest of my favorites on board.
Monthly Archives: May 2005
Free RSS plug-in for Outlook
Being more of a Mac and Linux guy and a loyal NetNewsWire user, I don’t track the RSS aggregator options for Windows very closely. But if I was stuck using Microsoft Outlook I’d probably use RSS Popper, a free aggregator that plugs into Outlook and makes tracking your favorite blogs as easy as checking your email.
Easy Web page creation with Nvu
I just discovered Nvu and I think we’ll include it on the student laptops in our one-to-one computing project next fall. Nvu is the latest incarnation of the old Netscape/Mozilla Composer which, like the Firefox browser, has been split out of Mozilla into a standalone application.
Most of the people who use graphical tools to create Web pages in our schools use Dreamweaver, but there’s no way I want to buy that for each of the 650 laptops. Nvu might be just the ticket for students who want to learn to create Web pages. The tool promotes CSS and other Web design best practices and seems to go well beyond basic Web development. Maybe they’ll all be blogging someday, but until then Nvu will have to do.
Buzzword alert: AJAX
It’s impossible to keep up with the acronyms that appear on the Web these days. One of the latest to show up on my radar screen is AJAX which stands for “Asynchronous Javascript and XML.” In a nutshell, AJAX describes a technique for building web applications that don’t necessarily act like web applications. If you’ve used the keyboard navigation in Gmail or the smooth map scrolling at Google Maps then you know what I’m talking about. Instead of continually loading entire Web pages like traditional Web-based applications (e.g., most online stores), AJAX apps usually fetch information in the background and respond more like desktop applications. If you’d like more geeky details, you might find the Wikipedia entry interesting.
So the next time a software vendor comes calling and advertises his application’s AJAX-compliance, you can be suitably unimpressed by his buzzword-compliance.
Update: Kottke’s got a post about how he’s using AJAX on the main page of his blog. More details about the technology if you’re interested.
I’ve been Tigerized
I have now emerged from the geek cave. Actually, my Mac OS 10.4 (Tiger) installation went smoothly and I’ve been chugging along quite successfully since I finished the install last Saturday. There are a ton of new features, but my favorite so far is Spotlight, Apple’s system search tool. It’s lightening fast and very cool.
One interesting feature in Tiger server is the built-in blog tool based on blojsom. System administrators can enable a blog for a user with a click of the mouse. On the browser side, the newest version of Safari has some great RSS features built in. I’m still exploring the new goodies, but I won’t go into detail because Tiger reviews are a dime a dozen.