IL2007: Cool Tools for Webmasters

IL2007: Cool Tools for Webmasters
Presenter: Darlene Fichter and Frank Cervone

Darlene Fichter and Frank Cervone gave us a list of tools that web developers should have in their toolboxes.  A popular repeat program at most ITI conferences (if not all--Darlene gets around!), this one was well-attended.  Nearly every seat was filled in the Steinbeck Forum, the largest room.  Darlene said she would post this entire presentation on her blog, so go there for complete details.

Sketchcast (www.sketchcast.com): This tool lets you draw and your digital drawings pair up with a voice file for a "cast."  This reminded me of the Common Craft "Plain English" videos.

JingProject (www.jingproject.com): captures screen images, lets you share them.  Sits in a browser toolbar, lets you select what you want to grab.

JustInTimeDemos: Lets you create quick screen demos of how to do particular tasks

Picnik (www.picnik.com): online photo editor, includes plugins for IE and Firefox which makes it convenient for editing screen captures.  It also captures the full page, not just what is captured within your screen resolution and lets you send images to social networking sites like Flickr and Facebook.

Kerpoof (www.kerpoof.com): storytelling application that lets you quickly create pictures, stories, or movies by choosing background scenes, characters to place in the scene, add talk bubbles, animation, etc.  Public and school libraries should bookmark this site.

Slideshare (www.slideshare.net): easy way to share your slides and you can add voice overs.  Others include Scribd (supports keyword searching), SplashCast (good for image and music heavy PPTs), Zoho Show (can edit slide show online), and SlideAware (good stats)

Thumbalizr (www.thumbalizr.com): Capture an image in set sizes (widths, heights)

Visual PageRank (www.iwebtool.com/visual_pagerank): Shows outbound links from any given website in Google

IBM Unstructured Information Modeler: Lets you analyze completely unstructured data sets, create and classifies categories automatically, and you can use it up to 10,000 records).  Basically an AI clusterer.

DiffDaff (www.diffdaff.com): Graphical interface to let you compare the differences in two different directories.  Compares when files were made, so you can see which is the most current side by side.

LogView (www.tucows.com/preview/504173): Lets you look at a server log real time.

SOAP Sonar (www.crosschecknet.com): Tests and analyzes web services - lets you see what is happening when your Web 2.0 technologies are interacting (analyzes problems).  Semantic and syntax checking.

Evolved (www.home.no/evolved): Text editor that adapts to a large number of programming languages (highlighting basic elements, content tags, etc.)

Perl Express (www.perl-express.com): This lets you do PERL programming much easier - free and open source integrated development environment.

Photo Slideshow: lets you turn a bunch of photos into a flash slideshow.  You get a webpage (in flash) with all the images in a directory that you can move to the web.

Flashgallery Generator (flashgallerygenerator.com/main.aspx): Creates a similar slideshow, but it is all XML based so you can edit it on a more granular level once it's created.

Google SiteMap Builder (www.sitemapbuilder.net): Upload an XML file to your server that lets Google index everything on your site.  This makes sure that it captures everything on your site through its spider and dumps out an XML file.  It shows you everything it has found, all the OK URLs, all the unfollowable URLs, and a visual chart of the data.

Open source federated searching: Library Find (libraryfind.org) from Oregon State, dbWiz (dbsiz.lib.sfu.ca/dbwiz/ from Simon Fraser University, and Masterkey from Index data

IBM Omnifind Yahoo! Edition: Free search engine for a website.  Upload to server.  Supports up to 500,000 documents, takes only a few minutes to set up, graphical tools let you configure look and feel, configure synonyms and featured links to increase their relevancy.  Does show a Yahoo! brand on the search screen and results.  Everything is GUI; no command-line stuff.

Google Coop Custom Search Engine (www.google.com/coop/cse): You can integrate the Google search engine into your webpages and make it look less Google-ish.  It does take some programming skills.  The results can be integrated into your frame, but does have a small Google logo over on the right.

OpenURL Referrer Toolbar: A Firefox toolbar for those who have OpenURL Resolvers in their organizations.  Students and staff can download this.  Then, when searching Google Library or Google Scholar, you will see a button when the library owns or has access to the item.

Flog Blog (apps.facebook.com/flogblog/): An application within Facebook that lets you put your own blog content within Facebook. 

Blog Friends: Another Facebook application

Portable Firefox: bundled with portable applications that lets you take bookmarks, extensions, and passwords

Asterisk Logger v1.02: Reveals passwords behind asterisks

Undelete: Recovers deleted files, unerases lost data

Unstoppable Copier: recovers all bytes from scratched data CDs

Simple File Shredder: securely deletes files so they can't be restored

IL2007