PETRONA: Software for good causes

Can anyone face any tecchy stuff? Well, I'm going to download a little if that's OK.

Social bookmarks, I love them. Here is a great site which allows you to choose the bookmarks you like (Connotea, Delicious, Digg etc), and provides you with a bit of code which you add to your template. This provides you with one of those little auto-links at the foot of each post so that people can click and add your post to aforementioned bookmark services. If you are into this "geeky/nerd" kind of thing, my recommendation is Connotea becuase that is where I have two of my many personalities: Maxine and Detective. Maxine has a lot of science-publishing related links, and detective has lots of links to do with crime fiction -- book reviews, blogs, websites and so on. (See explanation in left-hand sidebar under "Maxine's links"). However, Connotea overall is heavily science-biased (though pretty good for handbags), so Delicious might be preferable.

I've already posted a link to a site that lets you convert any page to a PDF "on the fly", here is one, on 43 folders, that does the same for rss. If I were truly serious about this blogging lark, I would use this code to provide an rss feed for each subject category on Petrona, but I am not serious at this kind of level, and I doubt that any of my very discerning, exclusive readership is either (except possibly Itchy Icahabod, if she reads this.)

If you are into getting listed and achieving recognition for your blog, here is a site called blogher;a lthough mainly for women bloggers it does not seem to be exclusively so. There is an annual conference, which I was interested in attending until I found it was fully subscribed for this year. Maybe some of us could get together there next year? (Especially if they hold it in California.) Again, the conference does not seem to be women-only, rather it is women-biased. I submitted Petrona to the blogroll, but when I went back to check today she did not seem to be listed, although another blog I admire, Deep Thinker, is there on the "new additions" list, so if Petrona does make it she will be in good company. Blogher has lots of ads, "workspaces" and forums, as well as links about the conference (which looks excellent); however the site is pretty clunky and slow. Amazingly, the blogroll, which as you may imagine is huge, is not indexed A to Z but is done Amazon-style with numbers. So if your blog happens to begin with P it takes forever to find it as you have to try "9" then "17" and so on. Bit frustrating when you do all that, waiting for the page to load up each time, then when you finally zero -in on P your blog isn't there. (I don't know whether this is the case, I ran out of patience long before reaching this point.)

Why and how to use blogs to improve library services. This article is "blogging 101", but ends with a list of libraries that are using blogs....er...to improve their services. Links provided.

Deanna Hoak has discovered a useful piece of software, lj archive, which lets you archive your entire blog in less than a minute. (She has a huge blog, apparently with 2225 comments.) The archive can easily (says Deanna) be converted into formats readable by Typepad or Wordpress. Deanna is soliciting feedback, and has already collected quite a lot of comments, so if you are interested in moving blog hosters, worth checking out the link.

Finally, for this post (is this becoming my catchphrase?) here is a case of someone using something tecchy (Google trends) to find out something literary. The Millions blog (a blog about books is its description) has used Google trends to uncover the world's most literary city. The results: (1) Delhi, Chennai, Austen, Portland (Oregon?), Chicago, Seattle, New York, Denver, (10) Philadelphia. Of course, what Google trends does is to allow you to search over time for keywords. All that has been done here is to map searches by the keyword "books", so judge for yourself what it all means. Not a lot, I suggest.