Alvin's Educational Technology Blog

Yesterday I talked about using del.icio.us for bookmarks.  I talked about a “start page” a few months ago.  The start page is one extra step you can take to improve not just your bookmarks, but almost everything you do on the Internet.  Create a “start page” with items you look at often.  I use Protopage.  Here is a Protopage I made just for this post.  It took five minutes to create and setup.

http://www.protopage.com/trustyblog

There are three main parts to this page.

1 – News
2 – Pictures
3 – Links

The first two items are driven by what is called RSS.  These are “feeds” from other sites that are dynamically created just for me.  Protopage acts as a news agent for me.  When I subscribed to “Alvin’s Educational Technology Blog”, I told Protopage’s RSS component to continually monitor that specific site on the Internet and report back any new stories.

You don’t have to use Protopage for your RSS subscriptions.  RSS is built into Internet Explorer and Firefox.  You can also setup a (free) Google Reader account.

The beauty of RSS is that I can subscribe to many different sites – news, pictures, comics, del.icio.us bookmarks – and have all that information come to me on one page.  I can glance at my one page and see if there are any new stores without visiting all those different web sites.  Did you catch that reference to del.icio.us?  If I know your del.icio.us username, I can subscribe to your bookmarks.  Any time you add a new bookmark, my RSS reader tells me.

Check out the Dilbert comic on the Protopage.

http://www.protopage.com/trustyblog

Today it is today’s comic strip.  Tomorrow it will be tomorrow’s strip.  Next Thursday it will be next Thursday’s strip.  All this happens automatically using RSS.

I subscribe to about fifty different feeds.  I can easily scroll through all those multiple times every day.  If I had fifty bookmarks and had to visit the sites interactively, it would take hours to go through all fifty just once.  I would have to sift through advertisement banners and other distractions.  Often I would click a link to find out nothing new is posted on the site.  RSS is one of the biggest time savers on the Internet.  Period.

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I have a computer at my office, a computer at home and a laptop for everywhere else.  I need to get to the Internet from each computer.  Many of the places I visit are the same every day… online email, check classes, news, weather, Dilbert.

As I read the news (mostly blogs about educational technology), I find interesting sites I want to remember.  Most people bookmark new sites.  For me, that doesn’t work.  There is only a one in three chance I’ll be using this computer the next time I want the URL.  This is why I use del.icio.us.  I can store all my bookmarks there and be able to access them from any computer.  Setup an account.  It’s free.

Here are my person bookmarks that I share with the public.

http://del.icio.us/atrusty

When I login, I get all my non-public bookmarks. 

Each time I speak at the eTech Ohio Conference, I post all the bookmarks with a special tag.  Here are last year’s links.

http://del.icio.us/tag/etechohio07

Tagging permits the grouping of links based on descriptive words of your choosing. You can manage your own links with tags or check links other people have found.  I have started to tag “educational court case” articles I read with the “edulaw” tag.

http://del.icio.us/tag/edulaw 

Using a site like del.icio.us makes it easy for me to move from computer to computer and always have my personal bookmarks.

There are other ways of accomplishing the same thing.  If you use Firefox, there is an extension called Google Browser Sync.  Start by setting up a Google account.  Then install this Firefox extension on each computer you use.  Each time you start Firefox, it will check to see if your bookmarks have been changed and update the current computer.

With del.icio.us there is no software to install.  You can get to your bookmarks from any computer in the world.  It’s one of those things I use every time I use the Internet.

There are two things you will do on the Internet.

1 – Find stuff.
2 – Buy, look at, read, download or interact with stuff you find.

You can drastically reduce the “finding” time if you learn the secrets of your search engine.  If you use Google (most people do), here is a link to the advanced search help page.

http://www.google.com/help/refinesearch.html

Wikipedia has an exhaustive list of search engines.  Check the “help” page for specific search terms if you are using something other than Google. Years ago I used AltaVista as my main search engine.  I didn’t switch to Google until after 2002 because the operators were different and I had already memorized all the shortcuts for AltaVista.  Eventually, the Google database had so much more information, I switched.  At some point in my life I will probably have to switch again.

There are two “operators” that I use most – quotes and the plus sign.

The quotes force the results to match your search word-for-word.

This search:

“alvin trusty”

has 359 results.  All of them have my first name immediately followed by my last name.

This search:

alvin trusty

has 67,800 results.  There are more listings because Google is not forced to find both words in sequence.  Actually, the search results will not necessarily have both words.

To force a word to show up in a search, put a plus sign in front of it.

This search:

+alvin +trusty

has 67,500 hits.  Apparently the previous search had 300 pages with only one of the two terms.  I think the Google database has gotten so big, almost all searches return results with all the terms.  It is as if the plus sign is always used in front of every term.

The minus is also helpful.  Sometimes there is one word you do not want in the results.  The minus keeps that word out.

chicago bears -teddy

will remove the word “teddy” from all results.  In the above search, that’s over a million pages you will not have to look at.

Here is a YouTube video I created last year that shows these search tips plus a few more.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mHLxRe_fx8I

TSPY=5.42

Nothing is more irritating than a program crash…. except the message that follows.  Would you like to send this data to Microsoft?  Send?  Don’t Send? 

This is a little more complicated than most of the tips I’ve posted.  It involves editing the registry.  This can be dangerous territory.  You may want to have the local computer expert do this one for you.

Click Start, Run and type Regedit
Press Enter

Find this key.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\PCHealth\ErrorReporting

Under this key is DoReport. DoReport can have one of two DWORD values.
1 = Send Reports
0 = Don’t Send

Set the DWORD value of DoReport to 0. That will end the irritating message and let you continue with your life a little quicker when a program crashes.

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