New Facebook feature to cite books!

There's a new application you can add to your Facebook account that can really speed up the process of creating work cited pages.

When you type in the name of a book in this widget, called CiteMe, it produces a perfect citation in all the popular documentation styles. As an added bonus you can also use this feature to search for books at the Ritz Library too!!

Interested? Once logged onto Facebook, seach for the term "citeme". At the CiteMe information page, follow the instructions for installatiing the widget and you're good to go.

Got the programming blues?

Tired of having to manually check every link in a webpage you've designed? Frustrated with using a website whose links seem tenuous at best? Check out this Firefox extension called LinkChecker: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/532

Ok, so you've downloaded it - now what? Go to View --> Toolbars --> Customize and look for the check mark. Drag and drop the button onto your toolbar. Go to any webpage, click on the check and see what happens. If a link is valid, it will highlight in green. If a link is invalid, a reddish pink highlight occurs, and if a link is a forwarded or forbidden link, it will appear in yellow.

Instead of spending hours verifying links, LinkChecker will check them all for you in seconds!

Color your world

Dress up Firefox or Flock with a little color when using tabbed browsing! The colorful tabs extension brings a little spice to the look of your browser. ColorfulTabs for Firefox is located at https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1368 and ColorfulTabs for Flock is located at http://binaryturf.com/software/colorfultabs-for-flock/


You can select a specific tab color by right clicking on the tab and selecting "ColorfulTabs" and "select a color". If you right click on ColorfulTabs and select "options", you can then choose to use a default palette for color generation, you can generate colors by URL or you can stick with teh default to generate colors randomly. Enjoy giving your browser a splash of color!

Goodreads

Awhile back I spoke about LibraryThing, a website that allows you to record the books you read in your own personal library. Having become an avid LibraryThinger, I can't imagine reading a book without entering it into my account. I've found keeping track of what I read allows me to make recommendations to others, enables me NOT to buy the book, reminds me of the plots and gives me clues as to what types of books I am enjoying at the moment. Plus, by using tags I can categorize my items in ways that make sense in my brain.

Goodreads is also a book cataloguing site with a bit more emphasis on the social end of book sharing. It automatically prompts you when you log in to check to see if you'd like to connect with more friends. The "my books" tab allows you to enter new books into your library and Goodreads lets you determine what book shelf those books are to go on. There are 3 default shelves:currently reading, read, and to-read with the capability of creating any number of additional shelves. You can assign a book to as many shelves as you'd like to. Like LibraryThing, Goodreads offers widgets to place on your blog or website and has active applications in Facebook and mySpace. So far I've been unable to determine if there is a limit to the number of free books that you can enter on Goodreads (200 is the number on LibraryThing before you need to pay a fee), so I'm working off the assumption "no". They also have a tab that I find enticing - the authors tab. The authors tab allows authors to connect with readers through the author program. Through the "meet people" tab you can see who is currently online, check out their shelves and recommendations, and try to connect.

Before I sign off here, you may want to check out Novel Action which is a book exchange program with minimal fees. Click here for information on "how it works".