Posts Tagged ‘rambling’

Useful Firefox extension of the month

Thursday, September 25th, 2008

Hello,

I’ve been a bit slack in producing the Workflow article. Partly due to my impending change of employment.

One of the things that bothers me when researching anything to do with technology, is that most of the information out there exists in a fairly temporary form. Take, for example, the information available in this very blog. How do you know it will be here when you revisit tomorrow? How do you know I won’t change it? How do you know I’ve paid my subscription charge and won’t loose my webspace account before you follow the favorites link in your browser to re-read my 70-542 study guide again? RSS can be used to fix this problem to some extent, but very often information you collect from the Internet can be disjointed and unorganised. This is a problem I’ve been thinking about quite a bit lately and have even begun to design tools to address the ‘problem’ on the back of till receipts and paper bags.

However, a small group of talented researches have produced an extension for Firefox I feel would be worthy of your time. Especially if you are currently studying for an exam by collecting links on the Internet, or just researching for a project. Zotero (an open source Firefox extension) is a fantastic realisation of the kind of tool my life has been missing, in a nutshell it allows you to ‘snapshot’ web pages and organise them with notes based on subject. So, say your studying for your next MCTS certification, you can create a “collection” containing all the relevant useful page from the web, store snapshots of them so that you don’t loose the data, make notes using a handy annotation tool and also, fantastically, Search through your collection for things! This is one of those extensions I won’t know how I ever lived without.

Back to SharePoint then, how about I point you at somebody else’s blog instead? Paul Culmsee writes an amusing and informative SharePoint blog which puts my efforts to shame. I strongly advise SharePoint interested parties to browse his content, the article on “why SharePoint projects fail” amused me greatly.

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