2008 SLA Technology Free-for-All session
From Reporting Cookbook: www.forjournalists.com/cookbook
Links and Notes
Downloading an entire site with Wget (Windows version). Wget is a command-line utility that can download single files or entire sites from the Web. It performs recursive downloading and works over even spotty connections. Ben Welsh of the LA Times has a tutorial aimed at people who use Macs.
Filtering RSS feeds with Yahoo Pipes. You'll need to sign up for an account, but once you do, you can take any RSS feed and build a new one based on the inclusion or exclusion of certain terms. There are many options, so perhaps the best way is to look at a pipe I created during the session. It uses a feed of GAO reports and filters it for certain terms. The result is a new feed that you can publish and subscribe to.
Stan Friedman of Conde Nast presented Awesome Highlighter, which allows you to quickly highlight and share snippets of text from a web page.
Many Eyes is a data visualization sandbox from IBM. You can use it to play with some data and form word trees, charts and other graphics. You can even publish them on your own site.
The open source database program SQLite is small, fast and highly portable. There's a Firefox add-on for working with SQLite databases as well. Firefox actually comes with SQLite built-in, which is indicative of how small it is. You can import CSV (text) files into SQLite, too.
Create a timeline with Dipity. This timeline sharing site allows you to build timelines manually or by grabbing an RSS feed, which has date and time elements built-in.
Interesting database of the day: the Royal Canadian Mounted Police graves database.
Didn't get to show it, but Snag-It allows you to grab and annotate images from your desktop. There's a good video tutorial for this.
If you're interested in this programming thing in any way, check out Learn2Code from librarian Dan Chudnov, who works at the Library of Congress. It uses a language called Processing, but the programming concepts apply to almost any language.
And two archives to round things out: TimesMachine from the NYT and the Times of London archive. At the NYT we have a blog that explains a little bit about our efforts in building tools like TimesMachine.
