• Admission
• Crawfest
• Events Calendar
• Howard-Tilton Library
• Louisiana Research Collection
• News
• Newcomb Art Gallery
• Newcomb College Center for Research on Women
• Registrar
• Sophielab
• Technology Pedagogy
• Technology Services
• Undergraduate Student Government

And here are some website I wish were on Twitter:

• 1834 Club Menu
• Bruff Commons Menu
• Euro Menu

Here’s how it works

1. Drag these two links to your bookmark toolbar:
   1. LoginCommonSpot
   2. EditThisPage
2. Navigate to a page you want to edit.
3. Press the LoginCommonSpot bookmark on your toolbar. It will open a new window with a login to CommonSpot. With Firefox, after you login, you’re get a scary security warning, it’s okay, click “Continue”. It will send you back to the page you started at.
4. Now you’re back in the window you want to edit. Click the EditThisPage bookmark on your toolbar.
5. Tada! That’s it. Now you can make that edit to the page.

Code Geekery

The person to thank for writing these bookmarklets is freedom_razor who answered my call for help and posted this javascript code in this thread:

javascript:void(window.open((location.href.replace(/w+://[w{3}.]*/,'https://authoring.')).replace(/(/[^/]+$)|/$/,'/login.cfm'),''),'0');

javascript:location=(location.href.replace(/w+://[w{3}.]*/,'https://authoring.')).replace(/#.*/,'');

One Last Trick

Here’s a last bookmarklet that will take you from the authoring page to the public page: PublicVersion

I know there’s the “read” view from the authoring panel, but sometimes you need to check the actual public page to make sure things are really working (especially when a customcf script is involved that might not have been synced over to the read servers yet…).

P.S.-if you prefer the login bookmarklet to open in the same window, here’s a version for you: LoginCommonSpot

Taking a cue from the Cult of Done Manifesto, I’m going to just post my raw notes and be done with it:

• mardi gras conference notes

I also put the papers online that came on the little flash drive given out at the conference:

• Mardi Gras Conference Proceedings 2009

Done. Enjoy!

• tul: search Tulane
  • remember by thinking Tulane
• tulp: search Tulane Phonebook
  • remember by thinking Tulane Phonebook
• tull: search Tulane Libraries by Book Title
  • remember by thinking Tulane Library
• tullk: search Tulane Libraries by Keyword
  • remember by thinking Tulane Library Keyword
• tulla: search Tulane Libraries by Author Name
  • remember by thinking Tulane Library Author

Browser Integration

I recommend the FastYub! Firefox add-on for integrating these search tools into your daily web searching routine. For other web browsers, check the Installing YubNub page.

Examples

• tul School of Liberal Arts
  • searches the Tulane.edu site for “School of Liberal Arts”
• tulp dorfman
  • searches the Tulane Phonebook for “dorfman”
• tull Zen of CSS Design
  • searches the Tulane Libraries for title “Zen of CSS Design”
• tullk montessori
  • searches the Tulane Libraries for keyword “montessori”
• tulla Snedeker Rebecca
  • searches the Tulane Libraries for author “Snedeker Rebecca”

Thanks

I was able to create the library commands with the help of the Voyager Canned Search Generator. Thank you to Daniel Xiao and John Fullerton for creating that useful tool.

Future Search Commands

If you or anyone else creates other Tulane commands on YubNub, you should be able to find them with this search: ls tulane.edu

1. Drag this link to your toolbar: AmazonTulaneLibrary
2. Next time you find a book on Amazon.com that you want to read (i.e. The Zen of CSS Design), click that link from your toolbar.
3. It will open a search of the Tulane Libraries in a new window for the book (i.e. The Zen of CSS Design).

I tried to create a similar bookmarklet for the New Orleans Public Library, but couldn’t get it working because they apparently don’t have ISBN search enabled. If anyone figures out how to get it working, please let me know. (One idea for how to get it working: change the bookmarklet to parse the book title from amazon instead of the ISBN.)

UPDATE: I spoke to a very friendly person at the New Orleans public library named Penny Lytle (Head of Automated Services) who agreed to enable ISBN search to the public. Yay. Thanks, Penny!

I created a bookmarklet for the New Orleans public library too:

1. Drag this link to your toolbar: NOlibraryLookup
2. Next time you find a book on Amazon.com that you want to read (i.e. Very Far Away from Anywhere Else by Ursula K. LeGuin), click that link from your toolbar.
3. It will open a search of the Tulane Libraries in a new window for the book (i.e. Very Far Away from Anywhere Else).

I’ve found a great way to keep Basecamp open all the time and not let it get lost in all my tabs and windows in Firefox. What makes this possible, is a great app for Mac called Fluid, which leverages the WebKit open source web browser engine (the same engine that powers Safari). Here’s how you set it up: 

1. Download & install Fluid.
2. Optional: download this nice PNG to use as the application logo.
3. Open Fluid and enter the information below into the window that opens:
   1. URL: enter the URL for your Basecamp site (it might be something like this: http://example.updatelog.com/)
   2. Name: BaseCamp (or whatever you want to call it)
   3. Location: Leave it set to your Applications folder.
   4. Icon: Choose the PNG that you downloaded above.
   5. Click Create.
4. Voila! You’ve got a BaseCamp application now!
5. Okay, there is one more little trick: When you open your new BaseCamp application it will take you to a login window. When you try to login, it will try to open the window in your default browser because the login URL is different from your Basecamp URL. The workaround is to open BaseCamp Preferences, click Advanced, and select Allow browsing to any URL. After you login once, you can switch this back to Allow browsing to URLs matching these patterns. UPDATE: Okay, one more gotcha. To view Writeboards, you’ll have to add a second pattern like this: *123.writeboard.com/*
    

You can also use Fluid to create other standalone applications for sites that you use a lot (e.g. WordPress Admin for updating your blog, Google Reader, etc.). When doing so, be sure to check the Flickr Group for Fluid Icons to search for a nice 512px icon for your app.

UPDATE: I wish I knew of something similar to Fluid for Windows that I could recommend to my Windows-using colleagues. If anyone knows of something, please leave a comment. Prism will let you do the same thing on Windows. Thanks for the tip, Budd!

UPDATE2: One more little trick to share. I find it useful to have the Formatting Guide (from the Writeboards help area) open in a separate window so I can refer to it while writing. You can use the same formatting from the Writeboards on other parts of Basecamp, namely Messages. So this is handy to have open if you want to do a bulleted list or somesuch in a Message. Here’s how I set up having that open in a separate window all the time: I saved the BaseCamp Formatting Guide to an html file (formatting_guide.html). I then saved that html file inside my BaseCamp.app (file:///Applications/BaseCamp.app/Contents/Resources/formatting_guide.html, just to have it in a place where it wouldn’t get lost).UPDATE: inside the App is not a good idea because it will get deleted at the next software update. Now I’m just saving it in the Applications folder. Then I opened a new window in BaseCamp and opened this file and added a bookmark in case it gets closed accidentally.

And on a related note, BaseCamp uses Textile for its formatting. There’s a Textile Quick Reference with some more options than those shown by BaseCamps Formatting Guide.

1. The 1834 Club (faculty & staff dining), upstairs at the LBC, is going to start serving more vegetarian options. They also plan to start clearly marking which items are vegetarian on their online menu. Holly Smith and Corey Blake are the people to thank.
2. La Gourmet is going to start serving Veggie Burgers next week. Lydia Simms is the person to thank.
3. The Sushi place in the LBC (Sushi Nori) now has brown rice! I asked them for brown rice every time I went there. And they finally got some! I don’t know the name of the person to thank, but thank whoever you see working behind the counter the next time you get some brown rice sushi.

Indiana University SLA screenshot

I’ve been looking at a lot of different University websites–especially School of Liberal Arts websites. Two features I really like about Indiana University’s SLA page are the News and Calendar Feeds on the front page.

I plan to implement something like this for our site.  I’ll pull the news stories from the New Wave by asking them to tag all articles related to the School of Liberal Arts with an “sla” tag.  I’m going to hold off on the calendar until the new University-wide calendar system is in place.

Note to self: Direct those who don’t know about and use RSS Feeds to this page by feedburner/google.