Saturday, November 8, 2008
CoolPreviews
Most of the time, when I come across something I find worth posting about here, its because I've been looking for something worth posting about here...absence of necessity, or boredom, is the mother of invention, as the saying goes (and, come to think of it, the mother of many of our activities. Take for instance shopping: shop⋅ping [shop-ing] –noun 1. the act of a person searching for an object to desire.) But occasionally, even in our day, one does look for something to fill a real need, and such was the case today when I was looking for a tool that would return a thumbnail preview of a webpage when you hover over its url. You can enable this kind of service on your own blog or website using Snapshots, which we decided to reimplement after our latest board meeting here at Knowbodies, and there are also add-ons that generate thumbnails for Google and Yahoo searches (Google preview) and previews for the tabs in your Firefox browser (Tabscope). I had to hunt around a bit for a tool that would provide previews for urls on pages that are not enabled with SnapShots or Thumbshots (another such service), but CoolPreviews is an add-on for Firefox that does just that. It can be useful if you want to quickly inspect a list of websites without visiting each site. For example (here comes the necessity - relatively speaking - that got me started on this), I wanted to do a very cursory examination of the many blogs listed in Walt Crawford's impressive "List of Blogs in the Liblog Landscape 2007-2008", in order to determine which of them are worthy of inclusion in the Knowbodies blogroll and soon-to-be-launched Netvibes portal to library blogs (although Knowbodies itself was deemed unworthy of inclusion in Walt's list, that doesn't stop me. I'm not that kind of person) By using CoolPreviews, I could get an impression of the blogs - e.g. how often they were updated - without visiting each one of them. CoolPreviews appends an unobtrusive blue icon at the end of the link when you mouse over it; if you want to see the preview, you just move the cursor over the icon. The preview is actually more like a fully functional resizable pop-up browser window, with a scroll bar and enabled interactivity. You will digress, but I guess that's what the internet is about! You can also use CoolPreviews to email the link of a site without leaving the current browser window. CoolPreviews is a very cool addon indeed! Below is a screen-shot of Walt's list in the background, and on the right a preview window to Phil Bradley's blog on the right.
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Very neat tool, and thanks for the name check!
ReplyDeleteGreat post. I think Snap also has an add-on if you dont want to add it to your blog.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.snap.com/about/addon.php
"Deemed unworthy" boils down to "not on the radar at the time." I don't remember ever seeing this blog in the directories I checked or the 250+ blogrolls I checked. I'm not judging the quality of liblogs...only their visibility.
ReplyDeleteOtherwise, well, if (a big if) there's another annual study down the line and you're in the directories or one of the blogrolls, you'd qualify. (The book I'm finishing now has a chapter on "visibility," and the new bar is "Google PageRank of two or higher and at least one post in the 180 days before the end of the study.")
Wow, Walt, you don't miss a beat! How do you guys catch all this stuff? Actually, I was having a bit of fun...in a bid to get some much needed visibility! You may not recall, but you were very patient and helpful in explaining to me why I did not make the cut in an email correspondence a while back, and the problem was - as you again gently point out - not quality but quantity...for some reason nobody looks at my blog, and I don't make the blogrolls. That's my fault, and I will surely read with interest your chapter on "visibility" to learn what I can do about it. Cheers, Petter
ReplyDeleteI have a lot of alerts set up to catch different things, such as my name, references to interesting resources, Web 2.0 applications and so on. Then it's just down to clicking on a link and taking a look. :)
ReplyDeleteI don't (yet) have a bunch of alerts (but do have one service)--but, although Walt at Random doesn't allow linkbacks, WordPress does show recent inbound links. That's how I saw this post. But I've added Knowbodies to Bloglines...
ReplyDelete(I'd forgotten the exchange. The visibility bar was a little more complicated, probably too complicated...and unworkable given the deterioration of tools such as popurio.us, or, rather, the unwillingness of other sites to play nice with them.)