Tools of the Trade

Today has been a day of downloading and installing new software. I added the bookmarklets for freshness of a page and number of links on a page as well as installing JAVA and shockwave.

I found the bookmarklets a bit of fun to play with and tested them on a few sites. I am also hoping for the freshness to be useful when working on assignments. It should help me with evaluating web sites validity and currency by showing when the site was last updated if no date is given on the site.

I usually have JAVA installed on my computer, but when I had to reformat it a couple of months ago it must of got overlooked! That shows I don't often go to websites that require JAVA to be installed on my computer.

I also tried installing shockwave player - for about the 50th time since the reformat, and for some reason in the past it has always said it is installed but then still isn't available for use. Very frustrating! Thankfully this time it worked :) I'm putting it down to a different website being used this time.

With the suggested bookmark managers, I passed on using these as I already use delicious and really like this site. I like how it is online as I frequently use different computers, allowing me to log on and to add to and retrieve my bookmarks from any computer... perfect for me.

Finally I gave Copernic a try. This sort of software is completely new to me and I thought it sounded well worth looking into. I read ahead to the next task while waiting for it to download... and the next tasks compares it to a search engine, which is what I was planning on doing anyway! As a result, I have only had a quick play for now, saving a more thorough analysis for when I do the next task. From my quick play though it definitely looks like a very useful piece of software that will help with undertaking far more effective searches! - A full post on Copernic will be made in the next few days....