Sometime ago I recommended Foldershare as part of this series. The reason I recommended this was that it made keeping the document folders on two computers in sync over the net pretty simple, which made my life as an academic much easier.
Since that time Microsoft have effectively withdrawn that product and replaced it with one which at least for me seems to crash on a regular basis. And while Foldershare was handy it lacks two important features.
The first is that foldershare required both computers to be on to make any transfers, so it only worked if you had your computer at home and at work on at the same time, not entirely environmentally friendly!
The second is that foldershare copied the whole changed file rather than just the changes, so with large files this could take a long time.
I've now switched to a program called Dropbox
Dropbox stores a copy of your documents in the "cloud" so it doesn't require both computers to be on, and it updates file incrementally rather than in entire file blocks.
To install the program go here: Dropbox
And download it. Once you have installed it, make a new folder in your Dropbox and copy any files you want to keep in sync (you get 2 GB's free which should be enough for any ones documents) into that folder. Then install Dropbox onto your other computers and voila, you have copies of the latest version of your documents wherever you go.
Thursday, August 20, 2009
Dropbox
Tuesday, August 07, 2007
Google Reader as a means of keeping up with journals, news, blogs and anything else
Since posting A motherlode of your very own I've had a few people email me to ask for more details on how to set up an RSS feed aggregator of their own. I've chosen to do this with Google Reader for three reasons, firstly it wasn't mentioned in the above post, because it is a powerful but intuitive feed reader, and judging by the readership of this blogs feed, quite popular. Most of the steps here are reasonably generic though and can be applied to different feed readers.
Step by step guide
Before we begin, a little bit of disambiguation. Google Reader and other feed aggregators are powered by RSS feed, which stands for really simple syndication (Actually it didn't originally, but most sites now tell you it does). Basically a site might publish an RSS feed to let its readers know that there is new content, so rather than having to keep on looking themselves, or signing up to bulky email updates, people who are interested can quickly tell if there is something new, that they find worth reading. It is built into most blogs as a matter of course, and many news agencies have now adopted it as well. As have many publishers. As such there is a rich array of feeds out there. To find rss feeds, look for this little orange symbol you can see to the right. 
May also find some text which says something like subscribe to my feed or atom or xml feed. This could be in a side bar, or sometimes at the bottom of a page.
Fortunately, Firefox and I believe Internet Explorer 7 now make it easier on sites like this one with a feed, they autodiscover it. If you look in the address bar at the top of the page you will see that little orange symbol, click on it, and you will be whisked to the feed for this site. OPML stands for some incomprehensible jargon, but the basic idea is that (in this context) OPML means a list of RSS feeds, in effect a Reading List, so if you want to add a whole lot of RSS feeds to a feed reader all at once, OPML is the way to do it.
1. First you need to decide whether you wish to begin with a tabula rasa, or whether you want to begin with a whole lot of feeds and then adjust them to suit. This is up to you personally I like to trim down and customise rather than start fresh, so I am going to be presuming you will use the OPML file/reading list that underwrites the Motherlode as your starting point.
2. As such you need a copy of that... (You can skip this step if you are starting from a blank slate). There are two ways to get this OPML file. The first and laziest way is to download it from this link here: Motherlode OPML Made Easy
Save this somewhere easy to find like your desktop.
However that link will only be updated when I remember to update it, so it is not likely to be the most recent version of the Motherlode. If you want the most recent version you will have to download it yourself. You can do this by going here: Motherlode OPML This will open up a page that looks like this:
You then need to save the webpage as an opml file. To do this go to File, then Save Webpage As, in the dialog box add a .opml to the end and save the file to your desktop (So the file should be called idmonfish.opml)
3. Now you need to go to google reader which is here: Google reader If you have used google products before such as gmail then you just need to enter your account details and passwords in to the box circled in red in the picture:
and move on to the next step. If you don't have a google account then you need to sign up for one which you can do here: New google account Once that is done, then sign into the account.
4. You should now see a screen that looks like this:
The tour is worth a read. However for now click manage subscriptions on the bottom left, circled in red in this picture:
5. Here you want to click on Import/Export which I have circled in red in this picture:
This will open up a dialogue box asking you to select an OPML file. Click on the browse button which will pop up a box to find the file. If you have followed the above instructions you will need to go to the desktop and find idmonfish.opml as shown here circled in red:
If you have named the file differently or put it somewhere different then that is where/what you need to look for. Once you have selected the right file, hit upload.
6. This should take a little while but ultimately take you to a page like this:
Here you can add tags and do all sorts of fun things with your feeds, but it is probably best to mess with that later, for now just click "back to google reader" Then hit home up on the left hand side of the screen which should then look something like this:
Your google reader is split into three areas, the first of which contains the home button and allows some meta navigation. When you hit the home button it will show you all the feeds that have new content since your last visit.
Below this is the reading list which contains all the feeds:
Notice that currently most of them are grey, this means there is presently no new items, when there are new items they turn black.
Finally there is the reading pane, where the messages themselves can be read:
7. To see google reader in action click on one of the feeds, I have chosen the table of contents for Bioethics. A tip box will pop up, just click dismiss and move onto this:
Which is the expanded view, this gives an at a glance overview of the contents of a feed, so you can scroll down to read the latest table of contents for Bioethics. Alternatively you can use the list view which I circled in red in the previous picture. Just click there and it will look like this:
As you can see you get a list of titles of the posts, which you can quickly scroll through, selecting to read only these posts which I think is more efficient, so I prefer it.
There are plenty more tips and tricks for using google reader well, but that is the basics of it.
Monday, July 09, 2007
Philos-L Email List RSS Feed
Philos-L is perhaps the most active philosophy email list. It is the place to subscribe to if you want to hear the latest that is happening in the job market (especially the UK) and with conferences etc. You can sign up to the Philos-L list here: Philos-L
However a fair number of people don't subscribe to it, both because of it's busyness and also because of the occasional 'discussions' that break out there. One way to deal with this is by setting the list to send you out a once daily digest which you can do here: Philos-L settings. Another way to work around this is explained below the fold.
The problem with the traditional digest mode is that you still have to sift through the stuff you don't want to get to read the stuff you do. I've been reading around recently about some people who are no longer reading their email, they are instead forwarding it to a website which converts it into an RSS feed. They can then select which items they want to read at a glance. A light bulb went on, why not do the same thing with the Philos-L list for those people who don't want to subscribe to the emails themselves? It took a fair bit of mucking about using Yahoo Pipes and a few other tools but I've finally managed it. So if you have a personalised home page or a feed reader as I discussed in A motherlode of your very own then you can now add the RSS feed of the Philos-L list to your reader if you want. You can get the feed here: Philos-L RSS feed
Of course I have already added it to the Motherlode.
Friday, July 06, 2007
A motherlode of your very own
You may not realise it but if you like the Motherlode (viewable here: Lode), you can create your own similar resource very easily. Basically the Motherlode is built on RSS feeds which automatically update when things are published on their websites. Most blogs, news sources and philosophy journals now have RSS feeds which is what made putting together the Motherlode possible. However it is quite easy to set yourself up with a similar personalised resource. Below the fold I will tell you how.
Primarily what you need is an RSS feed aggregator of some kind, these are often called News Readers or Personalised Home Pages. The difference roughly is that News Readers live on your computer, and Personalised Home Pages live on the web. Which you use is a matter of personal preference, I prefer Netvibes which is a personalised home page, primarily because I have integrated into it my emails for all my different accounts as well as a few other handy tools and the RSS feeds I like to keep up with. You can start from scratch and build up a list of things you like to read yourself of course, but that can take some time and effort. However if you want a lazier approach then you can use the feeds that form the Motherlode as your starting point. I use opmlmanager.com to host the OPML file that the Motherlode is based on. OPML is basically a file format for making hierarchical lists, and has been adopted by many feed readers and personalised home pages as a means of importing and exporting multiple RSS feeds at once. To get the OPML file for the Motherlode you can just click here: Motherlode OPML
Depending on which personalised home page/feed reader you pick you can either import the feeds directly from that webpage by copying its address into the feed reader or you may need to download the OPML and then upload it into the feed reader/ personalised home page.
I’ve shown below what the RSS feeds from the Motherlode look like in three different feed readers/personalised home pages:
Bloglines:
Bloglines is a popular personalised home page which functions just as a feed reader.
Feedreader:
Feedreader is an open source News Reader.
Netvibes:
Netvibes is my personal favourite personalised home page.
Tuesday, June 26, 2007
Zotero
I've blogged before about Citeulike.org an online reference manager as part of my Academic Ease series of posts. However an interesting alternative is a free Firefox extension called Zotero
Zotero is a mix between an online and offline citation management program. Because it is integrated into your web browser (Presuming you are using Firefox) it can be used online in much the same way as Citeulike. In fact it seems even more integrated with your browser, when it detects a paper that could be added to your library a little symbol pops up in your address bar (Like the RSS symbol, but a little notepad). Clicking this automatically adds the item to your library copying the citation details automatically and like citeulike allowing you to add tags. A particularly neat function is that from the table of contents pages for many journals if you click the notepad it will automatically give a list of the papers in that particular issue and ask you which ones you want to add to your library.
However where Zotero really shines is as an offline citation manager. While it is built into your web browser, all the information is stored locally on your machine meaning you do not need internet access to get to it. As such it effectively turns your web browser into a fairly well featured citation management program.
A particularly neat feature is that you can set it up to automatically save the PDF of any article which you add to your library. It saves these by paper and author name making them easy to find manually, and it maintains a link to the paper in Zotero so you can find the paper automatically as well. This means that Zotero is also a PDF manager, which if you have a burgeoning number of random PDF's on your computer as I do, this function alone makes Zotero a godsend.
There has been a plugin developed for MS Word so that Zotero can communicate with it directly and you can insert citations (in several different formats) directly from MS Word.
Perhaps the only downside is that it is currently only a Firefox extension so it is not available for those using Internet Explorer.
Reviewing articles
An interesting article on reviewing academic papers can be found here (Hat tip to Academic Productivity)
While it is an article about reviewing psychology papers the general points seem sound and generalizable across to philosophy. I particularly liked the first piece of advice:1. Know your mission. A reviewer’s job is to evaluate a submitted article, not (necessarily) to criticize it and certainly not to trash it. The editor is seeking your advice on whether or not to publish the paper, so you should point out both strengths and weaknesses of the paper and come to some balanced conclusion. Keep the big picture in mind: Is the problem addressed an important one in the context of the field? Does the current paper push knowledge forward in a substantive way? The question at issue is not “does this paper answer all the questions about this particular problem?” because the answer to that question is always “no.” The critical issue is whether the paper under review advances knowledge on the issue under consideration enough to be published. Yes, this requires human judgment, a notoriously fallible quality, but that is why there are two or three reviewers plus an editor. (Sometimes there are even more reviewers — too many, in fact — but I’ll save that problem for another column.) Always keep in mind that, as a reviewer, you are just one piece in the puzzle. You offer advice to the editor, and the editor decides on the publishability of the paper.
This is particularly useful advice since it can be hard as a new reviewer to figure out what your role is, its not something that gets covered in most postgraduate courses.
Wednesday, May 23, 2007
Ethix Bioethics Database search
An excellent resource for researching in bioethics can be found here: Ethix
This is a fairly comprehensive bibliographic database of articles relating to bioethics and is a good first step in getting to know a field. As they put it:Citations, some with abstracts or tables of contents, to literature on bioethics and professional ethics from many disciplines and publication types including journals, newspapers, books, bills, laws, court decisions, reports, and audiovisuals.
Brought to you by the Kennedy Institute of Ethics
Friday, March 16, 2007
Motherlode of Philosophy Journal Tables of Content, News, Blogs and Resources
So it turns out, that things on the internet go obsolete quite quickly, particularly when you learn more and more about how to do stuff. So I've now introduced an even better way of keeping up with what's going on in bioethics, ethics, political philosophy and general philosophy journals than I introduced here, or via the tabbed links at the top of the page. This is using the drop down box on the left called the Motherlode.
The motherlode is javascript box which contains all of the rss feeds that can be gotten from the tabs on this site, the table of contents for 22 ethics journals, for 22 bioethics journals, 14 political philosophy journals, 11 general philosophy journals. It also has 15 bioethics news sources, 36 ethics related blogs and 9 philosophy resources. I will be keeping the tabs on this site updated, but I think the best way is through the Motherlode. Although it is set to slider view you can customize it for example by using the three panel view. If you want a copy of the Motherlode on your own site just click the "add to your page" in the menu. I'd appreciate an acknowledgement on your site though.
****Update****
The Motherlode now contains 23 ethics journals, for 26 bioethics journals, 23 political philosophy journals, 11 general philosophy journals. It also has 17 bioethics news sources, 45 ethics related blogs and 9 philosophy resources. You can get to the Motherlode directly here: Motherlode
Enjoy
David
Saturday, March 10, 2007
INPAB & INEIRA Resources
As part of this network, and the Resource Allocation Network we have developed this website here: http://www.pageflakes.com/idmonfish.ashx
The site is based on and hosted by the pageflakes personalised home pages but is public. What it contains is a page with the latest table of contents of major ethics journals, another page with the latest table of contents of political theory journals, and of course another page with the table of contents for bioethics journals. There are two further pages, one with the feeds from bioethics and ethics blogs (broadly conceived) and another collating bioethics news feeds. All of these feeds are RSS feeds and as such will automatically update.
Update:
While the pageflakes site will be maintained, I have found pageflakes to be rather slow and a bit buggy. As such I have incorporated the above resources into this blog which can be gotten at via the tabs at the top of the blog, or via the Resources label or the links below:
Bioethics Journals Latest Table of Contents
Ethics Journals Latest Table of Contents
Political Theory Journals Latest Table of Contents
Bioethics News feed
Ethics Related Blogs
Flash journal table of contents, news, blogs
The last of these links is to a flash based RSS feeder which incorporates all the feeds on the other pages. However at this stage the feeder is a bit hard to navigate because certain journal publishers (Springer here is looking at you...) put their name, rather than the journal name in the title field of the feed.
On this site are the table of contents for 19 Bioethics Journals, 21 Ethics journals, 13 Political Theory Journals and 9 General Philosophy Journals.
The page flakes site and the rss feeds incorporated into this blog are still very much a work in process in terms of the available journals, and certainly some significant journals are not represented. This is primarily because either their publishers didn't think having an RSS feed for the journal was a good idea, or because I didn't find it. So if you know of any other ethics, bioethics or political theory journals with RSS feeds for their table of contents, or for that matter other ethics/bioethics related blogs or news feeds, please let me know and I will add them. If others are keen on making similar pages for other areas of philosophy, again let me know I would be happy to help.
Hope the site is of some use to you.
David
Wednesday, March 07, 2007
RSS Feed Home page
Yet another post in my series on easing academic life, this is the suggestion of making an RSS Feed based home page for yourself to start your day with. This has the advantage of including all the news you want to see, the blogs you want to keep up with, and the journal table of contents you want to keep up with. Of course if you want to really ease your way you could just use this site or the page flakes site that I have described in this post.
But if you have the do it yourself attitude then you can follow my instructions below
Firstly you should understand what RSS is. Basically its a format that allows content from a website to be picked up by other websites. So if you have or use a feed reader either on a website, or on your desktop, then subscribing to a feed allows you to be constantly updated with the goings on of that website. RSS has been around for ages, but it is really starting to catch on, and many people are now using it to broadcast information. As such you can use it to keep up with the headlines, blogs and even journal table of contents. It is even possible to use it to keep track of email lists, although I am still fiddling with that notion myself.
While you can download a feed reader to your desktop, I prefer to use a personalised homepage, it seems more natural. Many sites provide these (just google personalised homepage!) such as Google, Netvibes, PageFlakes etc. And they make the construction of a news page very pain free using RSS feeds.
Personally I prefer Netvibes myself, because this gives you a lovely tabbed home page. Personally I have mine set up with various tools on the first page, News links on the second, Philosophy blogs on the third and Philosophy Journals on the fourth. That way when I get up in the morning I can have a quick glance at the BBC, CNN etc, then I look at the philosophy blogs I like, all at once which saves heaps of time, then I check whether there is anything new in the journals.
I've made my philosophy blog tab and my philosophy journals tab public in the netvibes ecosystem, so in principle you can easily add them to your own netvibes home page. If that doesn't work email me and I can send you a link which I am told will allow you to add them. The disclaimer of course is that these just reflect my own personal predilections of course in terms of journals and blogs, and the effort I was willing to put in (Not that much...)
But it is easy to make your own, the hardest part is usually finding and collating the RSS feeds, if you find you share similar tastes to me, then it might be worth your while going to the Flash page I made collating all the Journal Table of Contents, Bioethics News and Ethics blogs found on this site.
At the bottom of the flash widget there is a link called get this widget, if you click this then you will be taken to a page which allows you to adjust the widget, and you can just copy and paste all the feeds out of that and into your own personalised homepage.
Cheers
David
Tuesday, March 06, 2007
CiteULike.org
Awhile ago I emailed the philos mailing list with a few tips on being a more efficient academic. This post is regarding one of my favourite websites, www.citeulike.org. This is a free online citation manager with one click integration into your browser, so you can gather citations literally while you read.
Its a powerful tool especially when combined with using rss feeds to keep track of your favourite journal's table of contents. Basically this is an online citation manager website as they say:“CiteULike is a free service to help academics to share, store, and organise the academic papers they are reading. When you see a paper on the web that interests you, you can click one button and have it added to your personal library. CiteULike automatically extracts the citation details, so there's no need to type them in yourself. It all works from within your web browser. There's no need to install any special software.”
We are no doubt all familiar with citation managers like Endnote. But personally I find these too much hard work, they don’t tend to work the same way I do. I tend to do a fair amount of reading online, particular from RSS feeds of the latest published papers. This means that when I find something I like if I was using endnote I would have to start it up, then cut and paste the details across a laborious enough task to put me off. But because CiteUlike is now part of my web browser and it is literally two clicks to store the citation, I now keep a much better track of what I read, which when I come around to writing makes things much easier, I just go to CiteULike and find the relevant references. Likewise if I want to re-read something finding it from CiteUlike is a synch because it keeps track of the weblink for the paper as well, it even keeps the abstract for you.
Finally it has a social aspect to it, as you post things to your library you add tags to help you sort things, these tags and the associated papers can be searched by anyone on the site giving you another way of finding interesting papers.
Their website is here: http://www.citeulike.org/
Hope you enjoy using it as much as I do.
Foldershare
This is another one of my academic ease series, posts aimed at making the life of academics easier. Again I emailed the philos list with this suggestion awhile ago, but have expanded upon it here. A classic problem for at least me, and I suspect other academics, is making sure that multiple computers ie the office, the home and possibly the laptop and/or handheld have the most up to date files on them. There are a variety of different ways to achieve this, from emailing yourself copies, to putting files on a USB stick and carrying them everywhere you go. Inevitably though each of these solutions carries costs and risks, of having to remember which copy is which, of having large quantities of emails gumming up your computers, copying the wrong file on top of the right one, and leaving the darn USB stick at home. Microsoft have a program which might well solve your problem in this regards, it certainly has for me.
This is a piece of software called Foldershare.
Developed by someone else but now provided for free by Microsoft, basically what foldershare allows you to do is to set it up to automatically sychronise the contents of selected folders on two machines that the program is running on via the internet.
I use this to keep the my documents folder on my home pc, my laptop and my office pc the same. Basically as soon as I save a document, it updates the other machines with the new version of it. This means no more messing about with emailing myself various works in progress, or mucking around with usb drives. It’s a huge time saver and I no longer suffer from the old copied over the top wrong version problem.
Their website is here: https://www.foldershare.com/info/aboutFoldershare.php?
It does work best if you can arrange it so that at least two of your machines are frequently on at the same time. This works for me because my wife often has the home computer on while I am at work.
In any case I hope this helps you.
Cheers
David
