I have some widgets on the right hand side of this blog which are worth learning how to use. At the top I have what appears to be a typical search box but it’s powered with the Lijit service. This is what could be seen as a supercharged search tool which applies to this blog. This box is easily the quickest way to get to any content on this site…
Beneath the world map and the tags lies the translator widget. Interestingly enough the value in describing it’s use…for those who may use it creates a bit of a Catch-22 in that I can only describe its use in English… The use of this tool is to click upon the national flag representing your (non-English) language… I’ve tried out the machine translation of this blog, and while it is certainly not perfect, it is certainly a bug jump ahead of what served in this manner only a few years ago… Having said that, please feel free to offer comments if you use this tool!
Next, we come to the Apture widget. If you don’t use Apture you can click on this link to download a Firefox add-on. The Apture add-on allows you to highlight any text and Apture will present you (in a popup window) with definitions and related media (photos and video) to better describe or to explicate your subject. The cool thing with Apture is that it will now work on every web site you go to.
Finally we come to the Odiogo widget. This relates to the ‘listen now’ box at the top of every one of my posts (when you click on a post and go to its page). This is a machine audio transcription of the post and may be about as accurate as the machine translation to other languages which I get with the translation widget. Most of my posts are not long enough to really qualify as podcasts (that is, if you use Odiogo), but the service does a pretty good job with basic vocabulary.
I’ve been trying to make this blog as lean and mean as possible, to the degree that these tools bring a lot of ‘bang per buck’ to this site.
How to Use Apture
http://www.problogger.net/archives/2009/10/19/how-to-use-apture
What is this Lijit thing?
http://www.atheistrev.com/2009/03/what-is-this-lijit-thing.html
Odiogo does really cool text-to-speech for blogs
http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-9819313-2.html
