Tuesday, April 08, 2008

CiL2008: Widgets and Doodads for Library Webmasters

This is another session that probably won't do you much good for me to write up all the details. :) The presenters talked about a lot of things like Firefox extensions to add to your browser to make some jobs easier. I hadn't heard of a lot of these - many of them I won't use, but others I will.

There's one called Feng GUI that simulates eye-tracking data for your website - in other words, it simulates the path a visitor's eye will take through your page, so you know where to put the important things and where not to. Something that will be immensely useful is BrowsherShots.org, which is a site that returns screenshots of what your site looks like on a lot of different browser/operating system configurations. It's a distributed netowrk - you send in your request, and they send it out to a bunch of different people with different browsers to take the shots. It's slow - they said it tends to take about 25 minutes or more for the results to come back - but invaluable for reaching all those browser/OS combos that are hard to track down.

For those of you who need to edit photos in the next few weeks for whatever Thing it is may want to take a look at Photoshop Express. It's a free online image-editing program by the makers of Photoshop.

And don't forget the LOLinator, where you can see your website as if created by LOLcats. :)

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