Online Resources
Written on February 17, 2009 by Katherine W. Prawl
One of the reasons I’ve been so upset over not having good internet access is that there are just so many things I want to do that require it. This won’t be news to any of my readers, of course, but it becomes even more apparent when that access is missing or impaired.
For instance, in late December I discovered a nifty website/Web app called Scrapplet. When I created a free account and started building pages on this site, it was more or less just for fun, to see what was possible. Now, though, I use it for my own organization, mainly to keep track of all the social networks I’ve joined. One of my pages is simply a collection of hyperlinks to each network’s page, so when I have a few minutes to check out the discussions, but don’t want to bother with organizing browser bookmarks (which are only up to date on one computer at a time), I just pull up my “social networks” page and click away. I was even able to quickly sort the network links by topic. Most important, the app works visually, via drag and drop. It’s possible to enhance the pages by adding code, of course, but that’s not strictly necessary. Virtually anyone capable of handling a web browser should be able to create a personal site at Scrapplet. It could be used to quickly prototype webpage designs, too.
Oh, and those online social networks! Obviously, to be active, it’s necessary to be online. Yes, I can see the sites on my iPhone, but except for a few individual networks, they are dependent on full-sized web browser screens, and use lots of visual effects. In at least one, I can’t even post a comment in a group discussion from my iPhone because of the underlying code. Apparently it requires a plug-in not available on the iPhone, like Flash or something.
But the thing that is really irritating is the way flakey internet access is making it difficult to do research for the book I’m working on (about ebook publishing), and to work on my websites. I would like to revamp my old History-eBooks website, and I have been working on it, but being frequently interrupted by crashing routers or bandwidth restrictions make that an uphill battle. In the time I’ve been able to get online, though, I’ve found a new tool for developing blog page themes, WordPress Theme Developer. It’s a free application running on a website, and works very well indeed, but yes, you have to be online to use it. Argh!
