CIL2006 -- Cool Tools Update for Webmasters

I think I mentioned earlier that I would have to flip a coin to decide between Cool Tools Update and Searching the New Digital format. Cool Tools won, and I'm glad I went. It was a most excellent session. The session was by Darlene Fichter, who I mentioned in my last entry, and Frank Cervone, who works at Northwestern University.

This session was PACKED with tool goodies. At first I was a little surprised because the tools mentioned swung between geeky (PHP editors) to end-user (Firefox extensions) to REALLY REALLY GEEKY (debugging software for XSL stylesheets.) I think it was to keep everybody interested and involved -- the pace was fast enough that if a tool was over your head or not your cup of tea, you just had to wait a minute for another tool to be mentioned.

What kind of tools? I'll just mention a few. CheckYourLinkPopularity.com, a bunch of planner/organizer type sites including Zohoplanner, Backpackit, and RemembertheMilk. (Darlene went off on one of the planner sites because she quickly came up against the free version limit, and wasn't yet comfortable enough with the site to start paying them. As she put it, "I wanted to keep dating but they wanted to get married, and I wasn't ready to get married yet!" Something to remember: if your free version is TOO limited, you're just going to annoy your users and run them off instead of marrying them.)

SuperGlu, MultiRSS, Powerbullet Presenter (that one I'm going to do some digging into) were also mentioned, in addition to a nice list of file exchange utilities (an audience member asked a very good question about the security of file exchange utilities. Darlene's answer was that low security items are probably okay, but don't go tossing your taxes around.) NVu ( http://www.nvu.com/ ) was mentioned and excited a LOT of interest. Got the impression that there are many people out there who want to get away from Dreamweaver. (oooooooo.... PORTABLE NVU! Consider my socks rocked.)

Darlene and Frank also mentioned a few tools that might show up on ResearchBuzz, including ZoomClouds, Clustrmaps, and an anti-spam e-e-mail encoder. Great, great stuff guys. I'm glad you won the coinflip.

Posted to Internet-Technology