There was the time when I used Feedster a LOT. Visited every day, sometimes multiple times a day. Relied on it.
Now, not so much. But I did want to note that Feedster has announced a new 2.0 version. The URL is still Feedster.com .
It’s very… green. Mostly green (and, if you’re using Opera, all green with a warning message that you should get a different browser. Pleh.)
The blog announcement goes on at great length about the feedbuzz, and making widgets to go on your blog, &etc. Also mentioned is a tweaked search that is supposed to minimize spaham. I think it needs to be tweaked again; do a search for used cars and you’ll see what I mean. (And if you think that’s too much of a leader, search for Feedster and look at all the discontinued feed notification entries.) Speaking of search, Feedster does have some pretty spiffy operators but doesn’t promote them much. Visit http://feedster.com/help/search.php for a list of what can be done including some very nice site operators. (You can also search for podcasts now on Feedster, which is new from when I was using it.)
I seem to recall that Feedster used to offer an RSS feed for its search results. I don’t see that readily to hand. If I wanted to create a Widget that’s obvious, but if I want to just take an RSS feed and do my own thing with it, that’s a little tougher.
The advanced search options are intriguing but the search seems a bit slow and I’m not interested in playing with Feedster widgets. The number of standalone blog search engines I like remains at two: Bloglines and IceRocket.
Props to the groovy people at Cool Tools for the pointer to a directory of hostels around the world — http://www.hostelz.com/ . This site contains information on over 22,000 hostels in over 6,000 countries in the world.
Searching from the front page is extremely simple. Enter the name of the city or country you wish to stay, or the name of the hostel. I’ve been reading a lot of Inspector Maigret stories lately so I searched on Paris. I got a couple dozen results of hostels in Paris (the results were not numbered) with the option to narrow down the results further by area of the city (a dozen different areas!) The results listing included a star rating, name, and a very brief description. Beneath the hostel listings you’ll also find reviews of the area itself.
Click on the hostel name to get to its page and much more extensive information, including address, price, direction, and contact information. The site has a great layout which contrasts the way the hostel describes itself with a Hostelz.com review. There are also often a lot of photographs available. After the hostelz.com reviews there were customer reviews available. It was a pleasant surprise to see that there were more places that had reviews than did not (on my sites I visit that’s reversed.) Some sites had dozens and dozens of reviews.
The left nav has links to other places in the area that you can link to, and also links to information resources (Wikipedia etc.) about the area.
All the places I looked at had contact information available, so you could get in touch with them directly for a reservation. Hostelz also had an option to look for reservations, but it seemed to take a bit of time to load.
Chock full of information and the reviews had a much higher usefulness percentage than I’ve seen on some sites. I would have only two suggestions — make there be some way to enlarge the pictures taken at the hostels (I clicked on them thinking I would get a larger version, nothing), and perhaps have some way to quickly show how old some of the visitor reviews are (maybe a shaded bar at the top of the review?)
This post came from ResearchBuzz, a site with news and information about online data collections. Visit us at ResearchBuzz.com .
When I first saw the press release about the new Mildred Wirt Benson archive, I had one reaction. “The Secret of the Old Clock.” The first Nancy Drew novel. Man, I must have read that book twenty times when I was a kid.
Mildred Wirt Benson wrote the first Nancy Drew novel in 1930 under the pseudonym Carolyn Keene, and wrote nearly two dozen of the series. Benson donated her personal papers to the University of Iowa Women’s archives, starting in 1992 until her death in 2002. These papers, plus other materials, make up the new Mildred Wirt Benson collection available at http://digital.lib.uiowa.edu/mwb .
From the front page you can browse all the items in the collection or view a timeline, but I recommend looking at the sample categories at the bottom of the page, including biographical information, photographs, and short stories. (Read the autobiographical sketch if you get a chance. I have great respect for people who can write fiction to start with — but to write so much of it so quickly! — you’d think she was Georges Simenon.
If you read any of the Nancy Drew books as a kid, the cover gallery will take you back, as it contains sixty covers from not only the Drew series but a variety of other youth series as well. Included here are covers from the “Dan Carter” “Dot and Dash” and “Honey Bunch” series. The second and third pages of covers have more Nancy Drew covers. A lot of these look familiar! When you click on the cover you’ll also get the opportunity to look at the other parts of the book — table of contents, endpapers, flyleaf, title page — everything but the actual content.
Fascinating to get a glimpse into one of the first writers behind Nancy Drew. Very interesting stuff!
This post came from ResearchBuzz, a site with news and information about online data collections. Visit us at ResearchBuzz.com .
