Resources of the Week: A Dozen (Plus) Time Savers
By Shirl Kennedy, Senior Editor
Sometimes, going in through the back door -- or a side door -- is much more convenient than using the front entrance. I looked at my list of bookmarks the other day and I realized how many of them are back entrances, side entrances and alternative ways of accessing information. Some of these may be "old friends," deserving of a re-visit, while others may be completely new to you. In no particular order...
Today's Reports at www.gao.gov: Want to see the latest releases from the Government Accountability Office? Use this "daybook" page, which presents them in reverse chronological order. Simple but elegant.
Virtual Chase's Database of Sources page offers a simple search box that allows you to query the site's excellent collection of resources "for finding legal or factual information or information about companies or people."
The GPO's Internet Publications page lets you search only for "records for and links to Federal Government publications that are available online. Records date from July 1976 to the present."
Open Source Web Design is a great place to find templates to use or modify if you need to put a web page together and you're emphatically not a web designer. The advanced search page gives you a variety of interesting options, from a simple keyword search to the ability to search by color, contrast, number of columns and more.
We mention the superb Librarians Index to the Internet quite a bit here on ResourceShelf. Another venerable librarian-built directory -- which concentrates on scholarly resources -- is INFOMINE. I usually head right for the advanced search page, which offers a bunch of check boxes and dropdown menus that allow for a closely focused search -- e.g., by field, subject area, type of resource and more.
The large, diverse collection of Baker Library Research Guides, from Harvard Business School, is good starting point not only for those doing business or industry research. Anyone looking for international information will be dazzled by the extensive list of country guides. Each one includes links to such major reference sources as the CIA World Fact Book and the Library of Congress Country Studies as well as to some sites you may not be familiar with, and sites that are local to the specific countries. (Some resources are Harvard-only accessible.)
Most of the photographs and images found on federal government websites are in the public domain and you can download and use them for free. If you drill down into the Reference Center at FirstGov, you'll find a large, alphabetized list of links to image collections on government agency websites. The fishing is good here. (A possible alternative -- the Creative Commons image search engine.)
A List of Every Website Statistic Publicly Available comes to us by way of the SEOmoz blog. For any web domain, you can look up technical information, ownership/hosting data, statistics/popularity data, search engine indexing data, link data, social tagging information, and more. Fascinating.
Just recently, I happened upon Zamzar, a free online file conversion site which supports four categories -- document, image, music/audio and video. You upload a file from your hard drive, use the dropdown menu to indicate which format you want it converted to and, when it's ready, you'll receive an e-mail with a live link you can click on to download your converted file. The link will be good for 24 hours. There are a few not-terribly-burdensome file size, etc., limitations. Read the FAQ. Also check out DocMorph from the National Library of Medicine, which "allows users to convert more than 50 types of electronic files into 5 possible outputs" -- PDF, TIFF, single page TIFF, text, synthesized speech. You can use the synthesized speech option to make your own audio books.
Have you ever had the frustrating experience of upgrading a software application and then discovering that the new version is buggier, more bloated, more resource-intensive, less convenient to use...whatever? Yeah...BTDT. OldVersion.com belongs in everyone's bookmark list because, as the site says, "Newer is not always better." Nothing fancy here -- just 1203 versions of 114 popular freeware and shareware programs, organized by category: communications, graphics, multimedia, Internet (browsers), file sharing, utilities, security, enterprise and ftp. Alas, Windows only at this time, although the FAQ page says they are looking for contributions of Macintosh software. (If, on the other hand, you're looking for the latest versions of Macintosh, Palm and Windows software, VersionTracker is the place to go. There are even RSS feeds.)
Answer to a frequent question. Want to Archive an Entire Site? Part of it? Try HTTRACK
Note: Frequent question two. Yes, a webmaster will likely notice your IP if you begin taking massive amounts of pages. To go "undercover" consider a proxy server or anonymizer.
Four months ago zSlide released Podmailer: a simple software which enables one to send and receive e-mail attachments of any size without clogging e-mail boxes thanks to Peer-to-Peer transfers. Today podmailing.com introduces a new feature called "Podmail Express" which assures a fast and reliable delivery in every situation, for files up to 2GB. The files in transit are stored on a highly scalable infrastructure that we have built on top of the Amazon S3 web service.
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