September 25, 2006

REVIEW: Writely, an online collaborative editor

http://www.writely.com

Writely is an online collaborative web editor, with some surprisingly nice additional features. Recently acquired by Google, Writely fills the need for a simple way to create documents, share them with other editors, and track revisions. Along the way it also allows you to publish these documents to your web space or post them to your blog.

Here's what the opening screen looks like, with the documents I've created:

You create and store documents directly online. The documents you create exist as HTML documents while in Writely. However, in addition to HTML files you can upload MSWord, OpenOffice, or text files to Writely, edit them, then download them back to your local computer as Word (.doc), OpenOffice, RTF, HTML, zip, or PDF documents. (Yes, PDF--so Windows users now have a free and easy way to turn their doc files into PDF.)

Here's a screen shot of the main editing window. As you can see it looks quite similar to Composer, Nvu or any simple web editor (and it has a spell checker):

Those of you who have despaired at the mess Word creates when saving a .doc file as an HTML file will be happy with Writely. I experimented with taking fairly complex Word documents (see one example in a separate blog posting below), uploading them to Writely, and checking the HTML code that was generated. Result: this is perhaps the cleanest HTML code I've ever seen come out of such a process.

What else can it do? Writely gives you the ability to publish any of the documents you create into a public space so they can be viewd by others, but not edited by them. Unfortunately, you cannot publish them directly to your UVM space. To do that you would have to create them in Writely (not a bad idea because it is a simple and good HTML editor, on par with Nvu or Composer), then download them to your desktop and upload them to your web space.

What about posting to a blog? Yes, this is easy. In fact, since the editor in Writely is so easy to use, Writely is a great way to create blog postings then send them to your blog--and it includes a spell checker! You can create the posting, preview it, then post it with one click, all within the same editing window. No need to login to the blog admin environment, etc. Currently there are two limitations: your blog entry window allows you to create a posting with a brief excerpt and then a link to an expanded posting. Writely doesn't: the posting is created as one big posting. Also, pictures are still a bit of a problem. You can easily include a picture in your Writely document, but they are still working on making it easy to have that picture transported to your blog. Stay tuned for that one.

One other nice feature: You can send any e-mail message to Writely for editing, so if someone sends you an e-mail to be edited, you can forward it to Writely. This also means you can forward them to your blog via Writely. That is, if you get an e-mail message and you want to post it to your blog, send it to Writely, then use Writely to post it.

So is it a wiki? No, though it shares some of a wiki's features. Yes, you can have multiple people editing a document, yes, it will track revisions, but unlike a wiki, it does not require you to learn and use special wiki-only editing codes. For example, in a wiki you might create a link to another document by enclosing it in square brackets []. In Writely you simply use the link button which creates standard HTML coding. A wiki will let you create a suite of doucments that act as a web site (think wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, for example). Writely simply stores your documents as a list of files.

Is it like Sharepoint? In terms of storing documents that multiple people can work on, and which tracks revisions, yes. However, Sharepoint is not an editing environment. Typically you create the documents outside Sharepoint and then upload them for sharing. Also, Sharepoint has many, many other features and functions like a tracking feature for project activities, discussion boards, surveys, lists, etc.

So, if you want an easy web editor that can

import multiple file types,
export multiple file types,
share documents,
allow collaborative editing,
track revisions and changes on shared documents,
limit access to those documents or allow for general viewing, and
have an easy way to create blog postings

you might want to give it a try at http://www.writely.com

Posted by hag at 12:21 PM | Comments (0)

September 22, 2006

Performancing: Firefox blog add-on

Our Movable Type blogs come with a handy utility named Quickpost (look for it on your opening blog admin page). It adds a bookmark to your Firefox toolbar that, when clicked, opens a login window to your blog, starts a new message, then grabs the URL of the web page you are on and inserts it in the message. It's a quick and easy way to send a web page to your blog, but it's also a quick and easy way to get to a new message window so you can create a blog entry.

That's what I've been using to create most posts to my blog. Until today.

Wesley forwarded a link to a Firefox add-on named "Performancing." Like all Firefox add-ons, this installs in just a few seconds. Once installed, you'll see a little icon at the bottom of the screen. Click it, and after filling in the obligatory install settings (see below), you get an HTML editor that lets you create a post, choose the blog or sub-blog to post it to, even choose a category.

It gives you all the standard basic HTML editing features: bold, italic, underline, strikethrough, increase/decrease font size, lists, links, images, justification, color. You can edit in "source code" mode, and you can preview. It does not appear to let you do tables, but this is for creating blog entries, so that's not a big lack.

Optional settings let you choose to enable draft mode as the default instead of publish mode, and to save a local copy of the post after it is sent to the blog.

Does it work? Well, I created this post with it!

Note: when installing, choose Manually Configure, Custom Blog, select Movable Type as your blog, then put your blog address where they have myserver.com. So, if your UVMNet ID is jsmith your regular blog address is http://jsmith.blog.uvm.edu, and here's what you would type for the setting:
http://jsmith.blog.uvm.edu/mt/mt-xmlrpc.cgi

Posted by hag at 2:24 PM | Comments (5)

September 21, 2006

WORKSHOP DETAILS:Open Archives Initiatives: An

WORKSHOP DETAILS:
Open Archives Initiatives: An Overview - Online Course

Thursday, September 28, 2006
10:00 am - 12:00 pm

The OAI (Open Archives Initiative) standard is one method of increasing
access to digital collections by making it possible to search many
digital repositories with one interface. Find out what's involved in
making your data OAI-compliant and what it takes to have your data
included in an OAI repository, including technical requirements and best
practices.

Posted by hag at 1:23 PM | Comments (0)

Let’s create a complex

Let’s create a complex document in Word for testing in Writely, to see how well it translates to .doc, pdf or html.

This change has been added on a subsequent day.

Here’s are several font changes and color changes.

Here is a table:

These cells are merged and text is centered
Cell a1	Cell b2	Cell c1
Cell b1	Cell b2	Cell c2

Now for some indents and bullets:

item 1
item 2
- item 2a
- item 2b
- item 2c
item 3
item 4

This is the Heading One Style

This is the Heading Two Style

…and let’s not forget a picture:

OK, I actually had to edit the image src by prefixing it with http://www.writely.com. I'm told the Writely folks are working on a simpler method.

Posted by hag at 11:25 AM | Comments (0)

September 19, 2006

This is a test document

This is a test document created with Writely. Writely is an online word processor that allows you to create documents using standard word processing features (including a spell checker). But that's just the beginning. It also lets you

import documents in .doc, .rtf, and then save them as html, doc, rtf and PDF files.
set up multiple collaborators so you can share and edit documents together, as well as view revision history
publish the documents to your blog

As I try out the features I'll let you know how well it works.

Test 1: Upload Word doc
- create a doc in Word that includes font changes, color changes, a table, some styles, some indents with bullets, in essence al the standard kinds of things one might find in a Word document, including a picture
- upload the document to Writely, which translates it to HTML
- the result? looks like a good translation: everything carried through including the picture (without having to upload it separately)
- the code? exceedingly clean for a Word doc! This might be our best "save Word as HTML" option yet!!

Test 2: Create PDF
- took the above doc file uploaded to Writely
- chose "Save as PDF" and saved it to the local drive
- opened it with Acrobat: voila! Looks just as it should
- Conclusion: Now Windows users can get free PDFs too!

Test 3: Republish to Blog
- edited this file to include test results and chose "Republish to Blog"
- Well, you are reading this new version so I guess that works too!

By the way, I just spell checked this in Writely and it took less than one second.

Posted by hag at 4:30 PM | Comments (0)

September 7, 2006

Digital Library: Villanova

Villanova Digital Library: http://digital.library.villanova.edu

Andrew Nagy of xml4lin announces:
The staff of Falvey Memorial Library proudly announces the grand opening of the Villanova University Digital Library.

The Digital Library is a repository of many digitized items from our Special Collections as well as other donated items and partnering institutions. The repository was developed by library staff and built from an open source platform. The repository uses a native XML database, eXist, to store and organize our digital objects encoded in the METS format. The web site allows for users to search and view all of the items stored in the repository by using many of the wonderful XML technologies such as XQuery and XSLT.

Noteworthy initial digital collections include: the complete collection of Cuala Press Broadsides, notable as a primary source for many folk songs and for the illustrations of Jack Yeats – brother of the Poet laureate; a signed and edited copy of Memoranda During the War by Walt Whitman; personal letters and books from the Joseph McGarrity Collection dealing with Irish and Irish-American History, an illuminated manuscript of selections from the Holy Koran, and plenty more!

Hope's Centre-Table

Hope Greenberg, Academic Computing, University of Vermont.