Useful Books and Software

New Price: $9.99 / Used Price: n.a.

Windows Vista Sidebar is a panel located on the desktop of a PC where gadgets can be placed for easy access and reference. These gadgets are small, single-purpose applications, such as clocks, calendars, games, RSS notifiers, search tools, stock tickers, etc, that reside on the Windows desktop and on the Windows Sidebar. The book will be a tutorial to design and develop a gadget. It will provide ready-to-use samples using .NET, XML, CSS and AJAX. After reading the book, a web developer/designer will be confident enough to start developing gadgets for Windows Vista Sidebar. The beginner portion of the book shows an overview of the subject with the design pattern, the architecture and implementation details. The later sections will have solid examples for instant results. In short, the book will tell how to do everything with Sidebar Gadgets using solid, unique examples. Brief outline: " Brief background on Gadgets " Define architecture, design consideration and implementation to give a clear view to the developer " Step by step, create a useful Gadget sample "My Blogs" " Elaborate the architecture design constraint and implementation details for the sample " Detail the standard practices " Recheck the gadget created for standard practices " Improvise and Improve with compare and contrast " Add advanced samples with .NET, AJAX and XHTML.

New Price: $19.99 / Used Price: $22.29

RSS can come to your rescue, but first you need to know what it is and how to use it. Syndicating Web Sites With RSS Feeds For Dummies has what you need to know to get up and running fast and with today s flood of constantly-changing information, fast is a top priority.

Here, in plain English, you ll find out how to:

• Use RSS to drive traffic to your Web site and build brand awareness
• Choose and install the right software, set up RSS feeds, and decide on the format that meets your needs
• Create RSS feeds from scratch, or put a news reader on your Web site
• Improve your site s ranking in search engines and build customer loyalty
• Enable your customers to choose when and how they receive updated information
• Tailor information for your audience and publish all your updates quickly and easily
• Promote your RSS feed and explain to your customers how to use it
• Provide added value for your customers

Making the most of RSS can make life easier for both you and those who do business with you. Syndicating Web Sites With RSS Feeds For Dummies will help you maintain fresh content for your Web site, blog, or e-zine, promote your site and establish links to it, and even update vital documents like employee guides, price lists, and procedures manuals, quickly and easily.

So you have a business and you have a Web site. Bravo! You’re doing all the right things to be successful. But wait — the information on your Web site needs to be updated, and your customers need to know. Good heavens, didn’t you spend half of last week doing that? There’s got to be a quicker, easier way to keep your clientele informed, and while we’re at it, how about building your business too?

RSS can come to your rescue, but first you need to know what it is and how to use it. Syndicating Web Sites With RSS Feeds For Dummies has what you need to know to get up and running fast—and with today’s flood of constantly-changing information, “fast” is a top priority.

Here, in plain English, you’ll find out how to:

• Use RSS to drive traffic to your Web site and build brand awareness
• Choose and install the right software, set up RSS feeds, and decide on the format that meets your needs
• Create RSS feeds from scratch, or put a news reader on your Web site
• Improve your site’s ranking in search engines and build customer loyalty
• Enable your customers to choose when and how they receive updated information
• Tailor information for your audience and publish all your updates quickly and easily
• Promote your RSS feed and explain to your customers how to use it
• Provide added value for your customers

Making the most of RSS can make life easier for both you and those who do business with you. Syndicating Web Sites With RSS Feeds For Dummies will help you maintain fresh content for your Web site, blog, or e-zine, promote your site and establish links to it, and even update vital documents like employee guides, price lists, and procedures manuals, quickly and easily.

Publisher: For Dummies
Author: Ellen Finkelstein
Release Date: 2005-04-08
ISBN/EAN: 0764588486 / 9780764588488

New Price: $7.54 / Used Price: $5.99

New Price: $49.99 / Used Price: $44.25

This book is not about the minutia of RSS and Atom programming. It's about doing cool stuff with syndication feeds-making the technology give you exactly what you want the way you want. It's about building a feed aggregator and routing feeds to your e-mail or iPod, producing and hosting feeds, filtering, sifting, and blending them, and much more. Tan-talizing loose ends beg you to create more hacks the author hasn't thought up yet. Because if you can't have fun with the technology, what's the point?

A sampler platter of things you'll learn to do

• Build a simple feed aggregator
• Add feeds to your buddy list
• Tune into rich media feeds with BitTorrent
• Monitor system logs and events with feeds
• Scrape feeds from old-fashioned Web sites
• Reroute mailing lists into your aggregator
• Distill popular links from blogs
• Republish feed headlines on your Web site
• Extend feeds using calendar events and microformats

New Price: $1.03 / Used Price: $0.93

Let industry expert and the About.com Guide to Web Search, Wendy Boswell, lead you through essential tips and tricks to streamline your searches. With this authoritative guide you'll learn how to:

• Choose the right search engine
• Google like a pro
• Evaluate sites for accuracy
• Dig deeper with the invisible Web
• Revolutionize searches using RSS
• Find relevant multimedia

From Boolean searches to mining the blogosphere, this guide is packed full of information for anyone who has ever sat staring at a search engine wondering where do I begin? With Wendy and About.com, you'll be clicking your way to information that is accurate, timely, and relevant in no time!

Publisher: Adams Media
Author: Wendy Boswell
Release Date: 2007-12-01
ISBN/EAN: 1598695037 / 9781598695038

New Price: $11.14 / Used Price: $12.66

"We the Media, has become something of a bible for those who believe the online medium will change journalism for the better." -Financial Times

Big Media has lost its monopoly on the news, thanks to the Internet. Now that it's possible to publish in real time to a worldwide audience, a new breed of grassroots journalists are taking the news into their own hands. Armed with laptops, cell phones, and digital cameras, these readers-turned-reporters are transforming the news from a lecture into a conversation. In We the Media, nationally acclaimed newspaper columnist and blogger Dan Gillmor tells the story of this emerging phenomenon and sheds light on this deep shift in how we make--and consume--the news.

Gillmor shows how anyone can produce the news, using personal blogs, Internet chat groups, email, and a host of other tools. He sends a wake-up call to newsmakers-politicians, business executives, celebrities-and the marketers and PR flacks who promote them. He explains how to successfully play by the rules of this new era and shift from "control" to "engagement." And he makes a strong case to his fell journalists that, in the face of a plethora of Internet-fueled news vehicles, they must change or become irrelevant.

Journalism in the 21st century will be fundamentally different from the Big Media oligarchy that prevails today. We the Media casts light on the future of journalism, and invites us all to be part of it.

Dan Gillmor is founder of Grassroots Media Inc., a project aimed at enabling grassroots journalism and expanding its reach. The company's first launch is Bayosphere.com, a site "of, by, and for the San Francisco Bay Area."

Dan Gillmor is the founder of the Center for Citizen Media, a project to enable and expand reach of grassroots media. From 1994-2004, Gillmor was a columnist at the San Jose Mercury News, Silicon Valley's daily newspaper, and wrote a weblog for SiliconValley.com. He joined the Mercury News after six years with the Detroit Free Press. Before that, he was with the Kansas City Times and several newspapers in Vermont. He has won or shared in several regional and national journalism awards. Before becoming a journalist he played music professionally for seven years.

New Price: $8.00 / Used Price: $4.00

New Price: $16.49 / Used Price: n.a.

Over two million registered Flickr users and counting have discovered the ease and fun of organizing their photo libraries, showing off their favorite pictures to the world, and securely sharing their private pictures with friends, family, or ad hoc groups. But Flickr's own plethora of intuitive menus, options, and features just scratches the surface.

Flickr Hacks goes beyond the basics of storing, sorting, and sharing your photos to the much bigger playground of what's possible. Whether you're a beginner looking to manage your metadata and play with tags, or a programmer in need of a detailed reference of Flickr API methods, you'll find what you're looking for here. In addition to getting under the hood of some of the most popular third-party Flickr toys already in the wild, you'll learn how to:

• Post photos to your blog directly from your cameraphone
• Mash up your own photos or others' public pictures into custom mosaics, collages, sliding puzzles, slideshows, or ransom notes
• Back up your Flickr library to your desktop, and save the comments too
• Set random desktop backgrounds and build your own Flickr screensaver
• Geotag your photos and map your contacts
• Download a list of photos and make a contact sheet
• Make your own Flickr-style tag cloud to visualize the frequency of common tags
• Build a color picker with a dynamic color wheel of Flickr photos
• Feed photos to your web site and subscribe to custom Flickr feeds using RSS
• Talk to the Flickr API using your web browser, Perl, or PHP; authenticate yourself and other users; and build custom API applications

New Price: $1.88 / Used Price: $1.23

* Learn how to use free and inexpensive software such as Garage Band and Audacity to manipulate audio files and create podcasts.

* Explore the pros and cons of various blogging platforms.

* Have your students blog, and use RSS to deliver their assignments to you automatically.

With RSS and the Read/Write Web, the possibilities are endless.

A glossary and an extensive list of online resources round out this essential guide to the power of Web syndication.

Publisher: International Society for Technology in Education
Author: John G. Hendron
Release Date: 2008-03-15
ISBN/EAN: 1564842398 / 9781564842398

New Price: $29.95 / Used Price: $99.64