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Delicious for pdfs?

furious — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 11:55:40 -0800

How can I organize offline pdfs on windows so that they're easy to find offline using a standard browser? In a perfect world, it would be like delicious, but for pdfs. Tags, sortable by tags, compact display. Endnote and Wordpress are the available tools. This is on Windows. There is an offline wordpress blog. There are a bunch of pdfs in folders on a shared drive. I wish I could have something like delicious, where anybody who has access to the shared drive could look for the pdfs by putting in tags. The listings brought up would be linked to the pdf files.

So with Endnote, Wordpress and a bunch of pdf files, how can I create an index that allows the pdfs to be searched for easily, by subject, tag, author, etc using a standard browser? A single page could be created on the wordpress blog with a list of all the pdfs, with keywords. A control+f search could be used to locate useful pdfs. But that would not be sortable. The wordpress blog already has entries, so entering each pdf as a separate entry would not work - tags would give you things other than links to the pdf files. An additional wordpress blog solely for the pdfs is not an option.

Example: person x says "I wonder about salamanders' tongues." Uses Internet Explorer or Firefox to go to the page. Tag search-animals. Nothing. Tag search amphibians. Tag search amphibians+anatomy. Brings up 5 locally linked pdfs. Person x wants more- tag search for salamander brings up 30 results. To get just recent results, tag search salamander+2009.

If there were some way to get some code from delicious, put it into a single page on the wordpress blog and have it mimic delicious, that would be perfect.

Any ideas? The process of entering in all the information will be arduous and time consuming, so I want the final product to be worth it.

Tagging in Acrobat Pro 8

nosila — Sat, 12 Sep 2009 15:59:38 -0800

I would like to be able to search comments in numerous pdf files at once using Adobe Acrobat Pro 8. Can it be done? Ideally, I would be able to designate a folder to search within. This way, the comments could act as tags. E.g. if I have a folder that is full of articles about Haydn that I've read and marked up, I could easily locate every comment in which I've written "Symphony No. 8." Then I could click on the search result and the appropriate pdf would open magically at the right place.

If this isn't possible in Acrobat Pro 8, any suggestions on how I might do it? I'm willing to entertain the possibility of using other software, though I really like Acrobat Pro aside from this.

How do I change part of a title across several episodes of the same podcast in iTunes?

booksherpa — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 11:27:30 -0800

How do I change part of a title across several episodes of the same podcast in iTunes? [rant]I can't believe I even have to use a question on this, because it seems like it should be dead stupid simple, but there ya go. Either I'm missing something, my Google-fu sucks, or iTunes really is that annoying.[/rant]

So I've got a bunch of TEDTalks in my podcasts, and everyone of them begins with "TEDTalks : " - i.e. TEDTalks : Joe Blow talks about technology. I'd like to remove all those leading TEDTalks (I know what podcast I'm listening to) because it takes up space on the screen when I'm trying to figure out which is which. I do NOT want to have to edit 70+ files by hand. Nor is TEDTalks the only podcast that demonstrates naming convention.

I run iTunes in Windows XP, so DougScripts are not an option. Nor is getting a Mac or running something in place of iTunes. I've tried doing a search and replace with a file renamer, and a different program that edits mp3 file tags. All that happens is iTunes refuses to recognize the files anymore, I have to reimport the folder where they live, and the names are back to what they were before.

There's got to be an easier way. I can't believe that something as basic as search and replace is impossible with iTunes or a script.

Methods that are free are preferred, but I'll consider paying if the software is that fabulous and time saving.

Too many tags, nothing to do.

ttyn — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 11:02:41 -0800

What's a cool project/thing to do with thousands of RFID tags? Each one is on a sticky avery sheet like this.

Can be as artsy or whacky as you want.

tuneup

plexi — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 09:05:34 -0800

Is there a way to sort by blank or null id3 fields in iTunes?

Help me snark more efficiently

jacquilynne — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 08:50:50 -0800

I need a third party Blogger app that'll help me manage draft posts. Either that, or instructions on how to do this in Blogger itself. I keep a lot of draft posts until I can collect them into daily sets of related posts and post them, but I'm having trouble in Blogger itself identifying the ones that go together.

I tag them with keywords, but there's no way to see just the keywords as they apply to draft posts, rather than all posts. I'm not interested in whether I have existing posts tagged with X, only if I have enough draft posts tagged with X to do another set about X.

I tried tagging things with draft and removing it before I published, in hopes that I could view posts that were tagged both X and draft, but that doesn't seem to be possible, unless I'm missing it.

So, is there a third party blogging app that will work with a Blogger.Com blog, and allow me to view my tags within a certain post status, or view posts that are tagged with two different tags?

I've found Blogger's list of third party tools, but I'd rather not install and check each of them to see if they do what I need, and it's kind of specific, so isn't generally mentioned in the overview of how the product works. Is anyone using one of these apps and knows it does what I want?

Viva la Revolution?

Anonymous — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 13:58:56 -0800

IRAN ELECTION FILTER: I am looking to create a few web pages to mirror some information back in to Iran. What editor should I use that will recognize Arabic script and what tags do I need to use to define the language when writing the HTML? To clarify a bit further, I have the text already in Farsi. I am looking to take information that is on pages that have been blocked/filtered by the Iranian government and put it in a simple plain text only page which I will host on a server that I have access to. I tried to use Notepad++ to create the pages but it does not like Farsi. Also I have never created a web page in another language so I don't know what tags to put in to define the language. Please help!

How Can I Tag Bookmarks on Safari?

The ____ of Justice — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 13:12:34 -0800

Is there a program or tool for organizing my Safari bookmarks using tags? (as opposed to folders) I really like the way delicious uses tags to organize bookmarks. Is there a way to do so in Safari? I do not want to use any social/online sites, since a lot of the bookmarks I visit have somewhat proprietary information. Plus, social/online sites would be overkill for me...I'm only using one computer.

I know Firefox has several add ons that do this, but Safari, as far as I know, has none.

Thanks!

OS X utility for wrapping text in HTML?

Typographica — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 14:34:31 -0800

Is there an OS X key command utility or service that will let me wrap selected text in clipboard text and predefined strings (such as HTML)? The blogging client Ecto has a nifty feature that will wrap selected text with whatever is on your clipboard plus predefined strings such as "a href" tags for quickly adding html links. Thus, linking some text is easy:

1. copy a URL
2. select the desired anchor text
3. hit key command and text is wrapped in a "a href" tag using your copied URL.

Is there an OS X utility that will allow me to do this in any app? This would be especially useful in a web browser where I am constantly linking text in forums and other input fields.

I've got Butler which can paste stored text, but it doesn't do the wrapping.

tips or tricks for organizing information using Windows XP

KokuRyu — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 17:15:03 -0800

Does anyone have any tips or tricks for organizing information using Windows XP and MS productivity software? Specifically, I'm wondering if there is a native "tags" function where you can tag specific documents so they can be easily retrieved.

When contracting, I relied on Gmail and the Google drive shell extension to easily store documents. In fact, I still use this system now for saving expense receipts for work: I email the receipts to a Gmail account and then search by keyword and date to find them.

However, I cannot use Gmail for work - it's against IT policy. I typically use Outlook 2007, Word 2007 and Excel 2007. The problem I have is that I often save multiple versions of files in multiple places.

I do have a filing system set up for email in Outlook 2007, but I often wish I could just bookmark an email, or bookmark and Excel spreadsheet.

Instead, I have to either save or file, and I much prefer Gmail's tagging system.

I am not considering moving to Gmail or whatever for my work-related productivity docs.

MS Desktop Search is enabled on my computer, but it's not quite as fast or efficient as the search function in Gmail.

So, once again, my question is:

Instead, does anyone have any tips or tricks for tagging items in Outlook 2007, or Word or Excel for easy retrieval? I'd love to hear your own unique solution using MS productivity software.

Note: my computer is locked down so I cannot easily install software.

The two most powerful warriors are patience and time. (or megapixels and HD Video?)

DrAlbin — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 00:17:14 -0800

Buy the Canon 450Xsi or wait for the 500TSi? I have been on the ledge about to take the leap to DSLR from point and shoot. I have read previous posts for newbie’s, read the reviews, went to a store picked the associates brain for a half an hour, picked up and tried (as much as you can in a store) the different brands and models. I finally justified spending $700+ for a Canon 450xsi. This week was going to be the week. And what does Canon do to reward me for my future purchase? They announce a new version of the camera to be released "early May".

Would it be more beneficial to wait till "early May" for the Tsi (the extra $200 isn’t going to be an issue if it's worth it)? Or take the plunge and buy the Xsi (even though with the new release the XSi will probably drop in price in "early May")

Question is not so much "What should I do?" rather "What would you do?"

Video wouldn’t be a huge selling feature, I have a decent Vid cam, just not HD.

Last.fm and Radio Times mashup?

Solomon — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 03:08:28 -0800

Last.fm for television? I'm looking for a UK-centric service/website that will allow me to punch in the name of a programme I like to watch, that will then suggest other programmes I might like based on that. For example, I could punch in Supernatural, and it would suggest Heroes. I could punch in The 9 o'clock News, and it would suggest a topical discussion programme. I could punch in a soap opera, and it would suggest other similar programmes.

Does such a thing exist? A more rambling explanation follows.

More specifically, I'm particularly interested in natural history documentaries. I was watching Natures Great Events on BBC iPlayer the other day, and only by chance I noticed that Yellowstone was also available to watch. I really enjoyed both programmes, but it was only luck that made me notice that the second was available to view. I'd rather not miss such programming.

I have television listings available to me, but I still managed to miss several interesting programmes. I also don't watch much TV, so I can't always catch the end of the programme I'm watching to see what other suggestions are made by the channel operators.

One click button to open up multiple tabs at once?

nam3d — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 17:21:34 -0800

One click button to open up multiple tabs at once (firefox)? I have seven websites which I visit each morning to get my daily news. For each section of news (Local, UK, Technology, Business, World, Media, Gossip) I use a different news source.

Here is my current list (make of it what you think).

Local - The News & Star (local newspaper)
UK - The Times
Technology - The Independent
Business - BBC News
World - The New York Times
Media - Media Guardian
Gossip - The Sun

What I would like to do is simply press one button (a simple bookmark) on my Firefox bookmark toolbar and have each website section open up in a new tab.

Is there a way of doing this either by using a Firefox plugin or some coding.

Thanks,

William

How does flickr do it?

hayvac — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 18:18:38 -0800

My developer and I want to create a database schema that allows us to search through hundreds of tags applied to thousands of records. So far our benchmarks suck. Are we expecting too much? Here's the deal (and I'm not the database guy, so bear with me if I mess up the nomenclature): We have a bunch of records and want to apply tags to them. We're testing a database schema with dummy data including 100,000 records and 750 tags, with an average tag-to-record count of 100. This doesn't perfectly approximate our actual data set, but it's close enough.

So we have Table 1, which lists the tag ids, Table 2, which lists the record ids, and a join table, which is a two-column table listing a tag id in one column and a record id in the other wherever that tag is associated with that record.

For example, if tag223 is associated with record12, record6994, and record90001, the join table looks like this:

tag223 | record12

tag223 | record6994

tag223 | record90001

(Given the numbers above, the actual join table has around 10,000,000 rows.)

This seemed to make sense when he explained it to me, but the benchmarks with the dummy data, even indexed, were ridiculously slow. This was just one a desktop machine, but it was several orders of magnitude slower than we want it to be.

Is it possible to do tag-based searching on this scale with decent performance? Are we missing something simple?

We're using Postgres. The final product is going to be extremely read-heavy (i.e., once the data's in it'll be only minor updates). If I've left anything out, please ask.

How can I put a list of all site tags on a WP sidebar?

jbickers — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 11:14:08 -0800

How do I get Wordpress to display a list of all tags, in the sidebar? New site I'm building uses tags in addition to categories. But the tag cloud thing, aside from being kinda ugly, isn't what we want - rather, we want a list of all available tags, in the sidebar, styled like the other list items on the sidebar (i.e. within ul li ).

Tags on WP are new enough that the documentation is pretty arcane, and there does not appear to be a sidebar widget that displays tags (like there is one for categories). Can you help me figure out how to code this? I'm guessing I'll need a query, running inside a text sidebar widget ...

How to model tagged data in Excel

alms — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 08:32:47 -0800

What's the best way to represent tagged data in Excel? I want to be able to give an item multiple tags. I would like to use these tags to generate pivot tables. But I'd rather not have to create a new column for each tag (at least, I'd rather not have to create them manually). This problem comes up for me very frequently. Here's trivial example:



WORD     LENGTH     TAGS

drum        4         toy, instrument

hawk        4         animal, bird

cat         3         animal, mammal, pet

bear        4         animal, mammal, toy

orange      6         color, food, fruit

apple       5         food, fruit

Oh, and I'm using Excel on the Mac, and a pretty old version at that. So I'd want a solution that doesn't rely on macros or scripting.

Is there a script or program that will automatically download the names of jazz album sidemen?

tweebiscuit — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 21:54:14 -0800

I have a few hundred jazz albums on MP3 in my iTunes library. I'd to add the names of the sidemen on the albums to the MP3's comment tags, but I'd rather not enter the info manually, for obvious reasons. Is there any form of script or program that exists that will do this for me -- perhaps pulling from Amazon, or some other source? (Prefix this with, "Hey, Lazyweb," if desired.) So, for example, I'd like the comment (or some other) tag for "Kind of Blue - So What" to read Cannonball Adderley, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, Paul Chambers, Jimmy Cobb

Where do I find a new MP3 player with all the features of my old iriver H320?

AZNsupermarket — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 14:15:59 -0800

Where do I find a new MP3 player with all the features of my old iriver H320? Hey Metafilter!
This is my first time asking a question so here goes. I really like my old iriver H320, but it's very old and it may be nearing the end of its lifespan. The weird thing is that it seems to have a lot of features that modern MP3 players don't have. I was wondering if anyone can recommend an mp3 player that basically does the following:

1. When you plug it in to the computer, the computer treats the MP3 player as a hard drive. I want to be able to rename, change, and move around songs without having to use itunes, Windows Media Player, or any other annoying software.

2. I want my MP3 player to act like a hard drive when I'm on the go. I especially want to be able to see my various folders that contain my music, see file names, and not have to use id3 tags.

Using third party firmware on a newer mp3 player isn't out of the question, but I really wasn't crazy about rockboxes' interface on my iriver, so I would prefer using first party firmware instead (assuming that any exists that meets my needs).

Thank You!

Looking for a Wordpress tagging plugin.

gramcracker — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 11:57:07 -0800

Searching for a Wordpress tagging plugin that will work like the tag search functions work here on MeFi or on del.icio.us. It's got to be out there, I just don't know how to search for it. I'd like a plugin that will know when I'm viewing tag X that there are other posts that include tag X and suggest tag Y or tags X+Y.

Like, for example, here on the music tag, I can either search for things that have also been tagged along with music, or search for posts tagged as music+mp3.

Insurance screw-up, who's resonsible for the fine?

spaltavian — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 17:38:07 -0800

My friend's car was totaled in January by a drunk driver. She sold it back to the insurance company and bought a new car. Somewhere, someone screwed up: her car insurance was never switched from her old car to her new car. She was, however, able to switch her tags to the new car and register it. Nonetheless, until last month, she was paying insurance on a totaled car that she no longer owned. She just got a fine from Maryland Vehicle Administration for 2K+ for having tags on an uninsured vehicle. What should she do? The insurance company is blaming the car dealership, and Maryland just wants its money. Isn't her paying insurance on a car the insurance company owned illegal?

I told her she should get a hold of all the documents- canceled checks to the insurance company, registrations, sales slips- and set up an appointment with a supervisor at the the MVA. If that fails, I told her to lawyer up.

I figure either she won't have to pay the fine, or she'll have to be refunded all her insurance payments since January. However, I am not a lawyer nor have I ever had to tangle with the MVA or insurance companies like this before. Any advice? Thank you in advance.

Whay do they blur license plates on TV shows?

fixedgear — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 11:53:24 -0800

Why blur license plates on TV shows? What can one do with a plate number? I mean, you can't search it unless you are a cop, right?

How do you index your Ray Mears clips?

verisimilitude — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 14:39:26 -0800

How can I add summary data to my video files? I've recently started a project to put all of Ray Mears's survival tips into some sort of idexable format. At this early stage I'm taking the hour long TV episodes and splitting them into 20 or so short avi. clips. To do this I'm using Windows Movie Maker to view the show and strip out all the content that isn't pure Ray wilderness gold. The output avi. I then put through a simple wmv/avi. splitter.

My question is in two parts. The first general, second specific.

1) Am I going about this project in the best way? This is the first video editing Ive done, so if there is better software for stripping the useful content out of TV shows then please let me know.

2) I'm going to finish up with about 1000 clips of educational wilderness survival, and I'm not quite sure exactly how I'm going to organise them ... but I'm sure that the tagging needs to be done now. For example, a clip with Ray demonstrating how to build a pit oven I would tag "cooking" "woodland" "meat preparation" - I'm sure you get the idea. But how do associate these tags with the file? I assumed I would just be able to open each of the avi file's properties and add the tags as summary data. Alas no. The summary data is 'greyed out' so my plan appears to be foiled.

My concern about this greyed out quirk led me (via a google search) straight to those infuriating bastards at 'experts exchange' where my question has been posed:

"I'd like to enter some descriptive comments for some of my files, to view in explorer (via My Computer), but when I rightclick/properties/summary/simple, everything is greyed out (well, greened out)."

So google as fails me, my faith in the Hive Mind grows.

Thanks for reading all this.

How can I import and then tag a huge list of items?

mickmel — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 05:28:53 -0800

I have a list with hundreds of items. How can I import/tag them so that I can later view them by tag? Is there a site/software that can do this? We gave a web-based survey to our church and got about 2500 comments (along with the standard check-box answers). I'd like to tag each comment with various things ("steve", "volume", "organ") so then I can give the relevant comments to different people.

I picture it like tagging a WordPress post and then viewing a page with a list of items for that tag, but in a much simpler manner. Any good way to do that?

Help my boy take home a Camaro!

konolia — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 07:57:48 -0800

So, my son bought a car off Ebay. He's in Colorado, the car is in Maryland. He will be flying to Maryland to pick up the car on Spring Break and driving back-but there's one little problem... ...Colorado won't give him temp tags because the car is in Maryland and Maryland won't give him temp tags because he is not a Maryland
resident. So....how can he get the car legal to drive back to USAFA with it? He is presently calling the insurance people to see what they suggest but meanwhile I thought the hive mind might have some ideas. (The car is a refurbished Camaro, and this is kinda his graduation present to himself-so if I'm not chewing him out for buying off of ebay, let's not go there here either. )

Removing Scratchy Tags

yarrow — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 10:54:15 -0800

Is there a good way to remove scratchy clothing tags? I'm talking about the tags that are sewn into the neck seams or side seams of shirts. If you cut out the tag, you are left with a remnant that is still pretty scratchy. If you try to take it out at the seam, you wind up with a hole in the seam. Is there a clever way to do this that I'm not thinking of?