I've added a link at the right to a fabulous website, Sourceforge. Sourceforge is the world's bazaar for open source software. Sourceforge is a great place to find *free* software. If you need something but don't know where to get it, or if you can't pay for commercial software, chances are you can find it or a substitute on Sourceforge. And just because its open source rather than commercial software doesn't mean it isn't as good: the open source Firefox web browser is considered by many to be superior to Microsoft's Internet Explorer. The drawbacks to Sourceforge are the following: (a) due to the fact that much of the site is geared to the non-layperson, it may be difficult sometimes for a person to figure out what the particular program actually does, how good it is, or what requirements are needed to run it on a particular computer, and (b) sometimes (I have only encountered this once) it is difficult to get a piece of software to run, because the product is not yet provided in computer-readable code.
Sourceforge is a great resource. From time to time, I hope to spotlight particular software applications available there.
Monday, March 17, 2008
Sunday, March 16, 2008
Getting Started: Daily Me Google Gadget
I will get this started in more depth and extent soon... The goal is to create a toolkit and discussion space for poets / (un)creative writers in general to cyber- themselves. More simply, we have plenty of digital poets or e-lit people, but the point here is to make it easy for other poets to make use of new media and digital means.
Here's a first thought: iGoogle. There's much to be said about Google and I'll offer more soon - there's a tremendous range of possibilities here, especially as Google is now offering comprehensive hosting, online document tools, desktop tools, etc.
But a making your own iGoogle gadget is quick way to create and distribute writing. Basically, you can post or distribute a link to this, and friends or others would put the gadget on their homepage (or even desktop if they're using Google desktop). There are a number of gadgets to choose from, but the one I think is most interesting for the computerpoet is the "Daily Me." It provides a kind of format for channeling text and image. Now, it takes about 10 days after it's created for it to be available to everyone in the Google Gadget directory, but you can send invitations to people right away. Try it out.
Here's a first thought: iGoogle. There's much to be said about Google and I'll offer more soon - there's a tremendous range of possibilities here, especially as Google is now offering comprehensive hosting, online document tools, desktop tools, etc.
But a making your own iGoogle gadget is quick way to create and distribute writing. Basically, you can post or distribute a link to this, and friends or others would put the gadget on their homepage (or even desktop if they're using Google desktop). There are a number of gadgets to choose from, but the one I think is most interesting for the computerpoet is the "Daily Me." It provides a kind of format for channeling text and image. Now, it takes about 10 days after it's created for it to be available to everyone in the Google Gadget directory, but you can send invitations to people right away. Try it out.
Wednesday, March 5, 2008
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