The Hindu : New web navigation aids

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Monday, Feb 02, 2004

Business

Business

New web navigation aids

THIS WEEK, NetSpeak takes a look at a few online services that have come up recently for providing the netizen a more personalised and efficient web navigation experience.

While on the Net we hop from site to site, deeply immersed in the variety of valuable information being presented to us. But many of us fail to document the sites visited and save the contents. The reluctance arises because it distracts one's concentration while navigating.

The problem arises when you want to go back to a site visited a few days ago. You may only vaguely remember the content of the web pages. For example, you may recall having read an article with some terms related to a patent but may not be able to recall the URL of the page. One solution to get around such troubles is to have access to an on-line service that allows you to save a web page's content on its site so that it can be accessed from any machine on the web. The new on-line service, Furl (http://www.furl.net), is an excellent product that meets this requirement.

Furl

Furl, which can be considered a personal `web page filing cabinet,' can be used to save any number of pages for future reference. To use the service, which is currently free, you just need to go through a simple registration process. To ease the web page saving process, the service provides a bookmarklet called `Furl It,' which can be integrated with your browser by just dragging it on to its toolbar. Now onwards, whenever you access a web page worth saving, just click on `Furl It' button, fill-up the fields on the input window that pops up and click on the `Save' button.

Another notable aspect of this tool is that while you save the web page, you can make it public so that it can be shared with other netizens having similar interests. In this aspect, it is almost similar to the social bookmark manager service, Delicious (http://del.icio.us/) mentioned in this column a few weeks back. When you access the site, you will find the latest entries being saved by other Furl users across the Net. As the site provides an RSS feed that contains the details of the latest entries, you can read them through a news aggregator also.

Findory: A personalised news service

We are all familiar with many on-line news services that collect the latest information from several news sources and display them under different categories. Topic.net (http://www.topix.net/), which organises news into more than 150,000 topics, is an example. But a drawback of these services is that the headlines displayed on a service look the same for all the readers. That is, the news service presents the information in the same format for all the readers without paying attention to their personal preferences. Hence the need for a service that can present information more relevant to a particular reader. One mechanism for presenting a customised news page is to know the interests of the reader by watching the links he/she accesses and then use this feedback to alter the page's content.

The on-line news service Findory (http://www.findory.com) uses this strategy to present you a news page with articles that deal with your favourite subject. The site automatically learns what you need by quietly following your web journey. Every time you click on a story the service measures this as an indication of your interest on a specific subject. Another notable feature of Findory is the option `What I have read' that displays the list of articles you have read so far; this lets you go back to any of the articles you had read from the service.

Gixo (http://www.gixo.com/) is another personalised news service that presents a customised front-page, taking feedback from the user. It also determines your tastes based on the articles you have read and uses this information to recommend the news stories that match your interests.

Yet another new product that attempts to provide you a better and more efficient web navigation experience is the `I like!' service. The service provides a bookmarklet named `I like!.' Whenever you are on a favourite web page, click on the `I like!' button to inform the service that you like that site. Based on the favourite links you fed to the service, `I like!' will provide the list of similar sites using the same type of feedback received from other users. For more details, check out: http://mercury.hjalli.com/ilike/

XAMPP: Apache/MySQL/PHP bundle

We have seen many programs that run on a LAMP (Linux/Windows Apache MySQL PHP/PERL) environment. In fact, this column has featured many free open-source tools that work in this environment. One hindrance with this is that ordinary Windows users sometimes find it difficult to install/configure this environment on their machines. To help such people there are packages that come bundled with programs such as Apache, MySQL and PHP.

The significance of such a software bundle is that by just extracting the archive on to your hard disk the whole system will come live automatically for you to use — no need to worry about configuring the system. The software bundle, XAMPP, which contains such components as Apache, MySQL, PHP, PERL, phpMyAdmin and FTP server, is one such product worth installing. For more details: http://www.apachefriends.org/ xampp-en.html.

Time zone converter

Would like to know the current time in different time zones/countries? Check out the on-line `Time Zone Converter' http://www.timezoneconverter. com/index.shtml.

J. Murali

Email the author at: murali27@satyam.net.in

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