25 Wednesday Jan 2012
Posted in JURN tips and tricks
A nice new footnotes plugin for WordPress. It uses simple square brackets, which must have a number at the start of them. It accepts HTML links inside the brackets. I’d love to see this plugin come as standard with the free WordPress.com -hosted blogs…
To get the smaller font size on the footnotes, paste this CSS into your theme’s styles CSS, probably at the foot of the font section (that worked for me). The plugin doesn’t add this CSS automatically.
07 Saturday Jan 2012
Posted in JURN tips and tricks, Spotted in the news
With the seeming demise of the too-long awaited Ion Book Scanner device (now vanished from both Amazon and the Ion website), those seeking to efficiently scan their private libraries might like to look at the DIY Book Scanner website…
It has plans, shopping lists, photos of items needed, and well… just about everything. If you can’t build it yourself, anyone on a decent salary should be able to find the funds to pay a couple of their neighborhood hobbyists to build one for them. It looks transportable, so perhaps a group of academics could pool their cash to get one built, then share the scanner.
29 Wednesday Jun 2011
Posted in JURN tips and tricks, JURN's Google watch
For Firefox 5 users, this is a simple way to remove the annoying new Google +1 button from your search results:
UPDATE, 20th July 2011: the previous AdBlock Plus solution stopped working at 13th July. Google changed something. I have now amended the instructions to work with their new code. What follows works at 20th July…
1. Open Firefox. Go to the top menu bar | Tools | Addons | Adblock Plus | Options
2. In your Filter option add…
www.google.com##BUTTON[class=”esw eswd”]
Don’t be tempted to add a “http://” in front. Save and exit the Adblock Plus options.
3. Restart Firefox. The distracting animated buttons are gone. If you run on some other national version of Google, try replacing “.com” with your national domain (like .uk or .ca).
28 Tuesday Jun 2011
Posted in JURN tips and tricks
New addition to the FAQ:
Q: I have installed Firefox 5, and now I can’t get more than one page of results using a JURN search from the main www.jurn.org Web page. What went wrong?
A: Disable the Firefox addon HTTPS-Everywhere, restart Firefox, and JURN will work again. Dedicated users of HTTPS-Everywhere, for instance those living in repressive nations, can also write a ruleset to exclude Google and JURN from the addon’s encryption process.
22 Tuesday Mar 2011
Posted in JURN tips and tricks, JURN's Google watch
Firefox 4 final is out now. Sadly it breaks the Greasemonkey script Google Noise Reduction, which was an excellent per-domain results blocker for Google Search.
However, the new and powerful Google Hit Hider does work very well, and is very similar. It’s obviously learned a lot from earlier software like Blocksite, Surfclarity, and Noise Reduction (all of which no longer work with FF4 / the latest Google) and there are some nice refinements. Not the least of which is very easy import/export as simple plain-text lists of URLs.
It’s a fairly simple process to get your hand-crafted Noise Reduction blocklist out of Firefox and into Google Hit Hider…
1. In Firefox’s address bar, type: about:config
2. Scroll down to greasemonkey.scriptvals.http://exego.net//Google Noise Reduction.blacklist You’ll see…
({‘britannia.com’:true, ‘oxfordjournals.org’:true, ‘tandf.co.uk’:true, ‘ingentaconnect.com’:true, ‘sagepub.com’:true, ‘myspace.com’:true, ‘experts-exchange.com’:true})
3. Double click on the line of banned URLs you’ll find there, and copy them to Notepad.
4. Now just top-and-tail the list, then search and replace until you have a clean list, but leave each URL separated by a single comma. Save the list as a .csv (comma separated value) file, then open that with MS Office’s Excel (or whatever the free Open Office equivalent is). The list should load up with one URL per cell.
5. Now just copy and paste the resulting cleaned list into: Manage Hiding / List Util / ‘Perma-ban list’ in Google Hit Hider.
The advantage of this over the now-native Google blocking is that: i) it lets you break the 500 URL limit; ii) you can block domains en-masse rather than one at a time; and iii) it lets you easily import/export the blocklist, in order to share with colleagues etc.
03 Thursday Feb 2011
Posted in JURN tips and tricks
A handy Hathi Trust website tutorial for UK and European readers. It details how to bypass the EU’s ridiculously elongated copyright terms, and access blocked material that is freely available to Americans.
Update: as of 2017 it’s now easier just to install the Opera Web browser (desktop PC version), and use their easy free VPN service.
Update, at spring 2020, a VPN seems to only way to reach Hathi from the UK. Even then, the site is just un-usably slow. This situation has been ongoing for about six weeks, at early May 2020.
25 Tuesday Jan 2011
Posted in JURN tips and tricks
Why you should keep the new Facebook paste-ins off your blog — they make the page clunky when loading, jar with your layout/colour-scheme, distend your sidebar, and sometimes even obscure your content…
For those who want an immediate “nuke from orbit” solution, the Remove Facebook script for Firefox/Greasemonkey works a treat at removing this sort of cruft from all the pages you encounter on the web.
20 Thursday Jan 2011
Posted in JURN tips and tricks
ReKindleit, a Firefox plugin that sends any web page to your Kindle. Simply add the email address readit@rekindle.it to your approved senders. Then simply drag the ReKindleit Bookmarklet to your Firefox toolbar. Only works on HTML pages, not PDF files. The blurb on the page about “then transfer by USB” is out of date — the new Kindle 3 pulls pages directly to the Kindle.
08 Saturday Jan 2011
Posted in JURN tips and tricks
The excellent free MultiLinks addon for Firefox can be a handy way to open links in many tabs. Just Crtl + right mouse-click and drag a box around the links you want to open. Then when you release the mouse, your selected links spring into life as new tabs all busy loading pages.
But MultiLinks can also work as a very handy links harvester, neatly copying URLs complete with their anchor text to the clipboard. That can certainly beat ferreting around among the code in ‘View Source’. Here’s how to do it.
1. Install MultiLinks. Then go to Tools | Addons…
2. Click the “Options” button on the MultiLinks listing…
3. Change the behaviour of MultiLinks to: Copy to Clipboard | URLs with Titles…
4. You can also tell it to ignore everything except the main links, on pages of Google Search results…
5. Now when you Crtl + right-click and drag a box around some Web links, when you release the mouse button those URLs and their anchor (title) text are placed on your clipboard. Not very useful, unless Excel 2007 automatically places these side-by-side in different columns. Thankfully it does…
6. Now you can use Excel to automatically turn them back into HTML links, as soon as you paste them into your spreadsheet. My ready-made spreadsheet with formula applied is URL-maker.xlsx. It uses the simple concatenation (‘combine columns’) formula: =C2&B2&D2&A2&E2
28 Tuesday Dec 2010
I’m pleased to say that I’ve found a robust way to auto-check if Google is still “seeing” content at the article-level URLs indexed by JURN. It’s a software based solution, and is basically ‘dark side’ SEO software that I’ve turned to the good side. It auto-prepends the site: modifier to each of the URLs contained in the JURN index, and then checks if those URLs are actually indexed by Google. It then logs any wholly un-indexed URLs. It just chugs away in the background and is very slow — so as not to trigger flood-control blocking measures. But it’s certainly better than doing the checking by hand.
If you have such a list you want to check, it’s probably best to remove or cut back any URLs containing multiple wildcards such as /*/*/. Google has also been known to choke on URLs containing question-marks (it can see them as evidence of someone trying a scripting exploit on Google), although I don’t see this happening during the checking. But if you’re doing the checking in blocks of 200, it’s not difficult to correct those sort of URLs first.