Online Publishing.

Share this post :

del.icio.us Tags: documents,online publishing,publishing,e-doc,e-books,googe books,tutorials,user generated content

Recently I was searching online for tutorials on drawing and information about the human body proportions, especially of different races and ethnicity. I was in particular interested in casual drawing, which I can import into Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator. I stumbled on a wonderful site called Scribd. Its a wonderful site where users can create documents and upload, typically tutorials technical documents, which they think help people world wide.

The system supports various document types, some of them are:

• Adobe Postscript
• Adobe PDF
• Microsoft Word
• Microsoft PPT
• Microsoft Excel
• Open Office (All document types)
• Text (Plain ASCII)
• and images (of various types)

I was able to download some tutorials about drawing and manga style drawing in no time. There is of course, a limit to the number of documents you can download per day, to prevent overloading the Scribd server by greedy pigs like me :) I am sure this great site will, come up with a premium account soon, if they don't have yet. There is not limit at least for online viewing though.

The registration is a breeze, and the site is pretty well organized. Still, I would have preferred more categories than already present. I am sure, they will come in due course of time.

The beauty of this site is, it has user generated content/documents for sharing. It scores over Google Books, as it allows the users to download the content to their desktops, unlike Google.

If you are looking for documents of any type, which can be downloaded for your leisurely reading, Scribd is your best bet.

You can view the documents in a very intuitive User Interface and I like very much the Book View the tool provides. Makes you feel, you are thumbing through a book. You can go full screen as well. The documents are converted to Flash and rendered on the browser. You do not require any particular document tools like word, acrobat or open office to be installed on your system. Just Flash Plug-in for your browser.

 

Yahoo Pipes VS Google Docs Feed Reader

Recently there was an article on Digital Inspiration about the ways to used Google Docs Spread Sheet as an RSS aggregator. Its pretty neat. I tried it with few regular feeds I read and I must say its good.

As with other documents, if you choose to publish the Feed Aggregator Spread Sheet, you can share the page with others. What was not very clear in the article of Digital Inspiration and other documents dealing with this, was the Query and how I can further improve upon this idea.

For people, who have not yet figured out how to use the "Query" Field of ImportFeed(URL, Query, Title, Number Of Items), here is a short explanation (limited by my own understanding :) )

If Cell A1 has the feed url, ex: http://feeds.labnol.org/labnol

then in any other vacant cell, you enter the following:

=Import(A1,"Items Title",FALSE,10)

here:

1. A1, - is the cell number of the feed
2. "Items Title" - is the query which will fetch the Title of the latest feeds
3. FALSE - to denote that we dont want the title of the different fields to be displayed.
4. finally 10 - is the number of feed entries to be copied to successive Spread Sheer Cells

The query can be :

1. "Items Title"; Very obvious.
   
2. "Items Author"; very obvious.
   
3. "Items Description"; Synopsis of the article
   
4. "Items Publishing Date" ; I do not know the exact query, I never use this
   
5. "Items URL"; the link to the article.

I found one major drawback when I published a test feed aggregator as HTML file. The URL is copied as text, and is not clickeable. Yes it might be possible to hack and make it a valid URL, but it would have been excellent appropriate HTML tags were added to the published document.


During the same period, I was experimenting with Yahoo Pipes. I had just then come accross Pipes on some web page, and I was just descovering the features of Pipes. I admit, I am still a very novice, when writing web applications. But, Yahoo Pipes is fantastic.

The same application of a Feed aggregator explained in the above section can be done in a jiffy. By adding one component. I suggest you try pipes if you have Yahoo Account. Its much more organised than GDocs hack to aggregate feeds. What's more, you can export the Pipes in various formats.

I am not sure if the above block of pipes code is going to work in the blogger or not. But I have placed just few lines, which is a feed reader of Armstrong Photographgy

You always wanted to download great pictures from Flickr without any distractions of various tags etc, right? now you can create your own pipe which filters any thing unwanted and presents you with just right pictures.