Candida Kutz's Blob, er, Blog

Best Online Reference Sites

This image of a "wanton gospeller" was found on the NY Public Library's Online Picture Collection, one of many reference sites deemed "best of" by the Machine-Assisted Reference Section (MARS) of the American Library Association, as reported on Search Engine Watch (SEW). I'm a reference site and book junkie (and yes, I admit to opening up the dictionary just for fun-or out of boredom- sometimes), and so was psyched to find this entry. See SEW's entry (Best Online Reference Sites) and the page from the Reference and User Services Assoc. website, MARS section (Innovative Web-Based Reference Services).

Selection criteria include the site be free to use, presents the service in a creative and functional manner (so glad there are some people that still care about good user interface!), and is adaptable to any library.

The Sophisticated Simplicity of TypePad

So here I am with my brand spanking new TypePad blog. Two months of the deluxe plan free courtesy of Six Apart (because I attended the 2005  New Communications Forum).

First impressions: this is waaaay cool. Nice interface. Lot of ways to customize your site without having to learn messy CSS, etc. This is one classy killer app., and it's obvious now why so many folks have chosen to blog this way.

Since I've been mucking about with MT since July or August now, I figured it was about time I checked out Six Apart's other blogging tool. Nice for those not worried about URLs. I would even venture to say that having a TypePad URL looks cool.

Wow!- this has a  spell checker. Why doesn't MT? I'm getting pissed now . . .

And the spell check will automatically start at the beginning of the entry, even though my cursor is down here. Why can't MS figure out a simple UI enhancement like this?