My Ruby Slippers

One of my colleagues, Tracy Seeley, at the University of San Francisco has just unleashed her newest book My Ruby Slippers: The Road Back to Kansas. I've already got my copy, but won't be reading it until those wonderful summer days in Paris in June. I highly suggest taking a look at the book. Here's the cover description:

Sure, there’s no place like home—but what if you can’t really pinpoint where home is? By the time she was nine, Tracy Seeley had lived in seven towns and thirteen different houses. Her father’s dreams of movie stardom, stoked by a series of affairs, kept the family on edge, and on the move, until he up and left. Thirty years later, settled in what seems like a charmed life in San Francisco, a diagnosis of cancer and the betrayal of a lover shake Seeley to her roots—roots she is suddenly determined to search out. My Ruby Slippers tells the story of that search, the tale of a woman with an impassioned if vague sense of mission: to find the meaning of home.

Seeley finds herself in a Kansas that defies memory, a place far more complex and elusive than the sum of its cultural myths. On back roads and in her many back years, Seeley also finds unexpected forgiveness for her errant father, and, in the face of mortality, a sense of what it means to be rooted in place, to dwell deeply in the only life we have.

Alternatively check out this book trailer:

Mind Mapping for Note Taking

Recently Toni Krasnic wrote a post titled: Mind Mapping to Replace Pen and Paper Note Taking in Classrooms. It's an interesting read, with several very useful links (including some mind maps he made of presentations at the conference he just attended). His mind mapping software of choice: iThoughts HD for the iPad. Check it out:

krasnic on mind mapping replacing note taking

Getting to Know OPML

David Sparks, creator of the Macsparky website and author of the book Mac at Work, posted a blog entry about three weeks ago titled: Dancing with OPML. If you don't speak geek, OPML stands for Outliner Processor Markup Language.

If you work with mind maps, visual organizers, outliners, or Scrivener then you most likely want to become acquainted with the OPML format. Put simply it will allow you to share information across different programs: such as starting an article structure in MindNode Pro mind mapping software, exporting as OPML, then bringing into Scrivener with your writing structure intact!

There's lots of good things about OPML, and David did a great job of explaining the benefits of this format. I highly advise reading his article titled:

dancing with opml

Note: This post has also been published at the Scrivener blog since going from iPad to Scrivener is one of the great benefits of OPML.

Zotero Growing Up!

There's been murmurs for awhile that Zotero was going to develop a standalone software program version. For those of you who've been watching too much t.v. or simply not into library stuff, Zotero is a fantastic integrated reference manager. What does that mean? Up until now it meant that if you did a research database search (think using a university library's research databases), saved the interesting articles in the database (typically easy to do), then you could save all of that reference information to Zotero—as long as your web browser was Firefox and you had the Zotero plug-in installed.

While Zotero works very nicely, and is free, there's a few key limitations. First, it only works with Firefox. Today an alpha version of Safari and Chrome extensions were provided! These are early versions, and I found my Safari extension didn't work in a lot of real world situations, but . . . it's great to see that somewhere this year we will have versions of Zotero that work smoothly in Safari and Chrome browsers.

A second limitation, and a huge demand, was to have a standalone application. Today they also released an alpha version of this for both Mac and Windows. My guess is that I'll end up using Safari to identify and send new research references to Zotero with one button push. And I'll probably use the standalone version for all the organizing into groups, creating bibliographies, exporting work.

Check out the new alpha download (if you are brave and comfortable with computers) plus read all about this new step forward at:

zotero standalone news post

Kathryn Pope on Scrivener

I recently ran across a short review of Scrivener written by Kathryn Pope (a fiction writer). I love her paragraph that reads:

There’s an assumption that novelists and other big-project writers should start at the beginning of whatever it is they’re writing and write, straight and steady, to the end. Not everyone thinks and works this way, though. When I write, I’ve got to make a big, old mess. I start in the middle or off to one side, and I jump around. If you write like this, it can be tough to keep all the scraps and thoughts in a place where you can find them. It’s clunky to copy and paste chapters or sections or to try to wrangle all the pieces into some folder somewhere, with ten different Word files. And when you want to see all the pieces at once, it can be hard to get a look at what you’ve got. Scrivener works with that kind of craziness, rather than against it.

Check out the full review here:

kathryn pope on scrivener

750 Words and Scrivener

I recently heard about a blog post written by Jennifer Jones. The title of the post is: Additions to my PhD Toolbox (for writing and planning). She focuses on two writing tools: 750words.com and Scrivener. Read her post to learn about why she values both tools. I had never heard of 750words.com before, but I can easily imagine why it would be so useful. Beyond Jennifer's post, it's worth taking time to explore the 750words website.

jennifer jones on phd toolbox additions