Current Projects
There are other things I have made that require me to pay for an API, and those are Patreon-only, but everything else I make I put up online for free and freely-available. If you’d like to support me on Patreon, that’s great but it’s certainly not required. Want to send a kind word? That’s good too! Want to tell me how I SHOULD be doing things? Go whisper it down a gopher hole! 😂
ResearchBuzz – In 1996 I wrote the first edition of Official Netscape Guide to Internet Research. In 1998 I wrote the second edition, and with the idea of creating some kind of ongoing update ResearchBuzz was born. The format has changed somewhat over the last 25+ years, but at the moment ResearchBuzz is a usually-twice-daily, sometimes-once-daily emailed newsletter covering updates in the world of archives, information collections, social media, disinformation, OSINT, etc etc. Also occasional articles on searching better and useful search tools. It’s free.
ResearchBuzz Firehose – In 2015, I started ResearchBuzz Firehose to index the individual items that make up the ResearchBuzz newsletters. Indexing the individual items makes very precise keyword and tag monitoring possible; click here for an article on how to make the most of it. In addition to the ResearchBuzz content, there is also an index of about 13,800 articles related to Covid-19 that were collected between March 2020 and early 2023. Finally, there is a index of about 1000 articles related to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. These items are focused on cyberwarfare, disinformation, propaganda, information warfare, destroyed and endangered cultural heritage, drones, OSINT, etc. This collection is still being updated but much more slowly than it was in early 2022.
SearchTweaks — As I get better at handcoding HTML I’m collecting the tools I make into their own sites. Handcoded HTML is less messy and makes the JavaScript mobile-compatible. Anyway, SearchTweaks is a collection of 17 tools to make the Google search experience better. I’m sure I’ll add more over time.
Local Search America — Three tools for finding information by city/state, state/metro area, or city radius. Find authoritative sources like local governments, institutions of higher education, and FCC-licensed television stations and search their web spaces on Google.
Congress Corral — Explore members of Congress via a Wikipedia-enriched dataset. Includes a public interest analysis utility, a tool to explore member news across local news and colleges, and a Wikipedia-powered related topics feature.
RSSGizmos — Hurrah for RSS! It’s an amazing tool for keeping up with information online and I literally could not do my job without it. This is a collection of ten RSS utilities, including a tool to find RSS feeds on Wikipedia and another to create keyword-based RSS feeds for a dozen sources.
MegaGladys — MegaGladys aggregates several tools for searching Wikipedia people and presents them in one interface. Also does some Wikipedia-based analysis of groups of people.
MiniGladys — A faster, easier to use, more streamlined version of MegaGladys. I keep this in a browser tab and it has replaced 90% of my Google quick reference/lookup searches.
WikiTwister — WikiTwister is a collection of nine tools designed to explore Wikipedia pages and categories. Not as person-oriented as MegaGladys, focused on page analysis and Wikidata extraction.
Blog Hiking — Blog Hiking lets you explore WordPress blogs by following trails of interconnected content. Search by keyword and find WordPress posts from across the web, organized like hiking trails with three different ways to explore.
Tube Terrain — Tube Terrain lets you browse lists of YouTube channels built from Wikipedia categories. Filter by keyword, subscriber count, video count, channel age and more!
Attention Junction — Attention Junction, what’s your function? To analyze the views of two Wikipedia pages, identify spans of public interest, find overlaps, and turn them into Google / Google News searches.
MastoGizmos — I used to spend a lot of time on Twitter, but I started moving away in November 2022. Now I spend a lot more time on Mastodon. I’ve made a collection of tools that for browsing and searching Mastodon across the fediverse, along with a couple of utilities for RSS and Wikipedia integration.
Nosy Raleigh — I love my hometown of Raleigh North Carolina. One of the things I love about it is that it offers a lot of government information as open data. In March 2023 I started this Web site as an ongoing experiment in blending traditional web monitoring tools like RSS with open government data. I don’t do as much with it as I used to as there’s not much interest.
ResearchBuzz on GitHub — A bunch of random scripts/bookmarklets/etc I’ve made for various things. At the moment it’s Mastodon-heavy.
One-Offs
Sometimes I make things just to see if they’ll work and they don’t fit well in a site. Those go here:
Temporary Obsessions RSS Feed Reader — A Google Sheets-based tool that lets you schedule your RSS feeds and give them expiration dates. (The link goes to a Google Sheet. Make a copy and check out the README sheet if you want to try it.)
Temporal Topic Explorer — Search for a topic day-by-day within a single month.
Wikiween — I made this for Halloween as you might guess. Turn Wikipedia people categories into spooky cemeteries!
Old Projects
Me: (Tries To Work) — Many years ago I worked a quite demanding job. I got very little sleep and my brain insisted on having weird conversations with me at all hours of the day and night. I wrote the funnier ones down.