John Miedema

Feed readers are old news for many active web users. Using a feed reader like Bloglines or Google Reader, a reader enjoys having the latest information from preferred sites all show up in one tool. I noticed that any site that did not have an RSS feed quickly fell off my radar. I asked, Does a site without RSS exist? Although many people still read the web the old-fashioned way of visiting bookmarked sites, I wondered if the new trend would cause non-RSS sites to fall off the map into …

You’ve heard the old saying, metadata is data about data, which suggests that metadata is somehow ‘higher’ than other data. What does it mean to be ‘higher’? We usually mean that metadata provides short summary values about some larger body of data. For example, a title, keywords, and an abstract are short text values that describe an article or book. Because these metadata values are short, and quick to read, they are useful for someone searching for information. It’s a good start.
The data and metadata world is more complex. Consider …

Makers Canadian launch in Toronto
You can legally download the entire digital book for free, but I just have this thing about reading the good stuff in print.

When my kids were small we had a trailer in a trailer park. One of my favourite things was picking my summer time reads off the community bookcase in the main lodge. All books donated, no hurry to return them, if at all. Just saw a related post and great photo at librarian.net. That bookcase is outdoors, so no worries about hours or loitering. I like it.

I recently posted the list of titles in my Back-to-the-Land collection. It’s just a beginning. Here are some premium titles recommended by others, and a few I added. I am not entirely clear on what counts as a “Back-to-the-Land” title yet, but these look like good ones.
I would love to hear more recommendations.
The Mad Farmer Liberation Front is a personal favourite. I haven’t read much else of his but I’m sure it belongs here.

One of several excellent suggestions by Deborah. The Canadian setting really piques my interest.

This title …