While we’ve done a great job keeping the NoodleTools servers humming along even as Web traffic has increased exponentially over the past several years, sometimes something unexpected comes along that requires us to take the site offline. While infrequent, we know that this type of unexpected downtime can be frustrating (even on a Friday night, there is someone who needs access right now!).

When school sites are having trouble connecting to our Web site, they have difficulty determining whether the problem is on their side or ours. Even when planned maintenance was announced on the NoodleTools blog (make sure you’re subscribed, if you aren’t already!), users aren’t always aware of it (or just want to know when the site will be back online).

To solve this, we now have a separate Web site, www.noodletools.info, which indicates the current NoodleTools.com server status. NoodleTools.info is hosted on a different server than NoodleTools.com, so it will be accessible even when NoodleTools.com is not. If there is planned or unplanned downtime, the site will provide information and status details.

Bookmark it now!

July 22nd will bring some big changes. Back in the Fall of 2006, we kicked off a 5-month usability study and Web site redesign project. We worked with one of the most talented Web design firms in the business. We interviewed teachers, librarians, and students of all ages. We visited schools and worked with individual students in the classroom to see what could be improved or simplified. And… let’s just say our “to-do” list will keep us busy for the next few years! But you’ll be seeing the first results of the study on Sunday, July 22nd — and we think you’ll be impressed! Get ready to make some updates to your lesson plans…

We’d also like to let you know what we’re working on for the remainder of 2007:

For late August:

• Additions to the APA version of NoodleBib based on the newly-released APA Style Guide to Electronic References
• Notecards speed improvements
• Improvements to “sharing” feature, including ability for teachers to comment on notecards and to provide general comments not associated with a particular citation or notecard.

For December/January:

• Chicago Manual of Style formatting (sorry we couldn’t quite fit this in for the August release!)

NoodleTools will be taken offline at approximately 2:00 PM on Saturday, July 21st. The site will most likely remain unavailable through midnight as we make the updates and do some initial testing.

Hope you are all having a wonderful summer!

Damon

This summer’s NoodleBib update (scheduled for Saturday, July 30th) includes a new feature that many of you have been anticipating — notecards! If you are someone who tried Google Notebook when it was released recently and thought “wow, something like this would be useful for taking notes for a research paper” then this is just the thing for you!

In a nutshell:

1. Link notecards to sources in your bibliography (or create “thought” cards that aren’t associated with a particular entry).
2. View notecards alongside bibliography entries (in the My Bibliography view), or organize notecards into main ideas (”clusters”) in a separate My Notes view.
3. Copy and paste anything (images, tables, formatting, etc.) from the Web into your notecards. Separate “Quote,” “Paraphrase,” and “My Ideas” fields to promote good notetaking skills and help prevent plagiarism.
4. Save notecards as an RTF file to open and manipulate in your word processor.
5. Apply any number of tags to each notecard (and then later search notecards by tag(s)).
6. Dynamic user interface similar to Google Notebook (organize notecards into clusters with drag/drop, show/hide details, quick-access links to clusters).
7. Uses AJAX to save your work in the background (no screen refreshes) as you go.
8. Notecards feature can be turned off by the account administrator via the subscription management interface, if it won’t be used.

Here are some preview screenshots of the notecards feature (click the thumbnail to open a larger image):

Note: Since this feature uses cutting-edge DHTML and AJAX technologies, only the following browsers will initially be supported (upgrade to these at your school if you plan to use this feature!):

• Internet Explorer 6+ or 7+
• Firefox 1.5+ (Mac or PC)
• Netscape 8.1+