Nestor, the Bibliography of Aegean and Related Areas, was started in 1957 as a traditional paper publication of the University of Wisconsin, later the University of Cincinnati. Nowadays, it’s also available on the internet with a search function included. What makes this bibliography database stand out though is that they offer an interesting way to access it without opening your browser: a dashboard widget (Mac OS X). “This field searches the entire bibliographical entry: authors, titles, years, publication data, even page numbers. Simply click in the field, type a search criteria and hit return. … Now for the fun part. One of the default widgets supplied by Apple is a translator widget. You can use this to help you find bibliography if you can’t quite remember the right word.” This is all good and well but… after I downloaded the widget file and unzipped it, no “.wdgt” appeared . Instead I got a folder with a bunch of files and folders, no .wdgt in sight. I tried the “index.html” file but all that did was forward to a new web page where I got an error message: “No file exists at the address ‘/nestor/index.php’.” I run Mac OS 10.4.11 on my MacBook which should be just fine as on the website they state that OS 10.4 or later is required. I have no idea what exactly is going wrong here (yes, I did re-download the zip file). I’ll try to see if I can get in touch with them. It just goes to show that it is important to maintain your website well, make sure that links work, that download files are correct/uncorrupted, etc. It happens to us all sooner or later. I’m sure this will be fixed soon as this is a wonderful idea. I know that iPhone apps are all the rage now but widgets are more useful when you’re working on your computer.
Update: just as I surmised, an email elicited a prompt response and everything is fine now. The widget works splendidly. What happened? “A backup routine of the Nestor website put the backup in the wrong place.” I had noticed that it took awfully long to download that widget: the wrong version was 22.8 MB, the correct one is 184 KB! Thank you, John Wallrodt for fixing this right away.
