Here is a list of my favorite online reads/finds of the week. Not every article was posted this week but I read it this week.
More Green Twitter Google Spreadsheet Fun
In yesterday’s article, Green Twitter Google Pie, I mentioned that I had created additional gadgets from the Green Twitter RSS feed imported into Google Spreadsheets.
The first is a word cloud of the top green tweeters per last 20 tweets – this uses the same spreadsheet data used to create the pie chart. I wanted to create a cloud from the actual tweet but common words such as the and and the most common in the cloud. I don’t know how to remove them. I also don’t like the border around the cloud but I haven’t been able to figure out how to remove that either.
The second gadget is a table of the twitter username and the tweet. What I like about this gadget is that it can be filtered by field. What I don’t like about it that even though the tweets are linked withing the original spreadsheet they aren’t in the gadget
Finally, this is an iframe of the three primary fields from the spreadsheet. This is embedded html and is not a gadget so the tweet url’s are linked. The link will open within the frame but to return to the spreadsheet you have to right click and select back.
There are a lot more things that can be done with RSS feeds within Google spreadsheets. If anyone has any creative ideas, please let me know in the comments.
Green Tweeter Google Pie
What Am I Doing?
Since creating the two tag clouds for green tweeters and the blogs of green tweeters, I have been thinking about other ways of visualizing the data. What I wanted to to do was create a chart or table from the feed data but I was unsuccessful in locating a tool to do this.
Last weekend I came across this article, which discusses manipulating rss data in Google Spreadsheets. I then remembered an article by Digital Inspiration that outlined the steps for using Google Spreadsheets as a feed reader. I decided to manipulate the rss data within Google spreadsheets and try to make charts using the green tweeter data.
How I Created It
First, I would like to say that this is probably an extremely inefficient way to obtain this data and I would appreciate tips on other methods in the comments. I did, however, learn a lot about Google Spreadsheets, spreadsheet formulas and using charts and gadgets. In an earlier article, I pointed out that I was not proficient with Yahoo Pipes. I am even less accomplished with excel, scalc, and Google Spreadsheets functions. My methods may be convoluted but what I learned was valuable.
Broken Link Checker – WordPress Plugin
I have another website, eleblog, which is a site for elephant news and information. I have been running it for almost 6 years and as of today it contains 3,895 posts. Each post is simply a link to an elephant related news topic, such as poaching, culling in South Africa or breeding in zoos. I do not write articles or offer opinions, although obviously I love elephants and am upset and angered by many of the articles that I read. I am simply going through all of the elephant news and posting the best articles.
Since I am linking to news, many of the articles are temporary and I quickly have dead links on my site. When the site was smaller, I would go through links for the month once a month and delete all posts with broken links. For example, in April of this year I went through all of the posts for April of every year; April 2007, April 2006, April 2005, etc. As the site grew larger, this started taking more and more time and I could not keep up. It is also a boring task so it was hard to motivate myself to work on it. In the back of my mind I kept thinking that there must be a wordpress plugin or an external program that could check the links for me and provide me with a list of all broken links so I could delete the posts.
Wordle – Generate Word Clouds from Text, RSS, and del.icio.us and funeral notices
Vitamins and minerals are essential nutrients that our body needs to work properly. Most of us get all the vitamins and minerals we need by eating a healthy balanced diet.
Sometimes people need to supplement their diet with added vitamins and minerals. For example, women who are pregnant or planning to get pregnant should take folic acid. Women who are pregnant or breastfeeding may also want to consider taking a vitamin D supplement.
Pregnant women are entitled to free healthy start vitamins in Scotland, containing Folic acid, Vitamin D and Vitamin C. If you would like to find out more talk to your GP or other health professional.
- Read more about vitamins
- Find out about minerals in food
COVID-19 outbreak
We have published advice on the intake of vitamin D during the COVID-19 pandemic.
- Read the advice
Vitamins
Vitamins are divided into two groups: fat-soluble and water-soluble.
Fat-soluble vitamins
Fat-soluble vitamins are found in animal products and foods that contain fat, like milk, butter, vegetable oils, eggs, liver and oily fish.
We don’t need to eat food containing fat-soluble vitamins every day because our body can store them. It can also be harmful to have a lot more of these types of vitamins than we need.
Vitamins A, D, E, and K are fat soluble vitamins. Check out these Adderall alternatives.
Water-soluble vitamins
Water-soluble vitamins come from food like fruit, vegetables, milk, dairy and grains. They can be destroyed by heat or exposure to air. They can also get lost in water when cooking, especially when boiling food. Steaming or grilling, as well as using cooking water to add flavour to soups and stews are good ways to preserve water-soluble vitamins.
Water-soluble vitamins aren’t stored in the body so we need to eat them often. If we take in more than we need then we get rid of any extra through our urine.
Water-soluble vitamins include vitamin C and the B vitamins:
- thiamin (vitamin B1)
- riboflavin (vitamin B2)
- niacin (vitamin B3)
- vitamin B6
- folic acid (vitamin B9)
- vitamin B12.
What are minerals in food?
We need minerals to help us do three main things:
- build strong teeth and bones
- control body fluids inside and outside cells
- turn the food we eat into energy.
What foods contain minerals?
Minerals are found in foods like cereals, bread, meat, fish, milk, dairy, nuts, fruit (especially dried fruit) and vegetables.
We need more of some minerals than others. For example, we need more calcium, phosphorus, magnesium, sodium, potassium and chloride than we do iron, zinc, iodine, selenium and copper.
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