What's at the Grocercy Store?

At Zeer you can find out what's in your groceries before you get to the store. This eliminates the need to squint at the tiny print on the box while blocking the aisle. I especially hate doing that when it's the frozen aisle.

Let's skip to the best part...
I love the advanced search. It looks especially helpful if you are starting on a new type of diet. For example, if you have allergies you can search for products that are egg free, gluten free, peanut free, etc.. You could also look for sodium free, fat free, or sugar free products.

More details...
It looks like they have downloaded a large database of groceries to their site. A search on butter gives me over 2,700 results and most of them have no reviews or recommendations attached to them. So if you're inclined you could make quite a name for yourself on this site.

They have the all standard features like uploading a photo, creating a profile, connecting with friends, and joining groups.

I wish they had...
I'm thinking a recipe section would be a nice complement to this site.

The Wellness Community

I just perused another great site. This one creates a community for cancer patients and their caregivers. It's called the Wellness Community. I've never heard of them before. This is the scoop from their website: "Founded in 1982, The Wellness Community is an international non-profit organization dedicated to providing free support, education and hope to people with cancer and their loved ones." They have both on-line and physical support groups with professional staff.

They have public discussion boards - free and easy to join - that are very similar to most social networking discussion boards. They also have on-line support groups that meet via phone and chat for 90 minutes/week. Trained facilitators lead these groups of 8-10 people. Other great features include a relaxation meditation that you can download, cooking and nutrition information, and a spanish version of the site.

Navigation on the site is fairly intuitive. The only warning I have is that the social media and on-line support "join" button is only available from the home page. I'm sure they will re-design the site so that if you look at the "about" page you will be able to jump back to the on-line community and join but for now, don't panic, just click on the logo in the upper left corner of the page. That takes you home where you can sign in.

Web 2.0 Directory

Go2Web20.net is a collection of Web 2.o web sites. So far they have about 2,500 sites listed. Go2Web2.0 has a visually appealing, simple design and makes an interesting sound (today I am easily amused). To explore the site, I recommend using the "Select Tag" feature at the top of the page. A beautiful green cloud of tags appears. If you choose "health", you'll get about 25 results. More than enough to keep you busy this summer.

They also have a search box which is less useful. When I type in "health", I get one result - a site called revolutionhealth.com. Typing in "heal" gets me an additional site called healia.com.

Wouldn't it be great if the tags were indexed?

Other than that it's a really nice set up.

National Library of Medicine Search Widget

I just added a search widget for the National Library of Medicine to the side of the page. It was created by Guus van den Brekel based on some whining I posted here and then a request I made for him to modify one of his widgets from his NLM Toolbars blog.

As background you might want to know that the National Library of Medicine has over 100 databases. I think that's alot for one organization but maybe not. They have so many database that some of them have retired.

You'll be happy to know, however, that the NLM has recognized that this could be a bit overwhelming and they have created the NLM gateway. This is a search interface that will look at 16 of their most popular databases all at once and then give you the results from each database. They even break down the results into "Bibliographic Resources" which apparently means it's used more for research purposes; "Consumer Health Resources" which is where most of us will want to go first; and "Other Information Resources".

To check it out just type in what you are searching for (e.g. "acne") and click on the search button. Thanks Guus!

[NOTE: I removed the whining post because it was irrelevant and made me look silly after Guus created another widget so quickly. Some of the comments refer to the other post.]