Week 5: #11 A Thing about Library Thing

I've never had any aspirations of becoming a cataloger. I just don't have the patience for detail work.

I created a small library of YA books that I have enjoyed. I was presently suprised to see how many other LibraryThing patrons had the same books in their catalog.

Here is the link to my library on LibraryThing: http://www.librarything.com/catalog/EvolvingLibrarian

Week 5: #10 Play around with Image Generators

This is an avatar I built using Meez. It doesn't look anything like me and I'm not musical but it was a lot of fun to generate. Click on it to see the animation.

Week 4: #9 Finding Feeds

As I mentioned in #8, newbies to feeds can find themselves looking for them on every site they visit. I used the Bloglines search tool in #8 right away in my search for feeds and blogs on children's and YA materials. I looked for resources on graphic novels as well, because they are increasingly popular in my field.

Of the four search tools we were supplied, I found Topix to be the easiest for me to navigate, and I found more items that were relevant to me. Syndic8 found lots of results that were not relevant to my search, the same for Technorati. I never was able to access Feedster.

Week 4: #8 Make life "really simple" with RSS and a newsreader

This was my favorite segment so far. I had wondered about what the small symbol on some websites represented. The demos were easy to follow, and made me curious. If RSS feeds are so easy to set up, why had I not heard about them before? So, I set up my bloglines account and chose feeds specifically about dogs, book reviews and politics and waited to see the results. Amazingly, the first feed that listed was about an issue I've been having with my older dog. I found out that an ailment was caused by a med he had been prescribed. He's now on different medication.

Several book review feeds came along but were of little value to me because I work with children, and all of the reviews were adult material. I got a kick out of the political feeds because they were updated frequently and I got to see which presidential candidate got to put their foot in his/her mouth on a daily basis.

I think searching out feeds could turn into an addiction. Sample here, try there, it's a lot of fun but very time-consuming.

Week 3: #7 Photo Editing Tools

For this post I edited a photo taken by a family member, using Snipshot. I cropped it, grayscaled it (made it black and white), sharpened the picture, upped the contrast and finally lightened it slightly so that more of the detail showed. This is the Monasterio de San Jerónimo in Lisbon, Portugal.

I think I like the original better.

Week 3, #6 Discovery Exercise

Visiting the myriad of sites featuring Flickr mash-ups and tools gave me mixed feelings. At Flickr Bits and Pieces http://www.flickrbits.com/ there were true wonders to see. I tested a few sites up and down the page, but found The Internet Inferno http://www.theinternetinferno.com/ the most amazing. Flickr photos are displayed that correlate to Wikipedia's description of Dante's Inferno. Evidently they are chosen by way of tags given to the photos. So, be careful of your tags because they could bring you anonymous fame on The Internet Inferno.

My mixed feelings are admiration for the imagination that these "artists" display and share with us, and envy that they have the time to spend on these efforts!

Week 3, #5 - Discovering Flickr

This week we are exploring the wonders of Flickr. Learning how to upload photos and then moving them to my blog was a little trickier than I expected. I chose a picture that I took during the summer reading program. It shows a 68 lb. desert tortoise that was in the middle of entertaining about 85 enthralled children when it decided to leave the activity room and stroll the main area of the library. Usually the patrons working on the computers can't be distracted by anything, but the sight of this enormous tortoise made many of them stop what they were doing and trail after it just like the children. It was a reptile Pied Piper!