Wednesday, October 31, 2007

Library Thing

This feels a little bit like cheating because I already have a Library Thing account, but I only have 11 books in it. And I have ignored it of late, so this is a good chance for me to become reacquainted with it. Here's the link.
Maybe I'll take this chance learn a little bit more about it.
Ciao

Here I am...

in another one of my incarnations:



I found the Harry Potter doll generator through the generator blog listed on the SPL 2.0 site. I love making characters like this so it was the first thing that really appealed to me. I know i like the FD Toys, but I don't have any images I want to play with right now.

Saturday, October 27, 2007

Feedster

I think I might become a regular Feedster visitor. I like that you can take a look at different channels to see what other people have to say but not commit to them by adding them to my bloglines account. Of course, if I find something I just absolutely love through and through I will add it, but I want to make sure I don't render the bloglines useless by making it overwhelming.

Friday, October 26, 2007

RSS 2

I started playing around with the links in the SPL 2.0 blog and was rather overwhelmed. Feedster is pretty and it seems like it would be really great for browsing, but I could see myself getting overloaded with feeds if I played around on it too much. I already have 24! Topix was ok and I think I might like Technorati once I watch the tutorial, but I am not able to listen to sound at the moment. I did not much care for Syndic8 because it seemed "tech-y" and not intuitive for me (although I did just see a podcast feed featured on the site that I might be interested in - maybe I'll just peek in on the page every once in a while to see what's there).

The bloglines tutorial showed me how to keep up with flickr accounts so I've added one to my list so far, but I made it private because pictures are more personal. I finally realized yesterday that I should check the sites I have on my del.icio.us account to see if I can grab some feeds off of those and I found quite a few that I had saved and then never really bothered to check but on a very irregular basis. Most of them are book reviews and library types of things and I think that having a bloglines account will definitely help me keep up to date. For instance, the YALSA blog let me know what the 2007 Teens Top 10 are which was good since I neglected to put the voting period in my calendar. Now I know I can make a top 10 display! I also found out yesterday that I could get feeds of everything in my del.icio.us account, but not everything I saved has feeds so I'd have to poke around that some to figure out how it works. I probably won't since I have my nice bloglines account, but I might...

RSS

I've been hearing about RSS for quite some time and I had a general idea of what it was all about, but I hadn't tried it until this week. And I must say that I love it! I'm pretty lazy about getting on the computer and checking the things I want to keep up on and this system makes it a lot easier to keep track of things with less work. I like less work.

So here's the link to my bloglines account (if I did it right): http://www.bloglines.com/public/alicesbrush

I planned on going to a concert tomorrow, but I discovered this morning that it happened earlier this week. If I'd had a bloglines account sooner, I probably would have realized that. argh...

I'm hoping this will help me to keep up on professional items a little more, such as the ALSC and YALSA blogs. Heck, I even put the SPL YS book reviews on it. Maybe that will inspire me to post to it. I think my next step is to see how I can get it all organized.

This is fun!

Friday, October 12, 2007

Chillin' in the woods


Ha ha ha!!

Technoblog

I'm not good with a lot of techno stuff, but I can figure a few things out just from looking around. I managed to set up a secure wireless connection at home, which made me very very happy and proud of myself. I like getting things set up just right, so I sometimes spend a lot of time messing around with setup options. If things aren't obvious I can often figure it out, but if it seems unclear or requires a lot of extra learning I might give up with the intention of figuring it out later (like setting up my myspace page - or maybe I'm being dumb about it - everyone else seems to do just fine). I guess I basically want things to be easy, but I'm willing to do a little bit of investigating to work things out. I think I might be rambling so I will stop now.

PS I would like to learn more about using my digicam effectively and making pretty pictures.

Mashups

At first I thought that Mashups were several pictures squashed together, but now I know that they are supercool (usually) applications that people make so that others can play with them. I had quite a lot of fun checking out the various toys available through Flickr. I like finding random photos through the color pickr, especially since it takes you to areas you might not find otherwise, but then I run the risk of spending too much time looking around. I really like the fun fd flickr toys, too but some of them require my own creativity which I run low on periodically. I do want to make a librarian trading card but I have to figure out how I want to do all the parts of it first. Once I do, I'll post it here. I'm not so sure it will be before SPL 2.0 is over, but I'll do it eventually.

Wednesday, October 10, 2007

Flickr Flickr Flickr




So here's the part where I put in an image from Flickr. I found one that my friend posted on her account. She has TONS of pictures and I like them. They are much more interesting that mine so far, but we'll say that's just because I am working on getting my boring old vacation photos online. So here is the picture I found. I like photos of dolls. And this one has an absolutely adorable outfit and a cutie-tootie friend. I should start carrying my camera around with me, but then I'd probably take forever to get the pictures out of it.

Saturday, October 6, 2007

Learning Habits

I suppose one of the easiest learning habits for me is to play (of course!). I can spend hours working on something if it can be made fun. I think that one of the hardest might be having confidence in myself as a competent, effective learner. I have been increasing my confidence lately as I have tackled new things on my own and found that they could be accomplished. I suppose another personal obstacle I have is the willingness to find time for new learning adventures. I guess that comes under the heading of accepting responsbility for my own learning, which I'm also getting better about.

Friday, October 5, 2007

Testing...

here is my test blog. I'm starting this late, so I haven't done the tutorial yet and I can't listen to audio right now, so I'll be doing that later.