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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.