Week 6, Thing 13: Tagging and Discover Del.icio.us

Now this site seems like something I could really use! How many times have I thought to myself: "I know I had a bookmark for that site on my computer at home/work?" It also helps as a search tool since you don't have to wade through everything on Google or another search engine to find the really relevant sites. Can figure that if a lot of other folks bookmarked a particular one, it must be a good one! I also like being able to use tags that reflect the way I look for something. The frustrating part of this exercise was that the tutorial was not working. I got a message saying that the site was either unavailble or did not exist.

Week 5, Thing 12: Roll your own search tool with Rollyo.

This was fun, but only works if you know where you want to search. I decided to create a tool that would search for Summer Reading Prizes on all of my favorite sites. That should save a lot of time!

Select...Summer Reading IdeasSearch The Web

Week 5, Thing 11: Take a look at LibraryThing and catalog some of your favorite books.

LibraryThing is very interesting. I liked seeing what other folks had to say about my favorite books. I am not really a book collector, and only buy books that I want to re-read. So my collection is small but special to me. I tried also putting some books I do not own but have read recently as I thought this would help me to remember them better.

Week 5, Thing 10: Continued

Well, I tried Meez and enjoyed being able to put an animated avatar on my profile page.
I tried the "Your Name in Lights" generator, but could only get "Anonymous" to tranfer over to this blog. No more time to fool with it!

Week 5, Thing 10: Play around with an online image generator

Car Sticker Generator

http://www.imagechef.com/ic/make.jsp?tid=Car+Sticker

Here is my Yahoo! Avatar. I could only have one of my two cats, though!

Week 4, Thing 9: Explore MERLIN and then locate a few other useful library-related blogs and/or news feeds

Bloglines own search seemed the easiest to use. Feedster seemed to return too many unrelated sites and it was difficult to refine the search. Topix was great for finding feeds for local area news, both Taneytown and Westminster. It almost seems like the best way is to add feeds for blogs, etc. when you come upon them during other kinds of searches.

MERLIN could definitely be helpful for finding training opportunities.

Week 4, Thing 8: Make Life Really Simple with RSS and a News Reader

I haven't had a chance to really see the newsreader in action yet. I added feeds for three other 23 Things participants, then had fun adding weather reports, a crossword "cheat" blog, urban legends updates, SLJ breaking news, Unshelved (will see if I like it better as a feed than as an email), and a Reader's Club for YA Sci-Fi/Fantasy. Would like to find a similar feed for children's fiction. Can see lots of possibilities when(if) I have time to explore further, especially for Reader's Advisory.

Here is my public Bloglines URL. The screens in Bloglines didn't look quite the same as in the example, but I found it anyway!

http://www.bloglines.com/blog/Minihelen